Even with a working day, I recovered from the cold pretty well. I'm telling you, two bags of Throat Coat steeping for several hours in a thermos is the way to go. I did the same for this evening, but I also threw in some licorice root. This time I picked up Sam Press, a young man of our acquaintance who had volunteered for a small part in the play. We showed up at 7:15 or so, and had plenty of time to get oriented. I set up and decided to do the walk-on music with ring modulation for extra creepiness. While I was warming up, bassist Steve joined in, and it was a rather nice sound. I was, happily, recording my part of the improv, so I can check it out later. Since there was that issue of hearing the outside cue, we decided to have him cue us after Steve heard the SUV cue, which didn't give us a lot of time to develop things, but still it was an interesting improv. While we were waiting we shared a few quips. Steve asked if he was playing too loud. "You mean right now?" I asked. It was funny at the time.
Once again there was a lot of hanging out in the early part of the play, listening for cues and making sure any conversations we'd got into weren't loud enough to be heard upstairs. I hipped Sam to the appropriate time to sneak up to the party, where I was able to jump in and carry Mike's hi-hat downstairs. (Apologies to anyone I might have jostled on the way to help Mike, though I did politely ask to be let through.)
We got set up for the "Last House" section, and the curtain came down, and Emmet and Steve's son Leo started their sax part immediately--whoops. They should have let the MC give her welcome, but we were off. Still, when we kicked into the tune, it really worked. I did my looped volume swells and brought them in and out, though even with the amp turned up, I was getting some weird lack of level from the guitar. Hard to say what's up with that. I turned up the preamp some to compensate.
As before, I did a minimal, once-a-bar pattern on "This Day Is Lost," and then at the end we did our curtain call music. Once again, there was something weird with the preamp, but we got through, had a good (and large) audience, and got plenty of applause.
