Did some laundry at The Dinosaur House and went out to lunch with Justin before packing up and heading downtown to a coffeeshop to spend the rest of our afternoon catching up on some internet work and hanging outside in the beautiful spring day. After hitting up a nearby pizza joint for some dinner, we made our way toward a movie theater to drop Lisa off to go watch a movie. Somehow we got confused on times and missed the start time on her movie but found Dickson St. -- the main college strip near the University of Arkansas that's lined with bars and clubs -- on our way. Cam got all fired up to find us a gig for the night and jumped out and went on the hunt. After close to an hour of asking around, he finally found a place called Toothpicks that was up for letting us setup and play until atleast 10pm when they would most likely be closing since UofA had just gone on spring break.We scoped it out and despite doubting that the empty pub would gain any customers in the next couple of hours since it was dead during dinnertime and definitely slightly hidden on the strip, we decided it would be fun to setup and play regardless, to at the very least practice some tunes we hadn’t really been playing much.
We busted a quick load-in and started setting up as the waitress/manager Alyssa and the cook Steve stood by watching and chatting with us. Around 8:30, though, as we were about half way setup, this party of about 10 stumbled in all rowdy and ready for dinner after being at the happy hour of a place up the street and watching the UofA basketball game that afternoon.
Oh my, they were some giddy and toasted middle-aged folks that were rowdy as all getout from the start. They were pretty vocally excited about the fact that there was a band setting up to entertain them for their dinner and the continuation of their drinking excursion. It was quickly pretty hilarious as they were begging for us to start. They all had Electric Kamikaze shots then ordered their dinner. We started around 9pm and were surprisingly greeted with a bunch of enthusiasm by these crazy dinner eaters of apparently the wealthier and older sort. Granted, we were consciously playing stuff of ours that we thought might go over a little better with them (and they were significantly lubed up), but still, we didn't expect such a warm reception. Drunkenness could’ve certainly led to violence and some intense heckling if we offended them in any way -- so we were psyched it was going the other way. They got their dinner about midway through our set, and soon after we decided to play our sexy dance tune Pump It, Fill It just for shits and giggles. About 2 min into it the entire table had emptied and had broken out into an all out dance party right up in front of us. At one point, one of the ladies, who had been adding some pretty rad harmony vocals throughout the evening, started bustin some funky funky rhythm on Cam’s washboard. It was unbelievable. What a random happening. We played about 4 more songs after that as the dance party continued to rage, and these crazy people worked off their dinner. It was 10:20. Time to close. Time for us to be done and time for our random little crowd to leave. It was a wild convergence of epicness. An experience that none of us will easily forget.
We packed up and drove out into the night to find a place to sleep. We were greeted with some magnificent lightning -- spidering all across the night sky. Really wild stuff. And then a downpour for about an hour. Same storm system that had sent a tornado through downtown Atlanta, GA that night.
Still no days off -- 10 shows in a row -- with two shows over the weekend that would extend that streak to 12. Our St. Patrick‘s Day show on Monday got cancelled though, so that‘s looking like it will probably end the streak and be our first day off, but who knows, as tonight had proven -- anything can happen.
We slept in the van for the first time this night. Our streak of 9 days without doing so ended, we were ok with it. Nice to keep to ourselves for a night.
Reporting from orbit for all of us Finn Rigginses
--gilbert
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