Musicians with a free, snowy morning...

...on their hands. My significant other- Michael- on resonator guitar, our dear buddy John on the banjer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj9dhIFjMoo

Seems like old times...

...but only for a second. Then I remember the mortgage, my smirky teenaged children [ who look so similar to the way I used to, somehow] and it all comes back into focus.

The day this was taken I was happy, wearing a new [ scratchy] shirt and it was as cool a fall day as ever happens in east Texas. My neighbour Steve's mother took this picture. Their family had just moved to Texas from Los Altos and were told that since nobody in Texas had long hair, their dad suggested they have it all cut off. Boy were they mad when they arrived and half our high school looked like Duane Allman.

Death by Gabardine

"Oh, Mom. I'm sorry...I just forgot with work and finals and..."

I sigh and crack one eye open. Such a fragmented, meekly uttered sentence usually means the rest of my day is toast and I'm never wrong.
The impending disaster this time involves a sadistic band director with a misguided sense of economy and possibly a vendetta against parents who need to be somewhere on a daily basis and don't have time to express their Oleg Cassini inner selves. The rest of the blame falls on my daughter, who really needs to write notes to herself. Last year, I was up making one of these nightmare band costumes while battling the flu. It looked as though vandals had broken into my home and completed the band uniform for me during the night.

Black gabardine, that most vile of fabrics, was once only used by victorian widows in mourning and Dominican nuns for their winter habits. It's cumbersome, slippery and shreds like crazy. But after hunting down the last pattern in the metroplex [ everybody else had theirs made two weeks ago, I'm thinking] I sat down and fought the good fight. Meanwhile, I broke my last heavy duty nachine needle, my significant other came in and added a few potatoes and more garlic to the deer stew [ a fine thing] but cranked up the heat to 'high' [ NOT a fine thing] He swears he had nothing to do with it.

My daughter's floor length, black gabardine skirt is finished now, and she looked lovely last night in her tuxedo shirt, jacket and skirt as she played in the Symphonic Winter Concert. I sat in the audience, everything blurry from trying to sew without my glasses [ vandals took them when they came in and turned up the stew] And I'm wondering: Is there any jail time attached to assaulting a school department head with an unattractive bolt of fabric? Or would that just be a hefty fine?