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Whew, busy week. One thing I forgot to mention about my show Tuesday morning: We have a new album on the playlist by a band called Dengue Fever. It's Cambodian garage rock, by an LA band with a Cambodian singer. Well, this has me excited (besides the fact that it's a great album) because I have this fabulous album called Cambodia Rocks with 22 great songs, but no information whatsoever about the artists, song titles, nothing. But Dengue Fever's album includes a lot of the same songs! Plus I've been web surfing, and reviews & articles about Dengue Fever always mention Cambodia Rocks so I'm hoping I'll finally be able to find out something about the older album.

Let's see, Tuesday out of the blue my friend Christa offered me a free ticket to that night's ADF performance. Apparently she does fundraising for them and she's good at it, and they offer comp tickets as a bonus. It was an Indian group called Nrityagram Dance Ensemble, comprising five women. They were wonderful. The first half of the performance was what I'd consider modern dance, set to Indian music; the second half seemed much more like traditional Indian dancing. Christa sees a lot of modern dancing so I think she had more of a vocabulary to appreciate the performance, but I really enjoyed it too. I didn't try to understand the meaning of the dancing, just sat back and enjoyed the beautiful movements.

One funny moment was during the intermission, when Christa and I tried to make a pit stop. The bathroom right by the theater was really crowded, but it was in the Bryan Center so we went downstairs to another bathroom. It had a "pardon our dust" construction sign, but the door was open so I went on it. Well, the toilets were all there but there were no stalls! Just a row of toilets against the wall. I definitely didn't need to go that badly, so I headed out, passing another woman as I left. I felt like I should say something to her, but she passed by me too quickly. She came right back out, laughing and saying "I wasn't ready for that!" She looked really familiar to me, but I couldn't figure out why.

Wednesday I didn't get as much work done as I would have hoped because I had to get my hair cut (shorter this time, I really like it) and then go to Stoneline. Luckily they didn't have much work for me at Stoneline because Georg and I had tickets to Orchestra Baobab that night. They were fabulous! They're a Senegalese Latin-influenced band from the 70s. Their album Pirates Choice was re-released a couple of years ago, and was such a big hit that the band was convinced to get back together. They made a new album, Specialist in All Styles (also fabulous), and now they're on tour.

It was an outdoor concert at the NC Museum of Art, and it had been raining on and off, sometimes heavily, so we were worried that the show would be cancelled. But the rain stopped a couple of hours before the show, and by the time we got to the museum the sun was actually shining. What a lucky break! Georg had brought a couple of waterproof cushions and rain jackets anyway, which was great because the seats were all sopping wet.

With the show at the museum, the crowd was a bit older and less hep than the typical club scene. Apparently these outdoor concerts are a big picnic outing for a lot of people; we saw a lot of people with big coolers. Also they played really awful pre-show music, some kind of James Taylor knock-off. You'd think that to warm up the crowd before a legendary African band, they could have played African music. You would think that, but you'd be wrong.

We saw a bunch of WXDU DJs: Phil, Christine, Lew, Sylvia and Jason. Not computer guy Jason, but new Jason, who runs a music store and is helping Sylvia track down some Latin music that lacks US distribution. New Jason did training with me and we had a really interesting conversation about nu-jazz if I recall correctly. So maybe I should call him "nuJason." Sylvia sat with us for most of the evening, but we were really close to the stage so conversation was difficult. Sylvia did tell us that one of the band had been a lawyer for the past 15 years, and we speculated that it was the guitarist on the left who wore glasses. Also, Sylvia was going to interview the band after the show -- she's really involved in the world music scene, when we saw Los Lobos she interviewed them too -- and she asked if we spoke French. Alas! We both studied French in high school, but we don't remember any of it. If either of us had even passable French, we could have been her interpreter for her interview.

Anyway, the show. It was terrific. They played for almost two hours, which would be a rather short performance in Africa from what I understand. It was a fairly large group, 7 or 8 members I think. We particularly liked the two men on the far right, rhythm guitar and saxophone, who moved from side to side in unison for most of the performance. They really had it going on.

One interesting thing was when people started walking up on stage and handing money to the performers. Georg told me that's really common in Africa; everyone tips the musicians throughout a show. In fact, if I recall correctly what got the ball rolling was when the lead singer gave a dollar to the drummer after a solo in one of the first couple of songs. Some of the people who gave money stuck the bills to the musicians' foreheads. Which might be what they do in Africa, but here it seemed a bit awkward. As Georg said, you could tell the people sticking the money to the musicians' heads were "outside their comfort zones." On the other hand, the Africans who tipped were for the most part much more matter-of-fact about it: just walk up on stage, put the bill in the guy's pocket or pass it to him in a handshake, and then back off the stage. Rather than a sort of "tee hee, I just stuck a dollar on a man's head!" nervousness.

The weird thing is, the familiar-looking woman I had seen the night before at ADF was at Orchestra Baobab! I had been wondering all day how I knew her, and there she was again. I went up and told her that I had seen her the day before, and I'd been wondering ever since why she looked so familiar. She looked at me kind of blankly, then said, "Did you get your hair cut since last night?" I guess the haircut must have been more drastic than I realized!

It turns out that she waits tables at Greenhouse Cafe, a restaurant Georg and I used to go to all the time. It was small, only a handful of tables, and she was the only waitress most nights, so we had gotten to be chatty with her. Unfortunately when I started doing low carb we had to stop going there. The menu was mainly starch-based (mostly pasta and rice dishes), and also changed every night so it was impossible to predict whether they'd have anything I could eat.

Anyway she was really nice. She said it happens to her a lot, that people recognize her but don't know why. I can believe it; that used to happen to me all the time when I worked at Ninth Street Bakery, and for years afterwards. (In fact I saw one of my favorite Ninth St. customers, David Halperin, just a couple of weeks ago at Breadman's in Chapel Hill, and he remembered me too.) She introduced herself, and invited me to sit with her! I noticed that she had a journal out before the show started. Seems like a really cool person.

Then yesterday during the day I got a lot done on that intranet we've been working on. In fact I think we're almost done. woo hoo! That gives our client a good week to use it & find whatever bugs turn up before they show it to the organization at a big meeting next weekend.

In the evening I subbed Divaville, the jazz standards show, for Christa. Since it was July 3rd I played a lot of patriotic music. Which meant mostly military songs, since most patriotic music in the Divaville genre is from WWII. I didn't mean for the show to turn out so hawkish, but that's the way it worked out.

I had two requests: "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and "Anchors Aweigh." The sad thing is, I couldn't find "Anchors Aweigh!" I ended up playing songs about the Army, Air Force and Marines to make up for the omission. Christa had lent me some stuff from her extensive collection, and I have a two-CD set of WWII music, so I had a pretty wide selection to choose from. I did not play "Der Fuhrer's Face" by Spike Jones, but I did play "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" by Nelson Eddy.

And now I'm finally caught up to today. Whew!