All hail mon462 for noodging me into registering for guitar classes at the Old Town School once more, after a multiyear hiatus where I only seldom touched my instrument, and then only to whizz through very basic accompaniments for songs I already knew how to play. All hail!

So yesterday was the first class of the new session, and I'm taking Guitar Ensemble Skills and Guitar 2-Repertoire (a techniques class). When last I was enrolled, I'd made it as far as 3-Rep, but my hiatus and general rustiness encouraged me to drop back down a level for this first toe-dabbling exercise, and I'm glad I did. I am (reasonably so) rather farther advanced than my classmates who just came out of 2, but I can see that the skills we're going to work this semester are precisely the ones that are scariest/weakest for me: treating my left hand's motions as not just simple presets, but variable, and doing Different Things (picking bass notes, different strum rhythms) with my right hand.

Guitar Ensemble Skills is also shaping up to be one of the most fun classes I've ever taken, as well as being 'useful'. Well, and hard. And encouraging me to practice stuff I've gotten extremely rusty on. Which is good! :-> Ensemble classes in general, at OTS, mean students with a range of instruments in a room working up arrangements to perform songs provided by the teachers (often themed -- there's a Guns'n'Roses ensemble, a Bangles ensemble, a jazz fusion ensemble, etc). Usually, this means 2/3 of the students present play guitar, you're lucky to get a vocalist, bassist, drummer, or Something Else Weird, and many of the teachers have been taken aback by the fact that one of my favorite things in all the world to do is to sing harmony vocals. So you often get six guitars all doing mostly the same rhythm part, with one Really Good guy doing leadlines, and a lot of unison singing.

Not in this class -- lawdamercy, no! And I'm glad of it. Firstly, I'm one of only three people who brought guitars to the class (and the least skilled of the three, which I anticipated), so there's actually a desire for me to learn and perform steady-but-basic rhythm lines. Drat it. Which means I have to actually practice my C#m chords at speed, and so on. However, the teachers are also massively in favor of multipart vocals YAAAAAY. And we have a drummer. And the gal who came to class without an instrument entirely, who said she wanted to primarily sing, turns out to be a classically-trained pianist in her 'other' musical life, so can put nifty keyboard riffs on things to substitute for, say, horn lines in the original artist's arrangement.

Yesterday we worked up a serviceable, really neat arrangement of Paul McCartney's song 'Jet' in an hour and a half -- I can tell you, it's really nice working with pros. :-> Now I just need to get home and practice my fingers off trying to get those barre chords back ... now that I have a shiny gaw-juss (to steal Eric Coleman's pronunciation) guitar with low enough action to make them unpainful.

Oh, and do my math writing assignment before Tuesday, and practice my piano class homework before Monday, and ... did I mention next week is the last week of classes at HWC? Argh. :-> Still, good argh.

When I was a child, I was what is politely called 'precocious.' [1] This had advantages, but it also meant that when I *didn't* pick up a new skill quickly, I got very frustrated very fast, threw tantrums, and generally just didn't understand why it had to be so hard.

My Grampa Beltz sat me down and explained it to me, over and over. Some things are easy. Some things are hard. But even the very, very hardest things, he said, I could learn. The trick was to make sure you made a big enough hole to put the magic in.

Magic? Ah, I should explain. There are fairies and leprechauns and other tutelary spirits in the world. [2] They want to help us, honest they do, but sometimes things are hard even for them. So you have to help them help you by pushing as hard as you can to open yourself up inside to make room for them to put the magic in, and then all sorts of things can happen.

I thought he was kidding -- or worse, humoring me -- until the day I learned to read.

( Long, weepy story inside. Feel free to avoid. )

John found, unexpectedly, one of the utterly unobtanium-coated Rock Band box sets with a PS2-compatible game in it [1], and he and I enjoyed playing some two-guitar multiplayer songs. Then he did guitar while I did vocals, which was also fun, and unexpectedly challenging. I never even considered trying the drum set, because it looked likely to caterpillar's-dilemma me badly.

One morning last weekend, however, John decided to start trying out drum parts. I was sleepily lying on the couch with both dogs, half-watching ... and suddenly I not only realized why he was having trouble, but somehow knew I knew how to do it. Or, at least, I got that videogame-fan impulse that says, "Ooh, ooh, lemme try, I can beat that level!"

Three songs later, I was consistently getting triple his scores, and he said from across the room with an admirable lack of bitterness, "Ok, so you're definitely going to be playing the skins from now on!"

I'm finding it surprisingly meditative. [3]

However, skill at playing Rock Band's drum parts is interacting interestingly with my piano class ... which I should have, perhaps, anticipated. Today we learned a technique called 'intervallic sightreading' [4] to which I have never before been introduced, despite a moderate past experience with taking piano lessons. It is STAGGERINGLY USEFUL. My ability to play cold (meaning, sit down with a piece I've not seen before and get mostly close first try) has quintupled, at least, since start of class today. YAY!

