Average Jane

Author: Average Jane

  • Average Jane Plays Another Gig

    I woke up at the crack of dawn yesterday to go to yoga class, which necessitated my taking a 3-and-a-half hour nap in the afternoon.

    When I woke up, I heard my phone ringing and it was my bass player. He wanted to know if I'd be interested in playing a gig that night. I couldn't see any reason why not, so I readily agreed. It turned out that our drummer couldn't make it on such short notice, but we found a fill-in guy and met up at the club around 7 p.m.

    The bar was called Hawg Wild, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about it. While we were setting up, a bartender came over to introduce himself. He said his name was Rattlesnake, and this was emphasized by his leather biker vest which not only had a rattlesnake embroidered on the back, but had an actual, taxidermied rattlesnake head attached to the front.

    Rattlesnake perused our set list and expressed some doubt about our song selection. I told him not to worry – we were going to rock.

    The fill-in drummer was obviously a pro and he did a pretty decent job of following along. A few songs were a little too fast, but that's actually fine in a bar setting.

    The only bad part about the evening was that I had a splitting headache that would not go away and no Tylenol with me. You can imagine how much fun it is to sing with a loud rock band all night long when your head feels like it's going to explode.

    Thanks to the magic of Twitter, my friends @socreepy (Happy Birthday again!) and @ms_nene came out and stayed for all three sets. I'd like to think it was because the band was so awesome, but even I have to admit that they really stuck around for the priceless people-watching.

    The bar patrons who were there when we got there were already hammered. Needless to say, this made them highly entertaining to observe. Keep in mind, this is a bar that owns a portable stripper pole, which they thoughtfully set up next to the dance floor before we started playing.

    A guy who was there from the beginning eventually passed out in one of the booths. He was still there, snoring away, while we loaded our gear out the door after 1:00 a.m. and did our best not to bump his motorcycle-booted feet every time we went by.

    At first there weren't many people in the bar, but over time more groups showed up. I thought that was rather surprising considering that we were in the midst of a relatively heavy snowstorm.

    We never got many people dancing, but the people there seemed to like us. We obviously won Rattlesnake over because he came up to the stage in the middle of a song and handed me a red rose with a rather dramatic flourish.

    Oh, and during the last song, a woman lifted her shirt and flashed her bare breasts at us. That's always delightful. Later on while we were breaking down our gear, she came over and told us how much she loved the band. "You know I'm serious," she said, "because I don't flash my boobs for just anyone."

    I'm doubtful if that's actually true, but I appreciated the sentiment.

    Once we'd packed the trailer, we all headed to IHOP and finished the night with multiple cups of coffee and syrup-covered carbs.

    It wasn't the best gig I've ever played, but it felt like redemption for our New Year's Eve disaster. I'm looking forward to completing our set list and keeping our momentum going. It can only keep getting better.

  • Average Jane Bombs

    A couple of days after Christmas, my bass player called and asked if I'd be interested in playing a New Year's Eve gig at a bar where my last band had played fairly often. They'd scheduled a DJ who cancelled at the last minute, so we could step in as the entertainment.

    Of course I said yes, because my husband had a gig that night with a country band at a biker bar and there was no way I was going with him either way.

    We arrived in the late morning for setup so we wouldn't disturb the bar's dinner shift by dragging equipment past the diners. Our guitarist had to work, but the rest of us got the PA going and did a sound check. The bar owners recognized me from my previous band and were very nice.

    We were scheduled to play three sets between 9:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. That was good because so far we only have three sets of material worked up. It was also bad for reasons I'll get into shortly. Our drummer got lost on the way there, so he pretty much walked in the door at 9:29 and we began playing immediately.

    Early on, we could tell we weren't meshing well with the crowd. Apparently none of them had turned on a radio since 1979, so anything we played that wasn't both old and relatively mellow was met with near-total silence.

    Remember how I mentioned that my last band played this particular bar quite often? Well, this new band's set list is not substantially different from the old one. In fact, I think we actually have more classic rock and less new rock than the last band.

    The low point of the evening was when we'd started a slow, newish song and the bar owner came up during the song and said, "If you guys don't switch up your playlist, we're going to go back to the jukebox."

