ETA: Midnight, on the cusp between Saturday night and Sunday morning. Watching HNIC as the "Battle Of Alberta" begins. Rooting for Edmonton, rather casually so, neither malice toward nor offence intended to Calgary. Hoping my only-half-suppressed victory shriek when the Habs won their own game a few minutes ago did not awaken Christina, who is on call and needs all the sleep she can get. Sipping a Black Horse and eating a Jam Jam, ruefully acknowledging the likely need to start abstaining from both if that nifty little clearance-rack sundress I bought for a song at the mall in the Soo is going to fit properly when we hit the California sunshine next month. And that's when the realisation comes, quietly and with no fanfare: It doesn't hurt like hell anymore. Pain no longer has the upper hand.
This is a very good thing. Likely good enough to make up for the impending lack of Black Horse and Jam Jams.
To celebrate the defeat of pain's ascendancy (yeah, I know...it's only one skirmish won in the continuing battle - and an incomplete win at that since it still hurts, though nowhere near as badly as it did - but I'll take the small victory, gladly and gratefully), here is yet another utterly lovely bit of proof of the sheer foolishness of the "Too Soon Fallacy" (this makes no sense unless you keep reading, and perhaps not even then).
Dreaming Out Loud In Black & White
True Magic.
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Wishes can't be whispered
O'er the roaring of the crowd
So break the silence
And dream out loud ( Dream Out Loud, Alan Doyle & Paul Lamb)
Alan Doyle, gorgeous and glorious during Excursion - shouting out at the perfect time, not one moment too soon.
Usually when it takes me forever to write about a show, when I keep saying over and over again that I'm going to do it but it keeps not happening, it's because I'm trying to decide if all of what I want to say should be written; it's rarely a matter of what, much more often one of how much. I'm not particularly accustomed to struggles with What; if this difficulty lives on to forge a partnership with perennial travelling companion How Much, I fear my "journalistic impulse" may have sufferered a thoroughly non-harmless blow. But the real reason for writing remains intact, and that is, as ever, the heart of the matter. The matter of the heart.
Westhampton Beach, then. With love...and with kisses and bruises too.
The Great Big Sea show at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Centre was not the best show of this past tour leg - of the shows I saw on this past tour leg, that is...I did not see Sarnia, Joplin or the PERL Benefit shows, so no comparisons are possible with those - not by my own (highly subjective) standards of determining "Best Show". The players were weary - travel-weary, battle-weary, conscience-weary, appeasement-weary - and all understandably so. They were more than ready to be heading back to home and family on Thanksgiving Weekend, and they brought that weariness and readiness, along with yesterday's and today's "celebratory" effects, out onto the stage with them at the start of the show. Out onto the stage of a venue that was already so packed with subtext that you couldn't move a step forward or backward or to either side without stubbing your toe or banging you shins against its cut-to-the-bone edges or without tripping and slipping over those edges into the murky depths below. And that's just the subtext I knew about...I am never so arrogant as to presume I'm aware of all the turbulence that's swirling beneath the surface sparkle on deep waters. Sufficient unto the evening was the subtext of which I was cognizant - more than sufficient, thanks much.
Put quite simply, Westhampton Beach was heading straight down the rails toward being a mess of a show. Westhampton Beach should have been a mess of a show, given the attendant circumstances. But it wasn't that, not at all...given the attendant circumstances.
Westhampton Beach wound up being a really good show - silly for sure, but enjoyable and engaging and fun, certainly for those off-stage and I believe for those on-stage as well, probably more than a bit to their own surprise. First credit for what the Westhampton Beach show became, what it became against all reasonable and sensible odds, goes to the WBPAC crowd, which did come darn close to being the Best Audience of this past tour leg (again, highly subjective standards). There is apparently a great deal of appreciation - genuine appreciation, not the gimme-gimme faux shit - for Great Big Sea on Long Island, and for many it goes back a long and loyal way. When the weary players came out on stage, they were showered in that genuine and generous appreciation, and the chief pleasure for me of this show became watching the healing, invigorating, and ultimately provocative power of that appreciation on those players as they first basked in it and then began to return it doublefold. Which caused it to rebound back to them again, triplefold. After that, the synergy could be measured only on a logarithmic scale.
If first credit is due to the Westhampton Beach crowd - who really were the initial Full Participants in this show - then second, and equally impressive, credit is owned by the band members. It's all well and good (very good, I would think) to let yourself be admired and adored and appreciated, to wallow in being in the spotlight and having all eyes fixed upon you as idol, prize, trophy, object of desire...Artist, Rock Star, Pope, Coolest Guys In The Room. Not a bad job if you can get it, though the hours are very long and the costs are sky high. But to permit that love to provoke the response to return something back to those who offer it up, to allow it to inspire the desire to give back as good as has been given - that's where true magic happens.
