When you least expect it.
“You think so?” said Jenn.
“Eighty-five per cent,” I said, after a moment, and then the guy on stage we were talking about did this thing with his eyes and I knew. “Ninety-five,” I said, since it’s always a good thing to leave some room for error, even if (especially if) you’re known for this sort of thing.
See, when my birthday rolled around last year Jenn got me Mink Car and the McSweeney’s with They Might Be Giants doing the soundtrack and tickets to the show which would be at the Crystal Ballroom the very night I would turn 33. (Actually, I turned 33 at 11:11 AM EDT, but that’s neither here nor there.) —Unfortunately, due to some understandable delays in air travel, they didn’t make the show, and so the show was postponed until this past Friday. (And if it weren’t too late to urge you to go see They Might Be Giants in a ballroom where you can dance on air I’d do it—when they do “Clap Your Hands” off the new album and everybody starts pogoing in synch you get some amazing height, like off a trampoline or something, wow.)
But we weren’t talking about They Might Be Giants; we were talking about the opening act. Who were this guy with a guitar and this other guy, and they could sing and did some killer Everly-esque harmonizing and some physical comedy and if reviewers tend to say they do a Barenaked Ladies–Phish kind of thing, I’m afraid I’ll have to bow to their judgment; I don’t know from either referenced band. But I can tell you about snarky comedy that veers close to wet sentiment but skates the thin edge and comes back, and how if you’ve got the stones to do a rearrangement of “Don’t Let’s Start” when you’re opening for Johns Linnell and Flansburgh, you’d damn well better be able to pull it off like these guys did.
But it wasn’t even that we were talking about. “You think he’s the guy from Buffy,” said Jenn.
“Yeah,” I said. “The one without the guitar, I mean.”
And you know what?
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