San Fran: The joy of seeing old friends

One of my favorite things about touring is catching up with old friends. I have a lot of them scattered about the country (and world at this point), from a few trips abroad and from Rice’s cosmopolitan population. I think it’s such a gift to be able to see people who live thousands and thousands of miles away and usually don’t have plans to come to Texas any time soon.

I plan to see many people, and solicit their couches a few weeks (or days) ahead before we reach a city. This was the case with Andy and Megan, some very close friends from Rice. We stayed with them in San Francisco, as Hooch mentioned in yesterday’s post, and had a great time. They cooked us incredible food, we went to the Farmer’s Market, we traded music and stories, we played frisbee, we talked politics and love and economics and religion and bio-psycho-social developmental theories (you know all the usual stuff). We all had a wonderful time.

I also got to catch up with one of my old roommates and very good friends Brian Chek. Awesome.

Wish I had a pic of what I was talking about, but this happened on Friday night after the show. There was a lot of graffiti already in those practice rooms, so we added to it. We like to leave our mark I guess.

Some of the most exciting times are the ones that are totally unexpected. We show up at the Brainwash two Fridays ago in San Francisco. It’s a sweet place – food, coffee, beer, laundry, and live music all in one. The show was fun, we played with the same band as Wednesday plus another, we jammed afterwards with them and some of their friends at a crazy warehouse practice space with grafitti everwhere. This alone would have been worth a blog post. Everyone we hung out with was incredibly generous with their instruments, booze, and northern Californian specialties.

Back to the show – there was this moment during our first song when I glanced over the counter at Brainwash only to see two friends that I had not seen in three and a half years – since I studied abroad with them in Ghana. I did a double take, and for a few moments, maybe even a few minutes, I had to make sure I was not indeed dreaming. First I saw Rachel with long hair, even though the whole time I knew her she had a buzz cut. Standing right next to her was Kristen, another friend from the same Ghanaian Urban Ethnomusicological drum and dance fest. What! Last I knew one was in St. Louis and the other was in New York. How’d they end up San Francisco? This alone made the night amazing, because I love these girls!

We got a chance to catch up; I got to meet one of their boyfriends whom I had heard about back in the day; we ate burritos. The time was of course way too short (it always is isn’t it?) but it was so sweet. And I love surprises.

Being able to reconnect with people like this always spreads my grin so wide that my mouth muscles hurt. It was almost too much – catching up with Cole on Wednesday and Thursday, Andy and Megan the whole time, Chek, plus Rachel and Kristen. There wasn’t even enough time for it all.