Of the Not Christian persuasion

I went to a lecture given by a survivor of the Holocaust, one of the so-called "Schlinder's Jews".  I say so-called, because quite honestly, he would vastly be preferred to be known as a renowned Cantor than a Holocaust survivor.  As he explained to us, he lost everyone - - - uncles, cousins, his mother, his sister, ev-ry-one - - - during those horrible years, and it is painful enough to live with his own memories, he neither needs nor wants pity from the rest of us.

Ever since someone gave me a copy of Anne Frank's Diary when I was 11 or 12, I have been a voracious reader of everything I could get my hands on about the Holocaust.  I studied German in college for a few varied reasons; it was the closest thing to Swedish my Uni offered, it was taught by someone I admired....but also in the hope that I would someday be able to read historical documents of the time in the original German.

I'm also a complete language geek, but y'all knew that already.

Due in part to that language geekiness, I even know a few words of Yiddish.  He peppered his lecture with the occasional Yiddish word, and is it wrong that I felt exceedingly smug for knowing what the words meant without a translation?  Probably.

At the end of his remarks, he took questions from the audience, and they were interested in many things about his journey; but a dominant theme, asked several times and in several different ways, was this: how had he survived?  What gave him hope?  What made him able to get through each day, through the thousands of indignities foisted on them, great and small?

Perhaps not surprising, considering that he is a world-renowned Cantor, his answer was that his faith had sustained him.  His spirituality.  Or maybe that is surprising, because you might think that music would have helped him significantly.  After the war, he came to the US and studied at Julliard, and in that, I envy him.  There was a time when I would have killed for that honor.  But he said no, that he had not discovered his musical talents until after the war.

I waited until almost the end of the question-and-answer session to ask my question.  Since he had talked a whole lot about his work as a Cantor, (although he's retired now) and he made a point of telling us how he'd rather be known for his singing than for his survival, I wanted to hear him sing.  So I asked: "Do you still sing, and would you sing for us?"

"I'm retired!" was his immediate response; several people in varied places in the crowd called out (hilariously, completely in chorus) "We don't mind!"  He looked at me and said, "Young woman, you put me on the spot!"  I smiled, completely unrepentant, and apologized.  I was really surprised, though, when the crowd began to urge him along, and began to applaud.

So he did.  I had thought to ask him to sing something joyful, as a counterpoint to the tragedy and horror he spoke of, but decided at the last second that just might have been pushing it, a specific request.  

He sang of faith, how those of the faith never walk alone.  

It was, in a word, glorious.  

I'm always surprised when people's singing voices differ greatly from their speaking voices; I think I sound the same no matter if I'm speaking or singing.  His singing voice was deeper and richer than his speaking voice, and almost without accent.  While when he was speaking, his accent was thick and obvious.

In addition to my language geek issues, I'm also a music geek, so I appreciated what he sang for the sheer musicality of it.  Singing a capella, with no warm-up, no advance warning, on pitch and on key?  Damn near impossible.  And therefore, impressive.  Extremely so.  Moving, too, there was barely a dry eye in the house when he finished.

Mostly due to my sheltered upbringing, I've never run into anyone who was as fervent about their faith as evangelical Christians are.  While I know that there are plenty of people who are as zealous about their non-Christian faiths as the evangelicals, I'd never met one before.

I feel much the same way about his deep faith as I do about the Christians I know; I can admire their faith without sharing it.  It was a beautiful thing to see.

After the lecture, several people thanked me (!!!) for asking him to sing, saying they'd wanted to ask but weren't brave enough.  I waited in line to speak to him, and apologized again for putting him on the spot.  In the most Continental fashion, he winked at me, kissed my hand (which was incredibly cute) and told me he hadn't minded.  I thanked him for indulging me, and told him I felt very lucky to have had the chance to hear him sing.

I left the lecture feeling as if I'd had an epiphany; how about that?  There are other faiths that feel as strongly about their religions.  Who knew?

