billy strayhorn

Just finished a tribute show all about Billy Strayhorn. (As usual, I forgot to mention it earlier today. Doh. At least I posted on Facebook.) It was a bit of a challenge to pull together, both due to issues I've written about already and some computer problems I've been having in the past week (the Mac with all the music on it suddenly decided to stop accepting CDs). Still, I think the show came together pretty well, and I don't think my frazzled feeling was apparent on the air. At least I hope not.

Strayhorn was a really interesting person and I highly recommend the book Lush Life by David Hajdu. Very well written, I felt like he did a great job of describing a complex person with sympathy.

Now I am so very, very glad that my marathon radio month (2 tribute shows a week apart!) is over. I haven't figured out yet what I'm going to do about Christmas -- usually I do an extra-long Christmas music show, but this year Christmas comes late in the week so my last show before the holiday is five days before. Maybe I'll just do the regular 2 hour show and not make a big deal about it this year. I think I'm not going to schedule any theme shows in January either. I'm always glad to do them, but there's so much research and planning and pressure to choose the right songs and say the right things, especially when it's a tribute to a person, that it ends up a bit exhausting. I need a couple of months off, to just have fun and play music in my show.

I've been looking at the 2010 calendar and there are some fun shows coming up next year -- Valentine's Day is on a Sunday, as is Halloween, also the birthdays of Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman and George Gershwin. Thankfully none of those are in January.

Really tonight I should work on the Divaville Lounge show website. I had been keeping it on an old version of Movable Type -- the only site still running on that old version -- because I used a special plugin to manage the dates. It would display "today's show," "last week's show," "next week's show" and the 6 upcoming shows -- in other words, it would display shows starting with tomorrow (the day after one viewed the page, that is) and ending 6 weeks in the future. And the home page rebuilt itself every night, so the relative dates were always correct. It was set up exactly the way I wanted.

Well, a couple of weeks ago my host upgraded my server and now this old version of MT doesn't work anymore. I couldn't add shows or edit the ones that were already there. And that essential plugin doesn't work with the new Movable Type. So I have to write my own code to handle all those relative dates. Kind of frustrating, I can't possibly be the only person who was using that plugin. I've got "today's show" and "all shows in the future" (which I can live with instead of the 6 upcoming shows, if I have to). Have not yet been able to get "last week's show" and "next week's show" to display. So I ought to work on that tonight. Probably won't.