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Blogging by email... it's the wave of the future.

I may even be naked right now. You'll never know.

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Hats off to Brian!

Not only did Brian arrange our participation in the two tsunami
benefit concerts, he also (1) picked out our new uniforms (black
shirts, dark blue jeans, black shoes, optional gum on jeans); (2)
directed our performance; (3) wrote three of the four songs we sang;
(4) sang solos on two of them, and (5) perhaps most importantly,
changed a lyric on the fly to keep from alienating our somewhat
geriatric audience.

The actual lyric in "High Notes" (a great new Rosen original about a
singer in a hugely successful rock/pop boy band who is trying to stay
loyal to his hometown girlfriend) is "All the other guys take a new
girl every night / Wasting all their time bangin' everything in
sight."

In the slightly edited version (assuming I heard it correctly), Brian
said "hitting" instead of "banging." That was smoooothly done, Senor
Song, though I'm not sure it was enough to make up for the punch line
of "I've Got Mail."

Another non-stop weekend for the Richter Scales. Saturday night was spent entertaining a suite filled with the crazed attendees of a wild bachelorette party. Fortunately, things were kept from getting too far out of hand, mostly because the groom of said bachelorette is none other than our very own too-sexy-for-this-bachelorette-party stud Curtis. So we were all on our best behavior. Although housekeeping is going to have a fit when they see what Curtis did to the sofa.

And then, a mere twelve hours after finishing up that gig, we showed up at the loading dock of Chabot College to start our sound check for the first of two a cappella benefits for the victims of the tsunami. They were great concerts, filled with some fantastic a cappella talent. It was great to see Clockwork again (we sang with them in the Harmony Sweepstakes last year, very nice guys and great singers) and we got to meet some other groups from the area. The crowd was a little bit older than many of our previous audiences, and I was worried that they wouldn't appreciate some of my...ummm...humor, but based upon the warm response in the lobby after the show, they seemed to like us just fine.

Some other things we discovered:

James Currier did not own a pair of jeans prior to this gig.
Mark Casey can catch grapes in his mouth with astounding accuracy.
Having your dressing room in the men's bathroom isn't too bad.
La Salsa makes great Wahoo.
Loren Cheng is capable of eating an entire bag of Mother's animal crackers.
Janus funds did some really messed up things back during the boom.

Hey. How are you doing. That's nice. Have a good weekend? Cool. What did you do? Ah. That's nice. You know what I did? I HAD A BLAST AT THE RICHTER SCALES RETREAT!

Yeah. That's one of the nice things about being a Richter Scale. A couple of times a year we rent out some cabin or something far away and spend a good 30 or 40 hours with the chaos that is the Richter Scales. Sorta like an extended sleepover party, a chance to regress a bit, channel our inner adolescent, eat a lot of junk food, and walk around in our underwear. And maybe sing a bit. This retreat was a bit unique in that at no point did we ever leave the cabin. Normally we head out to a nearby town to accost the locals with unrequested harmonies. (Sometimes they're thrilled. Sometimes they're indifferent. Sometimes they throw things.) However, due to the nasty weather this past weekend, we were holed up indoors the entire time, with only a brief walk to the beach when it stopped pouring and merely drizzled. There we had a nice game of catch the coconut. (No. That's not a euphamism for anything. You just throw a coconut and catch it. What are you thinking?)

We did get some singing done, learning Matt Hempey's brand new arrangement of a funk classic, and polishing up some tunes for our upcoming CD (is that better Curtis?). We also had long, soul searching discussions about the direction of the group, how we can best achieve our goals, and who we think is the prettiest girl in homeroom. (Mary Sue Peterson totally rules!) We laughed, we cried, we left the weekend a little bit wiser, a little bit closer, and three pounds heavier.

So. Got any plans for next weekend?