However, something else that's gotten staggeringly easier since yesterday is following certain kinds of drum lines on the note crawl in Rock Band.

I think I'm reprogramming my brain.

Which is cool.

Rokk on!!!!

---

Footnotes

1. PS2-compatible Rock Band *exists*, but is very hard to find. Xbox and PS3 versions are easier to come by. The PS2 one (which RockBand.com claims does NOT exist) was, apparently, only made in limited amounts -- most stores that wanted to sell the game at all got a stack of 10 or 20 PS2 ones, plus a larger number of each of the other two platforms, in November. Many sold out before December 1st, so when John and I went looking for one circum-Xmas, there were none to be had. Even online. Everyone was sold out.
   
   Until just a week or so ago, John walked into an FYE [2] for a CD and found an intact stack of 10 ... apparently nobody ever goes to FYE to buy RockBand. Score. :->
   
   
2. FYE is a small music-and-movies-etc store. Around here it seems to have eaten the former local chain Coconuts, which was similar but with different logos on the signs.
   
   
3. Drums as meditation However, unlike OCD-sufferer Hannelore (see 1, 2, 3, et al.), I'm not in it for the counting. I'm actually not counting at all, in a numeric or verbal sense; I'm vibing, just like I do when I'm playing guitar or singing. Which of course gets me into trouble when the 'extras' beats do something silly over an intended-to-be-constant 'skeleton' beat ... but I'm working on that.
   
   
4. Intervallic sightreading (which means 'sightreading using intervals') is a skill in which, instead of the page-to-sound cognitive process looking like: [1. See staff. 2. Translate note position to letter. 3. Translate letter to keyboard position. 4. Press key] it looks more like this: [1. See staff. 2. Choose initial hand positioning carefully (aided by notes on staff of learner sheet music). 3. Locate precise position of first note. 4. Proceed thereafter by relative gaps between said note and next notes: a third means 'skip one finger,' etc.]
   
   You don't play the notes at all; you play the distance between the notes. In many cases, I never even have any idea what letter-note I'm playing until I look down. I bet this is some cool secret Advanced Technique that all you experienced musicians already knew about, but nobody'd ever mentioned it to me, not once. STAGGERINGLY useful. I loves it, my preciousssss ....

Specifically, Walles Music on North Avenue at Oak Park Avenue. It's awesome. Small business, GREAT enormous retro sheet-metal-and-neon sign, good selection of guitars, good selection of non-guitar instruments (everything from 30 harmonicas in stock to a CHOICE of accordions and trumpets and flutes). They seem to be focussed on electric guitars, amps, and pedals, but as the lady said, that's what sells, so that's what they carry.

I went there in search of a tuner to replace my poor insane old Intellitouch. Really, it owes me nothing; it's well over 5 years old, and I've only had to change the battery once. The problem is, if I tune my guitar so that my tuner says I'm all set, anyone ELSE's tuner says I'm off. Consistently off, actually, so I think my tuner's idea of what an A-440 is, is the problem, but I don't know how to fix it. I've dredged through the manual, buttonpressed through its menus, nothing.

Therefore, time for a new one. Technology has marched on, and Intellitouch now has a smaller, cheaper one (I paid about $95 for mine, long ago; the same model is currently going for $75ish) that isn't infinitely retunable to differing As -- which is good, as I've never tried to take mine out of 'concert'.

Problem is, nobody seems to have it in stock. For values of 'nobody' that include the four non-chain they-sell-guitars music stores in easy striking distance of my house. However, Walles offered to order it for me. I considered coming home and checking eBay ... until I saw that they carry Seagulls at Walles. MULTIPLE MODELS of Seagulls. OMG, a guitar shop that's HEARD of the Canadian Heresy? Um, yeah. I rolled all my Willpower dice not to come home with a guitar today (especially hard since they had some decent ones in the sub-$500 range). I didn't even let myself play one, though I really, really wanted to.

They have good service, their folks are knowledgeable, their prices are on par with all the 'big stores,' they're near to my house, AND they like some of the same things I do in guitars. I'm totally going back when I have a few hundred to blow on upgrading from my Patient Lady to something I can actually do barre chords on ...

But in the meantime I ordered a tuner. It should be here in about a week. :->

Well, I did speak to a lot of good friends (most of who were amazingly good sports about how hyper or unfocussed I was), but for the most part, from my point of view, Windycon looked like this:

( Lots of rambling bullet points, most involving the word 'concert'. )</ul>

For those of you not clicking through the cut, yes, I'm told the concert went well. There are recordings. If/when you can hear it, I'll let you know how and where. Please God save me from concertgiving for at LEAST six months. Hopefully by then my life will be more togther.

Other than that, my overwhelming impression of Windycon is that that hotel (a) is run by monkeys, (b) they're unprofessional monkeys, (c) has about half the parking it needs, (d) is three times longer from one end of programming space to the other than anyone wants it to be, and (e) is slowly driving away, by being a-d, increasing numbers of people who would otherwise come to Windycon.