Wi'chew

I apologize most sincerely for inflicting this upon you, because you will leave this post with an obnoxious pop song stuck in your head.

I'm also putting on my Spinster Aunt Grammar Police hat.

You got me trippin', stumblin' flippin, fumbling
Clumsy cuz I'm fallin in love
You got me slippin, tumbling, sinking, fumbling
Clumsy cuz I'm fallin in love
So in love wit you

That's the chorus to Fergie's latest pop song, Clumsy. I've seen the video twice, randomly surfing the TV channels, and I am hearing the bass line in my head for hours afterward. I like Fergie's music, understand that. But that last line, "so in love wit you" has me all fired up, for a couple of reasons.

First, it is miserable grammar/pronunciation. Folks who don't enunciate make me nuts. "Wit" instead of "with" is really one of my pet peeves. Another one is people who mispronounce the word frustrate, but that's a story for another day. Wit is intelligence. Wit is savvy. W-I-T is not an appropriated shortened form of with. Grrr.

The other reason this irritates me requires a bit of backstory. You already know I'm a music geek. I don't think I've ever talked about my singing here; I no longer sing in public, but to not sing would be to not breathe. I sing all the time. With the iPod. Without the iPod. With the radio. Not with the radio. With the muzak in department stores. At full fortissimo or as quiet as a church mouse. I have a halfway decent voice. I'll never be Maria Callas or Mariah Carey, with their astonishing ranges, but I can carry a tune, and carry it well. From the time I was 12 years old until I left for Sweden at 16, I studied with a vocal coach, in addition to singing in my school's choirs.

My coach had been an opera singer with the Met, once upon a time. She taught me wonderful things about breath support and projecting volume. She was also at considerable pains to teach me how to sing the words 'with you' so it didn't sound like you were singing the word 'chew.' The choir director at school was the same guy from 6th grade all the way through graduation; this was one of his fussy things too. Thanks to both of them, this is something I notice in popular music, and when it is done incorrectly, it makes me grind my teeth. It isn't that hard to do; any singer should know this little trick. All you do is soften the "t" sound, almost as if you were going to drop it off all together, and emphasize the 'you', being careful not to introduce too much of your Midwest twang into it and making it sound like 'yew'. Oh, wait, that Midwest thing would just be me. Anyway.

Fergie-Ferg has a lovely voice, is a talented songstress, and produces extremely entertaining music. This just makes ME nuts, it is a psychosis, I know. The song really sticks with you, which speaks well for it being a major hit for her. And that means that I'll be hearing it everywhere.

If you need me, I'll be over there in the corner in the fetal, rocking and grinding my teeth.

clumsy 'cause I'm fallin' in love..in in love
so in love
wit you

grrrrrrr

Ancient Music

Well, OK, not ancient in the strictest sense. But in the world of pop music, positively ancient; from the early 90s or earlier.

I wrote a post a while back about an old mix tape that I have held on to for a long, long time. I've spent some time listening to it and trying to figure out just who the various bands are. This is a listing as best as I can discover of all of the songs on the tape.

Unfortunately, there are a few that are NOT available from iTunes or any other source I can discover. DH tells me that yes, it is possible to get music from analog tapes to mp3 format, but the gadget guru does not have the needed hardware. Yet.

Without further ado, here's the listing. This has taken forever to dig up all the links and to track down the names of the bands...and I'm not done. There are still two that I can't track down. Which in the age of everything in the whole world available on Google is as irritating as heck. The song title links to the lyrics (usually) and the band title links to the band's website, if they have one, and a fan site if they don't.

