those who were seen dancing

This is the most fun I've ever had filling out a list on the internets. I now kinda want to do it with every band I like.

Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title. [Though this is not a part of the original task, I challenge you to have both the title and the meaning of your song answer the question. I'm kinda 50/50 here, but it was in my mind.]

( Matt Pond PA answers your questions )

Here is how it works. Copy this list. Leave in the bands you've seen perform live. Delete the ones you haven't and add new ones that you have seen until you reach 25. An asterisk means the previous person had it on their list. Two asterisks means the last two people who did this before you had that band on their list.

1. The Church
2. Ani Difranco *
3. Crowded House
4. Jethro Tull
5. Nirvana
6. Mike Doughty
7. Clem Snide
8. Whiskeytown
9. 6 String Drag
10. Rainer Maria
11. Girlyman**
12. Blues Traveler
13. Dan Bern
14. They Might Be Giants
15. Son Volt
16. Peter Murphy
17. Turku
18. The Butchies
19. Pop Culture Casualties
20. Erin McKeown *
21. Rusted Root *
22. REM
23. Indigo Girls**
24. Concrete Blonde
25. Dar Williams**

I'm starting to feel like my harp practice is just a thing I do, like the dance and CST stuff. I think this is a good sign. But. I've also been feeling disconnected from practice in general, so I'm going to start keeping a practice log of everything. It'll be public but cut, so this is the last you have to read about it.
( relaxing sunday of practice )

( The lyrics to 'Minstrel Boy'. Dude, this song is so sad! )

First projects after "Scarborough Fair" (the easiest song evah): "Parting Glass" and "Minstrel Boy", because I-I-I am a Seeeentimental Girl.

For rackletang and anyone else who hates on the musical theatre.

Like pretty much every child who grew up in the 80s, I saw a tour of Cats. And I thought the theatre was magic to begin with, but whoa... theatre with singing and dancing. Mind blowing. Even from Cats, which, let's face it, is not T.S. Eliot's best work [not to mention Andrew Lloyd Webber's - I mean, no one's on roller skates, but...] and has very little to say about the world, the human condition, or anything but the imagination of children.

That's enough.

There is no way I could see enough high school productions of Into the Woods in this lifetime (and still, you know, have a life). Something about the grown-up fairy tale seems to resonate so perfectly with kids of a certain age that they're just so there.

Because the music. It is a metaphor for emotion. And the thing with metaphoric emotion is, it can change you. Temporarily or, if it's really really really good, forever. The musical demands a type of suspended disbelief that most other popular theatre doesn't even attempt (Tony Kushner, who essentially writes musical theatre without music, is an exception), absolutely requires you to live temporarily in another world. With all the other people in the room with you.

Really good musicals go one better and evoke more than they tell. Hello, Dolly, for instance, is all about the tell; it's prose - but Evita is a dream about Evita. Tommy (not as performed by the Who, but on stage) is visual poetry. Chess straddles the fence; it is both a straight story and an implied one.

Tommy, in fact, is the mostly provoking and transformative piece of musical theatre I can currently think of. It's probably difficult to envision without being there, but the B'way production years ago dealt in broad swaths of color and movement that just swept you up. And the architecture of the show literally pulled the audience into the performance - it wrapped around you (which, come to think of it, Cats had done when I was wee) and reflected back at you.

How can one sit in a dark room having the same experience with so many other people and not come away from it a little changed?