Well Mick, if I'm going to pick on either you or Rick, obviously it's going to be you. First, I've gotten used to never knowing what the hell Rick's talking about anyway; and second, I'm sucking up to him at the moment so I can keep borrowing all his stuff.

I've been thinking more about what Mark Clark said about his friend who quit the day job to study his instrument. In a sense, that's what I'm doing too. In my mind there's a clear distinction between a musician-as-entertainer and musician-as-artist. An entertainer's main "selling point" is the repertoire itself (as opposed to how the repertoire is performed), as well as being dependable and on time etc., whereas the artist is in demand for his or her unique ability to write songs and/or perform them at a certain level of skill.

What I want, long-term, is to be an artist, but I'm not ready to do so yet. So I've made being an entertainer my day job while I study to be an artist. I figure this will be more fun than other day jobs and will teach me some transferrable skills (business skills, PA use etc.), and I prefer the seniors' market route to the more common bar route since I hate smoke and I know more older pop music than current pop music anyway. But there are certainly some songs that I'm doing now that I could happily do without.

Marion