1. Hello~The Beloved
2. Come Together~Primal Scream
3. Candleland~Echo & The Bunnymen
4. All Together Now~The Beatles
5. Only Tongue Can Tell~Trash Can Sinatras
6. Scarborough Fair~Simon & Garfunkel
7. I'm Free~The Soup Dragons
8. Unknown
9. That's a lie (remix)~Too Much Joy
10. Theme from Twin Peaks(no lyrics)~Angelo Badalamenti
    
11. Laura Palmer's Theme (no lyrics)~Angelo Badalmenti
12. Right Here, Right Now~Jesus Jones
    
13. Hippychick~Soho
14. Wicked Game~Chris Isaak
15. Peek-a-Boo~Siouxsie & The Banshees
16. Give Peace A Chance~The Peace Choir
    
17. Deeper Shade of Soul~Urban Dance Squad
18. I Saw Red (Acoustic)~Warrant
19. Put It There~Paul McCartney
20. Imagine~John Lennon
21. Waterfall~The Stone Roses
22. Then~The Charlatans UK
    
23. Here Comes The Sun~The Beatles
24. Elizabeth My Dear~The Stone Roses

As I've said before, just about my favorite song of the bunch is Waterfall by the Stone Roses, but there isn't much I don't like. Track #8, the unknown one, is one that I've spent about 3 hours trying to find the name of the band and the song title. I'm pretty sure it is Britpop, but I've had no luck at all finding any information. The chorus of the song is as follows:

every beat of the heart
brings me closer to the start
takes me further away from you
brings me closer to the truth


If you know who sings this, what the title of the song is, please let me know. It is going to drive me crazy.


If I was super tech-savvy, I'd post a playlist with an MP3 player so you could hear all this ancient music, but I'm not that cool. Plus can you imagine the bandwith that would eat up?

Mix Tape

Back in the dark ages, before music was on computers and long before I was aware of the Internet, we made and traded mix tapes. Mix tapes were compilations of music, usually along a particular theme or just songs that you were fond of.

Over the years, from probably the age of 10 until 19, I probably made a hundred or so. I traded them with friends, shared them with school-mates, listened to them for hours at a time. These were the precursors to playlists.

I made them with a dual tape deck, or later, when CDs came along, taped from a CD. In the late 80s, though, I didn't have any CDs or a CD player. A good friend of mine, V, had several players and hundreds of CDs. She made great tapes.

Before I left for Sweden, she made me one that was full of Brit-pop and alternative music. I listened to it on the train, traveling around Sweden, on the bus back and forth on the way to school, at home, while riding my bike.

One of my favorite songs on the tape was by The Stone Roses, a song that I almost felt had been written for me. I identified strongly with the lyrics. But there were many other songs on the tape that I loved.

I liked the tape so much that when I tossed all of the rest of my analog tapes, having either replaced them with CDs or no longer caring about the music on the tapes, I kept that one. When DH and I moved house, the tape came along to our new domicile too. For at least the last 3 years, it has sat on a shelf with about 4 other tapes that survived the purge of old technology.

I'm not sure why, but just the other day a bit of the lyric from that old Stone Roses song popped into my head, and while I could remember that the song had been on the tape V gave me, I could remember neither the name of the song nor the band. I spent some time Googling the lyrics as I recalled them, but couldn't find it. I even looked for the mix tape, but didn't find it.

After a while, I remembered more of the lyric and eventually located the name of the song and the band, and I was satisfied with that, especially when iTunes provided me with the song for $0.99. (It is "Waterfall," from The Stone Roses self-titled album, should your own curiosity overwhelm you.)

Then DH and I watched a few movies last night and I changed the the DVD when one ended. While standing in front of the DVD player, I noticed the shelf of tapes, and sure enough, there was the mix tape from V.

We no longer have a tape player, except in my car, which is a 1999 and has a factory-installed tape player instead of a CD player for some reason. So when we went out today, I slipped the tape into my back pocket and popped it into the player.

The resulting stroll down memory lane made me very happy. As each song came on, I remembered long-forgotten things, including the lyrics to almost every song on the tape. While it is predominantly Brit-pop that I promise you've never heard of, there's also some Simon & Garfunkel, and a few things that were wildly popular at the time. Strangely, although V and I were both into a bit of heavy metal, there's only one song from a metal band, and it is a ballad.

