PriorBlog

Last night, my sister Nancy and I went to see Mark Mulcahy play at the Lizard Lounge. There was some confusion as to when he would be going on, or if he would be going on at all. It turns out that he was playing, but that Matt, my brother-in-law, would be unable to attend because Cebine, the dog of Matt and Nancy, as well as their daughter, my de facto niece, Maeve, had diarrhea. While Matt tended to his dog, Nancy and I made our way to Cambridge. We got to the club at about 8:30, and found out that Mark wasn’t going on until 11:45.

To kill time, I decided to show Nancy some of the sites along the Mass Ave in between Harvard and Porter Squares.

Then, Nancy had her last slice of pizza before the new baby arrives, while I drank Dr. Pepper and ate baclava. Then Nancy had another slice of pizza, because we still had a lot of time to go and it was cold outside. We tried and failed to get in touch with Mike Bukhin and Carl Thein. Finally, we headed back to the club and waited for the show.

As Mark was setting up, I noticed that unlike last time when I saw him, this time he had a lot of extra accompaniment. One of the guys looked kind of like Mr. Ray Neal (in case you don’t know, Mark and Mr. Ray played together in Miracle Legion), but I couldn’t be sure because last time I saw Mr. Ray was maybe eleven years ago, and then he had short cropped hair. This guy had a hat on, big mutton chop side burns and glasses. Plus, this guy was tuning up a bass, and Ray always played the guitar. But, I told Nancy anyway, hey that kind of looks like Mr. Ray. And as this man gradually lost the hat and the glasses, and the heavy jacket he had on, it became very obvious that it really was Mr. Ray. I know that Mark and Ray have played together over the last few years, but I wasn’t exactly sure how often this kind of thing happens. All I know is that Nancy and I were really excited about it, and spent the night taking cellphone photos and having between song conversations the gist of which could be summarized as ‘Matt is going to be so pissed! This is great!’

After the show we thought it would be funny if we got Mark to sign an autograph for Matt that went something like, ‘Matt, sorry you missed the show because your dog got diarrhea– Mark Mulcahy”, but Mark was somewhat reluctent to mention diarrhea in an autograph. So instead, he drew a picture of Cebine the dog, and signed his name to it. Then he told us a story about once, right before a gig, his cat became semi-paralyzed, but was later cured through accupuncture. The best part of the story, to me at least, was when he said, ‘yeah, the same thing happened to Ray’s cat.’