In Love, in Tampa
by Scott Hardie on February 16, 2015
Last night we took in a special show by Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman for Valentines Day. Kelly is a huge fan of both and I was happy to take her to see them.
I did not start the evening as a Palmer fan, but I was one by the time it ended. Her songs can be pretentious, self-involved, shrill, off-key -- all qualities that are off-putting at first that gradually become endearing. I particularly enjoyed her piano playing and wished for an instrumental number, but it wasn't in the cards.
I enjoyed Gaiman's comics back when I read comics, and I knew of his reputation as a very gifted storyteller otherwise. He doesn't have the best reading voice (and an even worse singing voice), but he certainly made do. His stories were touching and clever.
The best part of the show by far was the conversations with the audience, in the form of Q&A on notes dropped in a box in the lobby. Both stars have a mutual love affair with their fans, although Palmer's are far more extroverted (and prone to shouting things at her all night, as I learned). They improvised very funny answers to fan questions and showed a lot of personality. They were there to engage with the audience, not just put on a one-way show.
We arrived too late to have the planned dinner with friends in Tampa, so we sat shivering outside without jackets (boo hoo, right northern friends?) at a sidewalk bistro before showtime. I was on diet, so I just had to sit while Kelly ate hummus and tried to get it over with quickly. We walked around downtown Tampa a bit and found a shop selling all kinds of chocolates, the perfect spontaneous purchase on Valentines Day. Due to the show running past midnight and it already being a long drive to Tampa and back, we wound up having a ten-hour day trip. It was worth it.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Breaking Monopoly
My latest pastime has been seeing if I can rig a video game of Monopoly to give me infinite money. It turns out that I can, but it's incredibly tedious, far more so than I thought. I like to play with the NES version, because it's just colorful and fun enough without being too sophisticated in its AI. Go »Mars Needs Kitties
Thanks to Lori for sending me this: That gets me thinking: Do you think if people hadn't had the idea for crop circles until a decade later that the fad would have even happened? In this decade we have the tools on personal computers to fake images like this with photo-perfect results, and hoaxers could just distribute photos with the click of a mouse. Photos have been doctored for decades, of course, but now your grandma can do it, you know? Go »No Disrespect
One of my pet peeves is people saying, "Have you ever noticed that the phrase 'no disrespect' is immediately followed by something disrespectful?" Well, YEAH. That's the point of the phrase. Go »69.120.111.23
By now, we've all read the news of how the bodies of wrestler Chris Benoit and his family were found on the afternoon of June 25th. But who read the news early? Check out this Wikipedia edit which mentioned his wife's death 14 hours before the bodies were discovered. Go »Windbag
I don't know what Polaroids he has of whom, but somehow Tom Skilling has elevated himself to some kind of all-important weather-broadcasting god. When I grew up in Chicago, I watched him gradually get a bigger and bigger budget for his animated graphics, and gradually get a larger and larger timeframe to deliver his dull reports. By the time I left town, he had a whole 20 minutes of the hour-long midday newscast for the fucking weather, and boy did he find trivia to fill it: Average dew points across Cook County on this day in 1854, theta-e temperature predictions for every Cubs home game next season, you name it. Go »
