Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

A bad piper is annoying -- even worse indoors. A pretty good piper can be enjoyable, especially in the distance, setting a mood, and is pretty easy to find. But a Really Fine piper makes you suddenly realize what was missing when you were listening to all those pretty good pipers. I know a few of those, but I hear enough merely good piping in various places to occasionally forget how nice really fine piping is. And how much it makes you want to really pay attention to it.

Much to my surprise, the really good piper I heard today was able to play indoors without causing major ear pain -- I don't know whether that was another aspect of his skill, or merely the room acoustics, but he was just loud, not "oh my God the echoes the echoes my head is exploding" loud. (These were, of course, highland bagpipes. Shuttle pipes, in contrast, are meant to be played indoors, and need amplification in some rooms.)

I'm exhausted. I feel weak, and I've just drunk most of a half gallon of Gatorade. (Yes, Ru, I'll soon be following it with a similar quantity of water.) Not only did I sweat through my shirt, the waist of my kilt, and my hatband as usual; this time I completely saturated the leather laces on my shirt. I'm not kidding when I refer to The Homespun Ceilidh Band as "perspirational music". The heat isn't too bad out today (in Baltimore -- or in Bel Air, where we were playing), though the humidity is a bit suffocating ... but it's always hot on stage. Or in the corner of the room that passes for a stage.

We played a wedding. Now wedding audiences are, in general, pretty easy to begin with ... don't deafen anyone, and fail to suck, and they'll be happy -- after all, they're already happy walking in, it being a big celebration thing, and the band is not the main attraction. But when you're in a band that can do so much more than merely failing to suck, and a substantial number of the wedding guests dig the genre you play, well that's when it goes from "easy gig" to "serious fun worth working hard for". I love playing with this band. This is how playing in this band feels.

I wasn't sure the guests were going to let us leave. Someone even held up a cigarette lighter after what we'd announced would be our last set. Someone else commented that she could've danced off another four pounds if we'd played fifteen minutes longer. (We did play a little bit later than our scheduled stopping time.) It turns out there was another wedding scheduled shortly after the one we played for, so the site manager couldn't let things run very late, but she said she didn't really want to stop us either.

There are some damned good musicians in The Homespun Ceilidh Band, and I've got a pretty positive self-image as a Celtic rhythm guitarist, but I do think this is one of those "greater than the sum of its parts" situations.

So we had a good performance, a good audience, good food, and a good piper to play during one of our breaks. I was tentatively planning to try to go to the Storvik Post-Pennsic Dessert Revel this evening, but I may be too exhausted to make it to a second event today. (We'll see how I feel after a shower, a short nap, and a couple quarts of water. I might make it there after all, despite the long odds against it.) I had a really frustrating morning, but I'll put off the whining until a later post -- I'm too busy grooving on how good this afternoon's gig felt, and too darned tired, to write about the frustration right now.

Performing is addictive, you know. And boy, have I got a muse on my back.