![]() This Friday I went to the Bare Naked Ladies Concert at the Tweeter Center. It was a nice concert and the Bare Naked Ladies know how to put on a great show. I had heard this before so one of the reasons I got tickets was to see if, in fact, this was true. Another reason I went was because my best friend Matt loves the Bare Naked Ladies and I thought it would be fun to go see it with him. The final main reason for my going was who opened the show. Her name is Sarah Harmer and she is a Canadian singer/songwriter and I had only just heard of her this past February.
![]() It was February 1st, and I was killing time before I had to pick up my friend Dayna at Midway. I was in Borders and browsing the CD section. I came upon this listening station and one of the CDs had this black and white picture of a cute girl on it. I listened to it and really liked the music. The CD was You Were Here by Sarah Harmer and I bought it right then and there. Later I got myself on her e-mail mailing list and found out she was coming to Chicago February 17 at Schubas Tavern and Grill. So I bought a ticket and even though that day I was getting over being the most sick I've been in seven years, I went and enjoyed her show. She sounded live like she does on the album and I like that. I really don't like it when I find out that a group or person is horrible compared to their recorded sound. So, months later I get an e-mail from the Sarah Harmer mailing list and she announces that she will be touring for a bit with Bare Naked Ladies. That's enough of a reason for me, so I ask Matt if he want to go, he asks Lynette, his girlfriend and my friend, if she wants to go and she does and about a week later, we buy the tickets.
![]() This is almost how my decision to go to Lilith Fair came about. At the time, I was really into all the artists that were getting famous from the Lilith Fair tours, and I wanted to go too. This was the summer of '99 and at the time I was involved in a summer-rep production at the University of Florida. I was cast in the play "Escape from Happiness" and one of my fellow cast mates was also interested in going. Eventually he decided not to go, which sucked, but then my friend Jessica decided that she wanted to go and so we both bought tickets for the lawn section. This year's tour of Lilith Fair wasn't going into Florida and the closest city was Atlanta. Now, month before I knew the locations of the Lilith Fair gigs, I got a letter from the Jennifer Nettle Band mailing list. Wait, I need to back up just a bit.
![]() Let's go back to the spring of '98. I was in rehearsal for the first play I've been cast in, "Spring Awakening." I had just gotten done with a meeting of my college improv troupe, Theater Strike Force, and was about to go to "Spring Awakening" rehearsal. Once I stepped outside on the colonnade, I heard this amazing singing voice. She was singing some song and I was intrigued to find out find out who was singing this. I walked down some steps and saw this acoustic duo, a guy and a girl, playing outside what at the time was the Orange and Brew, an on campus restaurant that was later renamed the Tortilla Grill. I was just blown away by this group and bought their CD on the spot. It was The Sacred and Profane by Soul Miner's Daughter. I also got myself on their mailing list.
![]() Fast forward to next year's spring and they are auditioning for Lilith Fair to get onto the small acoustic stage they have set up for local talent. Soul Miner's Daughter gets on and all of us fans are so happy about this, "at last someone else is seeing how great this band is." Oh, the kind of music they played was rock with blues, soul, and rockabilly mixed in. Her voice, Jennifer Nettles, can sound like Aretha Franklin and his voice, Cory Jones, can sound like James Taylor. Then getting on Lilith Fair for a day totally makes me motivated in going and thank God I found a friend to come with me.
![]() Jessica and I drive from Gainesville to just north of Atlanta and we are one of the first people to arrive. We camp out in the shade, wait for hours until they let us in, and make out way to the head of the line ("we got there practically first, we deserve to be at the front of the line, so sue us if we were not in the line and over by the shade") and we get the best part of the lawn. We lay our blanket down stage-center, just on the front of the lawn where it starts to slope way down to the walkway in front of us. We get some people next to us to watch our blanket and we walk over to the acoustic stage in time to see Soul Miner's Daughter finishing their set up. They start their 20-minutes set and because they have such a short amount of time, they go from song to song. I think they got six songs in there. Because it was Lilith Fair, Jennifer Nettles was the focus of the show, doing all the songs she sings on. One note on the group, you could tell who wrote the songs because they sang it. Also by this time, by had a second album out so their set was a mix of their first and second albums.
