Saturday, April 01, 2006

Saturday AM Coffee

On a regular basis, my partner and I go to the local organic grocery/deli/coffee house, Strawberry Fields, and meet up with friends for coffee, conversation and KILLER white chocolate, raspberry scones. This originally started out as just Julie and I going there and waking up with a cup of coffee, a scone and the morning paper. It has grown into a weekly social outlet where we discuss anything from the purchase of a new IBook to issues that have perplexed us throughout the week. We look forward to it so much that we actually get out of bed earlier on Saturdays than we do the rest of the week.

Today we were having grand conversations about my experience at a local, mom-and-pop bike shop in town in comparison to our experience at Target (bad and great respectively), a dinner party in Amish Arthur, the difference between the IBook G4 and an IMac, the issues with assholes at work and just general mayhem that involves lots of laughing, swearing and heated discussion.

Often, there is live music on Saturday mornings. Most often it is blue-grass style music that is a very nice complement to the environment. Sometimes it is a local Yiddish combo which is a lot of fun. Other times there have been solo artists that have been very good. Today was not one of those days . . . just thinking back gives me the dry heaves! I saw on Friday when we stopped for coffee before work, that today was going to be the "musical stylings" of some young white kid from Peoria. Now, I know that young and white does not necessarily mean bad, but "musical stylings" tends to mean that this is someone who should be booted off American Idol in the first round. Think: tone deaf Barry Manilow. He started setting up and did a sound check and we got a glimpse of what we were in for. The electronic keyboard with the electronic drums was a dead give away. He also set up a video camera directly behind our table. I saw it, but no one else did.

We proceeded to BASH this kid to pieces because he was so bad and this was not the setting for 80's roller rink, couples skate music. He just did not fit in. . . he even had a small color changing ball on the table. About 15 minutes into his set, one of us realized that EVERYTHING we said was probably being picked up on the camera. This kid would have our commentary for the rest of his life. I was discussing how I thought that hell would be much hotter and smellier and there would be more stalagtites and stalagmites. We probably ruined this kid's career for him. That was our community service for the week.

Oh, by the way, the coffee and scone was GREAT!

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