I don't generally write posts of lists, even though I'm a compulsive list-maker, but as I eventually rediscover the names of the bands and the songs on the tape, I will make a list with links to the various band's websites and post it in the interest of fun and archaic music.

I haven't talked to V in more than 7 years. I'm not sure where she is these days. But listening to all that music again has prompted me to try to track her down and see how she's doing.

New Hardware

There's a new computer in the Arin household. Finally. In the entire time that DH and I have been together, we have used old computers, cobbled together from bits and pieces of computers that he's fixed. We've never had a brand-spanking-new one.

It runs on Windows Vista, which I am not sold on. There are a few things about Vista that I really don't like. A sidebar that you can't delete. Weird noises, which is why I have the speakers muted. Way, way, waaaaayy too many icons in the taskbar. It isn't a problem, just highly distracting. But the fact that you can't change the clock's format to 24 hour time, that really annoys me.

I went through and deleted a bunch of junk that came pre-installed on the computer, like 316 megs of arcade games. The graphics processor isn't really designed for gaming, so I'm confused about why it came with so many games pre-installed, but then when it comes to being a geek, I'm really minor-league.

Really.

It is fast, and it will burn CDs and DVDs and is compatible with iTunes, so finally I've got everything on 1 and only 1 computer. Thank heavens.

I got your grammar police right here!

Bad grammar bothers me. Always has. I have my parents, the grammar gestapo, to thank for this. Not that I'm complaining, really. I'm articulate thanks to them. I do appreciate that. The problem is that I want to correct everyone and everything when I see grammar errors.

Case in point?

Driving along a major road on my area, I saw the following sign:

"Summer Deals: Get them while their hot!"

Let's forget the punctuation error for a second, and instead focus on the homophone. Their. Which is the plural of he/she/it. What they meant to say was they're, the contraction of they are. This isn't rocket science. If you're not sure of your grammar, for chrissakes, ask someone else.

The English teacher I had from 5th grade to 7th grade had a rule, called "The Three English-Speaking People Rule." The rule required us to have at least 3 people who were English speakers read the compositions we turned in to her. She specified English speakers because we were little smart-asses who would tell her, "But I *did* have three people read it. They just weren't native speakers." Thinking back, if I were her, I might have shot us just for being brats. But then I'm not a patient woman. She was.

Regardless, I have instituted that rule every place I've ever worked, because people have terrible grammar. Abysmal grammar. Even a lawyer I worked for once upon a time was a habitual fragment-writer. I had to work with the typing pool on a nearly daily basis to "translate" what he had dictated for them.

I'm trying to hold myself back from calling the store with the grammatical error on the sign and telling them precisely what it should say, because that's a really obnoxious thing to do. On the other hand, there's the fact that unless someone tells them, I doubt that they'll ever know.

Then there's the punctuation error. Ahh, don't get me started.

Unexpected but pleasant surprise.

I spend quite a bit of time cruising my local chain bookstores. We have a Barnes & Noble and a Borders, not far away is a Joseph Beth Bookseller. They're nice and all, but kind of homogeneous.

Used to be there was a great independent bookseller located not far from where I live now, in a rambling old house. Books could be found shelved on every available surface, including on shelves over the toilet in the bathroom. Sci-Fi/Fantasy was in the basement, cookbooks near the back door, horror lined both staircases. It closed not long after Barnes & Noble came to town. I miss it; they introduced me to some of my favorite authors, it was there that I first found Anne McCaffrey. They even introduced me to lots of other things I'd never have picked up, published by alternative presses, things written by folks that I'd have never been exposed to otherwise.

I was in Barnes & Noble over the weekend, looking for presents for a birthday party. Going into ANY bookstore is dangerous for me. I love to read, and while my interests focus on the universes created by authors who write about dragons and spaceships, I'll read just about anything. Biographies, non-fiction, cookbooks...I think I've written about this before, so I'll stop walking that same path. The point is: I like to read. I will "lose" time in a bookstore, wandering the stacks, picking up random things, reading them 'for just a second' and suddenly I'll look at my watch and three hours has gone by. Ooops. The same thing happens to me in libraries.


