I’m With The Band

Andy’s been in bands for as long as I’ve known him; in fact, that’s how we met almost exactly eight years ago.  He was in your typical college “garage band” back then, playing house parties in basements and cramped student housing.  It’s funny because when I first met him (before seeing his band play), I wasn’t that attracted to him.  I think I wrote about him in my LiveJournal (I had a different account back then) and made fun of him because he talked constantly about his band.  He wasn’t really “my type”.  But I went to that house party (I actually brought a different guy as my date!) in a dark, musty basement filled shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred college students doing keg stands and jumping up and down to covers of songs like “Song 2″ by Blur and “Come As You Are” by Nirvana and watched Andy singing and playing lead guitar in front of that crowd of people and found him suddenly irresistible.  I ditched my date and stayed with Andy that night and the rest, as they say, is history…
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We got married two years later and Noah was born just a little over a month after that.  Andy had to put all of his musical hopes and dreams on hold, which wasn’t such a big deal because we were so incredibly busy and overwhelmed with life at that point.  We were really just kids ourselves and had gotten pregnant, moved in together, gotten married and had a baby all within the span of those nine months in 2004.  We were really just kind of flying by the seat of our pants at that point and on top of all of those changes, we were both still in our last semester of college so we didn’t have a lot of time to worry about anything extracurricular like Andy’s music.
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But I don’t think Andy can survive without music in his life in some capacity so he did have a little “studio” set up in our garage while we lived in that apartment in New Hope when Noah was a baby.  Mostly he played by himself — he had his drum kit set up as well as his bass and a couple of guitars, etc. and he’d just play whichever instrument he felt like playing on any given day.  But he did have a couple of friends who were interested in “jamming” every once in a while so they’d get together (and have the cops called on them for noise violations – ha!) and usually I’d come out with Noah and we’d stand a distance away from the garage where it wasn’t so loud and dance to Daddy’s music.
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When I got pregnant with the twins in 2006, the guys had named themselves “Under None” and were actually doing a bit of gigging at area bars.  I was still pretty indulgent throughout the pregnancy and didn’t have too much to say about his rehearsals and shows because they weren’t very frequent at that point.  I did tell Andy that when the babies arrived he would have to put the band on hold.  The twins were born in March of 2007 and the guys took a long break from doing shows at that point.  We had moved into a 3-level townhome while I was pregnant so about once a month I would “allow” Andy to host a rehearsal so they didn’t get too rusty during their time off; I’d stay upstairs on the third level with the kids while the guys would rehearse down in the basement, or when the weather was warm enough, I’d take the kids on a long walk to escape the noise.  We were lucky because we lived in one of the end units and our neighbors on the one side were a single mother and her teenage daughter and they were totally cool with the noise, especially since the rehearsals were pretty infrequent.
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When the twins were about six months old, we bought our first home in the suburbs and Andy was itching to take advantage of the fact that we had a nice, large private garage and a huge yard separating us on all sides from our neighbors.  He had been held back from his music for a long time while the circumstances of our lives kept him busy with work and lacking in sleep, but now he practically begged me to “allow” him to do more with the band.  So for the first year in our new home, rehearsals were usually on Saturday afternoons — scheduled around the twins’ naps (it seems like every aspect of our lives was ruled by the twins’ sleep schedules during those days) — and I discouraged Andy from planning any shows outside the home.  I really needed all the help I could get with the kids.
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Gradually, though, the kids got easier (in some ways; in other ways they just get more difficult with every passing day – haha!) and I started “allowing” Andy to rehearse at the drummer’s home instead of in our garage (I wanted him nearby in case I needed him; several times I cut their rehearsals short when the twins were having a meltdown and I needed another pair of arms!).  As their rehearsals got better, their music got better.  Pretty soon they were being asked to do shows at good venues.  And suddenly Under None turned into a ‘real’ band instead of just something they did for fun a couple of weekends per month.  That’s when it turned into a second job — and that’s when they needed to start buying merchandise and new equipment and traveling to do shows out of town.
