Good morning. Hello.How are you? #731
A quick trip to Merriweather Post for New Order and Pet Shop Boys
Good morning! Hello! How are you? Happy Friday. Already the weekend for me. I took Wednesday off for this show, worked from the car yesterday, and Timehop has its monthly recharge Friday off today, which is lovely. I forgot I have a doctor’s appointment, though, so I had to beg of my mother-in-law to watch Jane while I went to the doctor, since Emma will still be asleep. And I did the Walmart run this morning, oh, yipee. Surprisingly busy day.
Walmart was swell, no exciting new UHD Blu Rays or vinyl. I needed some more hangers and they had like 20 packs of my special hangers, which is hilarious, because for a year they barely had any and I bought them all. Clearly some computer has decided that the Chatham Walmart now needs lots of these hangers, there’s a strong demand for them in North Chatham County, NC, but nope, it was just me, for a year or so. Now I am done. Well, except for the pack today but never mind that. And so now there are 20 packs or so, just sitting there, sad and unloved, and it is all my fault. I should probably buy them all just to give them a happy home.
Also there is still shockingly barely any Purell. I got this new cup holder-shaped hand sanitizer dispenser for my car because Emma has one and it’s so, so much better than a dumb bottle. So I was trying to fill it, but you still can’t get Purell, at least at the North Chatham Walmart, in any size larger than 2oz. So I bought 6 of them, that was weird. Probably overpaid. Seems like there’s plenty on Amazon, though, so I guess that’s jusst me. Reminds me of that Monty Python string skit, where a guy goes to an advertising agency to get ads for his string, except through a bit of poor planning his miles of string is cut into three-inch sections, and the ad people are unruffled and come up with a bunch of brilliant ads for “stringettes” and whatnot. In hindsight that skit probably infuenced my career choices far, far too much.
Anyway, we are back from a one-night trip to Columbia, MD, which we will pretend was Baltimore, but was not, it was a weird suburban office town that has sprung up around Merriweather Post Pavillion. But the hotel was swell and within walking distance of the venue, so who’s going to complain. The entire trip continuously almost went off the rails, but never quite did. We gave ourselves 5 hours to get to Columbia, it took almost seven. So much DC traffic, which we timed to miss, but then we made one little mistake, had to make a stop, and suddenly after the stop our eta had gone completely out of whack, because that little stop was exactly enough time for DC’s horrendous traffic to cut in. It was awful. Winding back roads through Maryland trying to avoid the BW Parkway and I-95.
We had dinner plans with friends who had a brand new, three-week-old baby and we were late. We had to ask them to push the reservation 30 minutes, which hate, and we kept a new mom waiting, which probably ranks pretty up there in the compendium of sins when you step up to St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. They were very polite about it, though, and the baby was very well behaved and it was great to see them and dinner was lovely and Jane only whined a little bit.
Then the hotel, then the show, which was within walking distance, though it wasn’t exactly clear how to actually walk into the venue so we wildly overshot, and didn’t arrive until New Order just started the first song of the set, “Regret.” And Jane was pretty cranky about it, she kept saying she wanted to turn around and go home and go to bed. We had tricked her to go to the show by saying we were just going on the walk. It was all a massive gamble and sligntly immoral but maybe wouldn’t rank in St Peter’s compendium, at least. A little fib. But in any case, it all worked out because as soon as we got through the tickt and security line, Jane was very excited about it. We found a spot in the waaay waaaay back of the lawn, set up our blanket and chairs, and Jane had a great old time all the way through New Order and 90% of the Pet Shop Boys. She was adamant we leave around the time of “Vocal” toward the end of the Pet Shop Boys set, but we were pretty thankful by then that everything had actually worked so we went along with her, plus we could hear the rest of the set (It’s a Sin, West End Girls, Being Boring) as we walked out and all the way back to the hotel, which was honestly pretty awesome.
New Order were pretty great. They seem to be playing one or two different songs a night in the set: Toronto got “1963,” Boston got “Academic” and we got “Vanishing Point,” which is totally the one I would choose. I just looked through all the setlists of the seven previous times I’ve seen new order and I’ve never once seen them play it before — in general New Order is terrible about playing songs from Technique, though I have seen them play “Round and Round” before. But anyway, that was great. I was very happy. It was nice to see Gillian, too. I wasn’t sure if she’d be on this tour. At least I think that was her, hell, even the video screens were small, we were so far back.
Pet Shop Boys were great too, Neil Tennant has a great voice and it’s held up well, he’s always been a better live singer than Bernard. They had a lot of songs that had “cool visuals” on the monitors, though, and I don’t like that. If you’re way back on the lawn, you want the video screens to show the band, so, you know, you feel like you’re at the show. Luckily they did that about half the time, including a three-song run where they just showed Chris Lowe just standing there over his gear, not moving. Emma didn’t love that part she wanted to see Neil but I thought it was fantastic. Chris rules.
My old friend Keith came to the concert too, which was awesome. He came with an old friend of his, with whom he attended New Order at Merriweather Post in 1989. Keith and his brother Craig used to work at Merriweather Post, and back in the 90s when we all lived together they would regale me with tales of the place. But this was my first time there. It made sense that I got to be there for the first time with one of them. We had some good chats. Lovely to see a friend, friends are swell.
Then we all went back to the hotel and all slept in the same bedroom like some cavemen or something. Actually it all went remarkably well. Jane was so tired she just laid down and went to sleep. We had a near emergency when we realized that my travel CPAP mask had a giant tear in it, was making an unholy racket, and on top of that it wasn’t going to actually work, which meant that I was going to not get any sleep, which would suck for me, and snore all night, which was going to suck for Emma. But then like a magical MacGyver, I fixed it using two labels peeled off an old spice stick, a Hello Kitty band-aid and a fanny pack wrapped around my head like a bandage. It was amazing. I am still proud of myself.
In the morning I got up very early and went and saw my friend Liisa in Baltimore, which was great, her house is amazing and lovely, and her neighborhood is so cute. Apparently I was supposed to wake Emma and Jane up for this trip, but I messed that up, so they slept through it, and now Emma feels bad because she wanted to see Liisa, but I apologized profusely and we magically worked through through the strength of our marital bonds. I am assuming.
And I did not, it seems, think to take a picture of any of the friends I saw on this little trip. I barely took any pictures of my daughter! I have lost the travel photo habit, gotta get back into that. I did take some amazing video of Jane dancing to the Pet Shop Boys, though. It was super cute.
And now I am back and mildly discombobulated from my routine being all out of whack and I gotta leave town again next week and that is mildly stressful I don’t know how I managed to do this for, oh, fifteen years that really is crazy. I suppose it had to do with not having a wife and kid and garden at home or something.
Country playlist for you today. I hope you enjoy it! One of these days I am going to make “master” playlists of each genre – moody and quiet, W Hotel, country, etc so people can subscribe to those. But today, alas, is not that day.
And there’s much more to write, but I gotta get Jane up early and get her fed and get her to Grammy’s before this doctor’s appointment that I totally forgot about, so I will take my leave of you now and talk to you Monday. Farewell.
lol, i'm so disappointed that there's no photo of you wearing your macgyvered CPAP mask!