At a display table near the children's section, a powder-blue paperback cover caught my eye. While the expression says that you're not supposed to judge a book by its cover, we all do. Interesting artwork on a book's cover will always catch my eye. This one has three of those Valentine's candy hearts, with the words, "Boy Meets Boy" in the center of each heart, on that powder blue field. Nothing else. A wee bit jarring in its simplicity, surrounded by books for teens about cliques and whatever other tosh is popular that show girls dressed in the latest styles, mice with swords, elaborate and eye-catching designs.

I read about three chapters before I remembered that I had somewhere specific to be at a scheduled time, so I reluctantly put it down and found birthday presents. But the memory of those three chapters has stayed with me, and I almost need to go back and either read the rest of it or just buy it.

I'm surprised about the book's subject matter being so openly, prominently, displayed in my very conservative community. It is a high school love story, yes, but the principal characters are gay. I'm thrilled that it wasn't on a low shelf somewhere, wrapped in plain brown paper, because that's the way things would normally be handled around here.

The world inhabited by the central characters is devoid of homophobia, in fact the principal character talks about setting up a Gay-Straight Alliance in junior high school. Progressive, to say the least. Surprising, and refreshing.

It isn't like this kind of thing is difficult to find in the information age. The internet can lead you to anything you'd like, as long as you know how to search. Back when I was in high school, though, there weren't romance novels for gay kids, or any kind of resources for them. Not a single one of my contemporaries was openly gay in high school. In the several years its been since I graduated, though, several of them have come out. It goes without saying that most of them have chosen to move on, to bigger cities, where people aren't so incredibly intolerant. Ohio's "Defense of Marriage" constitutional amendment, passed recently, would have been enough for me to leave the state, were I gay. As it is, it just makes me embarrassed to be from Ohio.

As I walked out, wondering if B&N had been infected with the spirits of those independent booksellers I miss so much, I spotted someone who I know used to work in that rambling old house. He smiled and waved, recognizing me. Aha! Influence only for the good.

Perhaps baking as a form of therapy.

I was channel surfing yesterday and caught a few minutes of "Semi-Homemade with Sandra Lee" on Food TV. I wasn't fully focused on the telly, having the laptop in my lap and reading fan's accounts of Jensen's new movie Ten Inch Hero from the Newport Beach Film Festival. Lucky, lucky, lucky fangirls who attended the screening!!!! Part of the cast, including Jensen, was there. So since I was more engrossed in reading about how one fan got to take his picture and hear his voice in person, ('scuse me while I swoon!) I missed exactly how Sandra Lee made the cookies that I thought looked good.

I don't like most of what she does, because I vastly prefer to make my own stuff instead of doctoring box mixes or using some of the other shortcuts that she uses. Yes, she makes homemade cooking more accessible to folks who think the kitchen is a scary place, but for the rest of us who really enjoy the process, the chemistry, the end result, her recipes are usually a "pass". Besides, pre-packaged mixes are always full of the worst things for you, bleached flour, white sugar, tons of salt, high fructose corn syrup, even tBHQ. If you are trying to avoid those things, as I am, you've got to read the label on positively EVERYTHING you pick up in the grocery store, because you never know what you're going to get in that box of Hamburger Helper, or sugar cookie mix.

I've been so weighted down by the depression which I've been trying to work my way through that I haven't made anything from scratch, or created a new recipe, or even fussed much in the kitchen over about the last two months. Y'know things are not good when the food writer isn't working in the kitchen, doesn't want to eat, and can't focus enough to make dinner, right? Something about these macadamia nut cookies made me want to get in there and bake something, though, so today I went rooting through the cupboards and discovered that yes, I did have an unopened container of macadamia nuts. I'll take the spark of inspiration wherever it comes from, I'm not picky.