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By this time the drummer and bassist of Under None were feeling like members of the family.  When they were at our house, they’d hold the babies for me so I could run down to switch over a load of laundry or they’d get down on the floor to play cars and trucks with Noah.  It makes me smile when I think about it from the kids’ point of view — Josh and Matt have been a part of their lives for as far back as they can remember.  The kids love them; they draw pictures of them, they run to give them hugs when the guys come over, and they genuinely look up to and admire them.  It makes me happy to think that my children have these extra adults to look up to in their lives — honorary uncles to the kids, and true friends to Andy and me.
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2010 has been the year of the most growth and change for Under None thus far.  I have taken on the role of manager and booking agent, and I’m usually the “merch girl” selling their t-shirts and bumper stickers at their shows.  So far this year we’ve traveled all over Minnesota and Wisconsin for shows and we played Chicago in May.  They’ve been in the studio recording their first full-length album which they are hoping to have mixed and mastered by the end of September and ready for release in October or November.  The hope is that we will have the funding to do an extended tour out to the east coast next spring to play shows in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and many cities in between and along the way there and back.
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Money is the main road block right now; it’s hard to make a lot of money as an original band as opposed to a cover band.  Most of the band’s money has to come from merchandise sales because it is hard to depend on a good paycheck from the performance itself.  Bands are typically paid a percentage of the door and sometimes a percentage of bar sales for the evening.  Cover bands, on the other hand, make very good money.  As an example, an original band is lucky to make $50 at a local show and only slightly more when they are on the road.  When we travel, after you take into account the expenses of gas, food and lodging, we are lucky to break even.  However, a cover band makes several hundreds of dollars per night.  When the guys have accepted gigs up north doing cover shows, they have usually made about $1200 for the weekend.  So for this reason, starting in September the guys have taken on an “alter ego” band of sorts — they’ll be a Nirvana tribute band under the name of “Lithium” — and the hope is that the income from this cover band will supplement the profits from Under None in order to cover the costs of producing their album and pay for the upcoming national tour to promote the release of said album.  They’ll still be doing Under None gigs, too, but not as much — maybe once every six weeks or so until the release of the album when they will start accepting more gigs.
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It’s amazing to me the increase in booking inquiries there have been since they’ve decided to consider this cover band endeavor.  We played a show (as Under None) at a pretty popular music venue last Friday, but at the last minute they decided to throw in three or four cover songs to their set because the band they were opening for was a cover band.  The response was incredible and immediately after the set we were approached by the management to schedule two shows in September as Lithium, the Nirvana tribute band.  Clubs have been calling to inquire about booking Lithium AND Under None.  The September and October schedule is filling up fast and it’s really exciting.  But at the same time, the guys are understandably nervous — they are NOT a cover band and don’t want people to forget that.  But I keep trying to remind them that they can’t move forward with Under None if they don’t have money, and they just cannot make money only doing original shows.
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Anyway, it’s been an amazing journey watching this band go from a bunch of guys drinking beer and jamming in our apartment garage until the police inevitably showed up to tell them that neighbors had complained about the noise to what they’ve become now — a professional band filing taxes, doing photo shoots, coordinating wardrobes and playing music that Andy wrote and that fans sing along to in the crowd.  I love that this is the way we live our life.  I love that my kids are growing up with music.  I love that I’m married to a “rock star”.  And I love that Andy is following his dream, my amazing “Accountant By Day, Rockstar By Night” husband.  What a life…!!
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August 23, 2010 | Under None covering “Come As You Are” by Nirvana.  Sound quality is really poor because I took this video on my cell phone, but you get the idea.  Check out those scantily-clad Minneapolis Vix go-go girls dancing in cages! Haha!  (Pickle Park, Fridley, MN)
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August 23, 2010 | Andy and me in front of the merch booth before the Under None set
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May 14, 2010 | The guys posing in front of the BBC club in Milwaukee, WI
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February 6, 2010 | Andy hamming it up onstage
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February 26, 2010 | Club Underground in Minneapolis

