CAVE People Get Jobs! (November 15)

Tonight's subject line is taken from an ad on the SkyTrain wall. It depicts a group of people who all look extremely Indian. I feel that whichever organization has this acronym CAVE (I can't remember what else the poster said), they were perhaps ill-advised to word their slogan like that. Or, I'm racist and so the racist interpretation sprang to mind faster than it might to a nice person's. Either way, amusing in the way that those Western Union ads back in England are amusing. (If you've never seen them, they basically say: "Don't trust a member of your family to take money back to Pakistan to give to your poor needy mother! Send it via Western Union instead!" Because, that's right, if you're from Pakistan you can't trust your own family! Why, they're practically niggers! ... *sigh*)

Some more random highlights of the past couple of months which we've dredged from our "schmoozing" diary...

• We helped Kim write a song for her father's 60th birthday. It had started off sounding suspiciously like Billy Joel's Piano Man, but Sarah fixed that. I helped with a couple of lyrics, then Kim recorded it, I mixed it, and she put together a Powerpoint slideshow. Apparently it went down a treat and we were heroes. Hurrah!
• We've sold about $160 of our CDs, mostly at $10 a pop, occasionally cheaper where our nerve faltered or we were part-exchanging for another CD. Not bad. But still legally a hobby, defined as something you do where you don't make as much as you spend.
• James' ensemble, My Lady's Chamber, has not only worked on Sarah's choral piece The Blackbird Of Derrycairn, but has taken on our surreal jazz piece Air Conditioning. We joined them in performing it at the party the weekend before last and it was an absolute hoot to hear it with nearly a dozen voices powering it. As for Blackbird, Sarah is extremely pleased. It's been thirteen years since she composed it, and this is the first she's heard it performed (by anyone outside of a slightly incompetent panda multitracking his voice as a Christmas present a few years ago).
• And on the subject of things Sarah wrote thirteen years ago... Sleeping Beauty: The Musical is finally moving forward! This version of the traditional story is decidedly untraditional - the princess is a feminist and the prince is a prat, as one lyric observes - and after a couple of years of teasing people with songs taken from it, Sarah was at last persuaded to take the plunge and organize a singthrough/readthrough. People from High Spirits have leapt at the chance to take part, and no doubt (he says enthusiastically) you'll hear something about how it went on here at the start of December.
• We've bought some art! Two pictures from a great shop called Kimprint down in Gastown. One is from a series of scenes from Alice In Wonderland... the artist has a great command of perspective and the series is pretty striking, so we may slowly accumulate it. The other is a small but equally striking long-range picture of a fantasy city. Buying art made us feel grown-up. All this art plus my Medieval gold CD and our A New Brain framed poster on the walls... the apartment is starting to look like we live, rather than squat, here...

We went to the open mic at the Myles Of Beans cafe in Burnaby again tonight, but it was the least appreciative audience yet... no-one applauded much for anything by anyone. Feh. On the plus side, I sat behind the drums for an hour and drummed along in numerous jams. Sarah says I looked very cute, particularly when I looked sheepish whenever I tried something adventurous and it didn't quite work. But I did enjoy it.