little while it seemed I was getting to be kind of a face / force in the local arts community, but it seems everything I get involved with kind of has its dark side and every time I seemed to get drawn to something I later find something else to repel me.  Face, force… sometimes it feels more like I’m just a farce.

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July 22nd, 2012.
It was an incredible weekend. Two really amazing gigs and a fun open mic, it doesn’t get much better. Oh – and we discovered a new hot sauce. It really DOESN’T get much better than that!

I was wary of Urban H2O simply because there wasn’t a lot of information about it online. As a venue the place doesn’t seem to have any kind of online presence. People reference it here and there but it doesn’t have a website or a findable Facebook page – Reverbnation knows it as a venue but doesn’t have any information about it. I’d assumed it was a bar until I saw it referenced as an educational centre, at which I sort of assumed it was something like the Takoma Park Community Centre – and then someone referenced an aquarium and I had something like the Shark Bar from Northern Virginia in my head.

As we approached the venue these muddy preconceptions didn’t clear up. The road from Pleasantville to Yonkers was pleasant, but progressively less-so as we entered more and more urban areas. Yonkers (at least this part of it) began reminding me of a cross betwixt Washington DC and Pittsburgh. Very hilly with lots of foot traffic with steep roads leading down to the river (the Hudson?), sun glaring back up at us along with the pedestrians who seemed to question our place there.

ilyAIMY took some time out to go see a movie at a really wonderful artsy theatre in Delmar, NY. Moonlight Kingdom? Absolutely wonderful. Moonlight Kingdom at a theatre that serves brownies? POSITIVELY wonderful!

The address led us to an unassuming, low-slung building across the street from an imposing structure surrounded by police vehicles. We loaded up to see what we would see and were very pleased to discover that sound and people were set up. Urban H2O was filled with familiar faces bustling about familiar tasks in kind of a familiar environment – it’s a marshlands / wetlands education centre with lots of kid-friendly hands-on displays and aquariums that had been wheeled out of the way to set up chairs and a large sound system. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t have a lot of time to explore our surroundings – apparently everyone else had gotten the memo that a) the show we’d thought was starting at 8pm was actually starting at 7pm but b) there had been a 4pm load-in. I was severely non-plussed, but we’re good at our jobs and we got up, got sound-