    I actually stopped the song and we skipped to the next one on the list, which happened to be the first in a stretch of more uptempo songs. Still, the newer ones failed to get any response from the crowd. I spent the rest of the set trying to ignore the fact that my mouth was dry and I was uncomfortably sweaty.

    During the break, the band members all commiserated. We knew we were in a situation that we couldn't do anything about. You have no choice but to work with the material you have. For the final set, we nixed the Green Day song that we had planned to play and moved "Roadhouse Blues" by the Doors to the top of the list, figuring that we could do a super-duper long solo in the middle and keep people dancing, assuming that they were dancing in the first place.

    The midnight countdown came and we managed to get the crowd back, thanks in no small part to their general drunkenness, I'm sure. They loved our Doors jam and we had dancers for almost every song up to the end. We packed up our gear, got paid (which had been a matter of some concern between us for a stretch there), and went our separate ways at least knowing that we'd started the year off a little better than we'd ended it.

    I think it's worth mentioning that the crowd reaction at our last gig was almost the polar opposite of the one we got last night: they'd liked the harder, newer songs and weren't much into the older and poppier ones. You just never know how these things are going to go.

    So that was my New Year's Eve. How was yours?

  • Average Jane vs. the Snow

    So there was a huge snowstorm here on Christmas Eve. Once we'd slid our way home from dinner, we kept an eye on weather updates online and, particularly while I was up with stomachache-related insomnia at 3:30 a.m., it looked as though our Christmas Day commute to my sister's house was not going to happen.

    Once I finally woke up for good, I decided to give it a go. After all, I had already made a ton of food and my little car gets around in the snow pretty well.

    Our driveway slants downward into the garage from the street at a fairly significant angle, so backing up it in the snow has always been a chore. It was worse back in the days when the driveway was made of cracked asphalt, so it helps that it's now concrete and has predictable boundaries.

    Of course I had to shovel. I made parallel paths through the snow all the way up to the street, which was exhausting and made me sweat off my makeup and hairdo. Even with a path cleared, it still took me a couple dozen attempts to launch myself up to the street. From there on out, I was the living embodiment of "taking it easy" on the road. I made the usually 30-minute drive in less than an hour.

    I helped my sister with the meal, opened gifts with the family and snacked on all of the goodies all afternoon. My husband joined us right before dinner and said he'd gotten his SUV out of the driveway in one try with no shoveling. Hmmph.

    My aunt, uncle and cousin couldn't make it because they live on a rural road that didn't get plowed right away. We're hoping to be able to get together with them sometime this weekend or possibly next week to exchange gifts.

    We left before it started getting dark and had a significantly more difficult time getting home than we had getting there. My brother-in-law had to push my car out of their cul-de-sac, and I got hung up at an intersection trying to leave their subdivision and had to make a number of attempts before I freed my car.

    Once we got home, I was exhausted and took a long nap. I woke up and made a tasty batch of spaghetti out of random ingredients we had in the pantry and we ate while watching "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," thus completing our annual trifecta of holiday movies which included earlier viewings of "Elf" and "Bad Santa."

    This morning I awoke determined to get to the store for some groceries. All night long, it had continued to snow and drift. There was no way I was going to try to get my own car out, so I took my husband's Honda Element. It took at least a dozen tries, but I finally got out of the driveway and made it to the grocery store.

    Here's what the driveway looks like now:

    IMGP1763

    Note the drifts on the right-hand side, which my tiny little Honda Insight would have to plow through. It's just not going to happen.

    My office is closed all next week, so I went ahead and got the ingredients for a variety of meals, including stuffed peppers, tacos, homemade pizza, stir-fry, and chicken noodle soup. Chili, meatloaf and potato soup are also possibilities. I grabbed two half-gallon bottles of milk, assuming we'd want it for cereal and baking, and I replenished our rapidly-diminishing coffee supply.

    We know two guys with snowplows who live nearby, so odds are we'll get our driveway plowed today or tomorrow. Still, I wanted to be able to hole up and have tasty food choices in case another blizzard makes its way through.

    Did you have a White Christmas? Was it merely pretty or was it as much of a pain as ours?

  • Average Jane Celebrates With Food

    I started the day by sleeping in a bit (an extra hour anyway). Then I spent about an hour trying to finish one of the books I bought as a Christmas gift, before I have to wrap it. If I play my cards right, I'll be able to read one more gift book before tomorrow.

