On Thursday, we competed in the Thomas Point Beach Bluegrass Special Band Competition. It was such an amazing and wonderful experience. We didn’t win, but the band that did win – a young group called Twisted Pine – was so fantastic and talented. They were the deserved winners.
(Right now I’m listening to the Lonely Heartstring Band play Paul Simon’s Graceland, which is just about my favorite song of all time. I first heard them play it at Grey Fox in July and that pretty much cemented them as one of my all time favorite Bluegrass Bands.)
Anyway, we didn’t win the competition, but it hardly matters. All the competing bands were so talented that I would have been extremely surprised if we had won. The festival organizers did decide to comp all the competing bands full weekend passes to the festival – the first time they’ve ever done so – which saved our band five hundred dollars.
After they announced the winners, we ended up jamming with a couple of the guys from one of the other showcase bands – a group from Rhode Island called Four Bridges. We ended up jamming until about two in the morning.
I have this image in my head of just loading my bass and my dog into my car and driving from festival to festival all summer listening to music and jamming until well into the wee hours of the morning. Of course, it’d be difficult to justify spending so much time and money on a secondary hobby. I love playing the bass and I want to get as good as I can, which will be a life long journey, I know – but I have to remember that my first love is the written word – especially the ones I write myself – and every day I get closer to accomplishing the first of many writing goals – the completion and submission of my first manuscript for publication.
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