Fear
By Ciaran Carson
I fear the vast dimensions of eternity.
I fear the gap between the platform and the train.
I fear the onset of a murderous campaign.
I fear the palpitations caused by too much tea.
I fear the drawn pistol of a rapparee.
I fear the books will not survive the acid rain.
I fear the ruler and the blackboard and the cane.
I fear the Jabberwock, whatever it might be.
I fear the bad decisions of a referee.
I fear the only recourse is to plead insane.
I fear the implications of a lawyer's fee.
I fear the gremlins that have colonized my brain.
I fear to read the small print of the guarantee.
And what else do I fear? Let me begin again.
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I have had a perfectly lovely evening at a Harry Potter party at which I did not get a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. *g* I've had the book on order from Amazon since the week they started taking pre-orders; I'm supposed to get it tomorrow and if I don't, I get it for free, so I get to go to bed at a reasonable hour. But when we found out that Jennifer Cutting's Ocean Orchestra was giving a free concert at Borders in Silver Spring, how could we not go? We thought at first that it was just Jennifer and Grace Griffith, then the newspaper said that some of her band would be there, and when we arrived we discovered that the entire group plus Lisa Moscatiello were all performing. They did most of the songs they performed when we saw them last weekend -- now that I have albums with both Lisa and Grace singing "The Sands of Time" individually, I can say that there is nothing lovelier in the world than listening to them harmonize on it.
Okay, so I keep talking about this song -- you can hear a bit of it at Amazon.com (Grace Griffith's solo version too, here), and tonight while snapping photos I could not resist hitting the Quicktime button and recording a few seconds. So here live in motion are Jennifer on keyboards, Lisa on main vocals and Grace on harmony along with the rest of the Ocean Orchestra at YouSendIt, a .MOV file, 10MB. The album is on iTunes as well as Amazon.com and I cannot recommend it highly enough. There are a lot of references to magic in the lyrics so it was quite appropriate for a Harry Potter fest, and the kids were dancing to the raunchy tunes!
Anyway, we stuck around Borders for over an hour because they were supposed to have an uplink to a feed of Rowling reading from HBP -- Silver Spring was one of only three Borders in the US to have such footage -- but they couldn't get their video working, and the kids were tired and cranky, and finally we bowed to pressure and left. (Besides, if I'd stayed at that point, I would have gotten in line and bought the book, stayed up all night reading and then had to return it after getting my Amazon.com copies. *g*) But it was a lot of fun to be at the party where they were doing face painting and sorting kids into Hogwarts houses and having magicians walk around doing tricks. I had not been in this area of Silver Spring since it was entirely rebuilt, though I have no excuses because the new AFI Silver movie theater is around the corner. Before going to Borders for the concert we walked down the main street where there are now a dozen restaurants, and we discovered that there was a Phillips Seafood so we all had crab soup and crab cakes for dinner (very reasonably priced as it was counter-style rather than with servers). So it was a lovely evening all around and I couldn't care that I haven't started HP yet!
Incidentally, MD area folkies, Jennifer, Grace and some of the band are playing at the Borders in Hagerstown tomorrow afternoon -- info on Jennifer's web site. Summer in DC is such a fantastic time for free concerts, not even counting the ones at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival -- I just found out that Great Big Sea is coming to Wolf Trap along with Saw Doctors the week we will be in Delaware! *wails* And Colin Hay will be at the Birchmere that week, too! Ah well, maybe I can see Wolfstone at the Birchmere at the end of August. And we are seeing October Project in Virginia next weekend so I really have nothing to complain about! Next weekend we have also discovered that the HMS Bounty will be in Baltimore, so you can bet we will be there as well.
Here is my not-very-inspired review of "Miri" for TrekToday, with which I struggled so much that I had to cancel lunch with
Jennifer is so lovely onstage and off that I had to take a picture of her at the table where she was signing CDs.
Also, she can play the button accordion and I love her clothes. I think I'm crushing. Heh.
But what all the kids really loved were the bagpipes!
And how often do you get a guy in a Potomac Celtic Festival t-shirt at your concert next to a wizard?
Here's the lineup of kids waiting to get Sorted and have lightning bolts painted on their foreheads.
And Borders and the multiplex from across the street. I just thought the lights were pretty.
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