Fourteen.

Andy painted our bedroom while I was gone with the kids up north to Baudette to visit my family over the weekend. The Ziobrowskis were visiting from North Carolina and I haven’t seen my goddaughter, Claire, in almost a year. She’s not a baby anymore. The kids are at the perfect age to start loving to play together with their cousin… it was really fun to watch. I hope as they grow up they feel as close to Claire as I felt to my cousins while we were all growing up. A really magical time of my life, and I hope for theirs, too.
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The smell of the fresh paint as I’m trying to fall asleep reminds me of the summer when I was fourteen, almost fifteen. That was the summer that Auntie Nancy came to stay and helped me redecorate my bedroom, the year I attended cheerleading camps back to back all summer long, the summer I babysat the darling 9-month-old girl whose family had moved into the home of my best friend who had moved away years earlier, the summer my parents finally let me get a kitten, and the year I had my first real boyfriend and my first real “freedom.”
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It guess it would have been 1996 (it took me a long time to figure that out). It was the summer that “What’s The Story Morning Glory” was the cassette in my walkman — I was still wary of CDs at that point; you couldn’t make “mix CDs” like you could make mix tapes!  My aunt moved into my bedroom for the summer because my parents wanted me under constant supervision, though I didn’t realize that was the reason for her extended visit.  My parents had caught me with cigarettes  (!!) earlier that spring and I’m sure they thought that was to be the beginning of my downfall; suddenly I had an adult chaperone but I didn’t mind because my Godmother was so much fun to have around.  She was fired up to do fun projects together like picking strawberries and making strawberry jam.  She also helped me redecorate my bedroom for the first time since I had been a toddler moving into my parents’ newly built home — aside from the redecorating I did with the cutouts from my magazines and the hundreds of photos of Leonardo DiCraprio wallpapering an entire wall, that is.
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Nancy helped me not only paint over the baby pink walls of my childhood bedroom, but she also taught me (and mom) how to sponge-paint.  That was the summer my room turned into the early-90s-style gray/pink/white sponge-painted bedroom of my dreams.  (Only to be painted over in dark blue by my brother who couldn’t wait to move into my room the second I left home for college four years later, but that’s another story…)  Anyway, in the late summer after my aunt had gone home to Nevada, I remember sitting in my bedroom with my new fluffy kitten, smelling the fresh paint, and thinking I was the luckiest girl ever.  (I still hadn’t figured out the whole aunt-as-a-chaperone thing, though; Mom didn’t confess that one until just a couple of years ago! I really thought she was just there to spend a fun summer with us!)
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As I look back on that summer now — fourteen years and literally half my life later — I realize it really was one of my very most golden of summers.  It seemed to last for so long, yet now as I remember it I can’t believe how much I fit into those three short hot months in 1996.
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I had my first regular babysitting gig that summer.  I loved the little baby I watched most weekdays while her parents were working.  Her crib was set up in her bedroom right where my friend Sara’s bed had been sitting years earlier as we stayed up watching “Full House” and “Family Matters” on prime-time TGIF television during our frequent sleepovers.
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When I wasn’t babysitting, I spent the afternoons with my boyfriend (at the park, around town, wherever — I wasn’t usually allowed to have him in my parents’ house when they weren’t there.)  We walked and biked a lot that summer.  We rode to the old abandoned train depot where we’d carve our initials in the crumbling bricks and touch the trains as they roared past, slowing to go through customs as they crossed the river into Canada.  We climbed the grain elevator and looked out over the town of Baudette.  We hid beneath the bridge to sneak awkward first-kisses.
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I had cheerleading camps away from home that summer.  One was several hours away in North Dakota; it was my first experience of “summer camp” as I hadn’t done Bible camps or anything as a younger child.  We had the first “real” cheer coach that Baudette had probably ever seen and had spent the previous school year practicing for and competing in (and placing very well) in state competition.  We were the “best” cheerleaders at camp and had the most impressive stunts and most complicated routines.  We were feeling pretty superior.  After spending the day practicing, we’d go to sleep in bunk-style dormitories and I’d listen to my mix tape of Oasis, “Tha Crossroads” and LeAnn Rimes (a really odd mix in hindsight; Nancy really liked LeAnn Rimes so that explains that much).   The next camp was in Bemidji at BSU, where my sister was actually going to school at the time.  We stayed in real dorms and I wrote sappy love letters to Jason and called him with a calling card every night even though I was only gone for a week.  When I got home, Mom and Dad finally consented to getting a kitten when Mom’s coworker’s cat had the most adorable Persian/Himalayan-mix kittens.  We chose Sugar, who was the tiniest little puff of white fuzz and the most adorable kitten I had ever seen.
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That was the summer that lasted forever.  It was the year I watched the Independence Day fireworks while lying in the grass at the bottom of the hill with Jason on one side and my very best friend, Courtnay, on the other.  It was the year I had the freedom to stay out even later than my parents for special occasions like the Fourth of July street dance; the year we stood underneath my parents’ bedroom window at midnight on the eve of their wedding anniversary and sang “Happy Anniversary To You!” at the top of our lungs to the tune of the birthday song.
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It was a really, really wonderful summer and so many of my very treasured memories are from that year.  I hope I never forget.

