strike that

sometimes.

Sometimes, after spending the better part of the day feeling listless and down, you might decide to skip both your indoor soccer game and the dancing invite from Amber whom you met at last week’s clothing swap (even though you are trying to make local dancing friends) and instead drive an hour to Longview Washington, a neon-clad sliver of a town with nothing much to draw Portlanders except for you, tonight, to see some musicians your parents know from Philadelphia called Time for Three. You think they are bluegrass players and you think you ought to meet them, since your parents talk about them endlessly and they rarely come out west and there are worse things than an hour of driving to clear your head.

So you arrive at the theater only to find that the tickets are twenty-five dollars, and you talk them down to ten right before you realize you’ve forgotten your wallet, a thing you never do. Except this afternoon at the coffeeshop you got into a long involved conversation with TJ the filmmaker and you left late and had to hurry out the door to the concert, and you didn’t pull the wallet out of your computer bag. So you sit on the floor of the lobby to at least hear the music, and half way though the third number the usher sneaks you in the side door.

The music is marvelous, two violins and a bass, gleeful and unexpected and kinetic.

And afterwards you meet the musicians in the lobby, and they invite you out for drinks, so you dance about as they load their van and you follow them to the Ramada to drop off their bags. And in the lobby the clerk tells you about a casino that will pick you up for free in a limousine, and who can argue with that. So the five of you, you and the three musicians and the tour manager, climb into the back of a stretch limo and eat M&Ms and cheese popcorn on your way to the Cadillac Ranch. And it’s an awful place, bright and sad and filled with the sound of poker chips and the smell of fried, but you stay because your i.d. is in your wallet in Portland and none of the other bars will let you in. So you eat a breakfast, eggs and hashbrowns and buttered toast – a plate of yellow – and talk about touring, and fatigue, and tattoos.

Until sometime after two, when all this catches up, and you wait for your limo on the sidewalk in the cold night air while girls fight in a parking lot, and you borrow five dollars from the manager to get enough gas for the ride home, you’re that unprepared. And ten minutes after you leave, when you’re filling your tank around the corner (because it’s Washington, not Oregon, so you fill it yourself) he is suddenly standing there with a cd. And you listen to it all the way home.

posted by tortaluga @ 3:34 AM