Another Month Without Beds

Well, that's kind of a lie. There were a few nights that included beds.

The Kristy Kruger band drove to Grand Rapids, MI on 9/22 to meet up with our new boss, Brian Vander Ark. Brian is/was the lead singer of The Verve Pipe, a band who had a hit in the 90s with "The Freshmen".

Brian and his family are about as cool as they come. Dylan (guitar) and I slept in an Airstream trailer parked in his yard. Despite the fact that it was decked out with a flatscreen TV and other indulgences, I still felt like Randy Quaid from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. There were an embarrassingly high number of "Shitter's full" jokes made.

After days of rehearsing, our first show was in Detroit at a club that holds about 500 people. When Brian told us that it would probably sell out, I giggled. When we showed up for the show and it was packed two hours before showtime, I stopped giggling.

We played a bunch of shows with Brian, and played shows without him to fill in the gaps in the dates. NYC, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Richmond, Charlottesville, Dallas, Birmingham, Charlotte, Augusta, Atlanta.....I think I'm leaving some out.

One of the coolest places we played was a house in North Augusta, South Carolina. Chuck and Heather are both schoolteachers that have turned their basement into an honest-to-goodness nice theater. It holds 100 people, and four times each year, Chuck invites his email list of friends/music fans over for a show. He makes t-shirts, laminated passes and all other kinds of neat stuff to commemorate the show. It's BYOB, but he sets up an enormous cooler of ice and a pile of buckets so you can keep your B cold during the show. It was quite a pleasant way to spend an evening. As his neighbor/friend told me: "Everybody's got to have a hobby, and Chuck took just about the coolest fucking hobby you could ever have."

This trek lasted about a month, and the highlight of the trip may have been meeting new spouses of my friends. That was made even more fun after having this conversation with Brian's wife.

Richard, do you have a girlfriend?

No.

Why not?

Well, currently I'm sleeping in your front yard in a trailer. Over the next month, I'll probably sleep in a bed....well, probably 6-8 nights. The highlight of any given day could honestly be when we stop at a gas station that sells corn dogs. These things don't scream, "Date me."

I see.

Because of exhaustion and the fact that Kristy takes an incredibly large amount of pictures, I didn't take many pictures this trip. This was the best:

If it hadn't been 4am, we definitely would've gone inside to see if their boasting could've been true.