Speaking personally, I hope to God they haven't renewed their contract for next year, as if it's still in that hotel I'll have to have an overwhelming, WOW WANT TO GO reason, or I'll skip it myself. And I haven't missed a single Windycon since I started going in 94.

For other people's views of the con as I collect them, click here.

What did I do this past weekend? A nonexclusive bulleted list follows, and if I feel like expanding any of them in full entries later, I shall do so. First, though, some highlights in case I get too busy to do anything more thorough.

• Sang but not nearly as much as in some previous years, mostly because I:
  
• Talked for hours to a whole string of interesting people I've not had a chance to connect with before. Hi, joecoustic! Hi, maverick_weirdo! And others. Also bookwyrm_com (more on her later).
  
• Ate a nice hot breakfast of protein and fat every morning, thanks to the included-breakfast-buffet-with-room concept.
  
• Slept, but not nearly enough! :-> Maybe six hours Friday night, four on Saturday night, and fiveish last night.
  
• Drove a WHOLE lot! I-290 -> I-94 -> I-80 -> I-65 -> I-465 -> I-70 -> I-270 (briefly), to the hotel, from the hotel to BD's for the Dead Dog Dinner, and then the reverse course to come home. mannoftalent valiantly shared the long-distance driving chores, but I was glad to find my stamina for long trips and ability to stay able-to-drive over the long term are improving. Outbound trip began roughly 11:30AM CDT, and we got in to the con just before 8 EDT. On the way back, we were on the highway by 8AM EDT, and were walking up my front sidewalk by 1:30PM CDT. Outbound, though, we were unlucky enough to hit the height of rush hour on I-475 (going around Indianapolis), so THAT leg took nearly an hour and a half.
  
• Bought gas three times, each for less than $2.10/gal. Yay, full tank of cheapish gas ...
  
• Plotted with peteralway, bookwyrm_com, and ohiblather, among others. More on this in future.
  
• Exchanged filkbook files with gorgeousgary. Yayyyy! New-to-me repertoire! I haven't even had a chance to look through it. I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. :->
  
• Didn't sing with vixyish all weekend, except during the closing jam. This should change at some future con, but I'm not sure when. Miss you, Pegasus-Award-Winning-lady!!
  
• Touched base with accompanists (sp?) for the Windycon concert. Hope to have the info for them fully accessible (FULLY functional, captain!) by midweek.
  
• Hosted a theme circle for songs about 'myths and fairy stories'. My my, there are lots of those. :->
  
• Was reassured slightly by autographedcat, kitanzi, andjoecoustic on the subject of a somewhat-megalomaniac idea of mine. I was worried about exactly where it lay on the "Stupid -----> Clever" continuum, but they agree it's closer to the latter, which is calming. More on this later, probably much later.
  
• Heard a lot of great music, most notably (at the moment, for the purpose of this post) from a gal in elf-ears and a Vulcanish hairdo who sang a great variety of Tolkien songs of her own composition with style and verve. She's a published author (small-press), but despite her skill and creativity, had never ever been to a filk before. I hope to goodness she comes to more! She has already registered for next year's OVFF, so there if not before. She lives somewhere near Terre Haute, IN.
  
• Didn't freak out much despite being in highly social contexts for most of the weekend. Yayyyy!
  
• Wrestled and played with bookwyrm_com's lovely, friendly, and FLUFFY Eurasier, Empath. There are photos. It's horridly cute. My beagley boys are great fun, but I've missed the serious roughhousing one can do with an energetic *large* dog. Or, as bookwyrm_com correctly reminds me, a 'medium' dog, technically. :-> Expect mightyajax to blog about his view of all this (and Thursday night's beagletorture) sometime soon. For the record, my attempt to describe Empath to people at-con as 'the black dog in the vest' turned out to be spectacularly nonspecific; he was one of THREE black service dogs in attendance. The other two were Renee Alper's (lab?) and a gorgeous 16-week-old Great Dane puppy. At 16 weeks (note: NOT months), this sweet little bitch was already as tall as Empath or taller, and her paws were the size of my fists. I got pictures. She was staggeringly cute, and did quite well in situations even some humans find baffling and crowded.
  
• Met pocketnaomi's daughter, Her Grace the Wogglebug Duchess of filkhaven. A most excellent small person, though I almost can't believe she's as BIG as she is! filker0-and-spiritdance's David, likewise.
  
• Played some Railroad Tycoon II TSC.
  
• Played a lot more guitar-songs than I had expected to. I didn't even bring my own axe, and found its lack inconvenient at various points throughout the con. Guess I can no longer claim I 'don't play guitar', or even that I don't play enough to justify lugging the thing around. Especially since I got even more songs-with-chords from Gary ...

Other People's Views

... as I come across them.

• peteralway before, highlights.
  
• [Unknown LJ tag] space intentionally left blank
  
• [Unknown LJ tag] space intentionally left blank
  
• [Unknown LJ tag] space intentionally left blank

Woohoo!

