love

What can I say? My tour is too small! It’s that simple!

Heather’s trusty Jeep (La Jeffa) laden to the gills, snacks from the Park Slope Food Co-op neatly ensconced in Yuri’s back pack, and I with my ultra-marine cynicism painted on the top of my eyes. Yuri resurrects tapes from the seventies and eighties while the landscape between New York City and Boston stretches and gasps, and yawns and aches it’s joints truck by truck by truck. Credit cards make good cheese slicers.

We finally arrive at PA’s Lounge, where we are greeted by the owner and told to set up our stuff in the corner by the video games. We are hungry and perplexed. Then suddenly he, and all the other grizzled veterans of his establishment burst out in a long guffaw. We are then ushered into the actual performance space, where we are greeted by a Christian jazz-fusion band doing sound check.

I find out, much to my delight, that one of my Boston friends is pregnant. (Hurrah to Brad and Jackie!)

We play a fantastic set to an attentive, but intermittently puzzled crowd, among which we are very much pleased to see our old friends from Ad Frank (we played with them at Galapagos), BJ Snowden and her entourage, local music scenesters, some friends of ours, and a woman who is clearly there for only one thing, and one thing only: BJ Snowden!

You all know BJ Snowden, right? That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.

How’d it get to be so late? Why is it darkness in the sky between the clouds, and between my temples? Why are we getting lost? Why are we driving to Rhode Island? Because we are looking for our beds. And beds they are, lovingly placed there for our late arrival by Ruth Allderige Olsen, her husband Jim, and their three sons Lorin, Noah, and Daniel. Cocoa Puffs on the kitchen counter greet us in the stillness. Individual towels, and mugs are placed on our ingeniously crafted make shift beds on two couches and a floor. Heather, the iron-willed, though somewhat direction-challenged driver of La Jeffa (her Jeep), plummets to sleep.

In the morning we are treated to a lovely breakfast, again, hand-crafted by the family, some great conversation, great home-made Macromedia Director animated videos by Lorin, and then a gorgeous springtime walk in a park. Big thanks! to the Olsens. We can’t wait to drop by again.

Then, it’s off for more knife-edge navigation of the tri-state traffic armpit of the Eastern seaboard. Somehow, once again, our projected travel times are way off and we don’t arrive in Philadelphia until we’ve been scrunched together for eight hours. But we are in good spirits, though wrinkled and hungry. The Manhattan Room opts to treat us to a nice dinner rather than the joke we received from the establishment we played at in Boston, and we’re happy to see a good rock ‘n roll crowd gathered here. We are very impressed with opening band Algebra of Need. Really hard, dirty, but precise and utterly convincing. I’m sure they can go far if only they can keep their fans from messing with their equipment on stage. Again, we surprised ourself with how much energy and love and fun we could burn through on stage in forty minutes, considering how worn out we were at this point. Something about the stage that just erases the bumps and bruises and makes you want to put the arrow to the bow and fire without thinking.

We enjoyed playing, though there were lonely moments by the swag box,

especially when we were waiting in an almost empty bar for the last band to finish their set (they had borrowed Heather’s drums). At two am we finally were able to pack our brave little truck up again and make a beeline for New York City. We dropped Yuri off at his house, and then Heather and Kristofer raced to unload our stuff at the studio in Williamsburg, but we got there far too late to make the 4am Larry Lawrence curfew.

Our 40 hours of mini-tour included: 18 hours of driving, 6.5 hours of watching other bands, 6 hours of sleeping, 4 hours of eating, 3 hours of load-in/load-out, one-hour of walking in the park, and 1.5 hours of performing. Can’t wait to do it again, but MORE next time!

Thank you to all our fans who came out to support us.

Much Love,
Morex Optimo