I next went to my cookbook shelf, which takes up an entire section of my library's built-in bookcases. I was looking for a sugar cookie recipe that didn't require rolling out on the countertop (more mess than I could currently handle having to clean) or chilling in the refrigerator (I want COOKIES and I want them NOW).

Much like collecting shoes is an issue for me, collecting cookbooks is a habit that I can't break. I will actually sit down and READ a cookbook, just like I'll read a novel, learning new techniques or getting an idea for a concoction of my own. I own somewhere around 70 cookbooks, at last count. Go ahead, point at me and say, "Lucy, you're a complete geek." Yes, I know that and am OK with it. I have, at a minimum guess, about 10 cookbooks that are strictly cookies, and several of the old standby all-purpose cookbooks, like the red and white checked gingham covered Better Homes and Gardens, the Joy of Cooking. I couldn't find a recipe that I wanted to use, and even leafing through the huge three-ring binder full of things I've clipped out of magazines, printed from the web and photocopied out of library cookbooks didn't bring any inspiration. Dejected, I put the books all back on the shelf and went to lie down for a bit.

Christ, how ridiculous is it that something like that will put me into a tailspin? The anti-depressant seems to be helping a bit, but not enough, yet, to bring me out of that horrible funk. In my defense, I did only sleep about 3 hours last night, from around 3 am until about 6:30, so perhaps a short nap was just what I needed.

After napping for about a half hour, I thought about the bag of chocolate chips that I'd seen while hunting for macadamia nuts, and I decided that instead of a kind of sugar cookie with macadamia nuts in them, I'd make macadamia nut chocolate chip cookies. There are any number of good chocolate chip cookie recipes out there; I'm fond of the original Tollhouse recipe, with a few small modifications such as using all brown sugar instead of white, and the addition of a little bit of milk, but in about the last two years whenever I've made chocolate chip cookies, I've used Alton Brown's recipe for "The Chewy" which seem to stay soft after baking. I don't like rock-hard chocolate chip cookies. It is very much a personal preference.

A quick second of OT gushing...I heart Alton Brown's show Good Eats. Love how he explains the chemistry of cooking and baking, love his insistence that the only tool in your kitchen that only does one thing should be a fire extinguisher, love how he shows unique ways to accomplish complicated kitchen tasks with things that you already own.

When I'd finished mixing the dough, I looked at the lump of it sitting in the bowl, and was overwhelmed at the idea of scooping out four dozen cookies. (I make them much smaller than Alton recommends.) Just more than I could handle, I guess. So instead I put the whole thing into a round 9-inch cake pan and baked it for 30 minutes, and now cooling on the countertop is what looks like a cookie pizza.

I certainly don't NEED these cookies in the house. One of the problems that I have with food is that I can't eat just one cookie, I want a dozen. I don't want just the recommended serving size of potato chips, I want the whole bag of them. So I don't normally have things like that in my house to avoid temptation. I know this and can plan for it so it doesn't become a problem. When I am testing recipes, or working on a foodie article, I will give whatever it is away after reserving a small portion for myself.

This cookie pizza is cute, though, and I won't cut into it until DH gets home so that he can see what it looks like. And then it will go with me to work tomorrow, so my staff can eat it instead of me. They love it when I'm testing recipes.

Progress, however, in that I was able to get the house cleaned up today, I made something in the kitchen, did some laundry and I'm on the computer looking for story ideas for posts next week. The sun's out, birds are singing, distantly I hear lawnmowers chugging along as people cut the grass for the first time. My house smells like cookies and clean laundry, good, homey things that are sure-fire spirit lifters.


If only baking wonderful things was the answer. Wouldn't it be nice?

Delurk, c'mon, you know ya wanna

In the sidebar, I have a little note that tells you that IP tracking is ON and I SEE YOU!, but I've never really written about it before. I added that tracker to the blog more than six months ago out of genuine curiosity; who READS this garbage that I write?

And most of the time, people find the blog when they're searching for the quote by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, usually on Google. Every now and then someone will check out the site from a comment I've left on another blog. I know who my regular readers are, for the most part. All of the stats are interesting to my geek nature.

