5/17 – Solon Freeway Lounge

Well, it all started with my very own personal wardrobe malfunction. Just as I was getting ready to leave the house, a button fell off my blouse. Actually, I noticed a thread and pulled it and THEN the button fell off, but that’s beside the point. Let’s just say that if I had left it that way, it would have left nothing to the imagination about my northern parts.

That sent me into girl panic mode and I zoomed around the house like a squirrel in the middle of the road (before the car hits it) and I figured it would be quicker to sew the button back on than it would be to change tops. Sure.

Then I arrive at the gig to find out that it was booked as an outdoor gig for their patio opening. It was about 50-ish degrees and raining (at least we were setting up under an awning so we wouldn’t get soggy and/or electrocuted). And did I mention that the blouse material was very thin? It was. I realized too late that I should have taken the button “falling” off as a sign to have changed tops. But, I figured that I could just wear my jacket for the whole gig if I needed to. Mudcat was nice enough to offer me a sweatshirt that he had in the van if I wanted to change, but I toughed it out.

The rain let up and then stopped by the time we started playing and there were actually a few brave souls out there. And then the rain came back, but brought its good friend Wind Gust with it. So the brave souls turned out to be not so brave after all as they went running inside, while we kept playing.

The wind uprooted the table umbrellas and sent them hurling through the air like javelins. Thankfully the wind was blowing away from us. It was fun to see someone else turn into a squirrel in the middle of the road when the servers tried to catch those airborne umbrellas that were like giant Mary Poppins umbrellas, until they folded up and became weapons…

Not to be upstaged by the wind, the rain came back again. This time with a vengeance. That seemed like a good time to take a break. Mudcat became Carl Spakler when he told us that the heavy stuff wouldn’t be coming down for a while.

When our break was over it was still raining and had turned even colder, which meant there was nobody on the patio. The manager told us to move inside, so we did. Then it became an odd man out kinda gig.

The Miller Lite girls were there and I’m quite sure that their parents are so proud…and thankful that they chose that profession over being strippers. It was very amusing to me that grown men would gladly wear a plastic necklace with flashing lights as long as it was given to them by a stripper, I mean Miller Lite girl.

One of the TVs in the bar was showing a Seinfeld episode, which was fun to watch as we were singing and I could follow it since I pretty much knew all the lines. Perhaps I should be doing something else in my spare time…