November - December 2002
The PRAIRIE REHAB Tour is over, and it seems to have been a success. The full-length road journal will be posted soon, but give me a while to finish the rest of the site first. I took a lot of pictures, and you’ll see a few of those, complete with commentary, on the PICTURES page soon. Once I get around to scanning & posting them.
Meantime, here’s a somewhat quick rundown of the week’s events.
- Saturday 11/30: Adam Brodsky’s CD Release Party @ The North Star, Philadelphia
- Monday 12/2: Lach’s AntiHoot @ The Fort / Sidewalk Café, New York City
- Tuesday 12/3: Open Mic Night @ Doc Watson’s, Philadelphia
I played three shows (the addition of the third gig marked the transition from ‘road trip’ to ‘tour’), saw tons of other performers (there were 21 acts on the bill the first night ALONE), and I saw tons of people I haven’t seen in ages. Like Dave and Nicole, who I hadn’t seen in 6-8 years, although I can’t really figure out the exact number in either case. Or my cousins Eric & Kent & Kent’s wife Rosanna (I was going to call her a ‘cousin by marriage’ but that just sounds too Arkansas): I last saw Eric in the summer of 1985 - that’s 17 years, folks - and I hadn’t seen Kent and Ro since my sister Susie’s wedding in 1993. Add those all up, it's about 45 years' worth of lost time that was made up on this trip.
Kent and Ro are also the recipients of the first-ever “Hospitality So Far Above And Beyond The Call Of Duty That The Call Of Duty Looks Like An Ant From There” Award. Your generosity & hospitality were truly amazing - sorry about keeping you out so late - and I hope you give me the opportunity to return the favor sometime soon. You’re welcome in Tulsa anytime!
Coming back from Columbus to Tulsa on Friday December 6, as I merged onto I-44 west of St. Louis, I saw what looked like one of those ‘highway cleanup sponsored by:’ or ‘wildflowers planted by:’ signs in the tall grass outside the cloverleaf… but when I got closer I saw that the only text on the sign read PRAIRIE REHAB. I still have no idea what that means, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had a name for the tour. Traffic prevented me from getting a picture of the sign, so you’ll have to dust off that mind’s eye that was nearly ruined by all those years of watching television and imagine what it looked like. (It was brown, if that helps.)
Before that one presented itself, I toyed with a lot of different names for this tour, all of which came to me on the road somewhere and had something to do with what was going on out there… most of them were terrible, including the ones I’ve printed here:
- The ‘Thanksgiving And Then Some’ Tour
- The ‘Seriously, I Haven’t Seen You In AGES’ Tour
- The ‘Underwater Chinese Restaurant’ Tour
- The ‘It’s Called “Effingham, Illinois” Because The Real Name Is Dirty, Right?’ Tour
- The ‘I Toyed With A Lot Of Names For This Tour’ Tour
Now, it’s back to work, and back to scheduling shows. I've checked the logs, and it appears that the next show I play should be #100, so hopefully it'll be a good one. I’ve got at least one on the books for January, with more to follow soon, I hope. Sometime this week I’ll be putting up a SHOWS page here so you can actually find out about them before they happen. Meantime, here are the pertinent statistics from the trip, and a lot of non-pertinent ones to boot. Enjoy.
| Number of miles I drove in my truck, total | 2719 |
| Number of miles I traveled by train, total | 202 |
| Number of miles I walked in NYC & Philadelphia, just guessing | 15 |
| Number of miles I traveled, total, all forms of transportation | 2936 |
| Number of miles I traveled, per day, average | 266.9 |
| Number of states through which I traveled | 8 |
| Number of different states whose license plates I saw somewhere along the line* | 32 |
| Number of different Canadian provinces whose license plates I saw** | 2 |
| Number of different couches & beds I slept on | 5 |
| Number of nights I spent on each (average; most were also nonconsecutive) | 1.8 |
| Number of nights in the previous figures that were spent in a hotel | 1 |
| Number of hours I was actually a guest of that hotel | 5.5 |
| Number of those hours that I was actually asleep | 4 |
| Number of dollars per hour (average) that I paid for that luxury | 7.27 |
| Number of shows I played | 3 |
| Number of artists I saw perform on those 3 gig nights*** | 45 |
| Number of songs I played, total (I did a different set at every show) | 7 |
| Number of D strings I broke on stage | 1 |
| Number of songs, including practicing, I got out of that dumb string | 6 |
| Number of songs I wrote on the NYC-Trenton (NJ) train on Tuesday | 1 |
| Number of hours elapsed between writing it & performing it that night | 8 |
| Number of copies of the ROSS cd I sold | 0 |
| Number of copies of the ROSS cd I gave away | 4 |
| Number of pages in the green memo pad I carried in my back left pocket at all times | 50 |
| Number of pages that had been used before I left Tulsa | 3 |
| Number of pages that are still blank | 4 |
| Number of cups of convenience-store coffee I drank in the truck | 5 |
| Number of cups of convenience-store coffee I spilled in the truck | 1 |
| Number of my legs I spilled it upon | 1 |
| Number of miles I had driven so far that day | 1 |
| Number of miles I still had in front of me that day, wet leg and all | 406 |
| Number of CDs and audiobooks (great for travel) I acquired on the road | 10 |
| Number of batteries that came and went in my portable CD player | 12 |
| Number of cities in which I stayed | 6 |
| Number of cities in which I stayed (including Tulsa) that got snow | 6 |
| Number of cities in which I stayed that got snow while I was actually there | 0 |
| Number of days behind me the storms appear to have stayed (average) | 1.5 |
| Number, in percentage, representing how certain I am that I'll be paying for that soon | 100 |
| Number of emails waiting for me at work upon my return | 152 |
| Number of those emails that were complete junk | 85 |
| Number of those emails that weren't, or were at least from someone I know | 67 |
| Number of those emails that said ‘your mailbox is over its size limit’ | 2 |
*I only counted each state once, regardless of the variety of specialty plates each state offers now, which frankly made the counting process kind of annoying, but once I started I couldn’t stop
**both were Ontario, I don’t know if that’s weird or not
***this tally includes AntiFolk legends like Lach, Adam Brodsky, Tony Hightower, Butch Ross… I should also note that on Saturday I heard a few folks first as solo acts then again with ensembles, and those were counted separately; as was Christy "Hammered, Or Is That Hammer, Dulcimer Queen" Burns, who I heard on both Saturday and Tuesday; and of course I heard myself each night, so I’m in there three times myself