More Deep Thoughts About Sounds and Memories

Ha!  I crack me up. Coming up with titles for these “Remembering” posts is the hardest part. Anyway…
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It happened again tonight where I was lying in bed just minding my own business when I became totally enthralled with the sounds of nighttime in my neighborhood from out my open bedroom window.  Last night it was the trains; tonight it is the crickets/frogs that are keeping me awake remembering things from my childhood up north.
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Growing up in Baudette with a dad who worked for the DNR was really cool.  We always got to do neat nature-y stuff that I totally took for granted at the time but now look back upon all full of nostalgia.  I remember one spring that the frogs down on the bay beneath my parents’ house were so incredibly loud  — we kids were fascinated and Dad had lots of interesting stuff to tell us about the ways frogs live.  One weekend morning, he asked us if we wanted to go catch some tadpoles.
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Strangely I don’t remember the actual trip to get the tadpoles at all, but I remember the rest of that spring and summer very well!  Suddenly our Fisher Price huge heavy bright red sandbox became a “frog habitat.”  Dad had put the right amount of sand piled up like a “beach” on one side of the box, and it gradually sloped down into a little water-filled lake/reservoir with rock islands here and there.  And we literally had a hundred tadpoles.
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That was the best summer ever.  I remember rushing out to check the tadpoles every morning to see how much they had changed.  Eventually they grew tiny little legs and then arms, and then their tails started to shrink until they disappeared.  Then we had dozens upon dozens of teeny tiny frogs, which we watched grow bigger and strong enough to jump away.  We must have killed a bunch along the way but Dad must have checked the “habitat”  to clean out any floaters in the morning before he left for work or something, because that wasn’t the year I learned the hard truth about death.  (That was the baby bird year. More on that some other time; it’s not nearly as nice of a story.)
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So tonight I was lying in bed thinking about being glad that I had decided to live in a town that is small enough to allow me to remember those kinds of memories every night before I fall asleep in the summer.  I do not miss the sirens and constant “white noise” from the city.  Sometimes the freeway annoys me, but the frogs are usually louder so it’s not so bad at night.
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I just recently became suspicious of the “no dead frogs” memory from that story a couple of weeks ago when Andy and I helped Noah catch some baby toads/frogs.  We gave him a ginormous RubberMaid bin (I think it’s funny that it’s bright red like my sandbox was) and I carefully built up a beach and some islands in a couple of inches of water just like Dad had.  But all the frogs died after only like a day and Andy and I performed a stealthy late night body-disposing operation before Noah could find them that way.  (At least there were only 4 and not 100.)
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Ok, now that that’s out, maybe my brain will let me sleep now. Andy thinks I’m crazy, jumping up out of bed to get these memories written down before I forget them again. Maybe it’s because I’m afraid I’ll have Alzheimer’s Disease when I’m older… (Grandma had it; but that’s yet another story for another day.) Goodnight!

