Show 46: St. Augustine

Turnout: 18

Monetary Votes of Support: $24 (door) $2 (donations) $27 (merch)

Personal Injury Report: Bizarre tender lump on my left wrist. No idea how it got there. Other slight bumps and strangeness. Cement floor #5 in a row. Kate's voice hurt a bit afterward, due to shouting the whole show over the bar crowd. Ben's soul hurt after seeing a small sample of what is on television these days.

Show Description (by Ben): We came to St Augustine last winter and had a GREAT time. Went swimming in the ocean, played a huge show with a ton of bands, at a hip cafe/venue, really crazy high energy powerful stuff, and John Kuehne even got himself smitten with a cute girl who we had to leave behind at the end of the night. We were excited to come back, and are actually happy to have had a very different experience this time.

First, it was too cold to swim. We tried, but could stand getting in past our knees.

Second, we spent an afternoon bumming around St Augustine, which is the oldest still surviving European city in the US. Of course this historical fact makes it a huge tourist trap, which means almost everything is ugly, crowded and overpriced. We wandered around the outside of a fort (see pic) marveled at the endless little shops all selling the same overpriced crap, and struggled to find a place where we could sit down and check our email without paying for it (ended up being a parking lot).

Third, Cafe 11 was unable to host us, so Travis set us up at a different venue, St Augustine's best dive bar: Nobby's Sports Tavern. It seems he was pretty disappointed by this alternative (may have discovered an allergy to cigarette smoke) but definitely managed to make the most of the circumstances. He brought a good attentive crowd, some exiting music, and good energies to the show. The bar's regulars also came out, played pool and for the most part loudly ignored what we were doing. This gave us an opportunity to push our ability to perform under any circumstances further than every before, and Kate certainly rose to the occasion. There were a couple interesting moments when the pool balls stopped rolling and it sounded like everyone had frozen to puzzle over what the hell was going on on the other side of the room.

We didn't expect much different from a sports bar, but the exciting thing was how many people stuck with us, through the background noise, and clearly engaged with the play. We had a few good conversations with some really appreciative audience members, even some of the regulars who didn't know we were coming. We crashed with some activist folks who run the very active food not bombs program in town and told us some of the history that the trolley tours we dodged that afternoon leave out.

Also, they had this big white tropical bird that they'd recently rescued from somewhere but hadn't yet found a proper new home for. When we tried to go to sleep it insisted on crawling under the covers, stationing itself in between Kate and I and nibbling on our sides, which tickled something awful and kind of fruck me out. I envisioned a confrontation between it's irrational reptile mind deciding to tear and claw into my belly for no reason and my hesitation to defend myself for the sake of it's delicate wings and beautiful feathers.

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