That Emmet girl never updates her blog. Isn't that stupid?

Pudding pudding pudding,

It's been ages, I know. Here's the trouble: whenever one takes more than a few days to get around to writing one of these things, one begins to think that one should make up for the delay by providing one's readership with something truly epic in scope. The longer one waits, the less adequately epic one's adventures seem to be.

This is not to say that good times have not been had. Most prominently, perhaps, in terms of things that might interest you, Stereophonic just wrapped up.

Stereophonic is this big shiny crazy happy mid-winter music festival put on by CHMA in the shire every year. It features a whole lot of different performers playing in a whole lot of different venues over the course of a weekend and then also some weekdays just to be cheeky.

Confession #1: I only went to two shows this year.
Confession #2: That was one more than I went to last year.

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be the big live music nerd. I have a reputation to uphold. But if there's one thing I love to do even more than upholding my reputation, it's failing to meet expectations. In any case, the two shows I went to sure were swell.

The first was on Friday evening at the Vogue, and began with a performance by a young man whose name I forget but who sang a rather charming little song about a halfway house, accompanied by really impressive facial gesticulations. (And no, the word "expressions" would not be more accurate in this case. The dude was unmistakeable gesticulating. With his face. Which I suppose is a good thing to be able to do if you play an instrument which occupies your hands. The funny thing is, he didn't gesticulate with his hands or his face when talking in between songs.) Following him we had a lovely little dose of local fella Al Tuck.

Confession #3: This was my first time seeing Al Tuck perform. Shameful, brothers and sisters, shameful.

Anyhow. Al Tuck turned out to be quite the charming dude I've always been told he was, so that was nice, and then we heard from a guy I had seen before, Mount Allison's own Pat LePoidevin.

Confession #4: If it were not for Facebook, I would almost certainly have spelled Pat's last name hugely, hilariously, humiliatingly incorrectly.

Pat played some songs I'd heard before and some songs I hadn't. Of particular note: the story of a musical encounter with a wise polar bear named George. Swoon. (Oh my goodness the internet knows about it already! Funnily enough, it seems that that footage was taken by my fellow blogger Geoff. Crazycakes!)

Speaking of people who make me swoon, Julie Doiron was next on the bill. If you are not yet aware of/in love with Julie Doiron, I submit the following for your consideration:

Definitely somebody Sackville has reason to be proud of. She's lovely, just lovely, hopping around the stage in her sockfeet, sweetly ranting about bicycle theft in between songs. (By the way, if you stole Julie Doiron's bicycle, you should know that the brakes don't work. Unfortunately, this discredits my theory that my own bicycle is safe from theft simply because it barely works.)

Now, as gorgeous as all of the aforementioned folks were, my real reason for crawling out of my hobbit hole for this particular show was yet to come...and his name was Old Man Ludecke.

Confession #5: I may have cried a bit when he played Willie P. Bennett's Caney Fork River.

Now, there are many good things to be said about the Vogue Cinema, but you can't say it's the most dance-friendly venue in the shire, what with the permanently affixed seating and all. Nonetheless, that sweet little man with his sweet little banjo got us all up on our feet for the last few songs, cheerfully jostling each other in the aisles as we shared what little space there was.

Confession #6: I definitely bumped heads with a shadowy figure at the back of the theatre during one of the intermissions.
Confession #7: It turned out to be my employer. Oops.

Walking home from the theatre, my friend Charlotte remarked that the evening had been a huge renewal of faith for her: specifically, faith that people can be drawn to participate in simple, beautiful things if given the opportunity. I thought that summed up the overall feeling the evening left me with quite well.

The next morning there was a "Pancakes for Parkinson's" fundraiser at the Anglican Church, which was nice because I like pancakes and my room-mate likes toppings, so we went together and were well breakfasted. Then at 2:00 PM, I was back at the Vogue once more for the second of the two Stereophonic shows I chose to partake of this year: the Bluegrass Jam. Although it was the same venue and lighting set-up as the previous evening's entertainment, the atmosphere was quite different. Rather than being a crowd of students with the occasional adult, this was a crowd of seniors with a tiny smattering of younger folks, most of whom were connected to the radio station. Apparently this was the first specifically bluegrass show in the festival's 6-year history, and it definitely seems like it was about time. As the fella who produces the Buegrass Jam show on CHMA remarked into the mic,
"Bluegrass fans are probably some of CHMA's most dedicated listeners. I know this because any time we have a mix-up with the Jam we get big bunches of you calling in to tell us right away."

I had been particularly excited for this show because, while there are frequent bluegrass shows in the Sackville area, they tend to be a touch outside of the student transportation/price range. As I mentioned earlier regarding the Blues Society nights at George's, student shows are nice, but multi-generational shows are better. Bringing bluegrass into the Stereophonic schema is awesome. Thanks for doing that, Stereophonic people. Looking forward to more next year!

The next day was Sunday, and I was relieved to wake up to snow, because it was a pleasant change from it being just plain bitter fucking cold all the time. To quote Dr. Blagrave:
"In Sackville we can be reasonably assured that the weather is going to suck tomorrow, and that it's going to suck a different way the day after that."

Anyhow. The day increased in awesome when I got a call from a nice boy named Tim (who happens to be in Dr. Blagrave's class with me, funnily and irrelevantly enough), inviting me to a drum circle which I could hear over the telephone was already in progress. So I bundled up and headed on over. I wound up playing my knees more than I played any actual drums. This is not to say that there was a shortage of drums, just that I am mindbogglingly sucks at maintaining a decent beat on anything that is not my own person. Between the Old Man Ludeke show and this, I seem to have given myself a lot of tiny cute bruises on my thighs, but whatever. Totally worth it, and by the end of the afternoon I had actually worked my way up to an egg shaker, and then a real drum. All in all, it's nice to have friends who have drum circles and like you enough to call you up when they're happening. You should try it some time!

At some point that has been lost in the fuzzy excitement of my formatting-addled mind, I finished, in a humble, drafty sense, a script I have been working on for the better part of the past two years. I'm feeling equal parts relieved and terrified about this. The relief is probably fairly obvious, but the terror comes in right after it and tells me, in a voice like every girl who understood the ways of the world infinitely better than I in middle school, that if I think the hard part is over now, I am an idiot. Then it kicks me in the face. Then it tells me to get back to work. Then I do.

To that end: I dropped the script off at the bookstore to be photocopied this morning. Friends are coming over to read it out loud on Saturday night. As soon as I can stop not liking the idea of everybody hating this thing I've been dodging their company to work on for the past as-long-as-I've-known-anybody-I-know-here-and-then-some, I'll be fine. This of course means that I'm going to be having an ongoing aneurysm of the soul for the rest of the forseeable future, I think. That'll be okay, so long as it's a productive one, right?

The only problem with writing is that it makes you like, completely disgusting. Oh well.

By the by, to tide you over if I take too long between entries again (because I know you're like, 100% dependent on my daily observations), it might interest you to know that I also maintain this here twitter account. So, you know, you can keep updated on the important stuff, like when I misplace kitchen utensils and completely fail to not be an embarrassing internet fangirl dork. BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW THAT OR THEY WON'T LET YOU INTO THIS SCHOOL.

Seriously.

Okay, this is just getting silly. I love you, pudding. I love you possibly more than I love pudding, although now that I mention that, I sure haven't eaten pudding in a long time, and that's a shame.

NO MORE SILLINESS, EMMET!

Fine, fine. But I love pudding. Ambiguously.

More Life (and pudding),
Emmet