Some Things You Never Forget

I love to lie in bed on a warm summer night with the window open and listen to the trains going by several miles off to the west through Big Lake, MN.  If I close my eyes (and filter out the sound of traffic on the freeway in the opposite direction), I can almost convince myself I’m a young girl back home in Baudette, lying in my bed in my old room at my parents’ house listening to the CN trains traveling over the rail bridge to and from Canada.  I fell asleep to that sound every night during those summers growing up on the border; that and the sound of the cars passing over the International Bridge above the Rainy River, the hum of the tires climbing in pitch as they reached the peak of the bridge and then falling as they continued to the other side.

(Baudette-Rainy River International Bridge in background)

Arizona Immigration Law SB 1070

“If a cop stops me in Arizona and says ‘papers’ and I say ‘scissors’ do I win?” is the name of a group I just joined on Facebook.  It’s a lighthearted stab at Arizona’s new Senate Bill 1070 which will be effective this July and allows law enforcement to “determine the immigration status” of any person with whom they come in contact.  Many people (myself included) fear this new bill will intensify — even encourage –racial profiling, but a recent poll shows that 7 out of 10 Arizonans are now in favor of the law.   And support is growing nationwide as well; 17 states (including Minnesota) have filed or will file their own versions of Arizona’s SB 1070 law.

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I recently conducted a totally unofficial and obviously biased Facebook poll asking my friends how they felt about SB 1070.  In their responses, I also asked my friends to write about their most memorable experience(s) with immigrants — legal or illegal.  I was attempting to test a theory of mine that individuals who had grown up in cities with strong immigrant communities and those who had had very positive experiences with immigrants would be more likely to oppose this legislation, while those who had little experience with immigrant citizens would be more likely to support it.  Within hours I had a thread of about 60 comments; unfortunately it seems that most people who support the legislation felt too intimidated by the barrage of comments critical of SB 1070 to reply.  I did gather a large number of positive stories about immigrants, though — from people who had immigrant spouses, those who had worked alongside hard-working immigrant employees, and some heart-breaking stories about the hardships faced by immigrant friends.

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Without much participation from those who support SB 1070 I obviously was unable to draw any solid conclusions, but I did find it telling that the people who were so vocal in speaking out against SB 1070 had some really amazingly positive stories to tell about immigrants.

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I’m sad to see my state listed among the 17 in the process of filing similar legislation.

Credit: Jeff Parker

Credit: Debbie Groban

Credit: John Cole

Credit: Matt Bors

Time Marches On

A little over a week ago, my ‘babies’ turned three.  It’s amazing to consider the transformation our entire family has undergone in that amount of time.

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In lieu of a post full of words describing my beautiful babies, I’m just going to post pictures.  That’s about all I can manage now–this ‘growing up’ business is a very emotional process!

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March 26, 2007

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September 1, 2007

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March 5, 2008

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November 29, 2008

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February 15, 2009

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June 22, 2009

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July 3, 2009

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September 13, 2009

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March 1, 2010

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March 20, 2010 - Happy Third Birthday, Gianna and Adam!

Edit 3/30/10: Almost forgot!  I was a slacker and didn’t do a 3rd Birthday video this year, but here is the one I made last year.  I still love it so much!

Happy 2nd Birthday, Babies! (2009)

To Add to the Goal List:

I’ve decided that I want to wake up each morning this summer when the weather permits and drink my coffee outside while I read in the sunshine or just watch the kids play around me.  It’s a totally do-able component of what makes up my ‘perfect life’; naturally I’d prefer to be rich and have my coffee served to me while I receive a pedicure out by the pool after sleeping in until 10:00, but I could totally incorporate some morning coffee pampering into my ‘stay at home mom life’, too!

Thoughts on High School Reunions

Right now I find myself pretty active in the planning process for my high school graduating class’s 10-year reunion coming up this July.  It’s trippy–very trippy!–so of course you know I’ve got to talk about here, right?  ;)

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So, first of all I need to preface this by saying I happened to watch an episode of The Mentalist last night, purely by coincidence (I had laundry to fold and after cutting off our DishNetwork service last weekend I am still kind of floundering while trying to figure out how to survive “life after DVR”… I’d probably usually be watching something like Web Soup at that point.).  Anyway, I digress.  So in the episode, they were investigating some murder that occurred during a high school reunion and the idea was that since no one ever really changes after high school, the killer should be relatively easy to find if they could only determine what all the classmates had been like back in high school.

