It is 10 days until Crushing Krisis’s 10th birthday and I am having an editorial calendar failure. And a brain failure.
Really it’s kind of an overarching not being able to do anything except nap and read comic books failure, which as failures go is not such a bad one. It’s way better than the “so overstressed I can feel the ulcers growing” brand of failure I was experiencing two weeks ago.
Actually, I think the napping and the comic books had a lot to do with escaping that particular pit of despair. Napping, comic books, little purple pills, and not drinking a gallon of lemonade every single day.
Meanwhile, in news related to the brain failure, I have discovered that being in three separate musical acts each with their own set of unique arrangements is the functional limit of my brain capacity. The wherewithal to recall all of those songs seems to have jettisoned my ability to return phone calls or schedule home repairs.
I am now off book on seventeen bass arrangements for Filmstar. As long as someone yells out what key we’re in at the start of the song I am fine, except for the one song that only makes sense if I pretend we are playing a David Bowie song. Like, if we begin and I’m like, “Oh, it’s a Filmstar song,” then I am a hot mess and play about two correct notes. But, if I instead say, “This is the secret, unreleased B-Side to ‘Suffragette City,’” then I’m fine.
Meanwhile, as Arcati Crisis Gina and I are working on two new songs, which – per our modus operandi – are completely different in every possible way from anything we’ve done before. One is an acoustic dance song from me equally influenced by Gaga and Heart, which I just previewed on our Facebook page.
(The other is a Gina tune which could be referred to as “Message In a Bottle from an American Girl in Russia,” but is actually called the much more succinct “American Mikaela.” It’s chorus hook is so destructively catchy that I have successfully lobbied to sing it three times as much as Gina originally planned.)
There’s also the musical artist that is me, who I can sometimes forget about in all of the commotion between the other two and commuting to my actual, fully-paid, highly-beloved full time occupation. He’s rehearsing to support Mieka Pauley this weekend at our house concert shindig, where he is rumored to debut a brand new Madonna cover (and, when you rumor something to yourself, it’s pretty sad if it doesn’t come true, so I need to get on that).
Meanwhile, ten years minus ten days ago I was sitting in a dorm room with a broken collar bone, registered for a year of music courses totally outside of my major and wondering if I would have anywhere to live in a month.
Ten years. Wow. What were you doing ten years ago today?
For all I know, August 17th was the day when I had to get to Mandell Theater at 6:55am and set up all morning just to watch Tom Brokaw record about 15 takes of Tom Brokaw saying something like, “This is Tom Brokaw, and you’re watching MSNBC”.
I think I was busy enough with Orienting new students that I didn’t set foot in the theatre that summer.
If we were talking about a Tuesday NINE years ago, I was probably at a shop call :)
I was busy enough orientating students all summer that I basically never left the theater. Though I think we were done by this point, and I remember the Brokaw thing being one of the random things summer crew had to do between the end of orientation and being done for the summer.
Strong probability that 10 years ago today, I was at band camp, which would have been my first year on the weapons line and probably one of the times I sprained my pinky and begged to keep practicing.
We’ve come a long, long way.