Cat herding
The Ann Arbor Folk Festival means different things to different people. I was almost considering going to the Saturday night show this year. Joan Baez was the headliner. The problem was that I would have to sit through a whole ton of acts before Joan took the stage. I. Cannot. Sit. That long. I like to listen to music while I’m dancing around doing chores in my house.
Still I have learned to enjoy folk fest weekend. The GG seems to have come to understand how hard it is for me to sit and listen to other people make music (“Keb Mo” is an inside joke here). There’s an early Friday dinner at the Red Hawk followed by a glorious solo walk home. And there’s the pre-glow party at Rackham that the GG’s expensive tickets pay for. I don’t think I am *technically* entitled to this perk since I don’t attend the show but I’m a pretty light eater and I’ve learned that nobody much cares if I’m there (they make me a name tag) and I do my introvert’s best to blend in. After the pre-glow, I bound down four flights of marble stairs at Rackham and hit the women’s bathroom (in which one of the few pay phones left on earth resides) and galumph home.
That’s more or less what I did tonight except that the walk was unintended. It’s all complicated but I had a birthday engagement to attend and, in order to *not* spend an hour and a half wandering aimlessly around downtown between the pre-glow and the birthday party, I decided to make other arrangements and those involved me walking home lickety-split and the birthday person picking me up at home.
It was all good except I had been feeling kind of wonky all day. Hungry mostly and a wee bit more caffeinated than I wanted to be. That’s a bit unusual for me. I mean the hungry thing, not the over-caffeinated. I love to eat (pass the potatoes please) but I don’t tend to shovel big piles of food into my mouth even on the hungriest of days. I won’t go over the entire day in detail but I was fading fast at the end of the afternoon and although I had more than enough energy for my unplanned [second] walk back over to the west side, I wasn’t sure whether I was gonna be any good as a birthday companion or not.
But then we were seated at the Real Seafood and there was an empty water glass in front of me and suddenly I could not *wait* for our server to come around and fill it. When he did, I glugged that thing down like nobody’s business and then started working on the extra glass of water for the “ghost” person that never showed up. Eventually I began to feel more like myself. Dehydration? It’s a real thing and I know better. (Oh and this is the Great Lake State where we have lots of good clean water unless you happen to live in Flint or over a certain dioxane plume but those are whole other stories).
G’night,
KW
P.S. There was a ghost ‘hattan too but fortunately, the RS ‘hattans are a fraction of the size of Knights’.
January 31st, 2016 at 9:10 am
Not only is the presence of the pay phone unusual, but that it works is nearly a miracle. If technology can have a miracle component….
January 31st, 2016 at 8:29 pm
Dehydration is an issue in my family, so I try to drink more water than I want to. I’m not a fan. I prefer coffee and beer which are both BAD. 🙂