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Tour Recap--Glendale Folk Festival

We’re playing at the Glendale Folk Festival this weekend. We leave early for Phoenix on Saturday morning so we don’t hit much traffic. We do almost get into an accident when a pickup nearly changes lanes into us, but Ron’s quick reflexes save us. When we get to Phoenix, we stop at The Main Ingredient Ale House where Ron has an amazing BLT. We check into our hotel and rest for a bit. Then we rehearse our sets for Sunday afternoon at the festival and Sunday night at Fiddlers Dream Coffee House. We eventually go to dinner at Authentic Ethioafrican Kitchen where the food is delicious the women who runs it tells us it’s all home cooking. I haven’t had Ethiopian food in forever, so I’m happy.
Sunday morning, we wake up early and walk across the street from our hotel to the 5 & Diner for breakfast. We want to stop at Dutch Bros for more coffee, since we don't really have too many of them where we live, but the line is way too long, so we go somewhere else.
We get to the festival and we're emceeing at one of the stages in the morning for two hours. We check in, get to see our friend Eric Douglas, and do the emcee thing for a bit. It's fun, but it's a little stressful, because you have to keep everything running on time, announce people, make sure the act is there, etc. It's a lot of hats to wear, so I'm glad that Ron and I are doing it together.
After emceeing, we run into Mike Berman on the way and also Zoe Fitzgerald Carter, both of whom we met at the FAR-West Conference a few years ago. I also chat briefly with a woman named Kate, who plays the autoharp. We bond over a mutual love of the Trio album.
We have a bit of time after we're done emceeing so we reapply sunscreen and go into the Fruit Packing Shed where we are performing, mostly to stay out of the sun and heat. Ron has a compression fracture in his back (this is a repeat of 2019--when he last had one), so I'm carrying all the gear and we want to make sure he doesn't have to spend too much time on his feet and I don't have to spend too much time carrying guitars.
 

I feel lucky, and honestly a little guilty, that we are in the Fruit Packing Shed for our set this year. It's inside. It has air conditioning. It's a big brick room with great acoustics. It's probably the best situation we could be in. We hang out and watch some of the acts before us. They're all really talented and it's honestly a little intimidating. I always get nervous and can't sit much before we perform, so I kind of wander about in the big anteroom/quasi greenroom space there is and stand in the doorway watching the acts.

Bobbo shows up and so does his friend John and they watch our set. It goes much better than I anticipated. We have a few flubs (starting a song in two different keys becuase one of us has the capo in the wrong position and forgetting a lyric right at the beginning of a song, so we have to start over), but the audience is so on our side it doesn't even matter. And we sound great, because the sound person is great and the acoustics are great. I should sing in a big brick room every time. A gentleman in the front row keeps giving me a thumbs up every time I play even the tiniest lick on my guitar and applauds all of Ron's solos. At the end of our set, a few people even stand up and applaud, which we were not expecting at all.

The rest of the day, people keep coming up to us and telling us how much they enjoyed our set and it's just really nice. It's so hard to do this sometimes. You hear “no” so much and there's a lot of pressure to be good and market yourself and all of the things that go with it. But knowing someone really enjoyed the 25 minutes you played helps make it worth it.
We go watch Bobbo's set and he's wonderful as always, but there are a few folks in the audience talking at full volume about what they want to eat later and someone actually walks through his stage while he's performing. I'm annoyed. After Bobbo's set we have to book it to Fiddler's Dream (about half an hour away) because we are due to start at 6 and it's 4:30. We go to get out of where we are parked and the gate is blocked off because someone has crashed into it. We end up having to basically drive through the festival (probably where we are not supposed to be driving) to get out. It makes me nervous as a cat in a bathtub, but Ron gets us out of there and safely on the road.
We get to Fiddler's Dream later than I wanted, but luckily the set is all acoustic, so we don't have to soundcheck. We give Nia a lot of hugs. She's opened the venue for us on a day it's normally closed to let us play. We have a great audience. Mike and Zoe and John come (it's definitely dedication to watch an artist do two sets in one day), plus some folks Bobbo knows from Massachusetts who have relocated to the Phoenix area and some of their friends. Julie has made a cake to celebrate Bobbo's new book. There is singing and stories and a lot of laughing. Julie and I bond over knitting. Mike and I talk future recording plans. Zoe and I talk about how her music stuff is going. Nia and I talk politics (mostly, we're just preaching to the choir with each other--we both are hugely progressive, so we agree on pretty much everything).
We are wiped out afterwards and get pizza and eat it in our hotel room while watching reruns on TV. It's been a long, hot, dusty day, but totally worth it.
We leave Monday morning and it's mostly an easy drive. No near miss accidents. We stop in Palm Springs for lunch and fuel, but we are having such a great time with each other that we forget to gas up before leaving the city. We come this close to running out of gas on the freeway and have to have a little adventure finding gas in the (sort of) middle of nowhere, but luckily it's just another near miss. It's been a great trip with some amazing gigs and I go to bed happy.

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