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So, without really going into this in-depth discussion of the various subtleties and innuendos in the episode–it was enough to get me really wondering how true that statement really is.  Sure, we’ve all changed immensely on the outside in 10 years… but what about inside?  Will the cliques unconsciously drift together at the reunion; will we all walk back into our old familiar roles without really being conscious of it happening?  Even trippier, maybe, is the nagging question this automatically brings up in the back of your mind: What about me? What was I like in high school from an outside perspective?  Am I still that way?  Will it unconsciously drive my interactions with my classmates–even after all these years and all that distance between us?

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Sometimes it seems pretty clear that those psychology and research courses in college DID actually get through to me, even if I DID only go to class about 1/3 of the time…

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Anyway.  Here I am being this perky little reunion co-organizer and it’s kind of amusing.  They portrayed the organizers in The Mentalist as these self-important and better-than-thou air-headed jocks and princesses that everyone loves to hate and it does give you pause (“Shit, people don’t feel that way about ME, do they?!).  But I’m not embarrassed to admit I just want a good party, man.  I never get to see these people and we have a LOT of history together.  I just want to hang out with them ALL and enjoy that we are all grown up and over that petty high school drama and have a good time.

My goal for the new year: Authenticity.

I do this thing where I spend an hour typing up this really open and heartfelt post (usually on nights while Andy is gone at band rehearsal and I have time to indulge myself this way) and then I delete it without posting.  I guess what happens is I get carried away on a certain topic (last night I was writing about finding that balance between “being a parent” and “not being boring”), think I’m getting too personal, and scrap it all.

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I guess the point of this blog is to be personal, though.  When I started it a few months ago it was because I was sick of filtering and censoring and holding back in other areas of my life.  I used to blog at LiveJournal almost daily and that was a hugely therapeutic thing for me–but I guess the real difference there is that most of my readers were virtual strangers and it didn’t really matter if they knew how I really feel about things at 2:00 AM when I was least likely to censor myself.  The feedback was great and I picked up a lot of wonderful “real life” friends along the way.  But 2009 was a year of change for me; inexplicably I couldn’t blog at LiveJournal anymore.  I came here hoping that it would be another outlet for me to be open and honest–except this time without filters or special groups privy to more information than others, etc.

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I think it’s a struggle though because we all naturally put on different “faces” depending on our audience.  I’m a different person at work than I am at home with my husband than I am out at the bar with my girlfriends than I am with my family back home.  That’s only natural and so it makes sense that I am having some issues breaking down those walls and just being my one true authentic self for one and all to see.  So I guess it is a process that I will have to work on.  2009 was a catalyst for major change in my life and 2010 should unfold in all sorts of new and exciting ways as long as I resist this urge to compartmentalize myself all the time.

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I will say this:

Being myself and trying to worry less about how others perceive me has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life thus far.  As it dawns on me that I can be a mother and a wife and a friend yet not need to be exactly like every other mother, wife, and friend–it’s very freeing.  I’m very thankful that those pressures to “conform” seem less and less important as I get older.

Sane again in 2010!

I’ve got to stop this nonsense where I don’t post any entries unless I’ve got something “important” to write about.   I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat down to write an entry and then closed the page when the words didn’t flow as freely as I had hoped they would. One of my resolutions for 2010 is to blog at least once per week, regardless of the importance of the subject matter!

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Christmas was magical.  We had a crazy snowstorm that lasted nearly a week and left no doubt that it would be a white Christmas this year.  My parents came down from Baudette and stayed from Wednesday through Sunday and today we are preparing for the arrival of Andy’s parents.   I love to have a home full of company so I am excited and flitting around the house dusting and cleaning and putting away laundry and whatnot.  As a bonus, cleaning for company means that my house will be pretty clean when the new year starts on Friday and that will be a perfect start to the Fly Lady routine (another of my new year’s resolutions!).

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Anyway, I’ve got lots to do to keep me busy for the rest of the day until my in laws arrive so it’s time to peel myself away from the computer.  Look for more frequent updates in 2010; I’m sure you’re breathless in anticipation!