We had a great time up in the Pacific Northwest in February! Here are some tour highlights--and lowlights (so much more natural-looking!):

We stayed in Portland with yet ANOTHER lovely set of Tom's and Belle’s friends, who plied us with fine food and homemade liquor (wine and walnut brandy this time), came out to cheerlead at our show, and generally treated us like visiting royals.  Another valuable Portland supporters were San Francisco’s own Jeanie and Chuck Poling and former San Franciscan’s Ron and Rolf. Diana's fiddle got to hang out in a Portland bar (The Alberta Street Pub) way longer than she and its case did, in fact only meeting up with her again back in Wintergrass two nights later, having hitch-hiked naked to Seattle with Jeanie, Chuck and Ron.

We played for 500 K-through-8 catholic school students in the gym of the Holy Rosary School.  Ever tried editing a bluegrass set list for suitability for both tender young ears and religious sensibility?   "Doreen" had actually made the cut until we caught and axed it JUST before Jordan opened his mouth to start singing:   “When I first met Doreen, she was barely seventeen, she was drinking whiskey sours at the bar.  The way she tossed them back, I'd have a had a heart attack, but as it is I let her drive my car”.  But we knew we had the crowd with our somewhat b-list, tamer material, when we looked out to see the block of kindergarteners all playing air banjo, air fiddle, and air guitar along with us. 

Pickers infested every corner of the very swanky Murano hotel in downtown Tacoma.  What did your innocent civilian hotel guest make of "gravel yard" issuing simultaneously from two sides of the grand stairway landing?

Our emcee, "Aunt Mama", having introduced herself to us just prior to our first Wintergrass stage set and giving every impression of competence and tact, garbled our introduction and handed the show over to us with this high praise: "Belle Monroe and her Brewglass Boys--it's almost music!"

Four festival sets in just over 24 hours were capped by a balls-to-the-walls midnight acoustic set in the CBA tent, where, as one of only two California bands at Wintergrass, we tore it up despite running on fumes. This was maybe our fave set of the weekend. Thanks, Uncle Frank! Finally, all this was capped off by learning that Stephen Ruffo, the big honcho at Wintergrass, after hearing Ted's closing song in the CBA tent (Big Ol’ Pecker), actually calls himself "The Big Pecker" and has t-shirts for his assistants, The Peckerettes, which will be arriving in the mail for Belle and Diana soon…