We woke up in the Rabbit Hill Music Store in Easton and went around the corner to a little coffee shop and dilly-dallied for a while, checking email and checking out the cute girl who ran the place. I’m a fiend, I know. Not sure what’s wrong with me. Maybe nothing.
Then we drove to Baltimore and met up with Darren’s old friend Dave Cipriani, and we roamed around the Hampden neighborhood, getting lunch and cruising the thrift shops for snow globes. I found two at one thrift store, but they were kinda pathetic, with most of their water gone and no easy way to refill them, and they were $8 each. Silly. So I kept looking, and eventually found a prize specimen.
Then we met up with Dave’s friend Chrissy and Melissa, and Chrissy gave me advice on building a snow globe from scratch. Maybe I’m that ambitious, we’ll see.
Then I took a nap.
Then I went and had coffee with my old friend Emily who is in the writing program at Johns Hopkins. After some catch up time I went back to Dave’s and then we went to see Milkbaby play at the Mojo Room. It was a really good venue for them and they played a particularly cock-rocky version of their set. Then we watched the Vestal Vermin, an all-girl band who had plenty of heart but maybe not enough practice time. Still, I enjoyed it. Then we saw Los Hermanos de Something Something, and they were pretty good.
Then me and Dave split to go see this monster brass ensemble play at this gallery called the G-Spot. We got there just in time for the last song, which fortunately was really long and really rockin. I forget the name of the band, but there were seriously like 10 different hornists, a drummer, a percussionist, and a full row of hot lady singers up front and a lead man. Chrissy and Melissa were there and we all jumped and danced and I smiled so much it hurt.
Then we met up with Barry and Darren and Stephanie, and we tried to go to this all nite diner called Paper Moon but it was way too crowded so we just went to the grocery store and stocked up on grub and went back to Dave’s house. We mowed through most of the food and then we went down to the basement and played guitars for a while. Dave spent a month in India recently, learning guitar from some dude who learned from Ravi Shankar, so he played us a raga on a guitar that he had sort of converted into a scitar kinda thing, with a sympathetic drone string and open-tuned and what-not. It was really cool sounding. Then we all got really sleepy. So we slept.
The next morning I made a big egg scramble for the gang and a small tofu scramble for Stephanie. Several of the eggs had two yolks in them, which freaked me out a little. But I’m not one for omens so I didn’t think too much of it. After breakfast we said our goodbyes and got on the road to D.C.