PopTour: Day Six

PopTour: Day Six

Day Six: Wednesday 8 March

Pszyk drops me off to reconvene with Alyson, Dave, Michael & Quail at a bagelshop near Janice's place in the late morning. We've all enjoyed our little time apart and we make plans to do some sightseeing before we need to hook up with Don & Rob and get over to tonight's show in DC. I want to see the brandnew Hayden Planetarium, but when we find out the entrance fee is $19, we opt instead to go to the Guggenheim with Quail. That turns out to be $12 to get in, so I feel bad missing the Planetarium (since I've been to the Guggenheim before), but the featured exhibit throughout the museum is a retrospective on Korean video pioneer Nam June Paik, which is pretty damn cool. There's also a very disturbing exhibit of photographs about Eastern European performance artist Maria Abramovic which fascinates us. Then Michael buys a cool museum Swatch, and we have lunch outside at a perfect hot dog and knish stand -- man, you can't beat a superhot knish with spicy mustard and an icecold Coke. Plus it's Knish Wednesday, and we see lots of people walking around with dots of mustard on their foreheads...

Anyway, it's about 3.00, so we start to head back to Janice's to get our stuff, and we use our punkrawk celphone to leave a message for Don & Rob telling them to expect us in a couple hours. The subway takes about an hour to get us back, which unfortunately puts us on a collision course for the Holland Tunnel with about a million other people. We lose probably two full hours inching through, and ultimately we don't get to DC until about 10pm that night -- yowza! It's a replay in reverse of the Galaxy Hut show (Arlington VA is just outside of DC): ISG has been eagerly awaiting our arrival, growing concerned and agitated. We get to the club, I ask ISG to play since we are all frazzled by our unexpectedly long drive, and we relax a bit and watch them play another excellent set. I'm starting to feel kind of sick, and we play a not-great set for very few people, though Ivan Osorio (whose party we went to three nights ago) shows up, and -- wildly, unexpectedly, delightfully -- so do a few of the Gainesville kids (Eric the Idiot Dancer and Dave Detweiler) who happen to be in DC on Spring Break. That's very nice, and I'm sorry we don't do a better job for them. They're about the only people there.

One other oddity that night -- there's an old black man in the club all night, who tells us he is one of the original O'Jays, among many many other things. The most memorable comment I hear from him is about how he once took a Viagra and 'fucked a bitch nearly half to death'... yeah, it's a typical rough neighborhood in DC, our nation's capital.

After the show several of us walk down the street to Ben's Chili Bowl, famed eatery in this area -- it's partowned by Bill Cosby and the mighty Duke Ellington used to eat there. We get some swell chili dogs and french fries, then head back to the club where the last band after us is playing to NO one.

The soundguy tonight was our boy Greg Ceton, who does a fine job, and at the end of the night, after we've been paid, um, NOTHING AT ALL, we all follow Greg back to his RockHaus in the woods. It's pretty late when we get there, and we've all had a long day, so we bed down pretty quickly. I sleep comfortably in the van, Dave's in a hammock on the porch, and the other nine of us are scattered throughout the house. Very rock.

On to Day Seven...