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Friday, July 15, 2005 The Second Weekend in Chicago Chicago is getting to be my second home. Or something. After playing a show in Gibraltar on Saturday for a very receptive audience in sweltering heat, I drove back to Ann Arbor to meet up with friends and drive to Chicago for the second weekend in a row. Unlike the previous excursion, this trip was a planned one: Titus's Welcome Home (from six months in Iraq), Now Go Away (leaving the Navy and Chicago) Blues Party. The swing dancing scene in this country is fairly well networked, and the most well-networked dancer of them all is Titus--you can go to just about any scene, mention his name, and someone will either know him or have heard of him (he always wears orange, so he's easy to spot). Blues parties at his house are famous and attract dancers from all over--on that particular night, there were people there from Colorado, Michigan, Ohio, and probably a couple of other states. I danced for about seven hours, hardly taking any breaks--what can I say, I'm more than a little obsessed with blues--and left when my feet and legs were aching and it was light outside. Needless to say, the night was incredible, and with any luck a number of those dancers will come out when I play at the Red Line Tap in August. I've also decided that I need to travel with at least one dancer wherever I go. On Sunday, Melanie, Angelina, and I decided to spend some time wandering around Chicago; we went to one of my favorite cafes in the world, the Bourgeois Pig, and had dinner in Chinatown (Singaporean food two weekends in a row!), but while walking around Lincoln Park we stumbled across Eddie Perez playing at the Wise Fools Pub. Eddie's a singer-songwriter who was playing inside the pub, which essentially had an entire wall open to the street--two people on bikes were listening to him play, standing on the sidewalk, and since I was with dancers we started dancing right there (learning to lead has come in handy on more than one occasion). We doubled his audience and he was kind enough to give us CDs for free, which, I must say, are pretty good. I'll bet that was the first time he's ever had swing dancers spinning around to his music. Apparently he'll be in Michigan in August, so I gave him a copy of my CD. Friends, networking, dancing, good food, and music all at once. It doesn't get better than this. ^ Top | 10:26 AM | | | 
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