John Hiatt and Sleeping In

Snowman and I headed to Freeport last night, to catch John Hiatt performing in the LLBean Summer Concert Series. They set up a stage in the middle of the LLBean retail complex and all sorts of singers come to play throughout the summer. And best of all, it's free! Last year, Nate, Shannon, Snowman and I went to watch John Hiatt and Shawn Colvin. However, after one song by Shawn Colvin, it started to thunder and lightening and they hustled her off the stage. As it didn't seem too bad, and it didn't start to downpour, so we, and many others, hung around, hoping they would get the musicians back out on stage. It never happened. We left, unfulfilled. So, we came back this year in the hopes that we would get to actually hear John Hiatt sing. The weather cooperated and it was a beautiful evening.

We didn't arrive until around 6:45pm, by which time all the prime spots had been taken up, so we set up our chairs towards the back, with the hopes that we would still be able to see once Hiatt got on stage. We ate our sandwiches and people watched. We noticed my friend, George, from the Bradbury Breaker, sitting farther back with his wife on the bleachers near the big screen projector, but didn't recognize anyone else. At 7:30pm, the opening act, Graham Isaacson, came on stage. We couldn't see a thing. So, off I went to say hi to George, and check out how things would be back there. Much better! We could actually see Isaacson's head over the crowd, and of course, got full view on the big screen. We moved back, and sat down with George and his wife Anne. They are a super nice couple, and we had fun chatting.

Hiatt finally came on around 8:30pm, after what seemed like a long wait between Isaacson's last song and his first, but his show didn't disappoint. He played for two hours. Cool! Lots of old favorites and some of his new songs, as well as lots of funny banter in between. He didn't play "Your Dad Did," which I love for the lyrics, "But all hands fold as the two year old says grace. She says help the starving children to get well, but let my brother's hamster burn in hell." For some reason this just cracks me up. But regardless, he played a lot of good music and it was a great time!

Anyway, we didn't get to bed until 11:30pm or so, which is late for us old folk :-)

Which meant that this morning when the alarm went off at 6am I didn't get up. I did finally get up around 6:30, threw on my running clothes, went downstairs, started to eat, stretch, etc, pretty much all in a daze. I realized there was no sound from upstairs, and went to check on Snowman. He was still out. What I should have done was prodded him awake then and there. Or gone for a run myself. But what I did instead was crawl back into bed next to him and lie down, intending to stay there for a minute or two before I shook him awake. The next thing I knew it was 7:45 and time to get up, and organized so we could feed Nate and Shannon's cats and get up to the gallery. Crap. So much for a 5-mile run this morning. I guess we were tired.