This is not a dirty-old-man reverie. It’s just that the forces of coincidence drug Susan Weiner, Amiee Ringle, and Selina Doran into the house at about the same time. Susan is Rob & Terri’s daughter, home from grad school for a week and over here to play some of her fiddle tunes with us and expose a couple of songs at songwriters circle. Aimee is over from Port Townsend to discuss woods for her upcoming George Thomas guitar, and she let me participate in bringing her old student clarinet out of hibernation. And Selina is coming all the way across the street for what will be among the last of a long series of guitar lessons with Flip as she prepares to head out of town for college. Hearing them two at a time is inspiring. The future is in good hands, folks.
Rob and I premiered The Eagle Sails Today at songwriters’ circle and got lots of useful suggestions. Who’d have thought the word “sloop” would confuse anybody? We’ll have to schlep the sloop into the slop and slip in a ship that won’t slap anybody’s schplensibilities. And clarify the part of the plot where the guy who knows how to sail gets picked up and the guy who doesn’t know how to sail gets dropped off into the Eagle but nobody tells the captain.
Also I got to expose my assigned song, Good Old-Fashioned Phone Book. Considering that it was a silly subject to write anything important about, it went over fine. I have to add something about how useful a good thick phone book was as a booster seat for persons who sat a little shorter because they had, and have, so much more life ahead – those same persons who pointed out that their cell phones remembered numbers so who needs a phone book anymore anyway.
It was a really good circle, with eight people presenting eleven songs. We don’t really have a tradition of how much we expose the process to the world outside — one of the points of this kind of thing is that you get to try out things that may not work. For me, one of the highlights was Susan’s co-written song Happily Ever After, looking at a real relationship using fairy-tale paradigms. Every beauty must have her beast . . .
I’m not best pleased with ScribeFire. After I previewed this post, I couldn’t find the handle to edit it, so I published as is. That brought back the edit page, but after I had edited it wouldn’t let me publish it as an edit, only as a new post. Undoubtedly I can figure out what I did wrong, but to my grumpy mind the purpose of a program isn’t to punish wrongdoing, it’s to facilitate some task besides learning how to deal with software intolerance. But what do I know – I haven’t programmed professionally for three years now//Zeke
