There's Something in the Water

Friday night we went with some friends, Renee and Mark, to a DVD release party at Ruta Maya coffee house off south Congress. First we had dinner at Opal Divines where there were a number of people dressed up as pirates. It took us a while to make the connection that - aha - Friday was "Talk Like a Pirate" day and these folks were into it big time. Opal Divine's is near the St Eds campus and there were lots of college students. This location is at Penn Field which seems to be a very interesting little business park. If you follow the link you will see that it was the site of a WW I airstrip. There is this great fountain, which I should have photographed, with water that cascades down from two airplane wings. I looked for a photo on the web but couldn't find one out there. Next time I will take a picture.


The name of the documentary is "There's Something In The Water" and it was made by that guy Joel Melton we met at Shady Grove a few weeks ago at the Radney Foster show. I am looking forward to watching it as it is about Texas music and what's special about it. We saw Beaver Nelson, Wendy Allyn, Michael Fracasso. Unfortunately we were too tired to stay for our friend Joel, although he performed some back up harmony with Wendy and Michael. It was dark and I didn't want to flash my camera in the performers eyes, but here are a few pictures.

Here's Beaver Nelson, a really great singer songwriter and painter! House painter that is. Apparently it is a hard road to a profitable music career. This guy is good and we will look for him again.

Joel with Wendy. She did a really fun song called Catalina Days or something like that, that evoked fun memories of a carefree childhood in California.

Wendy sang a song about Lost in Austin that happened to have been the title of a song by this person, Nancy (below). Nancy came up, impromptu, and sang her version which was very good and very funny!The last act we saw was Michael Fracasso, who had the most amusing bass player with him. We were cracking up how casual he was playing. Just too cool for school. After this we were just too tired even though we REALLY wanted to see Joel perform. We'll have to catch him some other time when he plays before midnight.

Yesterday was the annual UT-Rice rout. This year the score was 54-10. Rice actually scored first, which made us a little nervous, but then Colt McCoy and his teammates produced over 600 offensive yards and decidedly beat Rice. I always feel bad for these teams up against UT, but then I remember they are getting a lot of funding from putting themselves through this pain and embarassment. Below is the formation by the Longhorn band. Today was also alumni band day and it was fun to see the 500 alumni performing out on the field. The only disappointment was that the Rice band didn't perform. They are known to do very funny performances. Last year they played music and ran around the field making fun of all the UT players who had been arrested recently. Just guessing Mack Brown probably wouldn't let them play this year.

The last picture I will post is of the moon last night when I was driving home. It was an orange slice and very rusty in color at the time. I caught it just in between the flashing red radio towers. Steffi promised to take a better picture tonight with her good camera and send it to me.