    The rest of the day will be given over to cooking and baking. Right now I have a dark chocolate pecan rum cake in the oven. It's just the standard Bacardi rum cake recipe but with chocolate cake mix (and Captain Morgan rum, because that's what I always have on hand). 

    After that, I'll start a batch of Swedish Cinnamon Rolls for tomorrow's breakfast while I broil bacon for today's breakfast.

    Those are the only things I have to make ahead of time. For tonight, I'm going to bake brie with brown sugar and pecans, and also heat up some Parmesan spinach/artichoke dip that I bought pre-made at Costco. I'm serving both with baguette crisps and Lavosh crackers. 

    We're having lots of guests for tomorrow's dinner, so my sister and I are making a turkey and a ham. I'm going over to her house early so I can make the turkey stuffing (and lend her my roasting pan) and I'll also mix together a batch of pomegranate salsa while I'm there. 

    If I'm feeling really inspired, I might make a batch of sugar cookies today, just for the heck of it. I have an entire drawer full of cookie cutters and it seems like a wasted opportunity when I let a holiday go by without using them.

    My only other plan for today is to finally wrap all of the gifts I've bought. My husband and I have given each other most of our gifts already, but I'll take the remaining ones over to my sister's so other people can see us unwrap them. I have little doubt that the cats will pluck the bows off the gifts within just a few hours, but at least I'll have *something* under the tree for a while.

    If I don't post again in the meantime, Merry Christmas! Hope your day is everything you want it to be.

  • Graceless Average Jane

    Yesterday morning I was bustling around the house in my robe and slippers doing chores and otherwise trying to finish out my weekend. I was headed down the short flight of carpeted stairs between the studio and the kitchen when one of my slippers got caught and I fell backwards.

    My foot was twisted so painfully that I couldn't even cry, only lie back on the stairs and gasp in pain. It occurred to me that if I'd fallen differently and gotten seriously injured, my husband would never have been able to hear me from where he was sleeping on the opposite side of the house, with a white-noise-producing fan drowning out all sounds.

    I sneaked a tentative look at my throbbing foot and was relieved to see that at least there was no blood.

    It's fairly certain that I fractured at least one toe, but if you've ever done the same, you know that there's nothing that can really be done about it. I hobbled around all day and discovered that my ridiculously expensive orthotic shoe inserts actually served quite well as a de facto cast when it came to keeping my foot stable and minimizing the pain. Still, I could feel my pulse in my entire foot all day long.

    I'm hoping to get in to see my sports medicine doctor sometime today, now that all of the other muscles I wrenched in the fall are speaking up and demanding recognition. I'm hoping that some laying on of electrodes will settle things down. For now, the only remedies I have available are ice packs and mega-doses of Tylenol.

    Falling down the stairs at home is actually one of my biggest fears. We have a steep, narrow staircase that leads to the basement and I am always afraid I'm going to slip or trip over one of the black cats in the semi-darkness and fall to the bottom. You can bet I'm going to be even more careful than usual on those stairs from now on.

    So how was your weekend? Did you make it through with your entire skeletal system intact?

  • Public Service Announcement from Average Jane

    This is only for my own neighbors, but I wanted to be sure to spread the word because this is so incredibly useful.

    Yesterday I took advantage of a service that allows you to park at the Johnson County Executive Offices parking lot in Mission and take a bus to the Country Club Plaza for $1. That's right: no parking hassles, no Plaza traffic to deal with directly. It was awesome.

    It runs through December 27th, so you can run out there, get your shopping and/or dining fix for the holidays, and not have to worry about the hideous inconvenience that is holiday Plaza traffic.

    The stops are at 47th & Pennsylvania and 47th & Central. I bailed out at Pennsylvania and grabbed a quick dinner at California Pizza Kitchen before meeting my sister, niece and nephew for coffee and a stroll later on. I should have gone to the new Blanc Burgers & Bottles location instead. If you weren't aware, it's in the old Pizzeria Uno spot. 

    I didn't end up catching the bus back because my sister had her car, but I can definitely envision going the bus route for dinner on the Plaza with my husband over the holidays. $4 round trip for two people is way cheaper than valet parking and you don't have to worry about all of the jaywalking pedestrians.

