I used to imagine a sell-out crowd at the Majestic Theater on First Street and then in later years it moved to the stage at the Rellik Tavern also on First. It’s good to have an Ace in the Hole card to fuel you through your working day. Just about an hour’s worth of my poems and songs, simple early stuff like “Kite Fly,” and “Boots Our Cat” up to the current stuff that I have plastered all over Youtube.com and my Facebook pages.

There’s something about show business or a LIVE audience that fuels both the romantic and the jester inside. Recently I remade an acquaintance with an old contact of mine, a musician from here in town. I recalled showing him my VHS tape with my 12 original songs we recorded in 2005 at The Listen & Be Heard Poetry Cafe on Marin Street in Vallejo and he had commented then that that was “old technology” and I ought to put out my material on a DVD…Well, I did that…then Benicia artist-poet-pal of mine, Tom Stanton helped me upload all my stuff and other Rellik-Benicia Literary Arts performances to Youtube… Recently I reviewed all that and made a list of LIVE links on a digital pdf. Now in the back of my mind it becomes my “Concert at The Naked Oyster,” fueling this jester-romantic-sled dog through just another working day.

Poster by Peter Bray

Peter Bray lives, works, and writes in Benicia
and has written this column since 2008.

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