I have something else to obsess about besides my writing today. My girl band is performing tonight! No, that’s not right…we’re providing “background music” for the chili supper at Old Brick. If the word “performance” had been used, I’m not sure any of us would have agreed to it. But “background music?” (i.e. we are not on a stage…and everyone is EATING CHILI and talking amongst themselves rather than staring at us!) Yeah…we can do that.
The chili supper is an annual event in downtown Iowa City…basically it’s a fundraiser for local public access television, which our teacher is heavily involved in. A bunch of local restaurants provide the chili, and $5 buys you all the chili you want. You can even vote for your favorite chili by dropping a bean in a cup next to your favorite. And you can say you were there for our big debut! (Oh yes…break out the candles and the lighters…we are THAT good. Not!)
We think we’ll be playing for about half an hour, but we don’t know for sure. Here is how our rehearsals tend to go: we play a song, we talk, we laugh; we play another song, we talk, we laugh; we play another song…you get the idea. We tried to time our set last week, but we couldn’t manage to stop talking between songs. (Or laughing.)
Oh well. Even if we totally BOMB, we’ll have a lot of fun doing it!
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We’ve had the hardest time coming up with the right name for our group. At first we were going to call ourselves the Davenport Street Ensemble (because our first meeting took place on Davenport Street…and we just liked the way Davenport Street sounded), but then we decided “ensemble” sounded a little hoity toity for us. So we switched to the Davenport Street String Band. We’re definitely more of a string band than an ensemble. But try saying Davenport Street String Band fast five times…we kept tripping over the “street string” part (and there wasn’t even any alcohol involved).
Last week, on a lark, I threw out the word FRETFUL (because we all play fretted instruments and well…we all have a tendency to fret now and then…). Everyone laughed. Boy, did they laugh. So until something better comes along…we’re FRETFUL!
