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Gretchen out on the town post hospitalization
Thursday, September 28 2017
My templating code was done, as was the integration of TinyMCE with our email editing system, so I wanted to test it in an environment that was accessible to more than just me. But it took hours of my day to get the staging environment for the email system. By the end of my workday, I was dogged by strange PHP errors about redeclared PHP functions. Later I would realize that this was because of hardcoded base paths in a config file that was including code from the live site, but at the time it was a complete mystery.
I cut out of work early (at 6:30pm) so I could come with Gretchen on the things she wanted to do tonight. It was her first night out on the town since her hospitalization, and it would begin with Chinese food at the Little Bear in Bearsville. Eating Chinese food was a big upgrade in her range of appetites; she'd been subsisting mostly on bland things like cereal, toast, crackers, and bland soups. But there we were in the Little Bear (it was a mostly elderly crowd tonight), and she ordered the mixed vegetables with tofu. I got the straw mushrooms with tofu and bamboo shoots, and it came out as an enormous bowl containing a stew with a somewhat gelatinous broth. Somehow I at the whole thing, which was greatly improved with the addition of pepper oil.
After dinner, we met up briefly with Chris & Kirsty at The Bear (the fancier non-ethnic restaurant nearby) as they finished their meal. Then the four of us walked to the Bearsville Theatre for the evening's featured event: a performance by a band called Kentucky Native as fronted by Ben Sollee, who is apparently one of Gretchen's recent musical heroes (he even appears as an epigraph for one of her poems in her poetry collection Kind on page 44). The show hadn't generated as much interest as expected and had been moved from the big room in the Bearsville Theatre to an intimate little space by the bar in the front room. It would be fair to characterize Ben Sollee and company as musicians' musicians, artists who inspire other artists while struggling to reach the public at large. As for the music itself, I found it a bit jazzier than expected (I was expecting more of a Bluegrass experience). This might've been a function of the sheer talent of all the musicians, who could play in oddball time signatures and effortlessly change tempo. I was most struck by the drummer, who seemed to be able to make anything serve as a drumset. His on-stage equipment was limited to just a few drums and cymbals, and his bass drum looked to be a big rectangular plastic box. For some songs, he stood with the rest of the band and played a customized guitar (called a "Shuitar") outfitted so that it could only produce percussive sounds. The banjo player was also amazing, partly because he'd been in the band (as a temporary substitute) for only a few days. He seemed like a total banjo geek, with his face screwing up in various ways as he poked and prodded a steady rain of notes out of his instrument, which perched perfectly at the apex of his pot belly. I could also say something about bearish bassist and the willowy seven-foot-tall fiddler who towered above him, but who has the time? The music was great for what it was, but it wasn't really my thing (Gretchen, on the other hand, loved nearly everything). I did, however, like a few songs: an oddball science fiction tune about working as a miner on the moon and "Something, Somewhere, Sometime," a song I'd remembered actually hearing on the radio. There's a straightforward earnest maturity to Ben Sollee that I found vaguely off-putting, though it's fair to say that I've felt this way about a lot of the people Gretchen is either friends with or admires).
After the show, as Gretchen handed Sollee a signed copy of Kind, she told him she'd drop me for him in a heartbeat. He jokingly replied that they should swap spouses, though I don't know what the implications would then be for his nine year old son and the daughter who is about to be born.
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