A Trip to Scarborough Faire

On Sunday Bruce, Shane, Christy, Pat, Susan, Amy and myself went to the Scarborough Faire Renaissance Festival in Waxahachie, TX (about 30 minutes south of the the Dallas metro area). We had a great time mostly drinking beer and walking around making fun of people. The Faire is not something that you would want to do every year but probably every three years or so it's nice to get out.

Trying to organize six people to do anything was found to be very difficult. As a result we only saw a couple of 'shows' but did get a great deal of food and gulped down a lot of the aforementioned beer.

I took my brand new binaural microphones and recorded about two hours worth of material. I also dropped one of the microphones in my beer. Amazingly it still worked great - heavy sigh of relief. Binaural microphones are stuck in the ear (like headphones) and are a very popular way to record nature and concerts. The playback is unbelievably cool - very 3D especially when listening in headphones. You can actually tell when people are ahead of you or behind you. Basically since we have learned to become 'experts' at interpreting direction and distance from the sound reaching our ears, we end up using those same skills in interpreting a binaural recording. It's not super clear how exactly I'm going to use these mics yet (they don't make super interviewing mics, for example) but it's kind of fun to experiment with them.

Here are some pics from the festival.



Pat, Susan and Amy
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Bruce, Shane and the Back of Christy trying to make themselves sick
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Who ARE these people?
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My Fair Lady Indeed!

This weekend I saw the musical "My Fair Lady" written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe at the Dallas Theater Center. I had seen the movie with Audry Hepburn and Rex Harrison and, as most people, had really enjoyed it. We got there kind of late and had to take some pretty bad seats for the first half. But we made up for it in the second half, snagging some pretty close seats on the floor.

I enjoyed it very much. Just about all the songs are very well known from my personal favorite "On The Street Where You Live" to songs like the very fun "Get Me To The Church On Time" and the lovely "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face". I hadn't seen this since I started writing songs myself and I was instantly drawn into the song writing. They were both simple but very clever and the melodies have stood the test of time. Absolutely excellent. The cast was really really good and I wasn't at all disappointed in the choice of Martin Kildare as Henry Higgins. Sherry Boone as Eliza cleaned up well and put on a terrific Cockney accent.

We (Susan, Amy, Carolyn and Ron) had dinner beforehand at the swanky Deep Ellum restaurant Local. Yum!

Tripping Bluebonnets

Last weekend Amy and I headed a bit south of Dallas to see bluebonnets and other Texas wildflowers. We had lovely weekend weather and snapped a few pictures. We also podcasted about the trip some on our latest podcast. Too see pictures and to listen to the podcast just click here to the podcast page.