Catching Up

May 14, 2010

Tara & Johnny



Mother's Day

Catching Up

The hectic pace of the last few weeks has allowed a number of events that we have been involved with to slip past without the notice they might have otherwise deserved, so I thought that I would post a sort of catch all to recap some of the things that we have done lately not involving the Songwriters’ Festival or the Dragon Boat races.





During the songwriter festival, we managed to make it to the 40th birthday of our friend Johnny. He celebrated the milestone along with his wife Tara and a huge gathering of friends at a sunset party at the Tiki Bar at the Galleon resort. It was a wonderful evening and our only regret is that we couldn’t stay longer. The beautiful sunset and sharing beers and food with friends made for an ideal celebration. The Galleon Tiki bar is a great location for a gathering, one that I rarely consider but offers a great waterfront, casual setting.






I also managed to sneak in one of the final performances of a wonderful play at the Red Barn Theatre, “Short Attention Span Theatre”. The play, a series of 10 minute vignettes was charming, funny and enjoyable. I attended specifically to see a friend of mine, Haripriya Fka-Shakti who was a member of the talented cast. I have been encouraging her to follow her desire to pursue acting and after seeing her wonderful performance, I can see that my faith was well-founded. The entire show was terrific.



Robin Smith-Martin

I try not to get too political on this blog, I figure that there are plenty of other forums for people to express their political beliefs, however one of our friends, Robin Smith-Martin is running for the Monroe County School Board and I attended his campaign kick-off party last week. The problems in the school system are well documented and it is nice to see a local product of that system seek to address the issues. Hopefully, whichever candidate you support, you will get out and vote this fall.



Mike Mongo

Mother’s Day is an especially big day at the Key West Preschool Co-op and for the first time, I attended the Mother’s Day program that the various classes put on for the parents. It was great, it is so impressive to see how the children have developed over the year and it was really inspiring to see how the kids interacted with their mothers. I know my mother is a regular reader of this blog and I want to take the opportunity to wish her again, Happy Mother’s Day. Love you Marta!





Graf

Not everyone celebrates Mother’s Day the same way and a couple of our friends, Graf & Eileen hosted a Mother’s Day dinner party for their childless friends, so of course Kathy & I joined a great group of our friends to celebrate the fact that we had no kids and did not want to be left out of the mother’s day celebration. We drank and ate and had a wonderful evening.



Trevor

Jim

Melissa & Rob

One more adventure that I wanted to mention is our stop at the No Name Pub in Big Pine Key with our friends Nadene & Trevor on the way home from the Dragon Boat Festival in Marathon. The No Name Pub is famous for being isolated, hard to find and for their delicious pizza. We had not been in far too long and they have really fixed up the place. Thankfully the food is still good and we had a great time. The No Name Pub is worth finding.

Nadene & Trevor





No Name Pub

Battle in the Bay

May 11, 2010







Battle in the Bay

Last year Kathy participated in the 1st annual Battle of the Bay Dragon Boat Festival which was held at Sombrero Beach in Marathon. I was out of town, but she had a great time paddling for her team the Squally HeronCanes which finished in 2nd place a mere 0.7 seconds behind the winning team in Division B. This year she was back again, having joined a new team, Paddles Up, Tweet Up sponsored by Twitter and the Weekly Newspaper, and I actually got to go up with her to spend a day at the beach watching racing.

Paddles Up, Tweet Up



She actually had spent much of the week practicing, heading out on the Dragon Boat that is kept at Parrotdise bar and grill. She was placed on the Twitter team, which is made up of people in a twitter group who connected on-line, she is not a tweeter by any stretch, just agreeing as she did last year, to join whatever team needed bodies.








This year 19 teams and over 400 paddlers signed up to participate. Each dragon boat, holds 20 paddlers, a helmsman and a drummer who pounds out a beat that the paddlers follow. The races are a series of 300 yard sprints along the beautiful Sombrero Beach in Marathon. The teams range from the professional (Tarpons, Red Dragons) who come from out of town, to various local teams from Rotary Clubs, The Florida Keys Dragon Boat Club, to teams racing for charities including Heron Peacock Supported Living, Womankind, Stand Up for Animals etc.





Girls'Night Out

There was also a team consisting entirely of breast cancer survivors (Save Our Sisters/SOS) that co-presented a beautiful Flower Ceremony midway through the racing to honor cancer victims along with the Girls’ Night Out Paddle Pushers team. It was a nice moment, one that brought home the spirit of the teams and the event itself.