![]() Then Jessica and I went back to the lawn and enjoyed the rest of the festival from our blanket. We got to see artists like Dido (way before her popularity, I didn't pay much attention to her set since I was eating dinner at the time and because it was raining hard and I was trying to stay under my poncho as best as possible), Mya, the Indigo Girls, Sheryl Crow, and Sarah McLachlan. Truly a great first concert experience.
![]() Why was it my first concert? Well, before then I wasn't really into any one artist enough to even think about seeing them in concert. Listening to their music on the radio or on tape was enough for me. Plus, my friends and I hardly ever talked about music. It wasn't until college that I started watching MTV or hanging with friends that really liked music and talked about it for hours on end. My childhood friends and I talked about movies and TV shows, but not about music. So you can imagine my awkwardness when I would be around friends talking about the Talking Heads, Violent Femmes, They Might Be Giants, and others while I had no idea who these group were. I knew the songs, but had no idea who sang them and sure as Hell didn't know the words to the songs by heart, like my friends did. I still am behind my friends (as was evident in a conversation I had Saturday on first CDs, tapes, and concerts) when it comes to music trivia and knowledge, but at least I'm more knowledgeable than I was.
![]() Also, in high school, all that I listened to was Oldies music. I listened to the Oldies station on the radio in Clearwater, FL, and I was pretty good at singing along to those songs. I just wasn't into any of the bands of the time. I liked Billy Joel and the early stuff of Michael Jackson, but never felt compelled to go out and buy their stuff. Not until my senior year of high school. It was around that time that the female singer/songwriters were getting recognition. I put it like this: one of the main appeal of the boy bands that our popular right now is sex appeal, right? Females like certain guys in rock for their looks as well as their sound. The same is for me: I like the women of rock for their sound and because women in rock are sexy. This is when Jagged Little Pill was out by Alanis Morissette. And that was the very first album I actually went out and bought with my own money, and I loved it. It is one of the few albums I currently own that I can listen to all the way through. Alanis paved the way for other women to get the recognition they deserved: Lisa Loeb, Sheryl Crow, Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan. Then Sarah McLachlan forwarded the movement even farther with Lilith Fair. Then we were exposed to Shawn Colvin, Paula Cole, Dido, the Indigo Girls, and many others. From this I got interested in Emmy Lou Harris, Patti Griffin, Patti Smith, Nanci Griffith, the Murmurs, the Pretenders, the Sundays, the Pixies, and many, many other women singers. For some reason, I just prefer to listen to a woman's voice sing. Don't get me wrong, I do like some of the guy singers and rock bands, but not as much as the women counterparts.
![]() The only guy bands (not to be confused with the horrible BOY bands) that I like are R.E.M., Cake, Radio Head, Dave Matthews Band, and the Bare Naked Ladies.
![]() Okay, now to relate this to improv. And this is a thing I have talked to a lot of guys about. If you see an attractive girl in improv doing bad stuff, your attraction for her decreases. However, if you see a girl that you wouldn't normally have been interested in doing something funny, then your attraction to her increases. Funny women are more attractive than unfunny women. This is an odd thing and some wonder if this isn't just another shallow thing. Is being attracted to a funny girl just as shallow as thinking a girl is good just because she is attractive? I don't think so because if a girl has a similar sense of humor, this is more closely associated to her personality than her physicality. So in my mind's logic, finding humor attractive is appreciating a woman for her mind. Plus, in the improv environment, you already have that in common with her. This is also a funny issue in improv because the ratio of women to men is low. So if there is an attractive woman in improv who is single, the analogy of fresh meat in a piranha tank come to mind. This was definitely true in my college improv troupe; they even scared away one girl because they gave her too much attention. However, I have also heard from some guys, mostly from guys who have dated other improvisers, that you should stay away from dating improvisers. This would be good advice, I think, if I had other hobbies. I spend most of my time around improv and am only surrounded by improv women. I think once I get through classes at Second City and IO, and when I have more money, that then I can afford to get involved in things I want to do; like photography, learning the drums, and learning French.
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