Wednesday 01/15/2025
Did my laundry, yay. At 1pm it was time for the monthly FOPAL zoom meeting. That was nice. I forget what we made but it was good.
Then did a run-through of my 3-song set for later, and changed clothes (gray slacks, black Steve Jobs style turtleneck) and went down to set up the mic for the birthday dinner, which I would sing into. The monthly, or I guess now bi-monthly birthday dinner is a semi-fancy setup, free wine and special cake, in Quad 4, one of the four divisions of the dining room that is closest to the auditorium. Only this quad has speakers in the ceiling driven by the audio desk in the auditorium. So you can set up a wireless mic on a stand in quad 4, and get amplified sound.
Except today when I set it up and turned it on, no sound came out. This is 4pm before a 5:15 performance. So I thrash around checking everything, then I get Paul the staff IT guy involved and he re-checks everything I checked, and he reboots the audio panel. Nothing. Now it’s 4:30.
Then I had a thought. There is a big rack of equipment backstage where all the wireless mic receivers are a other stuff, and I said, “Paul, is there like a separate amp for quad 4?” We walk backstage and open the gate over the rack and look, and down at the bottom of this stack of many boxes is one box labeled “Dining Room” and it has a power button that is in the off position. Turned it on and bingo. Audio in quad 4. Score one for me.
So at 5:15 there were about 30 people at tables in quad 4, people who had signed up for birthday dinner because they were born in December or January. I got out my guitar and Kay got out her flute, and I did Malvina Reynolds’ “Sing Along” and Pete Seeger’s “My Get up and Go” (Has got up and went), and a song called “New Lover’s Waltz” which I did the last time I performed at a birthday dinner, and Barbara, who organizes the birthday dinners, requested I do it again. And we sang Happy Birthday to us, happy birthday everybody. I didn’t screw up any chords or forget any lyrics, so that was ok.
Several people told me afterward that they really liked my performance and said other very nice and complimentary things.
I had set up my phone on a tripod all set to record video. But I forgot to start it recording. Duh. So no video of this wonderful performance.
Codgerville 