SATURDAY NIGHT, AND THE MOON IS OUT...

Like the song says (not one of mine), “it’s Saturday night and the moon is out.” And I have no intention of going anywhere. I marched two miles in the Dairy Parade, as part of the TAPA contingent, wearing my “Beauty Queen of Leenane” sash, and got my picture taken; that’s enough accomplishment for one day.

I will not be starring in “The Beauty Queen of Leenane”—they decided on the younger guy—and I am not bothered; it means I don’t have to change the date of the Sept. 25 “Joe Concert.” The play I’d really like a part in will come up this fall—“My Three Angels,” a French comedy that became a famous American film starring Humphrey Bogart (among others). I was suggested for the role of the evil uncle, but I’d rather be one of the criminals, I think; they’re much more interesting characters, even though they have a lot more lines. Either way, I will have to master speaking understandable English with a French accent.

This month, the Coventry songwriters over in England want songs intended to be sung by someone else. I had been working on one already, an “I fall in love too easy” song with Polly Hager in mind, and maybe this will be a spur to finishing it. If she’s not interested in it (and she may not be, after she sees the lyrics), it can get added to the list of songs I can always perform in a gay bar.

I have three—maybe four—photos thus far for the Board/Staff Art Show at the Bay City Arts Center July 10: two from the garden at home, and one from the Dairy Parade. (The fourth is a very conventional, albeit pretty, landscape shot from a friend’s rear window.) I have a frame for one, will need to get thrift-store frames for the others. I’ll let the frame dimensions dictate the size of the photos—might as well be unconventional about it. In addition, I have a photo of the masterpiece the cats did a while back—a dead bird tastefully arranged on the “Welcome” mat—and I’ve snapped mug shots of the two artists, too. (Those can go in separate, smaller frames.)

All the photos will have to have prices on them—something the Arts Center insists on, because we try to market artists as well as showcase them. I suppose the price for the “cat art” will have to be denominated in cat food. I’m sure the feline artists (Chloe and Emily) would not appreciate cash money

Photography, I think, follows the same rules as songwriting. (Maybe all of life does.) I keep my eyes open (keeping the ears open is probably not applicable in this case), and I always have my camera with me (I keep extra CDs in the camera case, after all), and as I see weird things, I snap their picture. Half the fun is figuring out the titles for the things.

Job interview (for a city manager job, no less) in two, maybe three weeks will be the first one in months. This one’s in the Willamette Valley, about a 2-hour drive from Garibaldi. I will eschew, this time, checking out the live music scene and fantasizing what it’d be like to be part of it until I find out whether I actually will be offered the job; I have built up my hopes and had them dashed too many times. Nothing but rejection letters or dead silence (which usually means rejection later) from everybody else I’ve applied to for jobs.

Thirsty Lion gig is Tuesday night; Monday through Friday, I’ll be helping teach “beach art” to kids at the Arts Center. I have a brochure to finish for the 2nd Street Market, and the Southern Oregon Songwriters July newsletter to do (and once again, I don’t have their material by deadline time). And I have the Darth Vader theme to record—on the banjo—for the “Pig Wars” video. No details yet on the band’s Garibaldi Days gig, and I need those right away, too, to go into the SOSA Newsletter. And we need to practice.

Joe