The large, stuck-for-months piece of the "making Grandma's finances marginally solvent between now and when we sell her condo" process has finally come unstuck, three days before I was expecting it to, meaning I now have several months of not needing to worry about her money situation (or figure out how to get someone to lend *ME* a couple thousand so I could pay her October nursing-home charges).

So, yay! Not so big a yay as you'll get from me when the condo finally frelling sells (and if you know anyone in the market for a very nice 1-2 bedroom steps from the lake, just south of the Evanston border, DO let me know?), but THAT yay shall be so loud a yawp as to shake the stars in the very firmament, so comparing the two is not really reasonable. :->

Impending dooooooooom.

I have a concert at Windycon (Nov 10-12 in Chicagoland). I feel a probably-irrational urge to make sure I put on a REALLY GOOD show, which to me means I can't just acapella and bad-guitar through the songs the way I do in circle. Meaning I have to line up accompanists. Meaning I have to have a settled set-list so I can parcel out who's-doing-what so they can practice. Right?

Uh huh. I'm just starting the climb out of a three-week brain-weather dip that's meant I, well, haven't gotten any further on planning for this than I was before. I'm betting I can shanghai anach into anything generally in 'our' repertoire just for the asking, but ...

Are any of the rest of y'all (a) going to be at Windy, (b) willing, and possibly (c) going to be at OVFF (so I can drag you off for an hour or two to practice/give chordsheets/etc)? Anything but (a) can be worked around if necessary, thanks to the magic of t3h Intarn3tz, of course, and I can make scratch-track-quality MP3s of me singing whatever-it-is to pass around as well if that would be helpful.

Knowing who I can get actually helps me shape my setlist, of all the insane things.

For those of you who won't be there, aren't instrumentalists, or just aren't extroverted enough to want to try to fling yourself off the deep end with me on stage at Windy, I have a question. If you went to a concert (at a con where the 'actual concert slots' are not only of uniformly high entertainment value, but often pull in non-filkers) and it was just a girl standing at a mike for 40 minutes, would you feel cheated? I mean, the kind of stuff I do in circle. Clearly I'd use my more-worked-up songs, not just singing it cold from a months-old memory of having heard it once before. I'm just trying to get a general sort of strawpoll feel for it.

Addendum

And in the interests of completeness, here is an entry from my mom detailing some of the piddling, dragging, annoying ARGGGGH of the other end of the grandma-ing process.

One of them being, well, a con last weekend. :-> But I've been explaining my two other recent pieces of fiscal irresponsibility/moderately-big-ticket-purchases to myself as birthday presents.

And I do, technically, have the money to pay for them without going more deeply into debt; it just keeps me from getting OUT of debt as fast as I would otherwise do, which is kind of a bad thing.

The first thing was a portable copier to bring to FKO (the con I shouldn't'a oughta been at anyway ... oops), which was a great hit and very useful to me as well; its tip jar will be paying for a replacement toner cartridge, and it already repaid me for the paper used that weekend. So that's all right.

The second thing strikes me as somewhat more frivolous, but very 'wanted'. I was going to get a really neat one from Peter Cox at FKO, but he didn't have any with him; in websearching later I found quite a quality version available for a rather reasonable price, failed my willpower roll, and bought it. It occurred to me yesterday that I could go to my dad and kind of shake him down for partial sponsorship on it ... and then it occurred to me that you folks might, in fact, be willing to 'take up a collection' via my Paypal account to chip in towards the pressie, which would then be from All Of You.

Given that it's a musical pressie, anyone who chips in gets at LEAST two songs played for them on it the next time I encounter you, and a name/appellation of your choice neatly and permanently written on its inside (for my memories) with 'Happy Birthday 2006'.

If you would like to sponsor some percentage of my new bowed psaltery, click below; please leave the name you'd like to have put 'on the card' in a comment through their interface. If you don't paypal but do really want to chip in, comment and we'll figure something out via email.

Update, 4/10: The psaltery is now just about half sponsored! Yay!

Just in time for printing out before the Milwaukee housefilk this weekend or FKO! Ok, that makes it for my convenience, not yours, but I figured some of y'all might be interested. :-> In no particular order. Now, if only I had ink in my printer ... Not all of them are songs, proper, in that several don't have tunes, but all are neat.

• You're So Vain (You Probably Think This Post is About You), by grynz, ttto Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'. Ahhh, sweet ljDrama. :->
  
• The Bold Librarian, by Joy Rutherford, ttto the trad Irish tune, 'Sullivan's John'. Probably based on one of those 'saucy coachman' or 'saucy blacksmith' bawdy ballads.
  
• A new Battle of New Orleans, by various commenters in the thread, ttto Johnny Horton's tune of the same title. About Katrina, obviously.
  
• Wild Tom Cat, by ottercat, ttto 'Wild Rover' (aka 'that No Nay Never song'). About one of the sad truths of modern cat-ownership, from the cat's point of view.
  
