Jon

Last night I went to see Bryan Ferry. I’ve been a fan of Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry since my teens, and I’d seen him live a couple of times before. So I was excited when tickets went on sale.

Still, I paused before buying the tickets, because I wasn’t sure who I’d go with. K wasn’t interested, observing that Ferry has never written for Broadway. But VV, a friend, tweeted that she really wanted to go, so I made it happen.

I like to think I would have bought the tickets anyway and worried later about finding someone to go with.

As much as I’d been looking forward to the show, when the date came, I was a little ambivalent. It’s been a busy week, and I’m fighting off a cold, so I was tired and uncomfortable. If I hadn’t made plans with my friend, there’s a non-zero chance I would have talked myself out of going.

I’m really glad I went. They started with an old-time Roxy Music song (“Re-make/Re-model”), which got me in the mood. And the next one (“Kiss and Tell”), from a mid-80s solo album, really energized me.

The performance itself was really good. Ferry can still sing, and his backup musicians managed to be faithful to Ferry’s sound while still putting themselves into the music.

I can’t say that it was objectively the best performance I’d ever attended, but I have never enjoyed a concert as much as I enjoyed that one.¹ Part of it was that it was an excellent show. But mostly, I think I was just ready to enjoy something, more ready than I’d been in years. I was finally in the right place, living the right life, listening to music that I’d loved for nearly thirty years.

For all of my ongoing issues and anxiety, I’m finally whole, and it’s wonderful.

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¹A very slight disappointment was the lack of showgirls. Previously when I’d seen Roxy Music or Bryan Ferry live, there had been a point in the show when two women in showgirl costumes—spangles, giant feathers, and all—came out and flanked the stage. I had been looking forward to seeing something along those lines at this concert because showgirls.

This weekend we spent in Kent, Connecticut, which is near the western edge of the state, about halfway between the northern and southern borders. Friends of ours—parents of one of the boy's classmates—have a weekend place up there, and they invited us to join them for the weekend. We'd been there before, and it's beautiful up there.
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The festival did provide a moment of pure magic, though. We had wandered into a master class taught by Béla Fleck, and someone asked him about the classical music he had arranged for, and played on, nontraditional instruments. For about 90 seconds, I sat transfixed as he played Bach on the banjo.

Then we drove home and got stuck in traffic.

I probably haven't mentioned this before, but I play the guitar. Well, played it, anyway. I was in fifth grade when I decided that I wanted to learn to play, and my mother bought a small, nylon-stringed instrument for me. When I graduated from elementary school, she gave me a large, steel-stringed Yamaha acoustic guitar as a graduation present.

That guitar has been a constant companion, even though long stretches of time have passed without my touching it. The past eight years or so have been the longest such stretch, I'm embarrassed to admit.

Lauren has never heard me play, in fact. But for my most recent birthday, she bought a series of lessons for me at Jalopy, a space that's a few blocks from our apartment. I suspect that she's tired of having this damned big guitar take up space in her apartment if I'm not going to use it.

I'm taking the intermediate guitar course, which meets on Monday nights. The first class in the series was this week, and it has turned out to be just me and another guy with the instructor. After some tentative probing, we seem to have decided to study some blues techniques, including finger-picking.

Congenital ingrate that I am, I resisted the idea some, figuring that I already had too much to do without dragging my lazy arse to guitar lessons and having to practice in between. But I've become excited about it. The class was fun, and, in hindsight, if I hadn't enjoyed playing, I wouldn't have kept the guitar all this time. I expect that I'll be even more excited when I get my calluses back. (Ouch.)

In other news, my workload has suddenly gotten all 'splodey, and my brain feels kind of 'splodey now, too, in consequence. And so it goes.