Holy Crap. Here we are in London, Ont. We are at Joey’s house. Joey is our agent. It is very nice to finally meet the man who has sent us on this epic quest.
What has happened since I last wrote? I’m having a hard time remembering, and my brain seems fuzzy, like it could use a scrub. I guess that’s because we’ve been driving for the last 2 days. As in, driving. Not doing anything but driving. We had a show in Moncton, NB and then we had a day off and tonight we have a show in London. It is about 1100 km from Moncton to London. In fact, it is quite an endeavor to drive form Moncton to London, even though it is easy to write “We drove form Moncton to London”. Because you know what’s in between Moncton and London? This little obstacle we like to call Quebec. Quebec is Canada’s largest province. Quebec is also home to Montreal, a city 3 times the size of Vancouver. We passed through Montreal in the middle of the night. Rather, we passed through it from about 12:30 am to about 2:00 am. There was miles of construction and the biggest, longest traffic jam I’ve ever seen. I’m not that wordly, but I have been stuck in really bad Vancouver traffic for enough hours of my life to not be completely naive about rush hours and the like. And here we were, crawling through Montreal in the wee hours of the morning bumper to bumper for miles and miles. We hit evening rush hour the first time we were driving through Montreal; I shudder to think what morning rush hour was going to be like along those vast stretches of freeway so densely populated with all those big boy toys and piles of dirt and concrete and pipes and serious things of that nature.
After 14 hours of barreling down the highway with a 100km/h wind rushing through the van, (which seriously affected my reading pleasure as I spent seemingly endless hours desperately trying to hold down my wee page so that I could read all the lovely words contained therein) we pulled in to a noisy, busy truck stop in Cornwall, Ont. We slept, badly, for a few hours until the van heated up to a disturbing intensity. After another full day of driving in which we ran out of band money again and Keith ran out of cigarettes – I could write a separate novel about what an unpleasant combination these two things really are – here we are in London. I have had a shower and am in clean clothes, so my life is not the perfect graveyard of buried hopes that it was 3 hours ago. I yearn to do laundry. Finding a suitcase stuffed haphazardly with unmarked hundred dollar bills is another powerful craving that seizes my entire being.
I’ve been reading Virginia Wolfe and George Eliot this week. Also a little L.M. Montgomery.
Most recent shows have been Fredericton and Moncton. Oh yes. Fredericton. Very pretty town. Lots of beautiful old stone architecture. Compact and tidy downtown core with lots of cool stores and benches everywhere to sit upon. City Hall gave us a parking pass which enabled us to park for free all day downtown. I thought this was most impressive, as shopping and eating are not possible for us due to the fact that theft is generally frowned upon. So at least we had a place to camp out in for free all day. The bar we played at was cool, but there was…wait for it… NO ONE THERE…This wasn’t as distressing as you might think, as we had a $200 guarantee. So it was actually a really good paid rehearsal. Naturally, we blew the minds of the bartender and the 3 guys slumped over the bar drinking slowly and steadily. And we met a lovely fellow named Grant who let us stay in his house and made us breakfast the next morning. It was like a very nice, platonic (group) one night stand.
The Moncton show was quite fun. We played with our new friends The Ride Theory, who we met in Montreal. They are still really good. They rocked my socks a good distance. Then we played. It wasn’t good for me. My keyboards kept cutting out due to a crappy power source, my mic kept falling onto my keyboard, I couldn’t really hear my keyboards, I couldn’t really sing my parts that well (mostly because I was unwilling to rest my face on my top keyboard to do so). Ferdy’s bass amp cut out again – not his fault though, but so annoying. Mike and Keith were outstandingly brilliant. And people seemed to like us. (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as an audience.) Sometimes we get to play in front of a group of people who listen to our music. That is a great way to spend an evening. We sold another cd. Reaching the masses, one hipster at a time. In another 10 000 years, the planet will be ours!!!! MOO HOO AH HA HA!!!
My documentary is coming along fine, thanks for asking. I”ve got some pretty compelling stuff. So far, my favorite moment captured on tape is when Mike drops the “man jack”(so christened becasue it is so very large and manly, fairly oozing with testosterone) on his foot. Ferdy wanted nothing to do with the jack that came with the van, dismissing it instantly as not worthy of the Gray Mare. He went out and returned with the man jack, probably after hunting down and slaying it with his bare Viking hands. And that’s what happens when you give a man jack to some Feminists. Somebody gets hurt. But it sure makes for good comedy, especially all the hopping about and swearing bits.
They spelled our name “The Femenists” in Moncton. But it was up in lights.
Time to go to the show. More later!