Taken by the Solar Flare

Good Monday! (That is meant as a greeting, not as a proclamation on the quality of my or your day so far.)

I thought I would give a short recap of my weekend for those of you keeping score at home. Actually I’ll go with a “Weekend plus One” recap. We’ll start with Thursday.

I spent Thursday evening with two of my most favorite people. As a Christmas gift my sister gave me the tickets to see Glen Phillips at the Workplay Theater in Birmingham. A much-appreciated gift I should add. After a couple of months of persistent invitation one of my best friends, the frequently mentioned herein Heath Mixon, agreed to accompany me for said performance.

I left Florence around 4:30 to drive to Birmingham. On the drive my iPod finally revealed its true usefulness. The trip passed quickly as I listened to a podcasts of couple of past episodes of Fresh Air. I love that Terry Gross!

Once I reached Birmingham, I pick Heath up at his house. I popped inside to say a quick hello to Mark and Owen & Charlie. Then Heath and I were off for a quick dinner at Subway and then to the show.

Vienna Teng opened the evening at Workplay. She impressed me. Actually, I was even more impressed with her percussionist/accompanist, Alex Wong. Dude could make some amazing sound from some unamazing apparatuses. I liked Vienna’s music; I just wish I’d been a little more familiar prior to seeing her live. Stylistically she reminded me a lot of Tori Amos. (Click on her name above if you want to hear some of her stuff.)

Glen put on a great show. I’ve seen him live several times now, and he never disappoints. I played the nerd fanboy and jotted down the set list as he played. You can see it here if you care.

One of my favorite parts of any Glen Phillips show is the between song banter/rambling. Always funny, often political. Fun stuff. My favorite quote from this night was a song dedication. He dedicated the song ‘Comes a Time’ to Glen Beck for “making so many people so afraid of so little.”

In other banter he reminded me what a remarkable talent he is. He mentioned, after flubbing a note on the guitar, the dangers of glass table sitting. I’d forgotten that a little over a year ago he sat on and fell through a glass-top table. In doing so, he severed the ulnar nerve in his left arm. The injury was repaired, but still left his left pinky useless. He had to relearn all of his own songs using only 3 fretting fingers instead of the 4 he used to write them all. Wow!

Here’s a short video from my phone of Solar Flare:

After the show (and after I admitted my man-crush on Glen) I dropped Heath off and headed back to Florence. This time I used a few episodes of The Playbill Podcast (Broadway news and interviews) to keep myself awake. Thank you Seth Rudetsky!

Friday night the Florence City School system hosted the 3^rd Annual Father-Daughter Valentines Dance. I took my daughter to the 1^st Father-Daughter extravaganza. After missing last year’s dance because of a trip, I promised we would not miss this year’s gala. So Friday afternoon I picked up a corsage and headed home to change clothes and pick up my date.

The dance was quite an event. We arrived and were shuffled into a former classroom to have our picture made. Then we headed to the auditorium to await the festivities. The Girl ran off into the auditorium to her friends while I waited outside, in the much quieter hallway.

As we waited I saw and briefly spoke to a few of the dads I knew: most I like and some I don’t care for. I stood in the hall and watched a room full of girls in party dresses run and chase as if they were on a playground. If not for the cringe-inducing screams, it would have been amusing. Instead I was in the midst of a miniature sensory overload experience.

Finally the dance began. The Girl came to retrieve me from the hall. We entered toe auditorium as some one in charge gave directions for each grade (Kindergarten through 4^th grade) to line up with their dads.

It was during this time, standing in line waiting for our turn in the refreshment room that I realized how truly anti-social I am. I stood behind my daughter as she stood in a circle of her friends. The other girls’ dads stood on the other side of the circle chitchatting. I spent the next several minutes hoping beyond hope that none of them would talk to me.

I’m not a fan of small talk. I know I’ve said it before, but I’m not good at it. I can’t bring myself to sincerely ask about the details of a stranger’s life and actually listen to their answers. That sounds terribly selfish, and I suppose it is. But the feeling is mutual (in my mind) no one wants to listen to me talk about the minutia that makes up Scott Coats either.

Aside from those few moments of trepidation, I had a great time. So did the girl. Unlike most of the girls there she spent most of the night with me. She wanted to dance to every song. We danced for most of them. At one point a friend came up and said to her, “Come on! You’ve been dancing with your dad all night!” That made me smile.

We danced. We ate. We danced some more. We had a wonderful time. I even took a couple of pictures of The Girl and a friend dancing the Macarena. Oh yeah. It’s still around. Here are the pics. (I “William-Kennedy-Smith-trialed” them to preserve anonymity.) (My daughter is in the black dress.)

I called this a weekend recap, but that’s pretty much it. I spent Saturday watching the 2009 Tony Awards (yes, I still have it on my TiVo, but only because I have not put it on DVD yet), grocery shopping, and watching the kids swim at the Y. I spent Sunday playing and singing with FAfC, taking a 2-hour nap, and cooking spaghetti.

All in all, despite some upsetting news toward the end (nothing devastating, but troubling nonetheless), it was a decent weekend.