Some variety

Yesterday my friend Andrew asked me to be in his act for the school's variety show (the talent show was cancelled and now they're having a variety show -- no, I don't know the difference). He said that he was going to be playing the guitar with someone, but the someone ducked out for some reason. I obliged to replace whoever it was and provide backing for Andrew's rendition of Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight." I had never heard the song, but he said it wasn't that hard and told me to bring my guitar for a practice tomorrow (today).

Today has been yesterday's tomorrow, so I brought my one of my electric guitars to school. As is custom for when I bring large things to school, I asked my first-hour teacher (my history teacher) if I could keep it in her room. She said it was okay, so I did. But when I came back after school, her room was locked. I had to go down to the office to ask for someone to send a guy to the room to unlock it for me. I went back to the room and behold, there was a guy. So I got my guitar and met up with Andrew. We went to the auditorium, and he was carrying a cage his bird, a lovebird named Chickenhawk. (He had brought it for a biology project.) It turns out that the girls really dig birds. Well, the ones we passed by did, anyway.

So we got in the auditorium and while I was standing on the stage, I got a really good view of the auditorium. It's a really small one -- it can only seat about half the school, and we're a small school -- but I never really grasped how tiny it was. Maybe it's an optical illusion from seeing the stadium-style floor escalating as it goes back, but the room seemed really, really tiny.

Anyway, I grabbed a seat in the audience like everyone else and generally got a feel for things. I knew some of the people in the production. Andrew seemed to be running around a lot; I assume he was part of the crew. At least one of us knew what was going on. I felt nervous, but it wasn't like the nervousness of picking classes (um, I'll get to that later). It's a sort of excited, confused nervousness, the kind I only get when I'm about to play a gig with my band. It's confused because I wasn't sure how we were going to go on and whatnot. I would get this feeling before playing in the two talent shows that we rocked at our old school. The latter of the two was the last talent show I had been in.

Later he told me that we should practice before our act came up. I thought it was a good idea, considering I didn't know the song. We exited stage left and ran through the song once. It wasn't hard at all, but I still needed to look at the chords. When we came back to the stage, we left our guitars out, with cables plugged in all ready to go.

Later, when our act came on, all we had to do was grab our guitars, plug them in to the amplifiers (big ol' Fenders!) on either side of the stage, and wait for the curtain to open. After a bit of struggle (my amp wasn't working; Andrew determined that something was plugged in to the wrong input on the thingy that goes on top of the actual speakers), I set the music on the floor so I could see it while I was playing, and we began. Well, Andrew began by performing the opening lick solo, and I joined in the second time he played it. And then the lady running the show said, "That's good, okay." We must have gotten in eight bars, but she was in a hurry to run through all the acts. So we packed up our guitars, and seeing that I was probably late for my ride to pick me up, I scrammed.

There are going to be more rehearsals on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday after school. The variety show is Thursday night. As a result, I probably won't have time to get online on those days (gotta do that homework, y'know), but there's always hope.

I was going to fill you all in on the latest developments in choosing my courses for next year (brace yourself for a surprising twist!), but I need something to write about tomorrow. Besides, that subject has dominated this blog for over a week. The title of this post just says it all, doesn't it?

This is a pretty clever idea. A 21-year-old college student named Matt Cooper is running for President of the United States in 2020, when he will be old enough to be eligible for the office. When I came across this site a few months ago (I find these links months in advance), I had just been thinking of doing the same thing in 2024, when I'll be old enough to be the White House's resident.