I really intended on posting a lot of entries to this but due to circumstances beyond my control, and general laziness, there hasn’t been a whole lot of activity. We do have a ridiculous amount of pictures, video, etc. that we’ll try to get up here at some point when we finish this madness. So anyhow, tour has been amazing. Say Hi and the Velvet Teen have both been great, and great guys (and gal). It’s been such a whirlwind, so much happening every day, it’s hard to even keep track. I can’t believe that when we were in Fargo, North Dakota, it was still part of this same trip. The stories have just been compounding…I hope we remember all of them. We’re in Baton Rouge right now, sitting above the venue enjoying some adult beverages and I’m feeling nostalgic so here’s one of my favorite stories so far….

The first night of the Ted Leo dates was in Columbus, Ohio, which is coincidentally very near the majority of my mothers family. My grandmother owns a massive farm fairly close by, which she maintains but doesn’t live in. So she let us have free reign and crash there, which was awesome (thanks grandma.) So this farm is also out in the middle of nowhere, more or less, a few hundred acres of corn with several barns and the house in which we were all staying. There’s something slightly creepy about it all, just because it’s so quiet and desolate, but it’s one of my favorite places in the world.

So we’re all asleep, spread out across a few rooms on the floor, when at 6:45 AM the phone rings. This wakes all of us up but not to the point of actually getting up to answer. The answering machine picks up and we’re all listening, still mostly asleep. The voice on the other end starts leaving a message. “Hello, this is the Union County Prison…we’re calling to let you know that at approximately 9:30 last night two prisoners escaped and were last seen heading in your direction…” Keep in mind, that this is not some prerecorded message. This sounds like the actual sheriff or whomever actually calling everyone in the area. The message continued to describe these characters… “if you see them, do not approach them”, etc. As soon as the message stops, a motion detector light just outside switches on. At this point I’m starting to freak out. I can see from the window the door to the barn across the driveway slightly open. I’m very tired and hallucinating a little bit. Are they in there? I lock the door and try to go back to sleep but I keep having visions of these characters showing up at the window. Nothing happens and morning comes. My grandmother comes over and tells us that the prison is literally just through the field behind her house and it is quite plausible that these escapees could have passed through there. I guess this story would be better if something actually happened but it was scary enough just waking up to that and we’ll never forget it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 12:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.