• Withdrawal, by djonn, ttto Tom Payne's 'Mr Compatibility'. There's not enough horror content on TV lately, apparently, so this song was written to beg more. :->
  
• The Work of the Reavers, by filkerdave, ttto 'The Wark of the Weavers' (available in Rise Up Singing, inter alia).
  
• all in green, by e.e. cummings, ttto (in my head, anyway) an original melody by batyatoon.
  
• anyone lived in a pretty how town, by e.e. cummings, ttto (in my head, anyway) an original melody by condotierre.
  
• Karl's Been the Wild Rover, by davebooth, ttto 'Wild Rover' again. Political; Karl Rove.
  
• When I Was a Boy: 2100, by tfabris, ttto Frank Hayes' song of almost the same title.
  
• Several by peteralway, tunes and words. He has sheet music/midis for most, and also chords when appropriate.
  • Polystyrene Shipwright is about the manly men who don't sail on boats, they make them! In their living rooms! Arrrrrrr.
    
  • Oryctolagus Cuniculus, is about that fuzziest of beasts, a bunny rabbit. Science-geeking.
    
  • Manly Song is just what it says it is.
    
  • ABS Plastic Shipwright, which is ttto 'I Saw Three Ships', a Catholic/Anglican Christmas carol whose provenance I do not know.
  
  
• A new verse to Mark Mandel's 'The Darwin Awards', by madfilkentist (I think).
  
• I'm On Firefly, by filkertom, ttto 'Because I Got High' (as recorded by Afroman).
  
• Believer, by Rob Carter, ttto Neil Diamond's 'I'm a Believer'. About SCA-ish combat. Or combat in a fantasy medievaloid world. Hard to tell. :->
  
• An instafilk, by hsifyppah, to an original tune. This is the song that had all of GAFilk giggling.
  
• Rocky Road to Hoe, by ozarque. About a really *inconvenient* psychic power.
  
• Miracle Bra, by teddywolf, ttto Austin Lounge Lizards' 'Miracle Dog'.
  
• Tails and Trotters, by Judy B. Goodenough
  
• Several by quadrivium:
  • Ravens
    
  • Summertime Beagle is about relaxing in the sun lazily.
    
  • Two Hours Away is about love and creativity and slumps and inspiration. Soundfile is on that page too.
    
  • Get Down Mama is wondrous creepy. :->
  
  
• Paper Worlds, by Talis Kimberley. Desperately want to learn the tune to this one.
  
• Crossed Over, by Bob Kanefsky, ttto catsittingstill's 'Wings'. The storyline, however, is from 'Anne Boleyn' (aka 'With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm'), with a mild Harry Potter crossover element.
  
• Morning Has Broken, by filker0, ttto Cat Stevens' song of the same title. Love this. :->
  
• Maid on the Shore. Love this traddy-ish ballad. It has so many harmony potentials.
  
• Post-colonial Literature of the Elves, by papersky.
  
• Leafenkind Ballad, by ozarque, ttto 'Le Roi Renaud' (trad; lyrics and midi available here.

Helpful Factors

• exapno last night brought over the (91MB! !?!?!) installer file for a Finale PrintMusic demo, because although I OWN a copy, I can't find the serial number, and it won't let me run it without reassuring it that I DID buy a copy. So now I have Sheet Music Capability, which is also Multitrack MIDI Playback Ability. Yay.
  
• Coke is life.
  
• I have a keyboard (thanks, tarkrai!) and a laptop all handy to a Comfy Chair to sit in. On a different floor than the computer set up for sound recording, but I'll get to that later.
  
• NPR. Sweet, sweet NPR.
  
• Filkhavenners on IRC, both for sanity-refills and a few thorny music-theory questions. For example, Finale insists that I tell it what key the composition is before I, y'know, start entering notes. I knew I had C# and F# and the rest unsharped-or-flatted, but had no idea what key that was until told. Yay for help!

Unhelpful Factors

• Ajax. Really, he gets his own little sublist, because he is Very Talented at Unhelpfulness.
  • Insisting on sitting on the back two-thirds of the seat of the chair by the synthesizer-and-laptop.
  • Woo-wooing manic-worriedly while frisking about, alternating said with catapulting into my lap and acting like he wanted something. What, I still have no idea, but he wanted SOMETHING.
  • Digging frantically on the pages of my staff-paper notebook.
  • Trying to steal my pencil, since it's clearly a stick, and sticks are of course his department.
  • Thoroughly, and worriedly, licking my hand. Though at least I got him onto my LEFT hand, letting me lean awkwardly over and try to concentrate and write on the staff paper with my (dominant) right hand.
  • Barking, wooing, baying, and whining at me when I sing/play through the melodies to try to figure out if I have the right notes lined up.
• I have to pee far too often for my convenience. Which means when Ajax settled down to nap, I'd get up to go pee, and by the time I got BACK he was all wound up and worried I was leaving. Again. See previous bullet-point tree.
  
