Started writing this one in July. Better late than never, I guess?

Last weekend Huzzban and I had our first proper Athens night out in well over a year. There was an all-day show at Southern Brewing, with something like ten different acts playing to benefit some charity or other (sorry, I can't remember what day it is or what I had for lunch today so six days ago is a veritable *lifetime*). Drivin n Cryin was headlining, and we both had to work so we missed the bulk of the day anyway, but mainly we were very excited to see John Moreland again. (Goddamn I wish I knew how to hyperlink. It's late and I'm tired and I am relearning how to do this on an Apple computer, so apologies. But go ahead and DuckDuckGo that shit. You're welcome.) 

The weather was alternately sunny and stormy, with heat being fairly constant. Hello, Georgia summer! Huzzban had to work at the Cheese Shop all day, so I picked him up after. we got a ride from a dear friend who answered my call on The Facepage because I knew there would be no parking and we were already going to be arriving so late. Since the pandemic it is virtually impossible to get a ride share in this town, and we were incredibly grateful for the assist. We arrived in the middle of Lera Lynn's set. I had not heard her stuff in years, and it was really enjoyable. We found our friends (or rather, they found us) pretty quickly, and after her set was over we went in to get some beers. We planted ourselves front and center for John Moreland's set and stood in the blazing sun between a very young and handsy teenaged couple and a somewhat inebriated woman who was closer to our age and definitely a JM fan. I was crying ten seconds into the first song, partially from relief and the return of familiarity and a small slice of normalcy, and partially because his songs are just so bloody sad. It was fantastic, and I only had to tell the teenagers to stop talking once. I did not have the heart to tell the drunk woman to stop singing the words, out loud and off key, just after JM did. in another circumstance I would likely have been much more annoyed, but I was so happy to be there that I really didn't care.

After the JM set it started pouring again, this time with some thunder, so everybody huddled inside again while we waited for it to blow over. When it did we all went back outside. D n C was great. you could tell they were also just happy to be back in front of people. I honestly don't know their music that well, outside of a couple of hits, but I had a blast. There were giant balloons being batted about (fairly healthy hippie contingent in their fan base), and there were special guests. Mike Mills has a voice that will always make me feel like it's a gorgeous, sunny, fall day in Illinois, even when it's a rainy, sweaty night in Athens, and for that I am grateful. Ran into another local music legend (not the internationally famous one with the recognizable face, but another guy who has not only played on but produced some of the best records in our collection (and likely yours). I hadn't seen him in ages, and as with many other folks in this town who know everyone, I wasn't sure if he would know me, but he did. we talked for probably 20 minutes, which is probably 18 minutes longer than we had ever consecutively spoken before. We were laughing about some drama that happened 20 years ago while he was recording some friends of mine, and then he told me about a fabulous punk rock couple in town who, unbeknownst to me, had been on a show called "Wife Swappers" or some such nonsense, where the Punk Rock wife moved in with a yuppie dad and his kid(s) and the mother from that family moved in with Punk Rock Husband and their young daughter and a TV crew captured the results. everyone was apparently paid very well. I was not able to find this on the internet, but boy howdy would I love to see it. When Mills got up to do a song, this guy looked at me and said "we are so incredibly lucky to live here." Which is all the more fantastic because I was thinking to myself "Dude, you were in -----." I am not going to say his name here because A) I don't want to appear to be a name dropper; and B) I don't want to call him out publicly for the next thing he said, which was "I'm sorry if I am talking a lot, but I just smoked some pot a couple of minutes ago and it really hit me." 

After the show we were nowhere near wanting to go home, so Huzzban and I are our friend P went to Waffle House. Not the nearest Waffle House, mind you, because P has knowledge and opinions about the quality of various Waffle Houses in town, and also we knew it would be packed with people getting out of the show. So we drove to the WH on the opposite side of town, and holy cow did it deliver. The guy working the grill was totally pro and loudly bragging about it. Our server was obviously brand new, but none of us cared because we were thrilled just to be in a damned WH in the first place. There was an older couple there who obviously owned the nicest car in the parking lot, a gorgeous, mint-condition vintage convertible that we had admired when we parked next to it. They were dressed to the proverbial nines, as if they had just come from a symphony or a charity fundraiser at a Country Club fancier than any of the ones in town. At the table behind P and Huzzban was a family of five with a little girl who was not older than three. Were it not 11pm I would have assumed they had just come from church. At the table behind me was a guy who was not wearing any shoes, slowly removing his soaking wet socks. He had a large backpack with him and was likely homeless. While we looked over the menu, he went, shoeless, to the rest room to dry his socks under the hand dryer. We knew this because that's what he was yelling back at the Grill Master, who was yelling across the counter to him that he needed to put his shoes on if he wanted to stay. All of this to say that it was a standard weekend night at the Waffle House. Our drinks hadn't arrived by the time the food started coming out. Not even water, which our server noticed right after she apologized for dropping my a la carte egg off of the plate and onto the table in front of me. Again, I did not care. We were just so happy to be there, to be anywhere. After all was said and done we were home and in bed before 12:30. It was a perfect and perfectly Athens night.