coming up from under.

Where to begin?

Maybe here: I just went to the grocery store to buy "everything" because we had "nothing". No crackers, no bread, no vegetables, no fruit, no fish, no nothing. Our refrigerators contained only condiments, butter, and milk. And old cheese.

Or we could maybe begin with some Lessons Learned. One is that sick people don't make awesome pallbearers. Over the past few days, Anat and I were experiencing varying degrees of physical malfunction, and when you're carrying a "dead" body on your shoulders, you can immediately feel any weakness in your fellow carriers b/c suddenly you're doing more work. And if there are only two of you and you're both a bit unsteady on your feet...it's exciting stuff.

But we managed to escape our four Amsterdam performances with only one minor meltdown: the night after the premiere (apparently well-known for being a night of potential trouble) I was kind of in a limbo of true sickness and untested cough medicine that rendered me incapable of walking properly, planning ahead, or dealing with anything unexpected on stage. So of course this is the night we paid someone 600 euro to come film the thing.

 I'd struggled through the first 40 minutes of the performance, but when it came time for my funeral, my guitar was suddenly distressingly out of tune, and it just got worse as the song went on. By the time the song was supposed to be building to its climax, the chords coming out of my guitar were neither predictable nor really recognizable as traditional elements of pop music. Apparently the amount of frustrated this made me was visible to the audience and received many positive comments afterwards ("It was so nice to see real anger onstage!"), but as a  musical performance I think "disaster" comes pretty close to summing it up.

Hopefully there's a happy ending: the person who was filming came back the next night (last night) and I'd say our performance was roughly 6000% better, wobbly pallbearers notwithstanding. Fingers crossed for an unblemished photo/video/audio registration.

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