Posted by I have a rather sizeable collection of t-shirts. I keep them stacked in meticulously tidy piles in a big old trunk and every morning I pull out the next one. No muss, no fuss, no unnecessary thought or second-guessing: that’s what I’m wearing for the day. I call it the “t-shirt lottery” and it’s how I’ve been selecting my daily wardrobe for the last thirty years*. We all have our quirks.
Though sometimes I feel like I have most of them myself.
Anyway, today’s lottery winner is a fiery red little number sporting a ring of fire on the front. In that ring of fire are the barely-decipherable words, “Blue Skies Music Festival 2009”. Which is how – even as I sit here in Newfoundland in late February, 3,000 kilometres and two seasons removed from where and when the Blue Skies Music Festival has always resided – my mind has been jolted back to one of my many visits to one of my favourite places.
The weekend started on Friday (which happened to be m’lady’s birthday) and lasted through to Monday morning, but for brevity’s sake (did you just roll your eyes?!?) I will pile the weekend’s synapse firings upon Saturday’s date, which was August 1st, 2009.
In addition to the astoundingly wonderful group of friends who go to Blue Skies every year (especially Jennifer and Jason and their young ‘uns, Corey and Karina and their young ‘uns, Grey and Lisa and theirs, [it’s a kid’s club all right. I gain admittance for remaining one, not for having one], and and and…), in addition to all of them there were a whole whack of other great friends on hand for this one. Jojo and his wife were there, as was Doug and Michelle. Even Huss and Maria were there!
So, armed with a great crew of people to kill time with we enjoyed a four-day weekend full of holistic workshops, delicious camp food, endless snacks, a seemingly unlimited amount of frosty, frosty beers, unbelievable campfire jams, ethereal stargazing, and all of it in very, very excellent company.
And oh, there was music, and good music too! Geez. There was so much fun for my memory to revel in that I almost forgot about the music…at a music festival. That’s how much fun we have at Blue Skies.
Anyway, my fellow Folklore Centre teacher (and one of Canada’s top flamenco guitarists) James Cohen was there with his Caravan and they were stellar. Heck, blues giant Matt Anderson was there and I bet you would pay as much to see him play a soft-seat theatre as it cost for a whole weekend camping pass at Blue Skies. Anyway, he was great too.
Cravery was there as well and he was also great. I’ve long been a big fan and I was really excited to see him with a headlining slot, and I gotta say: he didn’t hold back. Faced with a family-friendly crowd that reserves the front three rows for kids six and under, Cravery burst into song after song that chorused about downtrodden junkies, hookers, and various roustabouts. I cringed every time he said the swears “c*ck” and “c*nt” into the microphone, which was shockingly often. How odd to be standing near the front of that hippie-dippy crowd and hearing a barrage of seawards bouncing off of the magical hillside behind me.
He was still fantastic though. As is, was, and will be Blue Skies forever I hope. Sigh.
And all of this beauty springs to my consciousness every time the t-shirt lottery spits out a Blue Skies shirt. Luckily I have lots of Blue Skies t-shirts.
(In my first draft I wrote the following: “If you’re lucky I’ll edit all that stuff out when I proofread this. If you’re not, I won’t. And yes, I proofread.”
Because I sometimes have a hard time keeping my benevolence a secret I feel compelled to let you know: You were indeed lucky. In the original piece my first three paragraphs ran about 15,000 words long. It was basically an epic treatise upon a crate full of faded cotton and polyester wearable memories. It featured histories and forensics, graphs and indices, socio-political context…there were even blurbs for the inevitable back cover. I was quite proud of it, really, but when I stepped back I had to admit that it went on much too long and was rather tangential at times, and in the grand scheme of things a novella ostensibly about my t-shirt collection seemed rather superfluous to the topic at hand anyway. Which was, of course, Blues Skies 2009. So I deleted it, you lucky ducky**.)
*I used to dig down and pull my morning t-shirt out from the bottom of the trunk which – while a much more fun and authentic daily “lottery” – was starting to put debilitating stress on some seriously old and thinned-out shirts.
**Just to give you an idea of what you were spared, here is a small fragment that I managed to save just before the entire document was permanently erased:
“…while what I do every afternoon could not technically be considered flossing per se it is very much like flossing, and much more effective too. But I shan’t say anymore on that except: now I know how they built the pyramids…”
Todd Man Out 