What, and leave show business?

This is what the most veteran member of our band says when confronted with a situation that surprises even him (his seedy past included playing in a South Indian Carnatic Orchestra, a Ukrainian Bandura Orchestra, and also with Linda Ronstadt).

We try to protect ourselves with this mantra: Either a good gig, or good money, but not neither. This keeps us from playing at the openings of shopping malls, for instance.

We did a unexpectedly lovely wedding at the Celebrity Goat Farm in Pittsboro (to your right, an actual Celebrity Goatlet, picture by Gerry). They didn't tell us whether this was a celebrity farm for ordinary goats, or an ordinary farm for celebrity goats. Anyway, I would direct you to their website, but they don't have one. Too bad, cause they sell great (and very expensive) goat cheese and also hats that say "Celebrity Goat Farm" and you would be the only one on your block to own one. The guy that owns the farm and the 60 goats has a nice B&B there (except there's that smell of 60 goats) and is a GREAT cook and puts on weddings.

We mostly do non-mainstream weddings, specializing in "More-or-less Traditional Music from the Northern Hemisphere and the Previous Millennium" as we do. (When we started it was the Current Millennium, but then Y2K happened and we had to order new business cards.) That means if somebody Scottish is marrying somebody Jewish, they can Google "Scottish Jewish Wedding" and our band will pop up on the screen.

So this was a Polish Russian wedding but they wanted medieval music for the prelude. Just our kind of gig. When we got there the bride and groom were sweeping the floor and setting up chairs but they soon disappeared and changed into their lovely garb. They had made their own outfits, sort of SCA-esque with flowing sleeves and wreaths, and the bridegroom had sewn himself a green velour Russian sort of tunic. It was a Unitarian Universalist ceremony, candles and stuff. A Unitarian minister once told me Unitarians don't consider themselves Christians since they don't believe in God, I hadn't known that.

Afterwards we played oboreks and mazurkas and waltzes and everybody danced, young and old, mostly dances they were making up on the spot, and the food was absolutely wonderful. For once, instead of lurking in the back we sat at the banquet table with the bride and groom and their parents and got treated like royalty. At a goat farm. Isn't life good?

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