• My own weird mental translation blocks. I shoulda been properly 'paper-trained,' musically, in my childhood; I did take more than a year of piano class, and seven years of intensive school choir. However, being me, I instead took shameless advantage of my ability to learn by ear lightning-fast to, uhm, just look at the pages and sing the melodies from memory. Which isn't so helpful NOW.
  
• Trying to relearn to use Finale, suddenly. Hey, at least I'm better with it now than I have been at any other time in my life ("Hi, jerusha," she says sheepishly to the friend she usually makes do this for her).

So despite putting 'finish music crap relating to my harmonies' on my to-do list today in a prominent position, and despite not even getting up to Grandma's today, meaning more time to DO it in, I've spent a lot of time playing with/reassuring my dog (and playing addictive PopCap web games ...). When I have sheet music or mp3s to show, I promise I will. Grr.

Though, indeed, progress HAS been made. Unkinkings and layings-out and whatnot. I even have the melodies written out in sequences-of-letter-notes ... the main problem moving from that to real sheet music is that, unfortunately, I seem chronically unable to write melodies that are entirely composed of simple quarter notes. In "Ache", for example, most of the measures are either 'dotted-q, eighth, quarter' or 'eighth, dotted-q, quarter'. And I'm not even getting into the dotted-eighth rest. Sigh.

Back to wrestling pythons. Or semiquavers. Or whatever. At least I don't change time signature for the chorus, or write in anything but 4/4, 6/8, or 3/4. Yet. Sigh. :->

[ Update, 9PM -- Look! an mp3 of the midi two-track! Comments solicited ]

I would very much like to get some of my harmony arrangements into computerized-soundfile format sometime in the next month or so. However, I find that I don't actually DO IT when alone at home and/or dogwatching, for various complex neurotic reasons. John's unwilling to be my recording engineer.

Therefore, I was wondering if any of y'all out there (preferably Chicago-Area people, though hey, it's your travel budget!) wanted to help me out.

Gah, I feel so self-conscious even posting this, but hey, if I don't ask, nobody'll ever know I'm shopping for the help, right?

Duties

• Social nudging to help me stay cheerful and on-target, taskwise
  
• Flexible cheerfulness where Weird Software Balkiness is involved (experience with sound-recording software helpful but not necessary, I have a fairly user-friendly program in Audacity)
  
• Willingness to hear me sing through the same melody line over and over and OVER without feeling the need to have recourse to chainsaw application.

Remuneration is to include, but not necessarily be limited to

• Free all-you-can-eat homecooked food, probably of the chili/pasta sauce/goulash genre. Dietary requirements cheerfully work-aroundable. I have kosher meat.
  
• Selection influence on songs I sing in front of you (aka 'custom concert to order'), if desired.

Scheduling: choose one or more

• A Tuesday or Friday afternoon/evening
  
• A Saturday or Sunday timeslot

If I never get 'em in the computer and multitracked, I can't ever show 'em to other people so they can learn THEIR bits so they can be performed in public. Dammit. And yes, Mondegreens, I do intend to do the ones I showed you at OVFF, they're high on the list.

When packing for OVFF (and several housefilks previous), I flipped through my neatly-arranged shelf of songbooks, and wasn't finding at least two or three that I know I have. Meaning they were probably hiding together somewhere.

Just found 'em, which is the YAY! Bigtime. The *argh* is that, given what else was with them, they've been packed up and hidden since about last year this time (there's a 2004 Windycon program book in there). Sigh. I bet I know what happened, though. They were in my laptop backpack (which has been passed over by my husband in favor of the other laptop bag, for daily use), meaning I packed 'em for a con or for tnatj's housefilk, and then given how fried my brain was this time last year, slung it in a corner. Laptop was at some point extracted, rest left in, et voila.

Means I have my own rackafracka copy of the Echo's Children songbook back, though. Also the grey-fronted edition of anach's, which will be nice, and the last printed version of my OWN songbook (which currently exists deconstructedly in various textfiles on my computer, waiting for me to have time and spoons to revamp it and then put it out as a maintanable pdf once more). That latter is surprisingly good, since I'm finding my electronic version now does not have several songs it USED to have, dammit. So if all else fails I can scan 'em and OCR 'em and save myself typing.

Thursday:

• Get up, get dressed.
  
• Catch up on a few at-home tasks.
  
• Between 10:30 and noon: leave house.
  
• Change trains downtown, go up to Grandma's.
  
• Do Grandma things.
  
• Sometime before 3:45PM, leave Grandma's and get on the train.
  
• Be at work at the Goodman by 5; hopefully have eaten something before then.
  
• Circa 9PM, leave work, go home.
  
• Do John-relationship maintenance; pack for Saturday; stow packed stuff in car. Addendum: remember to put filkbook files ON LAPTOP.

Friday:

• Get up, get dressed.
  
• Make sure John has directions to mannoftalent's.
  
• Catch up on a few at-home tasks.
  
