BURLESQUE SHOW IN 2 DAYS...

JUST TWO DAYS till the Burlesque Show (I don’t count the day of the show—we’ll be doing a final dress rehearsal that day). In lieu of a program, we’re going to have a big 24x36 poster with our photos, Tarot cards, real and stage names, and functions in the show. I’m designing that. One more day to finish it in—Friday’s shot with a job interview in Salem, 90 miles away (and a 2-hour drive over bad roads).

The good news on the job front is I got called for an interview at the Library. Not the most challenging of the jobs I’ve applied for, or the best-paying—but definitely Reinvention Central. It’d be fun. (Really, any job would be fun right now.) So next week has two interviews now—library on Tuesday, and Woodburn (for city recorder) on Wednesday. Then the following Sunday, I leave for southern Oregon again—music Sunday night, and the interview with state Fish & Wildlife Monday. (This job-hunting stuff is getting really busy. I need to get a job just so I can rest.)

Talked with the school district, too, about being assistant speech coach. That’s a job that doesn’t pay squat (it’s relatively few hours, too), but it would be fun working with the kids. I like to think I have a few things I could teach about performance. The school district, though, doesn’t want to hire me because of the Uncertainty—they want me to guarantee that I’ll be around, and until I have a local job, I can’t. (They were nice and apologetic about it. And so was I.)

Insomnia Coffee Co. in Hillsboro did contact me back, finally—they want me for either October 10 or October 24, both Saturdays. I can do either one. (Could I do both?) Oct. 10 is the day of the “Rocktoberfest,” but that’s in the morning. I just want enough notice of which day I’m performing so I can do a little promoting. I notice the coffee company doesn’t do any advertising of the music that I can see on their Website. If I go in early enough for the Burlesque Show, I can drop these guys off posters (if I know which date I’m playing) and a CD.

And we still don’t have a lead player for the “Rocktoberfest” gig. I did have a Wild Idea that I’d really like to try—but I’d like to experiment with it before using it in a gig situation. Dick Ackerman, our blues harp player, is at the other end of the country now—but he has his cell phone with him, and wife Carol has hers. Would it be possible to mount a cell phone on a tripod, in front of a microphone, have Dick play harmonica long distance into his cell phone, and broadcast it to the audience? We could transmit the concert to him (so he could hear the music) through Carol’s cell phone, by stationing someone in front of one of the speakers. (And Dick’s got one of those remote-plug-into-the-ear things, so he could hear easily.) I don’t think anybody’s ever done something like that before.

And if that worked, could we record that way? There are some songs for the album I would really like to have Dick’s blues harp on, but we didn’t manage to get them all recorded before he and Carol went away. Yes, the technology’s poor—the Japanese may have sophisticated cell phones, but us country folk don’t—but we do have a good sound engineer, and he’s got really good sound-management software on his computer. Could that make up for the primitive sound transmission over a cell phone? Or, alternatively, would the novelty of the blues harp player being able to do this from 2000-plus miles away be attractive enough to make up for the primitiveness of the sound? One may have to try it to know the answer.

“Rocktoberfest” wants the band to start an hour earlier (they said it was a screwup in the printing of the posters), but as a trade-off, we’d get an hour instead of just 40 minutes. I’m game if the rest of the band is. We already have an hour-long set mapped out from the Museum gig, so it’d be easy.

Joe