Barbershop In The Very Rainy Park

OK that was an interesting gig! (see pictures) Today we flew in Doug's Cessna down to La Center, Oregon to sing at the third annual "Barbershop In The Park" event, organized by our good friend Linda. This was the first time we've used the Cessna since Doug joined the group in January, and it opens up a whole new era of cheap and easy travel to anywhere within 500 miles of Vancouver - what a way to fly, with no security lines, no set schedules... but I digress.

Of course normally in late August, the weather would be warm and dry, but today it started off as a sprinkle and turned into a deluge. And it's an outdoor event! Here's a picture of the audience, getting very, very wet.

There were five quartets, including "My Three Sons" who flew in from Florida, and our buddies the Christiansens (plus Loel) from "Three Out Of Four." Anyway by the time it got to be our turn to sing, the rain was really coming down in buckets, and Linda made the call to move the whole audience into the gazebo with us. This made the event a lot drier for them, and a whole lot more intimate as well - we sang twelve songs with no mics, just a few feet from the whole audience! We're used to the typical darkened auditoriums, so this was a real treat for us, and I think the audience was so happy to be safely out of the rain, they were predisposed to have a good time.

Hoping to come back and sing Barbershop In The Park again next year, but with better weather!

Festival Vancouver - post show

Thanks to everyone who came to the big outdoor stage at the Vancouver Art Gallery Thursday to see us perform in Festival Vancouver - it was pretty much a packed house, especially right under that huge inflatable... uh... thing... that dominates the Art Gallery facade currently. The weird white thing can be seen in the gallery. We saw many old friends and many new faces, not least probably 50 or 60 people from MAKE Technologies or St. Paul's Hospital, where the Metzger brothers pass their days.

(click pic to enlarge)

We sang 13 songs making up nearly an hour of music, some from our previous recordings and some new, accompanied at times by the jackhammers across the street at the Georgia Hotel construction zone. The experts from the CBC captured and mixed all that music, and played it on the CBC Radio 1 program "Almanac" across the province. Somehow they managed to edit out all the jackhammer noise. Nice job boys!