50 bands

I finished my review of Audrey’s Door last night and sent it off to Dead Reckonings. Two months ahead of deadline, no less. I’m in desk-clearing mode again. This morning I wrote my Storytellers Unplugged essay, which I’ll proof this evening and post to the dashboard tomorrow to go live on Monday morning.

There are days when I have to pinch myself, when something so surreal happens that it seems like it’s from a dream. Yesterday was one such day.

This morning, I was nudged by a Facebook friend to participate in the 50 bands meme. I don’t usually do those, but I thought I’d give it a shot. The first challenge was to see if I could come up with fifty. It seemed like a daunting number. During the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t see many live concerts. Groups tended not to come to eastern Canada all that often. The first one I saw was Supertramp, when I was in high school, and my parents drove me three hours each way to see that one. When I was living overseas I saw a few others, but it wasn’t until I moved to Texas that I really saw many of the groups I’d been listening to all my life. When the outdoor concert pavilion opened in my community, less than five miles from my apartment, it was like a dream come true. There were weeks when we went two or three times to different shows in those early years. David Bowie. Elton John. Emerson Lake & Palmer (that show cost $5, I remember). I finally got to see Pink Floyd when they came to Houston on their Division Bell tour — the only PF concert to ever be cut short by torrential rain, as a matter of fact. And I got to see Alan Parsons Project, which I would never have guessed when I was younger because they didn’t tour during their heyday.

I did manage to come up with fifty, though I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot of the shows we saw at the pavilion in its first few years.

Watched Raising the Bar last night, taped from Monday. Balco came up with an interest solution to the manufactured evidence situation, and the defence attorney thought she’d been given a huge gift by being offered a retrial. If she knew all the facts, she wouldn’t have been so happy. The second season of the show is much better than the first, now that the writers have found their feet and the characters are more solidified.