"I liked the one by that beaver guy"

So many things happened today that we want to tell everybody about!

Our 2nd concert of the tour was at the Children's Community School in Waterbury, CT. We played for a room full of about 50 kids who had just spent the day at the beach. When Ruth introduced the Biber Sonata, the kids got very excited that they were about to hear a piece by Justin Bieber. They recovered from their disappointment when they got to hear all the different animal sounds that we made with our instruments and they got to play the guessing game we made up to go along with the piece. One kid apparently missed the whole exchange about Justin Bieber because when the kids were asked at the end what their favorite part of the concert was, he raised his hand and responded, "I liked the one by that beaver guy." Maybe we should add a beaver movement to the piece. (There was also an incident that Ruth didn't want me to tell you about where a kid named Nicki Minaj as a female composer but Ruth didn't know who that was so she got confused.) We were really excited to play for the kids and they were very attentive and participated well, especially considering how hot it was in the room! We are very appreciative to Calida for organizing the concert and inviting us to play. Here's a picture of us in front of the pictures of the animals for the Biber (/Bieber/beaver) piece:

We went to a restaurant for dinner where there was a kind of crazy old waitress who's name was something like Jemma. Half the time she was working she just stood next to a table on the patio drinking a cup of tea from Dunkin' Donuts.

Then we went to concert number 2 of the day where we got to be in the audience instead of being the performers...or so we thought. The concert was one from a concert series Ben has arranged at La Paloma Sabanera coffee shop. The concert series is called the Hartford Phase Shift . It was an interesting concert that had 3 acts. The first was a trio that played experimental, jazz-inspired sounding music. The second was a crazy awesome grind violin player that played his violin while stomping polyrhythms with his feet while wearing a shaker on his bow arm. The last was a cellist/performance artist. Her first piece was a narrated story that took place in Berlin and before the piece started she asked if anyone spoke German. Since no one spoke up, Ruth reluctantly volunteered her high school German exposure. Half way through the piece, Ruth was dragged on stage, had a mask yanked on over her head, and was told she was supposed to be an angry police officer. She then had to yell in German on command (with no prior warning about what she was supposed to say!) She made up something sort of German...more like GermEnglish. It was hilarious though, and the audience got a kick out of it. I got a sort of blurry picture of it (I didn't want to use flash).

Half of the performers, including the one that got yelled at in German by Ruth, are now crashing at Ruth and Ben's house. They're pretty cool and apparently Ben agreed to make us all waffles for breakfast!