Sometimes you’re just not wanted. We have a thick skin, this little combo of ours. It doesn’t hurt our feelings much when they say “Thanks… but no thanks.” Tonight Kenny played The City Winery in Chicago. They didnt want Blue Sky Riders. He played the City Winery in NYC and they didn’t want us there either. It’s not us… or our music… they just don’t Iike opening acts. They want to get to the main show as quick as they can.Their menu doesn’t have salads or appetizers either. Only entrees. Dont dawdle. Get right to it. That’s the City Winery motto.

But we are cleverer than they are. We are here to play. We just rode seven hours from Ohio to Chicago and we didn’t do it for the thrill of the open road. We didn’t do it because we love to watch movies that freeze every sixty seconds just as the killer is about to say why he did it. We put ourselves through that horrific ride because we want to bring our music to the world.

So we do an end run around the rules. Kenny starts his show and when he hits “Friend”… he calls up Georgia. When that song ends… I come strolling out like the king of the world and we play three Blue Sky Rider songs. The audience never knows what hits them. (Technically speaking, what hits them is little bits of whatever we had for dinner right before the show!) Kenny loves it. The three songs we pick are very high energy so it kicks his show up a notch. (He has said this himself. He’s not gonna punch me for saying it. He has SO many other reasons to punch me.) We rock them out and BOOM! Georgia and I are done for the night.

On a night like this there’s not even any point to going out to the merch table and meeting and selling. We can’t do it during the second half of Kenny’s show because all the people talking to us will have their backs to Kenny. If we wait till the end of the entire show… no one is going to remember who the hell we are. We are afraid that the people will pass us on their way out, look in our direction and have that look on their faces like we remind them of someone they went to school with… or a dead uncle they once prosecuted.

They think they hurt us. They don’t hurt us. They give us a gift. The wonderful gift of time. The only downside to it is… if we only play three songs… we don’t have a lot of time to joke around and exude that fragrant perfume we like to call “Personality! By Chanel.” I just think of the stupid things to say, file them away and use them the next night when we play our entire forty minute show.

So thats what we did. We hit the stage… played our three songs and made the club rethink it’s whole plan.

Now we have a day off tomorrow in the wonderful city of Chicago. We are not singing so we can eat cheese. You know where cheese is found in its natural habitat? Deep dish pizzas! You know where they have deep dish pizzas? Oh, you do? Moving on.

The next show will find us well rested…. a little fatter… a little more congested from the lactose… but playing our show as if it’s an old friend we haven’t seen in a long, long time. Like it was in prison or something.