Yep

It was a gig-full weekend. Day One = Columbus Arts Festival with Nova Madrugada. The Club Stage was positioned perfectly in a sun-drenched wind tunnel. Foolishly, I did not get any photos, though unfoolishly, if I had, they would have captured my music blowing off the stand and my chasing after it when I could sacrifice my harp part due to bandmate volume. After over a decade of playing outdoor weddings this was a lesson learned -- People Who Play Festivals place a large piece of plexiglass over their music on the music stand. I've been surviving on office clips because on windy days I open and tack down my music to the most important piece and improvise the rest.

Lemon sorbet from Graeter's eased some of this humiliation, as did settling in for a night of Maggie Green and Canto Poetico -- she was on FIRE debuting her own tune.

Day two = wedding on the green of a small county golf club. Aside from playing the typical wedding fare -- the most important piece tacked down with office clips -- it was my job to drown out the generator that ironically was powering the equipment used to amplify the harp. Though I was booked to play longer, at the end of the ceremony the groom affirmed I successfully distracted the guests from the roaring equipment but should "prob'ly quit cuz dat's 'bout gonna run outta gas."

Day three = church service at the Columbus Center for Spiritual Living. J was recently hired as interim musical director to provide radically different music from one week to the next. The topic of the day was Mystery. Did his recently-composed piece Tristery -- a title combining my name and "mystery" -- have anything to do with why I was contacted for this? We mysteriously improvised with harp and piano and later I performed a snippet of Crimson (go here to hear). It was not a mystery that we found we can play together well, especially on the fly -- set a key and see what happens.

A mysterious weekend? It's a mystery that one day I figured I could find a way to get my car out if on a freak day my garage door opener died, and the very next day that is exactly what happened. It's a mystery that in the middle of the night I couldn't sleep and *PING* heard a harp string break downstairs, and once it was replaced as it needed to stretch to be in tune for an early gig the next day, fell asleep immediately. It's a mystery that I happened to be in the gardening section of a store and spotted just one super-on-sale plant I haven't been able to find anywhere else to complete a section of my always-needing-weeding landscape. It's a mystery that on the day after I run out of dark chocolate, I'm asked to share a bar of the darkest I've had yet -- this is high-octane Extreme at 88%, my friends. It's a mystery that one week I fret about being able to continue to make my living teaching and playing, and the next week am contacted about lessons and gigs.

Or is it?

Listening to: World Cafe on WCBE, the local NPR station -- the nightly two-hour slots are back!