Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

There has been a severe lack of blogging going on around these parts. There's not really that much to account for it. I took a three week intensive course and now I'm teaching again. I did win tickets to see the professional baseball team to the east play the defending series champs (and lose). But we enjoyed it anyway. Especially the brats, beer, and polka-singing during the 7th inning stretch. Unfortunately the lederhosened mascot in his chalet was updated to a uniform in a dugout. Fortunately he's still mustachioed, or we would have never guessed at his Germanic origins.

In other news, my bluegrass band had a few gigs right at the end of May with lots of drama. Our first was in a dive bar the guitar player frequents. When I got there the singers came up to me worried because a man with a tattoo of a bass on his arm said he was going to go home and get his and come back and play with us. Since I'm not one to argue with a man with a tattoo of his instrument of choice, I thought it should be fine. He showed up with his stand-up and was a fabulous bass player. Boy do I love me some stand up bass - walk ups and downs, slaps, everything!

This couldn't have happened at a better time because we had a big gig with for the TA union conference and our regular bassist would be out of town. So the Bass-Player said he'd come play. He was so good we're trying to figure out how to keep him in the band without hurting anyone's feelings. I think we're going to ask our regular bassist to play guitar since we're losing our banjo player and we'll need more rhythm. (Hope it goes over well!)

Here we are playing at the Italian working man's club:



Don't worry, despite the fact that they sicced the recruitment committee on me, I'm still not a member of the union. I already got me a religion, thank you very much. And I don't need my grandfather haunting me.

In other musical news, I played organ in church four weeks in a row, due to maternity leave and vacations. There are two secrets to successful organ playing: tempo and registration. First, you must, must, must play up to tempo and never follow the congregation. Second, you should play loud, louder, and loudest or at least make some registration changes. If I had a third tip, it would be to actually phrase the songs as one would sing, but that requires sometimes more time than I have to practice. In any event, my success from this round of organing include: playing "I Believe in Christ" up to tempo - it actually sounds like an anthem rather than a dirge at that given tempo and you finish in less than fifteen minutes.

The other big success was "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Do you the story of Johnny Cash and having a dream about the mariachi trumpets in "Ring of Fire"? Well, while preparing "Battle Hymn" I had a dream in which I played the chorus with a real bass line (1s and 5s and walk ups and everything). So the next time I practiced, I realized the chorus is really empty and needed . . . some bass loving. Now, I don't doubt that this was highly influenced by The Bass-Player, but you have to admit that the chorus as written is very empty. So I tried it out and loved it! And since it's a dramatic hymn to start with, I decided to do something totally wild on the last verse: I dropped the registration to mF, then built it back up on every line until I pulled out all of the stops on "While God is marching on". On "on" I kept the pedals on the the fifth instead of resolving and then walked down to the tonic and began my awesome bass line. I had an awesome time playing it and I got a number of enthusiastic compliments. Fortunately my bishopric is very hands-off with the music so I can get away with this kind of stuff.

That's enough for tonight. There's a number of post percolating in my head, mostly about feminism, Mormonism, or feminism and Mormonism, but I haven't quite thought them through enough to write something. But eventually I'll get back on track.