Day 42: Philadelphia, Day 2
Nau mai,
Yesterday we played our second night at Union Transfer in Philadelphia.
I caught the train to West Philadelphia in the morning to meet a friend for breakfast. It was the best kind of winter weather one could hope for with blue skies and a refreshing chill that was easily held at bay with a thick outer layer. The L subway line took me under the Schuylkill River and along Market Street, first below street level in a tunnel and then emerging onto an elevated line and depositing me at the 52nd station where I descended and walked a few blocks to a new neighbourhood brunch spot called Out West. This establishment was operating with cutting edge breakfast communications technology and took my phone number when I ordered so that they could send me a text message when the food was ready. Sure enough, five minutes after ordering I received a notification – “Pull up, your jawn ready for pickup at Out West!” My jawn in this case was a sandwich, a Korean fried chicken sausage patty with Kimchi pickles, over-easy egg, chili crisp, on a sesame seed bun.
The Breakfast and Travel Updates inbox received many fantastic suggestions on how to spend our downtime in the fine city of Philadelphia. What these people hadn’t reckoned on was that our dearly beloved tour manager Annie had booked a massage therapist to come and work at the venue for the afternoon. We were in week six of the tour and the exhaustion was starting to seep through the cracks; the prospect of a restorative deep tissue massage for us all was simply too good to pass up. All the suggestions are greatly appreciated though. Next time we are in Philly town we will armed with a deadly list of breakfast recommendations and will be taking the Magic Gardens by storm.
Sunday night at Union Transfer was another incredibly enjoyable show. I had a couple of favourite moments. The first happened while watching Phoebe Rings play another completely dialled in set that sounded sublime thanks to an excellent sound mix from Union Transfer’s mixing engineer. I was ready for the beautifully executed maraca toss this time and I caught this excellent piece of choreography on camera so the folks back home would be able to enjoy it in the best and most relevant format for 2025, the graphics interchangeable format.
*disclaimer: Squarespace has chosen today as the day to present me with an error when I try and upload anything in the preferred .gif format. I have had to convert this moving image to a .webp and I apologise to the reader for the reduced file size and the disappointment that this must cause.
The other moment occurred during our fifth song of the set. Everything was going smoothly until Liz choked on her words while delivering the opening lines of Metal. I had committed a prank, but I had not expected it to be discovered or reacted to in this way. Some of you may know that Liz’s percussion instruments of choice are the triangle and the banana shaker. Countless times we have tried to switch out Liz’s banana shaker for a real banana, but we are up against an astute fruit observer who can smell an intruder from a mile away. Instead, I placed a lime next to Liz’s banana shaker and completely forgot that I had committed this foul deed until she had to stop the song after laughing so hard that she couldn’t sing. The retaliatory prank is imminent, and I await it calmly, knowing that I deserve whatever fate awaits.
I’ll leave you with some Christmas cheer I spotted outside Philadelphia City Hall. Happy Holidays!