    Incidentally, I found out about the shuttle service because I'm now a fan of Mission, Kansas on Facebook. If your town has a Facebook page, I highly recommend following them. You never know what kinds of interesting things might be going on right under your nose.

  • Average Jane Supports Local Musicians

    It's common knowledge that being an artist or musician can be a hard row to hoe. Pay is low and often sporadic, health insurance is non-existent and if something happens and you can't play, well, it's all bad.

    This Sunday, the Kansas City music community is coming together to help out one of their own, Kenny Tuna, known to local audiences from the Dixie Cadillacs, the Bourbon Cowboys, the Tuna Boat Band and many more. In October, Kenny was seriously injured in a horrific roll-over automobile accident. He spent 70 days in the hospital and will be recovering for a long time to come.

    To help him and his family with expenses, a bunch of bands are putting on a benefit concert this Sunday, December 20th from noon to 9:00 p.m. at RG's, 9100 E. 35th Street S. (40 Highway and Blue Ridge Cutoff) in Independence, Missouri.

    The lineup includes:

    1:00 p.m. – Midnight Revue
    2:00 p.m. – Dan Doran
    3:00 p.m. – Camp Harlow
    4:00 p.m. – Loose Change
    5:00 p.m. – Riverrock
    6:00 p.m. – Nate Dean
    7:00 p.m. – Unfinished Business with Brian Daniels
    8:00 p.m. – Carl Butler and Friends

    My husband is the drummer for Brian Daniels' band, so he'll be out there in the late afternoon.

    Any donations you might be able to provide–monetary or merchandise for auctions and raffles–would be greatly appreciated. For more information, contact organizer Terry Hancock.

  • Average Jane’s Scooby Doo Lunch Box

    This week's {W}rite of Passage Challenge is to write about your elementary school lunch box.

    Mine was a metal Scooby Doo lunch box with a thermos inside. I don't recall it when it was brand new; all my memories include the sharp tang of rust mingled with whatever I was having for lunch that day.

    This was in the days when Ziploc bags were an extravagant luxury, so my mother would pack all my food in the type of sandwich bag that simply tucked in on itself. The scent memory I remember the strongest was pickle juice that leaked out of the bag and intensified the usual rusty odor of the lunch box.

    Then there were the bananas. I loved them then and I love them now, but they made all the food in my lunch box taste banana-y in a most unwelcome way.

    I understand now why parents are willing to buy pre-cut bags of apples and other fruit for kids' lunches. I almost never ate my apple or any other healthy dessert in my lunch, much preferring the Twinkies.

    The default sandwich spread back then was peanut butter and my mother did not limit her imagination when it came to pairing it with other things. There were various flavors of jam and jelly, of course. Sometimes she'd make peanut butter and honey sandwiches. My favorite to this day: peanut butter and Velveeta. I wish I had one right now.

    It's been a long time since those days and the memories of who ate with me and where we sat at lunch have dimmed to irretrievability. All that remains from back then is the knowledge that it's never a good idea to pack a banana in with a sandwich.

    Here's what everyone else had to say on the subject:

  • Average Jane’s Great Interview Experiment Part II

    As you may remember, I met and interviewed the delightful Natalie as my first part of Neil Kramer's Great Interview Experiment last month. I never heard from the person who was supposed to interview me but that was obviously fate stepping in because Neil assigned me a new interviewer, Erica, who turned out to be an alternate reality version of me, only she's from Texas and has three kids.

    We thought it would be fun to interview each other, so she set up a shared Google Document and we had a day of fun back-and-forth while we discovered all the things we had in common. In fact, she has formally proposed marriage to me now, so I just need to work out a few details with my existing husband, then I'll have the almost-doppelganger I've always wanted and the cats will feel like every day is a carnival.

    Here's our interview:

    EM: Erica, free fringes
    AJ:     me, Average Jane

    * * *

    EM: You've been blogging regularly since 2004 according to your archives at averagejane.
    What are the main differences in the online community you discovered
    when you first started and the online community you've found yourself
    in today?