But yesterday, my angsty rant about Jensen Ackles really brought people out in droves. I had what I think is the highest count yet for a single day, for me. And no so much from people searching HIM on Google, either, which considering the number of websites devoted soley to him (I've read estimates of somewhere around 20,000, if you're keeping track, but Google gets over a half million hits when you type 'Jensen Ackles') isn't really surprising.

What surprises me most, I suppose, is that when I'm doing what I intended to do when I started the blog, which was write about women's rights and liberal politics, I get very little feedback, which makes me feel like I'm standing on a soapbox on a busy street corner, screaming my lungs out, and no-one is paying any attention. Although in our celebrity-0bsessed culture, it really ought not surprise me at all. Sigh. (Not that I'm immune to that celebrity obsession...see yesterday's post and one titled "Fanatic" in February of 2007, plus my blogroll which lists the Go Fug Yourself girls, The Superficial, and Hot Gossip on MSN....)

But getting back on topic....I don't get too many comments every day, even though I see that on an average day, I get somewhere between 15-30 hits. So DELURK, people. I wanna know who you are, what brought you here. Leave a comment. You know you wanna.

A good rant.

Went to see Dave Matthews Band on Friday and Saturday nights in a land far, far away otherwise known as Burgettstown, Pennsylvania. I love Dave Matthews Band. If you don’t, you probably want to skip the rest of the post as I will be geeking out over the songs they played each night and what my friends and I thought. Sorry, anyone who is looking for political stuff today. It ain’t happening.

Friday night’s show was a much different vibe than Saturday’s. While B from AZ said he thought the crowd was younger on Saturday, I thought it was older. And older fans would have loved Friday’s set. They played “Satellite”, “The Dreaming Tree”, “Grace is Gone”, and “Jimi Thing”, all of which are older. The opener, “The Best of What’s Around” is one of my favorite ever DMB songs. Brings back memories of being on the train, in Sweden, traveling from Stockholm to Kungsör. I haven’t seen that live before, so that was a big thrill for me. But just about every song that I mention, I’m going to end up saying, “One of my favorites.” I’d be hard pressed to find a Dave song I didn’t like.

One of the things that JAMIL and I have noticed as we continue to go to shows (our first together ever was, according to her, in 1998. I think it was 1995, but what do I know?) is that we don’t see them play a big fan favorite, “Ants Marching” very often. After seeing more than 20 shows together, we have become even bigger fans, but more than that, sometimes guides to the much younger concertgoers around us. More about that later. In our infinite wisdom, we think they play “Ants” rarely because the band gets tired of being drowned out by the crowd when they play it. Yes, the crowd screams along to the song so loudly that they drown out the band. That takes some doing, let me tell you. A few other songs are becoming a problem with the crowd…”Dancing Nancies” being a great example. You also don’t see them play one of their biggest radio hits, “Crash” for the same reason.

JAMIL and I are often older than many of the concertgoers around us, which mortifies me and amuses her. Friday there were 2 very young couples in front of us that were so incredibly cute that I couldn’t stand it. They couldn’t have been any older than about 16, all 4 of them. The boy who sat in front of us was at not only his first ever DMB show, but his first concert. We told him our theory about “Ants” and “Crash” and he was really disappointed, and then we felt bad. Those were his two favorite Dave songs. But the band proved us wrong, playing “Ants” as the final song of the encore.

DH and I went to the Saturday show together. I had said on Friday that I wanted to hear “One Sweet World”, but they didn’t play it Friday night. Saturday, though, what did they open with? Yeah, that would be “OSW”. God, I love that song.

Nine planets around the sun
Only one does the sun embrace
Upon this watered world, so much we take for granted
So let sleep outside tonight
Lay down in our Mother’s arms
For here can we rest safely

Tomorrow I’ll be back to my usual politicking. Cheers!

Soundtrack: Dave Matthews Band Live at Central Park