My lips are probably the best-toned part of my body.
Great weekend! Played a wedding in West Point Grey on Saturday; the groom's family is Serbian and hired our band specifically. They even paid us $1,600 for it, plus catered food and unlimited access to the bar. The wedding planner that they had hired was apparently concerned that we might overindulge and be unable to play. Pah! We were fine, just fine, no need to hey! Are they serving mojitos? I had to leave a bit on the early side, as I had to open the store the next morning - thrill. Too bad, because the bride and groom came up to the remaining band members shortly after we finished playing what we thought was our final set (the DJ started doing his thing, which we took as our cue to wrap things up), only to ask the bad to stay and play some more. A few extra dollar bills were apparently thrown into our sax player's horn to sweeten the deal.
Sunday started with me working a whole three hours at the bookstore, then heading off to play at a Serbian family's barbecue near Victoria and Kingsway. The family that had asked us to play are local butchers and had invited some of their best customers to come by for the day and enjoy themselves. If you're a vegetarian, then you don't want to hear how amazing the whole roast pig was, complete with rotating spit, lamb sausage, plus salads, appetizers, sweet plum preserves from their backyard tree, plus tubs of different kinds of beers from around the world. Free, delicious food: what musician could possibly say no, right? Well, as we were playing, we had a couple of people come along and again drop money into the sax player's horn - twenties, fifties and at least two one hundred dollar bills.
So, to sum up: lots of music; delicious food and drink; and approximately $2,000 - all in two days. Sometimes the life of a musician can be so damned hard. My left ankle won't stop aching, I sadly missed the Folk Fest (one of these years I'm actually going to make it there, dammit!), and I'm going to probably spend much of Tuesday in bed, but it was well worth it.
Sunday started with me working a whole three hours at the bookstore, then heading off to play at a Serbian family's barbecue near Victoria and Kingsway. The family that had asked us to play are local butchers and had invited some of their best customers to come by for the day and enjoy themselves. If you're a vegetarian, then you don't want to hear how amazing the whole roast pig was, complete with rotating spit, lamb sausage, plus salads, appetizers, sweet plum preserves from their backyard tree, plus tubs of different kinds of beers from around the world. Free, delicious food: what musician could possibly say no, right? Well, as we were playing, we had a couple of people come along and again drop money into the sax player's horn - twenties, fifties and at least two one hundred dollar bills.
So, to sum up: lots of music; delicious food and drink; and approximately $2,000 - all in two days. Sometimes the life of a musician can be so damned hard. My left ankle won't stop aching, I sadly missed the Folk Fest (one of these years I'm actually going to make it there, dammit!), and I'm going to probably spend much of Tuesday in bed, but it was well worth it.