    AJ: I was the first of my real life friends to
    start a blog, so my early online community was largely made up of
    web-savvy people I already knew along with some random readers who
    found me via occasional front page features on Typepad and links from
    larger blogs such as J-Walk. Since then I've gained a lot of readers by participating in the BlogHer community (actually, my long-time friend Rita,
    who started blogging not long after I did, now works for BlogHer). In
    recent years, Facebook, Twitter and my local social media club have all
    done an enormous amount to expand my blog's reach as well as introduce
    me to lots of new people. So to answer the essence of your question, my
    online community is now significantly larger and quite a bit closer,
    now that we have so many different touch points.

    AJ: A
    question for you: You seem to blog pretty openly about your life, but
    of course we all set limits. What kinds of things do you hold back from
    blogging about?

    EM: I've always had this kind of
    dichotomous rep of being halfway open, halfway public. People feel very
    comfortable around me once they get to know me, but for most people, it
    takes a very long time to get to know me. I share, but only what I want
    people to know. On my blog, my largest mission is to help people
    understand that no matter how fucked up they feel, someone else is
    commensurately fucked up while making life work with what she has. I
    don't share details about my extended family, especially about my
    parents. They get basic parental descriptions. I don't use names except
    for my kids who have signed all kinds of waivers and love seeing their
    names in print as Mommy is writing about their knuckleheadedness. I'm
    still searching our Internet archives
    for the post Q wrote about Jon Alex unknowingly using my Vagisil to
    brush his teeth. He numbed his lips and gums for more than an hour.
    That was too funny to keep secret.

    I'm impressed that she's willing to share the occasional "warts and all" post. I sometimes find myself posting such a sunny, Technicolor version of events that I feel like a big, fat liar.

    EM: I'd like to go back
    to the subject of your online community for a second. I just don't do
    groups although I fantasize about having large social networks, parties
    to attend, brunches to brunch, yet I get hives with each new Facebook
    friend request. What overwhelms you as your social network grows?

    This is where she asks me to marry her, and I am embarrassed to say that I got caught up in my answer to her interview question and failed to respond to the proposal.

    AJ: There are several
    overwhelming things about my social network and it is indeed so large
    now–particularly on Twitter–that I lose track of whether I've met
    certain people in real life or not. My general rule for Facebook is that I have
    to have met you in person at least once before I'll add you. Yet I
    still have 357 Facebook friends, which gives you an idea of just how
    much networking I do. I don't generally block anyone on Twitter except
    for porn spammers, but I am not in the habit of reviewing my followers
    very often these days, so often I won't follow someone back unless they
    @ me or ask me in person.

    The truly overwhelming thing about my
    social network is that I am constantly turning down invitations to
    things. Since I don't have kids, I have a pretty good amount of free
    time and I'm not fond of sitting around at home. Still, it's gotten to
    the point where I sometimes have more than one social event to attend
    on a given weekday evening, and that's just too much. My husband is
    starting to complain that I'm not spending enough time with him, so I'm
    doing my best to cut back.

    AJ: And, yes, I noticed how
    much we have in common, which leads me to my next question: How are you
    feeling about being in your 40s? Where's your balance point between the
    positive aspects of maturing and growing into your self, and the
    negatives of being concerned about aging?

    EM: First let me say I am taking your silence on the marriage proposal as a maybe.

    This
    will sound weird, but I never thought I'd make it to 40. I'm one of
    those people who is surprised the house didn't burn to the ground while
    I was on vacation and that I wasn't fatally sideswiped during a lane
    change on the way home. Now that I'm a year past 40, I've stopped
    counting because it seems like a dream, like it's not really happening.
    I feel no more than 32, 33. So the positive aspects are certainly that
    I've made it this far and genetically should have about 40 more to go.
    I am concerned about aging not as a negative, mainly because that will
    mean my kids will also be older and more mature, and I won't have to
    drive everybody to every single errand and activity. My balance point
    lies somewhere between a much higher self-awareness, like working on my
    fixable faults, and whether or not I'll color my hair when I'm 60.

    Yes, you should color your hair when you're 60! Never give up!

    EM:     Rapid fire answers: Stevie or Janis? Candied or caramel?
    Flannel or flimsy? Codeine or morphine? Seaside or town square? Circus
    or carnival? Roma or cherry? Long or short? Walk or ride? Kiss or tell?

