Oh My Mraz!

#JasonandJane

     Rarely would I call attending a concert a trans-formative experience,  but I definitely just had one. I just saw Jason Mraz last night, and I really saw him! The show was in a small intimate venue with his all-female opening act/backup band Raining Jane. I've seen Mraz before, at open air venues in the summer, at Madison Square Garden, and next week I'll also see him at Radio City Music Hall. Nothing will top this show!

Stories with Mraz

    My friend and I attended the show at Lehman College in the Bronx as part of Mraz's 5 Boroughs tour. He is playing all 5 boroughs in the next two weeks and the significance of this is that large scale artists play many different venues on Manhattan and even some in Brooklyn, but they rarely appear in the Bronx, Queens (aside from Citi Field) or Staten Island. Our seats were 13th row, center, about 15-20 feet from the man himself, and the acoustics were unreal! Jason's voice was so pure, and he was able to connect with the audience in such a natural way. He told stories, including a great one about how he came to write "The Dynamo of Volition." It was part of an online songwriting group  challenge Mraz regularly participates in, and his phrase for the week was "Blind Man's Bike," and the rest was history.

See my video below of Jason singing duet "Lucky" with four lovely females!

I'm Getting Too Old for This.... A Concert Trip

Ah summer, that glorious time of year when we all flock outdoors and listen to music. I chose several fun concerts for this summer season (The Backstreet Boys, Gavin DeGraw, Tim MgGraw and Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan to name a few), but I could not be more excited to see Keith Urban live and in my field of vision. But myself any my two friends had spent quite enough on concert tickets by the time this August show was going on sale, so we opted to get some lawn seats and head to upstate NY for the show. We once got hurricane-like rain sheets on us during a Train concert, so we fully understood what we could be signing up for if it rained.

The Sunday evening show was perfection with no clouds in sight. Keith dazzled us with his Aussie accent and even braved it up to the lawn area to sing a few songs, tossing glow necklaces on his guitar and donning a fan's cowboy hat. He signed his guitar as he sweetly proclaimed "You Look Good in My Shirt."

   Here is my only complaint, the crowd and the general idea of the LAWN.  The event was at Bethel Woods, home to the legendary Woodstock Festival, so I imagine there has been some obscenely awful things that happened on that lawn over the years, but still, it was not the best experience. 

It might as well have said: prepare to spend 8 hours with some people, you're never going to see again . The crowd was pretty terrible. In fact they were downright annoying. But as it turns out, they would not be the worst concert crowd I found that summer. I'm well under 30, but I felt like a crotchety old woman yelling at a group of kids in front us that they needed to lower the young lady they were tossing around and dropping on the lawn. Most of my videos from the show have a silhouetted fist bumping guy in front of  us, preparing for a new reality show that I can only imaged would be called Jersey Sticks. 

   On top of  having to get to the lawn gate promptly a half hour before 5 so we could storm the lawn when the front gate opened, we also couldn't bring in our own lawn chairs to the show and had to rent a $5 seat at the venue. Food was available,e but we managed to bring our own sandwiches and salad for a picnic dinner. Did anyone get charged for food and chairs at the first Woodstock? Don't answer that, on second thought, I'm sure people got charged much more for that event. 

   When Keith took to the smaller and more intimate lawn stage, there was a mad rush of people over to the area (myself included), turning aside chairs, trampling blankets and generally running any semblance of common decency in the lawn. People were pushed and shoved to get to the tiny stage. I took a space behind a pretty tall guy and held my camera up, bracing for someone the size of a linebacker to tackle me. Thankfully, I returned with a slight crunch to my toe (thanks to my cowboy boots not too bad) and some great videos. I realized that night, as I proclaimed to my two friends, freshly 27 years old, I am way too old to sit on the lawn...even if the videos are this good.

Video courtesy of my private collection (c)2014. 