That magic happened in Westhampton Beach, on a night when and where logic and sense and pragmatism would have joined in dour chorus to insist it could never happen. But still it happened. The more open-hearted appreciation that determined crowd showered on the band, the more the band responded and gave their own appreciation right back to the crowd. Who then sent it right back up to them. Magic. Totally unlooked for and completely unexpected...as true magic should always be.
Throughout it all, subtext's brutal cutting edges and murky deep waters lurked right behind the evening's delight. All you had to do was glance back over your shoulder, and there it was. Magic has no power to make such troublesome aspects of reality disappear; all it can do is help us to find our own way toward perspective and acceptance and the courage to continue. It can touch our hearts and remind us of what it is we are really here for. And at its most potently true, it can provoke us to into responding with hearts that have felt its touch. The Reciprocity of Magic is the loudest dream I know.
I had a good eye at Westhampton Beach, but a somewhat shaky hand. Not the best show pictures of this past tour leg either, I am sorry to say. But because this show wound up being important to me personally, so too are these photos. Sometimes I take a pile of photos at a show, and it's only in a few that I find what I was looking for...one or two moments that distill the essence of what I saw as being the Truth of that particular show: Yes, that's what it was all about. Every now and then, it's the photos themselves that help me find my own stumbling way to a Truth I was too weary, too distracted, too confused, too unsure, or too wounded to see as it took place before my eyes in a present moment: Oh, that's what really was going on. Westhampton Beach was a bit of both of these for me, and perhaps that accounts at least partly for the shaky camera hand.
I'm thinking of eventually putting them all up, along with the much-larger pile of other show photos, over on Flickr, but for now, some of the photos I like best from what I've gotten done so far really do belong here, with more to come as I finish editing them. I'm approaching the halfway point of that process - I just started in on the Let It Go photos this morning, and that was the penultimate song of the first set - and it's taking me all the (admittedly scant) discipline I possess to edit and post photos in set-list order when what I really want to do is head straight for the utterly gorgeous Excursion photos. My own version of a persistent inclination toward shouting out too soon, I suppose, though I still and will always say there's no such thing as "too soon," not when you can just go ahead and do it again.
Come to think of it, I do believe I will toss scant discipline directly over the side and go back to edit in a few of those most gorgeous of photos at the beginning here; then I will simply put them up again "in order" later, thereby proving the fallacy of "too soon" once and for all. That sure works for me.
No pictures from the first few songs - Donkey Riding and Captain Kidd - for a whole host of good reasons. My camera started clicking away with the dramatic curtain drop as the first chord of Love Me Tonight is struck with commanding grace.
My Paddy Murphy photos all sucked (sadly and as ever not in the good way) as they so often do whenever the motion of the crowd jumping up and down winds up making the floor beneath all of our feet follow suit. But When I'm Up is quite a different story, quite a different result as well. When I'm Up was where that responsive crowd really let itself be known as such; at one point, Alan backed off during the verse and watched and listened while the song's momentum was carried on without a missed beat or syllable by several hundred voices. That was where the Reciprocal Magic stole the show from circumstance and gave it as a gift to all hands and voices and hearts present. From that point on, Alan never looked back, and neither did I.
The Fountain Of Affection.
.
If ever there were a man who deserved all all that he desired, with never a hushed and humbled longing to endure, with never a whispered wish left unheard...this would be that man.
Appropriately, the next song to follow after was the one about a Newfoundland Super Hero. Before plunging into Jack Hinks, Alan took time to gree his crowd and also to tell Murray how sexy he looked in that green shirt he was wearing.
Irresistible face meets oh-so-movable object.
I didn't take a single picture during Charlie Horse; I spent the entire song enjoying watching the crowd get "whipped into a frenzy" and grinning each time Alan sang one of the lyric lines that have proved so pliable and willing in the hands of a Master Double Entendre-ist. Pulls the logs more faster, indeed. I did take quite a few of the next song, Sean's masterpiece England, trying (with only fair-to-middling success) to capture the way in which the song's mood is depicted so well in the simple subtlety of the lighting, something they really could use more of in this area of their staging.
That's probably a good place to close for now. There's pea soup cooking on the stove - the smell of suppertime if ever there was one. I'll keep working on the photos and put up the next batch, probably from The Mermaid through the Run, Runaway to close out the first set, fairly soon. I might be willing to re-enable comments by then too. Not so much because I believe the shit and the hurt and the disappointment will stop coming, but because I may have - I hope - found my way to a place where they loses the power to interfere with what's important. That might be magic too.
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