Marian Call in Concert

I treated myself to a night out on the town this weekend. Rob was off ice fishing with his buddies, and I was really not interested in hanging out in my house because of the whole roommate issue – so I got tickets to a jazz concert at The Organic Oasis.

I arrived about 40 minutes early (I am chronically early for everything, it seems – heck, I was even born early) so ordered my dinner and wrote a few letters while waiting for the music to start. The Organic Oasis has probably the best salads in town, in my humble opinion at least. Their yam stew is pretty tasty, too. Add to that a nice hot mug of Yerba Matte tea, and I was quite content to sit there and wait.

They had their normal layout of tables and chairs but added numerous folding chairs to the mix, and even so ended up with several people standing up at the walls to watch. Tickets were just $15 a head, but even so I’m thinking they made a pretty good profit that night.

Finally Marian Call came on stage, wearing a “slinky dress” as promised. She is normally a “jeans and sweater” type of girl, so this was rather unusual for her. She looked quite stunning, I have to admit. Accompanying her on stage was the standard electric guitar player, a base player, a piano player, a drummer, and a tenor saxophonist = all of whom were very good, and got plenty of opportunity to strut their stuff. The only thing missing was her old typewriter (circa 1930s?) which she uses as a percussion instrument occasionally.

Marian sang quite a few well known songs as well as several that she wrote herself. One that got a lot of audience participation was “I Wish I Were A Real Alaskan Girl” (or something like that) wherein she talks about how tough a real Alaskan girl is, able to skin a bear – fix a flat – and eat Rudolf for breakfast and Bullwinkle for lunch. She also made mention of the popular bumper sticker that states Alaskan Girls Kick Ass, and when she brought up the fact that a real Alaskan girl has long flowing hair on her legs I had to laugh as I realized it’s been probably a good 6 months since I last shaved.

Another song that was well received was about Karaoke. I have no idea how she managed to do this, but she stood up on stage and belted out some of the WORST singing I’d heard in a long time, as typically you would find when listening to the general (drunk) public singing Karaoke. It was hilarious, because she’d switch from her beautiful voice singing the verses to that awful caterwauling at full volume for each chorus.

If you ever have the chance to listen to Marian Call sing, I highly recommend it – but in the meantime, you can look her up on the internet and download her songs from there.