Killing Us Softly

So my friends and I are playing this coffeehouse in Boca Raton.  It’s a church thing, one of those hip, flow-charted, super-seeker-friendly churches and stuff, and we planned the usual assortment: original stuff, plus Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, Clapton, blah blah blah. 

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It was a fairly cool deal.  Not a huge crowd, but they seemed to be enjoying our unique brand of not-quite-fully-practiced acoustic stuff from the oversized stage.

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…and then the miming started.

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It wasn’t my fault, but I felt like it was.  See, there was this woman, and she came up to me right beforehand, and she’s from Missouri, and she wanted to know if she could “do a song” when we took a break, and she’s from Missouri, and it would only take a few minutes, and she’s from central Missouri, and could she do a song?

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Well, sorry miss – it’s not my coffeehouse.  I told her to talk to somebody in charge, and she said she had, but they said it was up to me (grrr) and she’s from Missouri, and it would only take a few minutes.  I told her, well, I guess I can’t stop her from singing her song, so whatever – we were going to take a break after our first set. 

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We wrap up the last song of the set, and I’m on stage, saying, “I guess now there’s this lady from Missouri who’s going to sing a – no – she’s…she’s, uh…”  And I see her walking directly past below me.

“No, she’s apparently in full mime regalia,” I said.  “I believe there’s going to be some miming.”

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And I am here to tell you there was some serious, serious hardcore miming that happened. 

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There wasn’t much we could do, really, once it started.  She was from Missouri, and she was miming.

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She was miming to Carman.

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That song ended, and she kept miming to another really big anthemic song.  It was a huge song, and she mimed proportionately.  She was miming as if there were no tomorrow; like everything, somehow, was silently at stake.  It was apocalyptic miming.  You know what I mean: the sort of miming that makes you do some serious thinking about all sorts of things.  She was killing us softly with her miming.

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We wrapped up with a few more songs and we went to Wendy’s, and I had the Mandarin Chicken Salad, which was pretty good because you get almond bits and the little noodle-things.