Tonight is the Spring Concert at my little private school, an event that The Virus denied us in 2020, and which my illness earlier this week seemed to threaten.  Indeed, it’s the first true concert the students have given since the ignominious Christmas Concert 2019, which veterans of my class have dubbed “Corporate Christmas” for reasons I cannot elaborate upon here.

In the spirit of live music, I thought I’d look back this week at a post about the first Spooktacular, before the epic front porch Spooktacular II.  This inaugural Spooktacular was back during The Before Times, in The Long, Long Ago, when coffee shops still would let me gyrate behind a keyboard for tips on Halloween.

The show ended up being a huge success, and inspired the at-home, front-porch sequel in October 2020.  I’m currently planning a springtime front porch concert for Friday, 28 May 2021, but I’ve gotsta get through tonight first.

With that, here is 2019’s “Gig Day III: Spooktacular“:

It’s been a pretty wild week; by “wild,” I mean that I’ve spent most of my time during the day working, only to stay up too late playing Heroes of Hammerwatch ($11.99 on Steam), a grinding rogue-like, with my brother and friends.  Talk about burning the candles at both ends.  I also just finished grading a massive stack of quizzes—just in time for a massive stack of tests to rise in their place.

Grading papers is a bit like the mythical hydra in that regard—lop off a few heads, and dozens take their places.  It is easily my least favorite part of the teaching profession.

Regardless, the wild week is going to end on a spooktacular note:  tonight I’m dusting off the keyboard and, for the first time in a few months, playing one of my legendary (and legendarily poorly-attended) coffee shop concerts.

Last year I decided that I wanted to observe October and Halloween properly.  The month always seems to blow by—can you believe we’re already a third of the way through it?!—and with Christmas’s festive tentacles encroaching ever-earlier into the calendar year, it seems as though poor Halloween is getting short shrift.

As such, I decided to do a little Halloween show.  Autumn is a great time for live music, regardless—the days are getting shorter and chillier, and people are looking for more cozy, indoor entertainment.  Coffee shops are whipping out their pumpkin spice [insert product here], and there’s a whimsical magic in the air.  I can see why the ancients thought it was a time of attenuated, blurred lines between the natural and the supernatural worlds.

In keeping with that tradition, I’ll be playing a little gig at The Purple Fish Coffee Company in Darlington, South Carolina tonight from 7-9 PM, which I’ve dubbed “TJC’s Halloween Spooktacular.”  The Purple Fish is run as part of a local church, and they inconceivably do half-off specials on Friday nights.

I won’t have time for my elaborate pre-show rituals for this gig, but I will be packing up the van for a weekend of festival-going (more details in next weekend’s SubscribeStar Saturday post).  I’ll also have a student-drummer sitting in on some tunes, and my buddy John will be joining in on vocals and twelve-string guitar.  Scary!

Happy Twenty Days from Halloween!

–TPP