Busy week

I know not a lot has been happening on this blog lately. But then lots of stuff DID happen this week and Blogger was out of commission for two days! So let me try to do a recap of this week: This week, I was invited to the Theatre World Awards in June, wrote a letter to Mark Wing-Davey (of Hitchhiker's fame), met Jerry Stiller, and saw both Damien Jurado and JohnVanderslice live in concert. Oh, yeah, and this took over my life today, but I'm not even going to get into that now.

We had a book launch for a book at work, and Jerry Stiller and a bunch of other famous people came to celebrate Jerry Orbach by reading from the new book. I shook Jerry Stiller's hand and thanked him a couple times. At one point, he pointed at me and asked my co-worker "Who's this?!" It was kind of odd, but funny.

Then, tonight I went to see Damien Jurado in Brooklyn. Technically, he was the opener. I didn't really care who the headliner was. He doesn't have a lot of stage presence since he just sits on a stool and plays guitar and sings, but he's sure talented. He had a woman sing with him for a while too (Melody, was it?). I'll post some video later. Here is someone else's video of him singing everyone's favorite song Ohio. Wished he would have played his harmonica. But still a really great performance.

Turns out the headliner was actually really cool. I hadn't heard of John Vanderslice before, but he's this really happy rocker who knows how to connect with his fans. "May is Audience Participation Month!" he said. Apparently he'd done a shout out on his email list or something asking for anyone who was going to be at any of his shows who would like to perform with him. So each night, he wrote their names on his hand and would call them up on stage. So tonight we had a beatboxer, a guy who sang and played tamborine, and a girl who sang. Their equipment kept crapping out on them, but I wasn't a fan of the synth sound anyway. The music was actually good. At one point, after tons of coaxing, he convinced his road manager to come out of the sound booth and crowd surf! Video of that to come. Then later on, John himself did some crowd surfing.

Haven't even gotten to the best part yet: he goes "Okay, let's sing the last few songs on the rooftop!" So he, Damien, and the band lead the ENTIRE AUDIENCE through the building, up the stairs, and onto the roof where all the musicians stood in the middle with fans crowding around close enough to bump into the musicians, and everybody else knew all the words and sang along. It was like some kind of weird cult, haha, but it was tons of fun. Definitely not what I was expecting. I'll post video later, but it was almost exactly like this.