Continuing mudcat marvels/lunacy:
In anticipation of the impending event, Toronto tests out every known weather pattern, gets its aim. Rain pours, temperature goes up to 32, and then it is noon, and shazam, God stops fiddling with the dials for a few hours and the weather decides to be beautiful. Rick is out with a weed wacker, removing what is left of his front lawn. Bonnie and Duckboots are wisely sitting on the panoramic garden bench, taking in the afternoon.
It may be that cases are the defining qualities of musicians -- including stacks of beer cases -- and not the music inside them. Crowhugger, Willie- O (O standing for some kind of Martin guitar, I surmise -- he and Rick are deep into Martineana within about 1/33 of a second. (The Martins have landed, the Martins have landed). Anyway, cases of all sizes and descriptions, woven, leathered, black enter -- they stack up by the washing machine.
I go out and sit in a very beautiful patio chair, compete with cushions, surrounded by multi-coloured flowers. In instants, my backside is soaking wet. The cushions are wet whoopies from the morning deluge. Must do something about that.
Bonnie has brought her resonator dish which focusses universal harmonic rays on the potato salad, so that we can start the party.
While we wait for the guests of honour, we test out harmony ("You Ain't Goin Nowhere"), bottomed out by Tony's bass, Bonnie hovering, me faking whatever sounds good, Crowhugger weaving, Wille-O filling in, and Rick concertmeistering. The Tokens can sleep easy in the sweet arms of Jesus, but hey.
In an explosion of ecstasy, Bick Mick (disguised behind a very inadequate Dave Swan button courtesy of Bill Sables) and Dave Swan (disguised behind a somewhat more adequate but still not exactly semiotically challenged button designating him as Big Mick), and PJ and MarlyLou and Ciara, and god knows what all, arrive. We are all immediately in total humsville, as my mother used to call it.
It all begins to blur:
The last defining moment is probably the first, which involves a cunning trap set up by Duckboots. With majestic aplomb, Big Mick sits in a patio chair (no cushion by now!), whose back legs slowly sink into the garden, catapulting with the slow grace that only big men can achieve, Himself into the rhododendrons. Vast numbers of flowers willingly go to the grave, crushed under this loving weight. Ladies, till you have seen Big Mick garlanded with posies, you have not seen him in full, well, flowering.
Somewhere in here, Ciara, the daughter, obviously being groomed for superstardom, stepdances. This is only the beginning of myriad wonders. Within minutes, she is into card tricks, baffling everyone -- including, it must be admitted, herself on occasion. Clearly there is a Victorian upbringing going on here. I expect her at one moment to break into "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" or "Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight". Within a year or two she will be watercolouring, and learning the latest minuets from France. Some young man out there is in big trouble, and is blithely going about his business unsuspecting. At the end of the afternoon, she and I are engaged in tagteam washboarding. In between, she is keyboarding, weaving, crafting. A few more hours, and she would be differentiating partial equations. At her age, I was attempting to graduate from buttons to zippers.
Dave Swan reveals that he is in Michigan to learn to drive oxen. It is pointed out to him that this is a really slow way to get to a fire, but he explains carefully that they are for farming. We discuss the virtues of mules over oxen. Rick as usual tries to get everyone into that famous ox-driving song that none of us have ever heard of.
More marvels. Pj pulls out a bodhran, and we all run for cover. And then we all run back again. We have never heard such a thing: so that's what a good one sounds like!!! I am sitting kittycorner (there are cats too, here on occasion) watching this piece of fabulosity --- the music is pretty good too. Dave is seriously, seriously lucky, and seriously, seriously knows it.
We are all crowded around the phone talking and singing to a woman in Wyoming named katlaughing, and a little later, another woman in Colorado named Wyowoman. A Martian would be completely puzzled. What possesses these Earthlings? I mean apart from getting in a car and driving 6 and a half hours (or 3 in the case of Willie-O) to sing with a bunch of Canadians in Toronto to women in Wyoming and Colorado. Makes sense to me.
Fine thing: we get whole doses of really well done unaccompanied singing from most everyone. Dave and I sit on the steps listening to Tony Burns doing the Tay Boat song. Dave does a beautiful version of the song from Cymbeline -- "fear no more the heat of the sun." Gaelic songs flow out of Mick like, well, like Gaelic songs.
We raise a toast to Max, Dick and Susan, and to all Mudcatters, everywhere -- ain't technology grand?
Sounds: Crowhugger's sonorous cello; Willie-O's sweet guitar work; Rick and PJ's dueling percussionisms, Bonnie's hypnotic "white shoes".
The sun fills the late afternoon. Rick goes for broke and brings out the fiddle. The bodhran lady rises. Hoedown. Problem: we have about 30 square feet filled with musicians and chairs, and beyond that are the precious flowers that Mick fell in (have I mentioned that yet? I promised I wouldn't say anything about that). "Skip To My Lou". Bonnie and I do a soon to be patented "buck-and-wing" mingled with the Texas Star. We are a mild sensation, and only a few flowers are martyred.
Mick envelops us in "The Dutchman".
It is getting late -- it is all like a haiku, seventeen syllables with a world in it -- and there are some requests for that "well-known folksinger". Rick has already given us "Margins of My Neighbourhood" and "Bachelors Hall". He sobers us all with "Voices of Struggle." We fool the gods of time for a few more moments, but it does not work for long, damn them.
Everyone kind of has to leave, and it happens, but we are not happy about it. We pile out to the front lawn, still reeling from Rick' s attack so many hours earlier, and kidnap an innocent passerby into taking a group photo. And then they are gone.
An hour later I am on a bus, and a memory comes into my mind, as the summer darkness finally comes down. I have been in Rick's house to get some refreshment, and I come out and at the bottom of the garden where the patio is, I see everyone in mid-song, playing away like a dream of some strange fullscale (well, overscale) elves or faeries amidst the patterns of multi-coloured flowers everywhere. It is like a mirage. But it is really the Mudcat made flesh, and as ever, it is a miraculous sight to behold.