My weekend of funk....

Not one, but two live performances (unquestionably better than dead performances) by Seattle groups, two nights in a row.

Hard to choose which I liked better, so I'll say I loved them both.

First up: The Balls Out Booze Band --



The curly-topped, hip-spectacled guitar player on the left is Gus, aka P.J.Williker, who spent a good chunk of his early years at my house. He lived down the street, and was the best buddy of my boys. (I claimed him as one of my own.) So how in heck did he go from his Ninja-Turtle-cowboy phase to this ultra cool guy on stage with idiosyncratic style and uber-confidence? All I can say is dayam. I knew him when.

And to add frosting to this already marvelously sweet evening, BABB performed at a new music venue a mile from my house: The Royal Room. I am SO lucky to live here!!

Funk event #2, plus a family Christmas party --

My late-husband Mark's family hosts an annual event at the local community club, and this year included a performance by the reformed (minus several band members claimed early by hard living) Acapulco Gold, a seventies-era Seattle funk band. This is the best part: before I knew this family, when I was in high school in the suburbs, this band was the one to get for school dances. (And also the most difficult to get, they were so scheduled-up.) I remember listening and dancing to them at a club when I was in college.


When Mark and I were first living together at the eponymous "109" (former neighborhood grocery store building), his brother and an ever-transient assemblage of musicians lived downstairs. Those were some sweet days, albeit with all the glassware tinkling in our apartment because the volume emanating from below was, well, at times deafening. My favorite music memory from then is of entire afternoons of Mark's brother Paul doing riffs on his electric guitar: a mightily talented man.

Several times Paul borrowed Mark's car, and while we were at work, Paul and his friends -- perpetually cash-poor artists -- came up to our apartment and helped themselves to breakfast, leaving a mess of dishes that made it appear as if an entire touring roadshow, groupies included, had converged in our tiny kitchen for a feast. It wasn't long before Mark caught on to the trick, and lent the car minus our apartment key. I don't think either of us would have minded so much if that had just cleaned up after themselves, damn it!

Bittersweet moment last night, sitting with my two sons listening to their uncle perform. Life has completed a circle, despite fewer of us sitting in the warmth of the extended family beside the Christmas tree. There was delight and elation in the listening, as well as a wrenching of the heart that Mark wasn't with us.

And even more bittersweet in that, had I still been married to NoGoode, I most likely wouldn't have been sitting there, wouldn't have made the Sunday evening trek alone across the lake to Southeast Seattle. (His interest in anything Seattle was/is marginal, at best, even as colorful a piece of history as Acapulco Gold.)

Big sigh.

Here they are in a cheesy iPhone video, but trust me, these guys (even with a noticeable decrease in hair) are HOT!





And finally, cousins....