3rd times harm

Back from San Diego Pride and at this point recovered enough to jot it out.

We left around 9 on Friday night and drove down in 3 separate cars, we glitters understand the importance of conservation. Amy and I had Marc in our car, along with various equipment and a whole bunch of drag. Leaving late in the evening as we did made for a fast easy drive. Dylan and Tiger in his car arrived in SD first, followed shortly by Devin, Bun and David. Dylan and Tiger headed towards Friends of Tiger's where he would be staying and Devin and his gang headed to the hotel that devin had reserved... For last month. He was shocked to find that not only did he not have a reservation for the weekend, but that he had been charged for a weekend for the month before. Scary. In previous years we had been unable to find a room in all of San Diego, panic began to soon set in.
Luckily our car, bringing up the rear, was passing an exit called "hotel circle" just as we got the news from Devin that we had no where to stay for the weekend. We pulled off and the first hotel we checked had a sign stating "no availability", hmm... Luck would have it that the motel six next door did in fact have a room for us, and we settled in quickly.
We spent the rest of the evening like a good family on vacation, swilling a 20 pack of beer and various wine coolers playing music trivia from a book.
Saturday we found ourselves up at the crack of noon ready to get the show on the road. We ate brunch at a place with Mimi in the title. Good Brunch.
Fully filled we made a journey to Balboa park to play for gay. We entered as near our stage as possible. Devin and I still ended up hiking nearly half a mile carrying instruments looking for our stage.
San Diego pride went through a major overhaul prior to this year. A new company took over and the seemed to want to run a gay pride like any standard music festival, which doesn't really work all that well. They went from 2 stages to 10, and separated all the kids from the adults, apparently because "you know how those gay folks are with children". The beer gardens were also kept in major lock down areas, hidden from view of the fine members of the community who of course came out to show their support... The beer gardens while annoying can work to a degree, as long as they all three remain open. This year they did not, one was closed down do to what the fire Marshall called "too much goofing off".
What the fire Marshall refers to as "too much goofing off" had better be nothing short of a 30 man gang bang, because closing the garden the closed ended up forcing lines and one in one out policies at the other two gardens, which really annoyed me later when I wanted a beer.
Anyway...
Having finally found our stage, something called the Buzz Lawn stage, I was less than thrilled. In previous years we had played for kids, teens, what we in the business refer to as "the record buying public", or "our bread and butter". And of course since they had been held in lock down in some secret area this year they were no where to be seen. Instead the audience at our stage seemed to be made up of people who had no idea how large the festival actual was who walked too far in one direction and ended up near passing out from heat stroke in front of our stage. When we accepted the invite to play this year, they stated that they wanted us on the youth stage and the main stage. Of course after we accept we find out we were on the passed out in the grass stage. Fun Fun Fun.
The show itself started very poorly also. Our first number, an updated version of Backdoor Jesus was going along in my mind fine, until almost all sound cut out half way. The sound man not one to lose his cool, sat staring at nothing making no attempts fix anything, since it never occurred to him that maybe the song didn't end abruptly in the middle of a verse. Oh well.
Later I would hear a recording of this song and it's probably just as well that it cut off since you couldn't hear any lead vocal in the audience. To confound the issue even further I was blessed with no monitor on my side of the stage for the first two songs.
So enough bitching, it was annoying and could have been much more fun.
Directly after the show sucking we all adjusted our attitudes and had a great time for the rest of the weekend. We went out on the town and made joy. We met some people, including a drummer who lives in Silver Lake. Could be a good thing.

Preparing to leave for Iceland next week. So very excited.