• Between 9:30 and 10: leave house.
  
• Go get measured for glasses and pay for two new pairs downtown at America's Best's new location. Addendum: remember to get MAP to new location so you can FIND it, dumbass.
  
• Whenever that's done, change trains downtown and go up to Grandma's.
  
• Do Grandma things.
  
• Explain to Grandma that I won't be there at all on Saturday. Reassure. Sigh.
  
• Sometime before 4:45, leave Grandma's and get on the train.
  
• Get off train at Morse.
  
• Go to mannoftalent's house.
  
• Eat chinese takeout. Mmmmmmm.
  
• Socialize. Aaaaaaah!
  
• See Serenity. Mmmmmmm.
  
• Socialize (perhaps). Aaaaaaah!
  
• Leave, with John.
  
• Go home on train.
  
• Collect car.
  
• Get dropped off at jerusha and anach's, though not before THEY'RE through seeing Serenity and getting home; set up timing by their phone call upon leaving their theatre.
  
• Get to sleep as fast as is humanly possible.

Saturday:

• Get up circa 7AM, get dressed.
  
• Repack anything that needs repacked.
  
• Eat something, dumbass.
  
• Be out the door by 8-8:15.
  
• Drive to the favored breakpoint in Indiana so that anach can rest up. Addendum: this involves first exposure to highway driving. Please to not freak out, hindbrain. You can handle this.
  
• Eat tacos. Mmmmmmmm.
  
• Switch drivers. Yaaaaaay!
  
• Arrive at tnatj's housefilk. Yaaaaaaay!
  
• Socialize, sing, eat, socialize, sing, eat, cook. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  
• Leave earlier than usual, since likely jerusha won't be driving, and *I* won't be driving at night, and anach gets sleepy early.
  
• Arrive back at my place or their place or somewhere, who cares, it's too late to bother about such things. :->
  
• Sleep.

Yes, as you can see by the posting-time, I'm already behind. Aaaaaaah! I'll manage. :->

I should start by saying I'm not being paid. My only relationship with the creators of this piece is that I'm friends with mannoftalent, and he knows several of them. That's it.

I'm just this show's first raving, drooling fangirl.

mannoftalent took me to a bare-stage reading [1] of this show several months ago, and by the end I was sobbing hysterically, it was so good. And sad. But good. And funny! But sad. You get the idea. And that's WITHOUT costumes, sets, props, or choreography, for the most part. I'm panting to find out how much better it is WITH all that.

And you can see it too! Which is the point of this post. Sorry. I'm a little excited. :-> No, I'm a lot excited. And I intend to use the power of my relatively-massive LJ readership (only for good) to do my damndest to see the show turns a profit. And maybe gets produced again. Several times. And makes a DVD so I can have it for my VERY OWN.

Ahem. Wait, I should probably tell you about the show, shouldn't I? :->

It's based on Geoff Ryman's novel Was (and has the same title); the novel is an extended fugue on the themes and story of Baum's The Wizard of Oz, and the later MGM musical. People keep saying, "You mean, like Wicked?" and I guess sort of yes, but mostly no. Yes in the sense that it's 'fanfic', by my (rather liberal) genre definitions, but no in that it doesn't radically recast the entire bent of the story to the same degree that Wicked does[2]. It is a production of Northwestern University's New American Music Theatre project, and there's a homepage for it on their site.

For those of you who haven't read the novel, it's several intertwining plot lines that show how the lives of people who never met can nonetheless intersect. Person 1, 'Our Hero,' is an actor named Jonathan. In the show's 'present' (which is the early 80s), Jonathan is very ill, and using the small time remaining to him to investigate something that's always fascinated him: was there perhaps a real little girl Dorothy who inspired L. Frank Baum to write the Wizard of Oz? Person 2 is Dorothy Gael, who at the death of her parents in St. Louis moves to her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry Gulch's farm in Kansas. Bad things happen to her [3]. An itinerant man-of-all-work named Frank Baum comes to town and ends up her substitute teacher; when he tries to get justice for her he's disbelieved and run out of town. He decides to try to give her a better life, if only in fiction. Person 3 is also Dorothy Gael, but a much older Dorothy, in a mental institution in Manhattan, Kansas. While there she meets a young intern, who grows up to be Jonathan's psychiatrist ... which is how Jonathan ends up in Kansas many years later. [4]

The plotlines interweave like mating garter snakes, revealing far more about the people in them than they could if played in straight chrono order. It's wrenching, and touching, and sweet, and sad, and funny, and silly.

