Galloway Station

Last night was the weekly session at Galloway Station, and we were 'fiddle-light' as three of the three fiddlers were absent from their usual perches on the back porch of Galloway Station. Lee, LeeAnn, Max and John had all gone to a performance of LeeAnn's at Drury for the civic orchestra, and Brian is getting ready for his wedding in a few weeks. Plus, we were missing Steve and Linda W., who are regular heavy-weights when it comes to trad. tunes and performance. Even my wife was gone, step-dancer rhythmic guru that she is, as she had gone to a performance of one of her friends in Willard.

I never thought that I would miss all those strings, horsehair and rosin so much! Nothing else quite stirs up a crowd like a fiddle; maybe it's the way that the fiddley overtones cut thru the air, but nothing else gets people moving like a fiddle. So, we did what any group without a musical quorum does: played for the sheer enjoyment of it! Besides, it's not what you play when you know what to play that counts; it's what you play when you don't know what to play that music magic happens.

We all really had to pull our own musical weight, but it takes alot of experience and confidence, plus a way to really push those notes out of your instrument and acoustically project. My mom does a fair job, but she is kindof erratic in how she plays tunes. Of course, I could say the same thing about myself sometimes; it's just that I have alot more experience performing erratically in those types of situations.

Everyone present did a good job of rising to the musical occassion. Liz, the harp player, even came and she has obviously been practicing her harp, as she is really beginning to project her sound nicely: she chorded alot to several of the regular tunes, and I really liked to hear that chordal background to a melodic line that was pretty well dominated by air-fairy flutes and whistles and pipes. She also led melodically on a few tunes, but unfortuntately it's hard to hear a harp in a noisy outdoor situation.

During the performance, which went on for almost two hours, I noticed that one of my graduate school classmate's boyfriend walked in. He nodded at me and I nodded back. On my way out the door, I said hi to him, and it turns out that he works with Barb, my dad's new wife, in the pharmaceutical sales business. What a small world! Chad called me by my real name "Jason" again, so I mentioned that my nickname was "Beau" and that I had always gone by that. When he first met Barb and heard her last name, he asked her if she knew a Jason. She said something like, "I don't know a Jason, but I know a Beau. But, Jason is Beau." So, he already knew my nickname, or alter ego, I should say. It's the Gemini in me: we're twins and two for the price of one!