Climate chaos continued: Please don’t come to my concert

The upcoming Vershire performance is in the Town Center Building, and was initiated by (among others) the town clerk. It is truly a town concert. 

And the town has asked residents to stay home.

Vershire is on its third prolonged thaw-out of the year, and it’s still weeks before the traditional start of mud season. To make matters worse, the road foreman just quit because he was fed up with the constant complaints of townspeople who misdirected their frustration with the new climate at the road crew. To keep things from deteriorating further, and to avoid mishaps, the town has advised those on dirt roads to stay off them.*

I’ve already played on Vermont’s smokiest day ever and the warmest-ever day in November. Now we can add the muddiest March.

*Note to out-of-town fans: the main roads are fine. Please come!

A travelogue of picture-postcard charms

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue

Of picture post card charms
Oh Amelia, it was just a false alarm   

—Joni Mitchell, “Amelia” 

This project has given my wife and me the gift of sending us all over the state and getting to know its towns and villages—something we’d always meant to do, but never made the time for. In concerts and surrounding publicity, we emphasize the joy of experiencing Vermont’s surprising variety of landscapes and communities, and say that eschewing flying and staying close has been anything but a privation.

Yet even though we’re not scrambling from airport to hotel to venue like Joni Mitchell, we’re not exactly dawdling about. Fitting the concert journeys between the obligations of home, work, and pets waiting for our return; allowing time to set up and rehearse with local collaborators; practicing often to the last minute because of my commitment to playing concert-specific repertoire and a fresh Scarlatti and Scarlatti intro every time (what was I thinking?); then talking to the audience after, breaking down, and packing up—all this means that in 9 concert trips out of 10, there’s maybe 30-45 minutes left for anything else; a little bit more when we do back-to-back dates on successive dates with an overnight in between. 

My wife says we’ll need to do the tour all over again after it’s done, this time without any concerts. As it is, most of the time we have only have time to grab a photo or two of the venue and maybe walk the dog for a half-hour afterwards somewhere nearby. Even though we’re not going far, we’re acting like hurried tourists, and rushing to grap a few shots of the town to post in the concert write-ups can feel performative, inauthentic, Instagrammy. A travelogue of picture-postcard charms.