# Sadness and Naked Time
It's St. Patrick's day weekend; Dee is off performing already. She's always playing over the weekend nearest her birthday (which is actually St. Patty's). This is very much her choice, of course. So that's well and good. One place is comping her group a room Sat and Sun. TL;DR: I'll be out and about a bunch over the weekend.
Tomorrow morning I'll go with Bob to help Robin, Leo's widow, take apart some things at POD studio which, of course, doubled as Sargasso's rehersial space. Bob is the front-man and song-writer in Sargasso, and has been friends with Leo and Robin for more than 30 years. (Not linking our page but here's something from Bob's YouTube.) It will be good to be doing something practical that helps Robin; I hope there's enough lifting and toting to totally swamp my always busy brain into full Bail Lifting & Barge Toteing mode (See bail-lifting-&-barge-toteing-mode).
We (Sargasso) will be playing the last show (AFAIK?) that Leo booked for us next Thursday. We've invited a number of special guests such the Intangangles and Ländfillharmonik (Facebook) and TBH I'm not sure who all. Certainly anyone who's played with/as us in the past is welcome (and perhaps likely) to show up and jump in where they may.
Did you know that local bands are (allegorically, by which I mean "because I say so") the most common type of "small business" in the United States, perhaps the world? Dee is in several.
On interesting tidbit you could pick up if you "play out" is that hotels are good places to look for gigs, especially on events around (celebrated on/over) weekends. Hotels generally need to keep restaurants open during, and cannot afford to understaff, so it's worth it to have live music in to keep guests spending their cash in the hotel vs wherever else they might go out and visit about town. And a hotel will often have a room or two open, for example a contingency contracts with an airline so pilots have several potential places to call if they need to spend a night on slightly short notice. So, we can have these contracts reserve some special events for our own use, and our booking availability baselines for oneline and 3rd party sales don't change.
Or whatever. Anyway. Leading to free room-nights, for me.
In point of fact, of course, it's additional comp. But the comp was already decent. In this case, Dee really could have had her pick of gigs (because this group actually plays Irish music, much in demand for this particular weekend). I'm not actually sure how much the rooms swayed the groups decision to take it-
Dee was think not to use them, in fact. I'm like
"WTF? That boy", meaning our eldest child living at home, "will be 17 in July. Of course we're going."
Naked time.