12/24/07
Mirah (Portland, OR)
My dear and brilliant friend Katy Davidson (aka Dear Nora) chanced to have a show in Seattle the same week as my Share This Place debut at the Seattle International Children’s Festival. It was a pretty mellow scene. So mellow, in fact, that even after the first band finished their sound check and the show was to begin, there were still no audience members in sight. The lack of attendees was a bit perplexing. Some shows go that way. Plenty of great art, music and performance gets made without a soul around to appreciate it except the creator. Katy went on a walk, and I sat in her car and talked to my mom on the phone for a while, kind of pretending that I was on tour myself—even though in reality I was just in Seattle for a week staying in a fancy hotel and performing songs about bugs for kids every morning at 11 a.m.
The show finally started. The first band, a very sweet crew from Canada, began with their earnest pop tunes, harmonizing about love and life with accordions and guitars. All of a sudden, the garage door, which was the rear wall of the space, opened up and in came two “parents” pushing one “grandmother” in a wheelchair, all three with the most delighted faces I have ever seen on an adult person. Absolute glee. They parked right in the middle of the empty room, and each promptly took out their respective digital cameras and started recording the spectacle. There were no other audience members to get in the way of their zooms and pans, and they enjoyed that set as fully and proudly as any parent or grandparent I have ever seen. They sashayed to the right. They listened from the left. They took still pictures and movies with sound. They smiled at each other, they smiled at their son and his bandmates, they held hands. It was almost too much, how happy everyone was. It suddenly didn’t matter that no one else had shown up for the show. There they were, the greatest audience on earth, absolutely attentive, absolutely enjoying themselves.
Katy and I were sad that they had to leave before she played. Maybe it got too late? Some more folks did show up to hear Katy’s amazing set, but I kept thinking about how I would trade the biggest crowd of onlookers in the world for just a little group of utterly delighted grandmothers.
