Lightfoot Days

Hi Everybody
I’m sorry. I know I said there was going to be another travelogue for the Lightfoot Days Festival in Orillia but (this is going to sound like a lame excuse), when I got up there on Thursday afternoon, I realized I hadn’t brought the right computer with me. 
I have three MacBooks. There is some redundancy, but for the most part, each one serves a different purpose. The one I use to create, edit, and publish these posts was left on my kitchen table.

What I would have posted

Thursday October 30 
Sometimes, hurricanes get into the Gulf of Mexico, and the remnants travel up the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. Alternately, these gigantic storms avoid the Gulf and head north along the US east coast, where their massive spiral arms occasionally collide with lows from the Canadian west. 
Either way, the result is harsh winds and torrential rain in southern Ontario. 
That was the case as Jeanette and I drove north to Orillia. While the unending convoys of trucks splashed tsunamis of gray-white wash against my windshield, I hydro-planed up the fast lane and rapidly lost patience with the universe. 
It was in this frame of mind that I checked us into the Champlain Hotel. It’s an old, refurbished building with extra wings added over the years. It was very nice but had an unusual floor plan.
Hotel clerk: You are in room 215. There are two second floors, an upper and a lower with three ways to get there depending on whether you enter from street level, the parking lot or through the side ramp nearest the newer wing with the elevator but don’t press the button for the second floor or you’ll be faced with another set of stairs that go down and then back up towards the ice machine that regretfully isn’t working right now but tells you that you did indeed make a bad decision to use the elevator in the first place………
Me (outside voice): Stop, we’ll find it.
Me (inside voice): SHUT UP!
Jeanette: We’ll need the GPS

A Bull’s Ass At Fly Time

The show was great. The band is so tight now that if anything does go wrong, like a missed cue or a forgotten solo, we adjust for it. To an audience that knows every nuance of Lightfoot music, it just sounds like an edit or a new interpretation.
Here’s something I do: If I make a mistake early in a song, I repeat it later so it sounds like it’s part of the arrangement.

Photos courtesy of Jeanette Lynes

Next Post: The panels on Friday.