Gimme the beat, boys

Last night, we headed over to a local park with friends (and about 2000 other people) to enjoy some warm evening breezes, a picnic dinner, and an earful of good old fashioned live rock and roll.

Gwen and Maddy LOVE live music.  Since they were babies, we've noticed that they'll stand, mouth agape, and stare unblinkingly at anyone wielding a musical instrument or a microphone.  Last night was all that and more and Maddy danced for two straight hours while Gwen was extra stoked to take it all in from her perch atop a perfect climbin' tree.  

I'm not exaggerating when I say there were a few thousand people here.  They were mostly local families who probably hiked in pulling a red Radio Flyer wagon loaded with small kids and buckets of KFC.  We used to live here and might have easily been one of them -- Michael's old high school is spitting distance away -- if we'd only known that they do this (the music -- not the spitting) every Thursday night in July and have FOR THE LAST 6 YEARS!  Yeah, we're always the last to know.   

The demographic was mostly parents in their late 30's to late 40's with children under age 10.  And the band was good.  They played a nice danceable mix of classic rock from the 80's (plus or minus a decade).   Andrew and I killed a fair bit of grass underfoot as we danced in our horribly inappropriate shoes to recognizable U2, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith and Michael Jackson tunes.   And do I dare confess that our "dance" consisted of nothing more than the six or seven steps we can remember from our West Coast Swing classes of 2002?

Okay, I know how pathetically I've dated myself by using such phraseology as 'stoked' and 'tunes' so I'll stop embarrassing myself and give you what you really came to see:  Pictures.