Fiddling While Rome Burns part 2

Picking up where I left off in part 1…

I made it to New Jersey. Red Bank, if you’re wondering. I had zero idea of what to expect there, but it vastly outstripped anything I could have imagined. Red Bank, NJ is charming. I spent the entire time I was there wandering around muttering that I wished I had an extra day to spend there. The irony is, I was initially only supposed to see one concert that week, and I *had* added an extra day, for two specific reasons:

The first is that, immediately after buying my first ticket, I said to myself “that’s nice, but where the hell am I actually going?” and started trying to look at the area. And that’s when I found the lighthouse. Lighthouses. The Navesink Twin Lights are technically in Highlands, NJ, but it’s a very short drive (up a very steep hill) to get there from Red Bank. They are two lights, connected by a 300-some foot wall, and one of them was not only the first electrified light in the United States, it was also lit by a quarter-million candlepower arc lamp that could be seen in Battery Park on Manhattan island, 17 miles away. Clearly, I had to go. And, if I was going to need an extra day to climb lighthouses, and there just so happened to also be a concert that evening (half a state away, in Newton, NJ), then, oops, my hand slipped and I guess I have a ticket to that show as well. And, I mean, that was also going to be July 20, John’s birthday. AND and, that one time I got to see the Moodies all play together was ALSO on a July 20th, 18 years ago, so clearly that was some kind of sign. Cosmic permission, if you will.

So, the whole time I was schlepping around, sweating my face off, muttering about needing an extra day… was during the extra day.

…But back to the concerts. Show #1 (which was also the first stop on the tour) was at the Count Basie Center for the Arts. I took myself to dinner before hand at the Dublin House in Red Bank, because if there’s something I can always use, it’s a gigantic plate of fish & chips and a cider. Half the restaurant was headed to the show, and we all sort of staggered back to the theatre together. I was wearing that green dress in the first photo, which I found in an estate sale in Waukegan earlier this year, and my St. Christopher-in-a-Gemini-capsule pin that I found… in a completely different estate sale in Waukegan this year. Veteran Cosmic Rocker, and all that.

I was parked about a block away from the theatre, if you approached it from behind, which was only weird because I had to go back to my car like 4 times between when I parked there and when I finally got to the show, and I started getting really weird looks from the venue crew smoking on the loading dock as I kept passing by. The downside of being immediately recognizable in any given situation.

Parked in the loading dock were two SUVs, one hauling one of those *tiiiiiiny* U-Haul trailers. It’s kind of strange to say that someone’s random rental cars have become some kind of mental/emotional touchstone, but the familiarity of seeing them outside one venue… and then the next one… and then the next one… and then the last one… feels comforting at this moment. It’s hard to explain without derailing the narrative, I suppose, but my memory of the past two months is actually almost nonexistent at this point, for various reasons, but locking on to that little U-Haul trailer in my mind sort of helps pull everything back into some kind of focus.

…So we’re in the theatre. The whole show sort of meanders. Not in a bad way, it’s just obvious that this is the first time we’re doing this version of things. The mics go out at some point. It becomes a comical call-and-response of “can you hear me now?” colliding against the fact that… he can’t actually hear us with his monitors in. After a beat, he looks around at everyone and says “Well… if you can’t hear, you can climb up on the stage, and listen in my ears.” to which I instinctively heckle back “I don’t think security is gonna like that!”

…He didn’t hear me. I’m pretty sure Jason, his cellist did though.

The second show is tighter. I’m further away from the stage. People have brought birthday cards, balloons, tinsel, garlands, honest-to-god wrapped presents. Emily, his poor daughter (who is also his manager) is just trying to, you know, do her job and run everything, and is getting stopped like, every four feet by someone trying to hand something off. The stage manager in me empathizes, though I was never in a situation quite like that.

By the time I’m driving back to Red Bank, I can’t feel my feet. I collapse into bed, bereft, and have to wake up at dawn the next morning to drive all the way back to Chicago.

Part 3, coming soon…