An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

When you are in a band you will always notice the people who dance in front of the stage. For example, when Great Northern plays at The New Deal Café, there's a guy who comes out and just spins and spins through the entire performance. Doesn't dance, exactly - just spins. I don't know who he is. He's never at any of our other shows. But clearly he isn't prone to dizziness.  During set breaks I always like to go out and talk with people in the crowd, particularly the dancers. They're the ones most visibly enjoying the show and it's fun and flattering to interact with them. I've got a standard patter about how much I enjoy feeling the energy from the crowd and that the band feeds that energy back out in the performance, and it the result is an energetic bond between the performers and the audience. It's all a little more hippie-dippie new-agey schtick than anything I actually believe, but it's not entirely bullshit, and it makes for good small talk...

We recently visited friends who retired to Lewes, Delaware (near Rehoboth Beach). We've visited them many times at this point, so this time to do something different we decided to take the Lewes-Cape May ferry and bike into Cape May. Going on a ferry with a bike is fun. I'm not sure why - I guess because you're kind both pedestrian and vehicle. You roll onto the ferry like a car, except without any traffic hassles, and you're traveling light, like a pedestrian. I've taken a bike onto ferries in Portugal, the Netherlands, Delaware/New Jersey, and of course, there's the Staten Island Ferry in New York (which I've ridden as part of the Five Boro Bike Tour ).  Ferries vary in size. The ones I took on my Netherlands trip were tiny little boats - rafts, almost (though big enough to hold a couple of cars), crossing tiny canals or small rivers. Until recently we had a fairly small fdrry locally: the now (at least temporarily) defunct White's Ferry on the Potomac...