In the bag

You know how I'm a professional musician now? Well, get this.

So a skeleton BP/P crew made of myself, Steven and Maya headed out to the Black Magic Voodoo Lounge in SF yesterday to make a little open mic appearance. I think I expected either throngs of puffed up hipsters or a spotting of wizened hecklers, but neither was the case!

We arrived at Lombard and Van Ness half an hour after the supposed beginning time to find a cute and classy little bar with 10ish reasonable and friendly looking people in it. The infamous Ray was still setting things up, but upon seeing even just the shapes of our instrument cases, he demanded that we play not just three our four songs, but something more on the order of six. Surely we must have six songs!

We puzzled it over at a small table buried under piles of instruments and came up with a good seven song set list as equipment was arranged. It turns out open mics are frequented primarily by solo acts but we managed to squeeze all our supplies into a little corner and huddled around the mics. Bluegrass-style, he called it. <3

And then there we were standing up at the front of an even more populated bar being announced by the talented Ray. A better introduction that you'd get if you were playing any normal venue. Who gets introductions?? I've only ever seen them otherwise at the Twang Cafe, which incidentally would have happened last night as well.

With that, we were playing, and I was singing. In Public. And shaking eggs, ringing bicycle bells. I even managed to play the glockenspiel bit of Scenic World reasonably without hitting too many stray notes (which I can never do!) and even then I think they were all at least in the right key, which is practically just as good as hitting the right notes! I even managed to learn Picture on the ukulele (which I had never done before yesterday) and play it standing on one foot so that I could attempt to lean over to the mic to do the Ooooo'ing parts.

All in all, a success.

A great success, and Ray the m.c. came over to us afterwards to insist that we give him contact info (good thing we had those handy block print flyers hand colored by my dad, eh???). I scribbled my email address on the back and he told us the banjulele was so cute and that he loved our instrumentation banjo-fiddle-guitar so much that we should really come back and be one of the featured acts at an open mic (wherein he would advertise that we would be playing such and such day at 7pm and we could invite our friends to a Proper Show. With Amplification! (well, some amplification)).

And not only that! I like to think that my cowboy boots, lacey flannel shirt and bandana (along with the banjulele) helped to give him the impression that we might just make a great opening act for this one country band with a show coming up....

We shall see what the future will hold!!

Rockstardom is pounding at the door!!