    AJ:
    How rude of me to fail to respond to your proposal! I could definitely
    use a wife like me. The husband's skill set is a good adjunct to mine,
    but I really need another me in the household to get things done.

    Stevie. Caramel. Flannel. Codeine. Town square (mostly because I've
    grown up landlocked and don't know what I'm missing with seaside).
    Circus (except for lingering worry about the welfare of the animals).
    Roma. Long. Ride (lazy, I know). Neither kiss nor tell at this point.

    EM: Celeste, you grout, you sheetrock, you cook,
    you rock out in a band. You party at BlogHer. I'm nowhere near a wife
    like you. I was hoping you could use a baby mama who starts drinking at
    kickoff on NFL Sundays and is asleep by halftime. The kids will be in
    charge of taking your cats out for piggyback rides and Slurpees.

    To be honest, I only know how to patch sheetrock. I think I can figure out how to hang sheetrock, too, but I haven't tried it yet. I, too, am a fan of the Sunday at halftime afternoon nap. I can't wait to see how the cats respond to piggyback rides and Slurpees.

    AJ: In keeping with the rapid fire portion of our interview: Cats
    or dogs? Who or Zeppelin? Pie or cake? Wine or beer? Vegas or NYC? TV
    or theater? Donate or volunteer? Hug or handshake? Penny wise or pound
    foolish?

    EM: As pets, neither. As headaches, both. Who. Mmmmmmm pie. And cake.
    Vodka. New York. TV now, theatre before. Burned out on volunteering, so
    check-writer. Don't touch me. Money wisdom is not my strong suit.

    See, she is my long-lost sister! Ask anyone – I love me some martinis and desserts, and am a notorious non-hugger. Plus I haven't balanced my checkbook in literally 15 years. 

    Not enough Erica for you? Follow her on Twitter at hmx5. If you'd like to read her version of all this, it's here.

  • Average Jane’s 15th Wedding Anniversary

    Yesterday my husband and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage. If we didn't have a photo record of all of the hairstyles between then and now, I'd have trouble believing it's been that long.

    Oftentimes we'll go to Las Vegas for the milestone anniversaries (here's what we did for our 10th anniversary) because that's where we got married in the first place. However, we'd just been there last summer for BlogWorld Expo, so we decided to do something else.

    I took a vacation day and we spent the day recreating our first date from 1992. The plan was:

    • Lunch at the Chinese restaurant where we first ate together
    • Ice cream cones at the nearby McDonald's
    • A viewing of "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey"

    You know what? Seventeen years is a long time. We realized that when we got to the restaurant I thought had been the site of our first date and we both agreed that it wasn't the right place. Even on the way there, we'd been puzzling over why we would have been in that neighborhood at all back then, considering that I lived a considerable distance away at the time.

    The thing is, we hadn't meant to go on a date at all that day in 1992. We'd met up to discuss the idea of putting a band together (which ultimately took us about a decade), hit it off rather well, and decided to go grab a bite to eat. The evening turned into a date, but because we hadn't actually planned it, we didn't take as much note of the particulars as we'd thought.

    Thus, we both agreed that we'd eaten at a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the general vicinity of the wrong one, but neither one of us remembered what it was called or where it was. We ended up picking a random, old-school Chinese place and deciding that we were at least following the spirit of our first date, if not the specifics. Our anniversary-appropriate fortune cookie fortunes were, "A chance meeting opens new doors to success and friendship" and "Cookies go stale. Fortunes are forever."

    Once we'd blown the restaurant portion of the day, we figured we might as well have a good ice cream cone, so McDonald's gave way to Baskin-Robbins. Mmm, chocolate almond!

    I had the Bill and Ted DVD all ready to go, but my husband thought it might be fun to go to a movie in a theater, which we seldom do these days. Thus, we finished out our day seeing "New Moon." It was even his idea, I'll have you know.

    Neither of us was ready for dinner after the movie, so we ended up grabbing some fast food tacos right before my bedtime. My husband spent most of the night suffering from food poisoning, which he suspected came from the restaurant where we had lunch. So much for choosing randomly.

    I don't know what we'll do for our 20th, but I'm thinking it might be time to break away from our history and do something bold and new. Any suggestions?