Some of my best weekends are those that are ALL GRASS! (g) And I don’t mean the green on the ground in the yard stuff! But good ole bluegrass music!

First off, we were invited to come and play at the Toledo Art Museum! They have a Friday night special once a month, called “It’s Friday!” and it was quite an honor to be asked to come and play and to be paid too!

The place where we played was called the Glass Salon and it was in the new Glass Pavilion, a super beautiful modern glass building where they showcase all that the Glass City has to offer! Now you can see why Toledo is called the Glass City and why we called our Opry, the Glass City Opry.

The girls came with me and while we were all setting up our sound equipment and sound checking the room, they wandered off and took a few shots of some of the neat pieces. Really cool stuff.

This is one of Jessy’s self portraits… if you watch her photo shoots, she always seems to have at least one where she is captured in a reflection or off to the side, or in a mirror! Hahaha… she’s already developing her own style. Cool stuff.

Once we started to play, it soon became dark and then the building was simply stunning. All the lights play off each other and the reflections to make these infinitey streams out into the darkness. The crowd was super nice and receptive and we had a great time playing for them all.

It was such a lovely evening… even playing for 3 hours didn’t deter the experience. That is a long time to play, but we had a few little breaks to get a drink and set down a bit. The banjo is heavy! It’s the heaviest of the instruments. Everyone was just really nice and we tried to handle a few requests….

We love it when Jeff has to sing Man of Constant Sorrow! We think he does a great job, and it’s such a fun song. We need to add it to our set list… we forget to!

Well, after that evening…. I had to get up WAY early, 6:30 AM!!! (Did you know that it’s actually light at early? I thought the sun came up around 8 or 9? HAHAHA) Jessy has a special short intense English course in college and they meet at 8 until 1pm on Saturday. Ugh. So I drove her to that, and then had to come back and get ready to go to our next event, an indoor bluegrass festival at the Roadhouse in Grand Rapids, Ohio.

That was fun too, except that three of us got sick at lunch… phew…. no fun…. not sure what, but something made us not too happy, but we got through the day and had two great sets there! This was more of the type of bluegrass event we normally play at… a big lodge with a dancefloor and dim lights and lots of folks dressed up for the dancing.

Three other bands played… our Opry Sound Crew plays in the Hand Hewn String Band and they were all there! Great bunch of folk! They have one of the largest bands around, like 7 or 8 people! Wow… Got them on video too… you can go and click on any of these videos and it will take you to You Tube and then if you click my name on the right hand side, you will see all the videos I’ve taken of bluegrass events… over 270+! And growing!

Fulton County Bluegrass was there too and Jeff and I used to be in the band. Fun to see everyone there. Tim got drafted to play with them, that was kinda fun to watch him play with them!

The place was pretty dark, so the pictures didn’t turn out so nice. I gave up on photos pretty quick. However our buddy Brian was there and he offered to man the video camera, so we have some nice videos of the experience… here are just a few!

And here is Tim, the Moby Master Craftsman, doing Freeborn Man…. he’s not just handy with a drill, he’s a great singer and guitar player!

Well, that was my weekend! Sunday was house cleaning and food making and relaxing day…. okay, yeah potato harvest too… and organizing and putting away all the bluegrass stuff… okay, it was a very busy day, not that relaxing! HAHA. Well I sure did need a day at home to just get things back on track. We played 3 gigs this past week… that is a lot for us. It was like being on tour! I think…. just without a lot of driving! I love the way we sound after 3 straight gigs, really helps to get you all tight and really working great as a band, but you should have seen Jeff’s fingers!!!! OH MY…. HUGE blisters…. he really needed to take a few days off to get them healed up. Bass players should wear gloves or something!

Well, that was the adventure in photos, words and video! Great fun!

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