the wurst festival went as planned and was pretty much the same as it was last year, except for the fact that i wasn’t recovering so immenently from a brain injury this year. i actually got a chance to look around a little, although there wasn’t much. basically it’s a church/school/neighborhood party that’s gone a little overboard: they had a bunch of inflatable “rides”, a dunk-tank, a few food booths, a few more sales booths and that’s it… although they did have a really nice mixing board, which i assume they had last year as well, i just didn’t notice.

the tacoma gig was excellent if you were the audience, but it was so-so from a performer’s point of view. we started performing at 5:00 and finished at 10:00, after a “parade” (in which the rich, starched-collar patrons of the two museums involved wandered from one museum to the other while the band – especially the tuba player who has an upright tuba, no strap, and a brain-injured right hand that doesn’t work as well as it’s supposed to – struggled to keep up), and a two hour “break” in which we had to frantically get set up and ready for the show while the rich patrons had dinner. my book ended up in the back of alan’s truck during the parade, and then alan disappeared, so i didn’t get my book back until just before we started, but it all worked out. the show was only a half an hour, but we included all of the best parts from august’s show, and macque added a new twist to pyrochaotica without telling anybody: two pyro-fountains at the end, which were loud enough that they drowned out the band for a couple minutes. the effect was sensational though – a fountain of crackling sparks going about 75 feet in the air, along with the standard compliment of other pyro stuff, with the backdrop of puget sound and the glass museum. there will probably be pictures eventually. it’s kind of odd, though, because one of the organisations that was putting the whole thing on was the philanthropy northwest society, but apparently they didn’t think to provide the “hired help” with important things like food, and passes to get in to the dressing room. we had a dressing room, but we had about 30 performers and only four passes, so there was as much searching for someone with a pass to get in as there was just about anything else, and i went home hungry. it’s presumably a good thing though, because now we can put the show on our “resume” and people will know that we can interact with highbrow society without getting under their skin, which will mean more performances in the future.