The Time I Saw Ol' Bocephus

USA's Playing House:
The Bocephus Disguise

     According to Urban Dictionary: Bocephus is a common nickname for Hank Williams Jr. Hank got the nickname from his famous father, who looked in the cradle and just called him "Bocephus." Bocephus is a common phrase airbrushed on 1984 Ford F-150s.

     I won tickets to attend the third day of a three-day country music festival in upstate New York. It happened to be on Father's day, so I got my trusty pop to be my plus one. We were hoping to arrive early afternoon after a family lunch and we would catch acts like Thompson Square and Thomas Rhett. The first two days of the festival had amazing headliner acts like Brad Paisley, Dierks Bentley, and our Sunday night juggernaut, ol' Bochphus.

View from the top of the ski slope.

     A long story short, we ended op getting very lost. My GPS on the phone was picking up signals beyond 1x data,  I think guidance was likely from spaceships. When we arrived, we were able to park nearby the camping area, outside of the ski resort t for no additional fee. Other told us they had paid $30.00-$50.00 to park their cars there. The staff managed to find two more bracelets to admit us in, and into the breach we went. Thank god for real bathrooms! We were also relieved to find there was still some beer.

Ol' Junior. 

     Just in time for the last set, we struggled to make a list of songs we knew from Hank Jr. We came up with the Monday Night Football Theme and the original version of "I Fought the Law." We were treated to renditions of songs by his father and Jerry Lee Lewis, we we were very much out of sync with the rest of the crowd. There were so many mud-stricken people there, dirty and drunk from three long days of partying, and covered in terrible sunburn. Halfway into the set, dad asked I wanted to head home, and I couldn't have been happier to head back to civilization.  I can safely say I would never have enjoyed Woodstock.

Girl Meets 21st Century

     In 1993, I began watching a sitcom that would become one of the most treasured shows of all time for kids growing up in the 90's. Rarely have I met someone who does not acknowledge that Boy Meets World changed the cultural landscape. Unlike the oddball last-ditch season of Saved By the Bell: The College Years, this show followed kids really growing up from middle school through the first year of college, (and some milestones like Shawn's losing a parent, getting married, and Cory's parents midlife crisis baby) ending with them going out to the world. Cory Matthews (Ben Savage) and his wife Topanga (Danielle Fishel) now live in New York City with their two kids, pre-teen dreamer Riley and too-cute kindergartner Auggie.
   
     The new focus of the sequel show Girl Meets World is daughter Riley (Rowan Blanchard) and her journey into adulthood with with pals Maya, Lucas and Farkle. Maya Hart serves as Riley's own Shawn Hunter, a misguided attention-seeking kid of a single parent that gets kindness and guidance from the Matthews family. I hope to see Shawn unveiled as Maya's long-absent father, or on a more reasonable plot, see him mentor the kid. Maya definitely has some issues to overcome and I know she will eventually open up. We see Farkle Minkus is the son of Topanga's old rival Stewart Minkus (future guest star Lee Norris), a know-it-all. The girls befriend new kid from Texas, Lucas Friar, and Riley is in love with him from first glance. As Coy and Topanga struggle to let go with their oldest, Cory takes on the role of Mr. Feeny, teaching all of the kids at John Quincy Adams Middle school (sounds like John Adams High in Philadelphia?) more than just history, but lessons for life.

     The show is on Disney, so I'm not sure what to expect. I grabbed a bunch of friends and some beers to watch last night's first episode, followed promptly by a screening of the first episode of Boy Meets World. The clothes seem a little unrealistic for your average kid, and all of the girls (and mom Topanga) have extension-laden hair. Cory's son Auggie reminds me of Cory's little sister Morgan, and we know the cute Morgan got re-cast from about age 5 to age ten in one season hiatus, so we'll see how that goes. The plot lines for the upcoming season seem more millennial-comedic than real-life based, but there could be some hidden emotional depth to the show.

FINAL: Favorite Moment 
There was a great cameo at the end of the episode by Mr. Feeny, who appears as a subway poster urging kids to stay in school.