Flower Ceremony



Dragon boat racing has been a sport in China for over 2000 years, but has only recently really begun gaining popularity in the US as thousands of teams forming. Marathon has taken advantage of the increasing popularity to host the Battle in the Bay and teams have turned out to compete in what looks to be a growing fixture of the Keys calendar.







In addition to the boats, the festival also featured arts, crafts, food and beer vendors and even a stage with some live music during the afternoon. All the necessary ingredients for a fun day at the beach and the weather could not have been better, sunny and warm with a bit of a breeze that picked up as the day went on.



Amy

Kathy’s team did fairly well all things considered. They went off in the very first race of the day with only 14 paddlers, but their time and crew size was much better in their second heat- a victory over the Girls’ Night Out team. In fact they qualified on time for the championship race of their division. In the championship final, they faced the Real Rotary Rowers, a team made up of Rotary Club members.

Jim Brooks & the Rotary Rowers



It was an exciting race as they jumped out to a large early lead, unfortunately they could not maintain the pace and with each stroke, you could see the Rotary team creeping up. At the line, Rotary Rowers made a final push to win by all of 1 second. Still the time they set was their fastest of the day, and finishing in second is no small accomplishment for a team that had never practiced together. The Tarpons team won the overall (Division A) title and the 2000 Meter challenge as well. It was a great time. Plans are already formulating to form a team for next year. Let us know if you have any interest.





Battle in the Bay Website

You Should Have Seen It In Color…

May 4, 2010

Jamey Johnson & Friends

Raul Malo

Irish Kevin's



You Should Have Seen It In Color…

Jamey Johnson

The 15th Annual Key West Songwriters’ Festival wrapped up over the weekend with a series of amazing performances, crazy parties and indelible memories for those who were fortunate enough to participate. Saturday evening, after spending the day at the pool party Kathy & I settled in for a long incredible night.





We started out the evening back at the main stage at the Ocean Key House pier where a full-on concert by Raul Malo and his band was on tap. The crowd was somewhat smaller than I’d expected, but they were certainly enthusiastic and the weather gods blessed us with another amazing perfect Key West evening.





Kathy

Getting to see Raul with the full band is a totally different experience from the acoustic solo shows that we had the pleasure of seeing earlier in the week. The band brings a fullness and energy that is contagious. The crowd really seemed to get into the music which was excellent. The sound was excellent and you could actually hear each word. Raul performed almost all the songs from his recent CD and even performed a wonderful version of the quintessential Cuban anthem, “Guantanamera”; stating that he couldn’t be so close and not play it.

Raul Malo- “Guantanamera”

While the Raul Malo show offered the crowd space to move about and dance, the show we headed to next was quite a different story. Since he started coming to the festival, Jamey Johnson has made a late-night Saturday tradition to host a show at Irish Kevin’s bar on Duval Street. It has become wildly popular, last year it was so crowded that they had to shut the doors and lock in the crowd to keep the crush from the street from forcing their way in.







We were fortunate, in that we had been invited to the special VIP viewing area on the balcony at Irish Kevin’s, which required going through a special entrance down a spooky alley and up some back stairs through the bar’s offices. The balcony proved however to be as crowded, if not more so than the actual floor of the bar, so we soon headed down into the crowd to join the masses for the show.

Jamey Johnson- “In Color”

The show features Jamey Johnson and any number of his friends who join him onstage and take turns playing their own songs, covers and even each others’ songs. Among the many to share the stage over the course of the evening were Dallas Davidson, Bobby Pinson and Robert Earl Keen. It is hard to describe the mood, certainly it was festive. Having never spent a long night in some backwoods Honky Tonk, I can only guess that this night captured the spirit of just such a place.







Robert Earl Keen & Jamey Johnson

The performers themselves seemed to be having as good a time as the crowd, which was massive, but not the unmanageable mess that it had been last year. The doors remained open all night, and by all night I mean well into the wee hours of the morning. There were undoubtedly, large quantities of alcohol consumed, but the crowd remained well behaved and respectful throughout the night.

Robert Earl Keen- “Swervin’ in My Lane”

The show was amazing and was (for us) a fitting finale for the festival. After being out most of the night again on Saturday, we just never made it up and about to take in any of what I hear were excellent shows on Sunday. All in all, it was a fantastic week of incredible music, we can’t wait until next year.

REK