Here is how it works. Copy this list. Leave in the bands you've seen perform live. Delete the ones you haven't and add new ones that you have seen until you reach 25. An asterisk means the previous person had it on their list. Two asterisks means the last two people who did this before you had that band on their list.

1. The Church
2. Ani Difranco *
3. Crowded House
4. Jethro Tull
5. Nirvana
6. Mike Doughty
7. Clem Snide
8. Whiskeytown
9. 6 String Drag
10. Rainer Maria
11. Girlyman**
12. Blues Traveler
13. Dan Bern
14. They Might Be Giants
15. Son Volt
16. Peter Murphy
17. Turku
18. The Butchies
19. Pop Culture Casualties
20. Erin McKeown *
21. Rusted Root *
22. REM
23. Indigo Girls**
24. Concrete Blonde
25. Dar Williams**

May is hula hoop month! I should work on getting my itty bitty hoop going around my neck. We should take our hoops out to a park!

Also, I? Have mad pretentious taste. If the beer post the other day didn't prove it, I believe the fact that I heard the word "Sanskrit" in two separate songs (on the iPod) on a 20 minute trip to the grocery story should.

I'm starting to feel like my harp practice is just a thing I do, like the dance and CST stuff. I think this is a good sign. But. I've also been feeling disconnected from practice in general, so I'm going to start keeping a practice log of everything. It'll be public but cut, so this is the last you have to read about it.
( relaxing sunday of practice )

I had my first harp harp (not harmonica harp) lesson in many many years this week. The coolest thing of all was seeing my teacher again after so long and realising - you know, in many ways, who I am is who she is.

Pause and let the coolness of that sink in.

So we talked about what I do now and being able to travel and play for fun. I played a little therapy harp (which sounds lovely and is so wee!). She lent me an ear-training book that teaches you to play music non-classically. It's strange to think of myself as a classical musician cause I know so little about theory and composition, but that really is the way I learned - I know how to reproduce notes on a page, but not how to play from nothing. And then I drove home up 460 watching cotton grow and trying to pick out little simple harmonies on my not-harp harp.

So I'm learning from nothing on two different instruments. I'm playing "Hot Cross Buns" five thousand times in different keys teaching myself what a full step sounds like in a major key. And then I'm remembering chords and thirds and major sevenths and keys and realising how little music I knew in the first place. I want to get music now in a way I didn't even really imagine before.

In short, I am geeking out, people. It's a good time. It's hard work. It's yet another way I am reprogramming my whole damned brain.

In the meantime, people keep asking me to play for them, and I think they mean they want notes on a page. I want to show them this whole universe instead.

( The lyrics to 'Minstrel Boy'. Dude, this song is so sad! )

First projects after "Scarborough Fair" (the easiest song evah): "Parting Glass" and "Minstrel Boy", because I-I-I am a Seeeentimental Girl.

I just learned the first 4 bars of 'Danny Boy' on the harmonica!

Not that it was very good, but still! I played the harmonica! Everything begins with one step.

That's all. Go about your evenings.

For rackletang and anyone else who hates on the musical theatre.

Like pretty much every child who grew up in the 80s, I saw a tour of Cats. And I thought the theatre was magic to begin with, but whoa... theatre with singing and dancing. Mind blowing. Even from Cats, which, let's face it, is not T.S. Eliot's best work [not to mention Andrew Lloyd Webber's - I mean, no one's on roller skates, but...] and has very little to say about the world, the human condition, or anything but the imagination of children.

That's enough.

There is no way I could see enough high school productions of Into the Woods in this lifetime (and still, you know, have a life). Something about the grown-up fairy tale seems to resonate so perfectly with kids of a certain age that they're just so there.

Because the music. It is a metaphor for emotion. And the thing with metaphoric emotion is, it can change you. Temporarily or, if it's really really really good, forever. The musical demands a type of suspended disbelief that most other popular theatre doesn't even attempt (Tony Kushner, who essentially writes musical theatre without music, is an exception), absolutely requires you to live temporarily in another world. With all the other people in the room with you.

Really good musicals go one better and evoke more than they tell. Hello, Dolly, for instance, is all about the tell; it's prose - but Evita is a dream about Evita. Tommy (not as performed by the Who, but on stage) is visual poetry. Chess straddles the fence; it is both a straight story and an implied one.

Tommy, in fact, is the mostly provoking and transformative piece of musical theatre I can currently think of. It's probably difficult to envision without being there, but the B'way production years ago dealt in broad swaths of color and movement that just swept you up. And the architecture of the show literally pulled the audience into the performance - it wrapped around you (which, come to think of it, Cats had done when I was wee) and reflected back at you.

How can one sit in a dark room having the same experience with so many other people and not come away from it a little changed?

Cause I know y'all are just dying to know what my songs were. Right? Right?

And apparently, my meme was hard (so says the boy, although I'm not sure how much he can be trusted, as he guessed 90% of them).

( The Answers. Laugh all you like. )

This meme's a bit overdue, but it had to be pondered.

( 20 songs meme )