part 1: thursday is the new monday

I have had a string of bad Thursdays. Seriously, they have sucked. Mightily. This past Thursday was no exception.

One of the low points was a co-worker telling me that I should get a new hairstyle or a manicure. My first translation of this was that she was telling me, “Hey, you look like crap,” which is true enough, but I realized she meant that I should do something nice for myself to brighten my day.

I wanted to tell her that my particular pick-me-up is loud live music, and I wish that a mere manicure or new hairstyle would give me that kind of boost, because they are more easily obtained than the baptism of noise I want and need.

And so it was that I stood in the parking lot after work, smelling the spring air and mulling two options in my mind:
(1) go home and work some more
(2) take a pleasant drive to see Scott Miller and the Commonwealth, guaranteed to rock my world

I chose Option 2.

After all, back in June 2004, I wrote, “I have a short list of bands I would drive a healthy distance to see, and Scott Miller and the Commonwealth are now on that list.”

So I drove the healthy distance and arrived well before the advertised start time. I’d never been to the tiny club before, and I was concerned tickets would be gone by the time I got there. (No need to worry -- there were fewer than 50 people in the audience and the band didn’t go on for nearly two hours.) I passed the time talking hockey with Paul the bartender (he’s a Red Wings fan) and finishing some spreadsheets and paperwork -- probably the most productive 90 minutes I had all week.

The band finally arrived and sat at the bar to do their own kind of work, a pre-show warm-up without instruments. (Read as: The boys can really put it away.) They were making friends with Paul the bartender. I was still working on my spreadsheet and wished I could think of something deeply intelligent to say about their catalog of music. However, all I could think of was that scene in “The Blues Brothers” when the club owner says, “Well, we pay $200, and you boys drank $300 worth of beer.” About that time, one of the guys in the band made the same connection and quoted for his buddies, “ ‘Well, we pay $200 ... ”

Next time: The Stan Lynch fan club