"And Your Ship Will Come In" Part Two - Now, While We're Alive: Vancouver Casino Show Straight To Hell Video And Photos & Saying A Sad Goodbye

Starting off with Something Beautiful.

Alan Doyle, listening to the Coquitlam Casino crowd singing along during Lukey.

And then on to the Beautiful, the Sexy, and the Sublime - a video of the song I believe has the potential to be Great Big Sea's biggest hit since Sea Of No Cares (and paired with Walk On The Moon, maybe their biggest one-two punch since SoNC and Clearest): 

Straight To Hell - Great Big Sea, Richmond River Rock Casino, Nov 2007 (video download link, 205 MB)

Just two frames from that video, the first one showing the hottest of all of Alan's Straight To Hell moves, sizzling even with the pants on.

And the second frame showing the Man With The Dangerous Face once again - the face that is apparently always going to elicit an "Anything At All That Causes This Expression Is A Very Good Thing" response. That, and  "You are going to be an irresistibly (and sometimes maddeningly) lovable 14-year-old boy for the rest of your life."

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I've hardly had any tine at all to look at the photos from these two shows, let alone edit and upload them. Ironically, as is so often the case, the better show (Saturday at River Rock, in my own opinion) wound up being the one with slightly less impressive photos. Even after all these shows, I still get excited when the stage is being set afire, and when I get excited, I tend to go off a bit soon. With the camera. No worries, though; there's always the next show, and doing it all again. This little preview of photos is from Friday's show at the Red Robinson Theatre in Coquitlam, with plenty more from both nights still to come when I get a bit more time to work on them.

The Rock Star Guitar God in all his glory. WIAK lead solo.

Sean and Bob doing their parts during an intense River Driver encore.

The full-size version of the Lukey photo, clearly showing an abundance of, as Mary Walsh once described it, "that incredible charm".

What might be a little better edit of this photo, taken near the end of Rant & Roar. This is a face that transcends danger; this is a face that elicits a simple and straightforward "Yes".

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And now for the hard part. Saying goodbye is always the hard part.

I thought about Kat yesterday morning, even though it's been quite some time since I'd seen or talked to her. I think about Kat every November 5th, the birthday the two of us share; it's an odd sort of connection, but for me it's been a lasting one.

When you travel to a lot of GBS shows over the course of a few years, especially when you travel by yourself, you wind up getting to know some of the people who will be at shows in a particular area; seeing them once again in all their usual places makes those faraway places feel familiar, still a long way from home but no longer quite so distant. To me,Texas shows meant spending a little time with Kat and her Mom, with a few of her friends, one time even with her cat. Occasionally they coaxed their poor little car a bit farther and surprised me in Atlanta or some other Southern US city, but wherever they showed up, they always made it feel a bit closer to home.

In a world where there are a disproportionate number of users and abusers, Kat and her Mom always acted like straight-up, enthusiastic, "we love these guys" fans. Financial and health reasons made it difficult for them to come to shows, but they found a way to come whenever they could because it was something they could share with each other and it was something that was important to them. They were grateful for what they got from the shows, and they were thoughtful and considerate toward those who gave it to them. They were invariably thoughtful and considerate toward me too, and I will always be grateful to them.

I knew from the first meeting that Kat had already been fighting a hard battle with kidney disease, and over the next few years, it was clear that the struggle was getting more difficult. The last time I saw them - Austin, Mother's Day Weekend, in 2004 - Kat had come to the venue directly from a dialysis session. She smiled all through supper at the Hard Rock Cafe and then she sang and clapped all through the show. Right before they headed back home, Kat's Mom told me quietly that things were starting to get bad, and that she didn't know if they'd be making it to any more shows. I watched while Kat's Mom fussed over her daughter as they were getting into the car. I was a few months into being the daughter who had lost her mother; the sight of the mother who was losing her daughter made my heart ache.

Time passed, and I didn't see much from Kat on the GBS message board. November 5th came and went, and I thought about Kat as always and hoped she was still holding her own in the battle. I hoped I'd see her some time  in the coming year, but that year turned into the Year Of The Long Break and the dismembering of much of the GBS online community. More time  passed, another shared birthday went by, and when the 2006 shows came around, there were no Texas gigs scheduled, next to nothing at all in the American South. I wound up skipping Atlanta, and wondered briefly if maybe Kat and her Mom had made it there, but it seemed unlikely. There were so many people I was no longer seeing at the shows on that tour, most of them absent for reasons far less compelling and intractable. There has been no shortage of familiar faces to miss these past few years, but in that midst, it's been Kat and her Mom who were among those most missed. I recalled her Mom's parting words at that last show, and felt a chill dread in my heart.

Another birthday yesterday, another thought about a sweet, creative, funny, kind young woman who had been dealt a truly shitty set of cards to play out. And then, a bit later in the day, another considerate person tried to contact Kat to wish her a Happy Birthday and discovered that she had fought her last battle a few weeks ago. That person was so considerate as to let me know too, as did a few others, and so I found out on our birthdays that Kat was now gone, that she had died in exactly the place I would have expected: In her Mom's arms.

People come into and go out of our lives every day. Co-workers at our previous jobs, neighbours at our old apartment building, friends and lovers who no longer feel the same way they once did, parents and spouses and children who have passed beyond the reach of our arms and the need for our devotion. Familiar faces at the shows of our favourite band. We gain, we lose. We remember. If we are wise, we learn to hesitate less and to love more.

All of my heartfelt sympathy to those who loved this young woman and who now suffer her loss, as well as my gratitude to those who told me the end of her story.