Two Sisters

I'm lucky to have four sisters, and especially lucky that we all have such fun together. Our interests are varied, our lifestyles differ, we are often busy with work and family... but we all appreciate our "sister time" when we can get it.

Music is one of the things Kathie and I share, and we have for many years now. It was Kathie that actually got me started on the guitar so many years ago and since then I've added many other musical instruments of interest, with my current focus on fiddling. Kath has been a pretty faithful attendee of our Tuesday jam session, which she affectionatly refers to as the PAMJam, haha... she has also played out with the jam group over the past year or so. One of the gigs we do is to play for the Norlands live-in program's barn dance. We've been doing it for more than a year now. We had scheduled to play there tonight, but everyone from the jam group was otherwise busy so Kathie and I decided we'd be able to do it together. Richard is in Bar Harbor calling for the College of the Atlantic contradance, or he'd have been with us too. Anyway, this was a bit of a stretch because it was just the two of us, but we did it and we had a blast! The caller was really happy with us, the dancers were having such a good time, and after it was all over, we were happy to hear the caller comment that we must really like playing together... how nice to know it shows!

We're planning to play for a couple more contradances over the next couple of months... October 6 in Norridgewock and December 15 in Fairfield... Richard will join us for those dances. There are a lot of good things about playing with Kathie, she's nearby so practice is pretty easy to schedule even if it's only 1/2 hour or so; she has a great sense of rhythm; she's been to Maine Fiddle Camp with me so she gets the whole idea of playing contra tunes FOR the dancers and that the dancers are the most important reason for playing; she's flexible and also has great ideas about putting tune medleys together... plus she's fun to hang out with and play music with in general!

She's even got me knitting again! The only thing I really like knitting is scarves, so she found me a pattern that is pretty easy and is letting me knit the yarn she spun.

Two Sisters is a nice waltz written by Steve Muise.