And oh my god does this show SING. But don't take my word for it; they've posted a movie (.mov format, 6MB) of one of the cuter numbers (possibly-necessary context: this is a buddy/best-friends song, not entirely out of the vein of 'Friend Like Me' from Aladdin or that one from Monsters, Inc Randy Newman did). It ends about fifteen seconds before what I think is the cutest line in the entire show, but I suppose it's a spoiler, so sigh. :->

And it's only $25 to see it. Such a deal! It's showing at the Ethel M. Barber Theatre from October 28 to November 13 of this year. Tickets may be purchased at the box office, 30 Arts Circle Drive, on the Evanston campus or by calling 847-491-7282 (box office hours: Tues-Fri: 10am - 5pm; Sat. Noon-4pm). You can also subscribe to an 8- or 9-play series of these works (of which Was is only the first) for $135, if you're a true junkie. More info on the other plays in the series is available here.

Who wants to go with me, and when? I'm open as to night, and may very well see it more than once. And will probably want to squee about it in depth/discuss it afterwards, just so you're warned. :->

---

1. A staged reading is the actors on a bare stage with lines of folding chairs. Anyone not in a particular scene retreats to the folding chairs to wait for their next scene, when they rise, come forward, and act, until they 'leave the stage,' when they sit down again. They're allowed to read from their script binders, but there is actually a great deal of acting involved already, and they do all the songs (though just with a single piano). The part of Toto was played by the stage manager sitting off to the side and barking (quite realistically! Good characterization :-> ) when needed. Some actors are wearing street clothes chosen to evoke the right 'kind' of character or mood, though it's nowhere near as far as true costuming.
   
2. Wicked Which, btw, I still haven't seen and desperately want to, but (a) it's bugnuts expensive and (b) I've been saving my money to promote the heck out of Was when it finally came out, so I can give them LOTS OF MONEY so they MAKE MORE. That said, Christmas is coming, and I'm sure it'll still be playing then, so if you want to hear me squee so loud and high that bats fall out of the SKY, you can get me Wicked tickets. :->
   
3. Bad Things I won't go into great detail here, but suffice to say this is not a show for younger-or-more-sensitive-viewers, though there is nothing graphic on-stage at all. In impact and staging, the treatment of the Bad Things reminds me somewhat of how Creusa's death is handled in Medea (mind you, the Ancient Greeks did it that way because they hadn't anything like the special effects budget and technology we have, and showing a woman burning to death on stage from a cursed dress would have been, uhm, not entirely possible for them).
   
4. Plotlines There is an additional plotline in the book that is cut entirely from the musical, about the life of Frances Gumm (who grows up to take the stage name Judy Garland), and the filming of the movie version of the Wizard of Oz. I didn't miss it, but book-loving purists might.

I am the administrator of a Chicago filk-and-folk-and-participatory-music announcements list. In a busy month it might get three posts. I forward to it any email I get that applies to the vague Chicago area and events of that sort: the Milwaukee Housefilk announcements, the various new Chicago Housefilk stuff, and some one-offs that seem appropriate. If you have such info that you want to post to a list of folks who've opted in to get it, send it to me. If you want to be on the list (and/or aren't sure you already are), drop a comment and I can add you manually, or you can go to the web interface for the hostsite, make a login, and subscribe, if you're technically inclined.

Also, if you want to know what kind of starship captain I'd make, click below. This one's actually a lot more fun than some I've seen. I got it from haflagirl.

( I cut the meme because it's long and I looooove yooooou ... )

Aside from standard amounts of grandma-ing, the unexpected parts of this weekend include:

1. A Housefilk in Mount Prospect

Which was fun. I sang a lot, and there was good goulash, and janmagic made little bbq-chicken baked nacho things, which were very good, and John came, which was AMAZING and rare, and seemed to enjoy himself, and ate frozen mini-eclairs. And saved the world by extending his 'microwave my freezies so they're just slushy enough to eat' technique to them, so the rest of the room could eat barely-unfrozen mini-eclairs.

Partial lj-user attendance report: billroper, daisy_knotwise, janmagic,jerusha, anach, gorgeousgary (yes, in town from DC! He was our Super Secret Guest, sort of). I'm certain there were more, but I can't remember ljnames to go with RL names, so fah on it. :->

We managed to sing about six of the nominated-for-Pegasus songs, which made us feel kinda virtuous. Or me, anyway. It's marginally terrifying (or else REALLY COOL!) how many of the nominees are in my standard repertoire. That means if you see me and there's some Peggy songs for this year you don't know, feel free to ask; I may well be able to give you an impromptu sample. Or, of course, download the mp3s from that site, I suppose. :->

Then we came home. And slept. And, in preparation for the Third Thing in this post, we

2. Moved Furniture. A lot.

The last time morning_glory and her husband and her toddler came over, we used their imminent arrival as perfect excuse to empty and clean the Great Room downstairs, because the following week we were going to get an airdrop of furniture inherited from John's grandmother. So we needed the room anyway, and besides, toddlerproofing is great practice for just CLEANING UP. So yay.

This time, we HAD the furniture, so we used their imminent arrival as an excuse to (a) rearrange enough to facilitate Cool Activities during this particular visit, and as an extension (b) try to get some of the furniture to its final resting place on the second floor. We attempted to move two separate couches up the stairs, only to find that neither fit. The second one was rather amusingly rest-able