So, we had our school cultural festival. As I have said before, Urawa Jitsugyo puts on a pretty boring Cultural Festival, because the school is so strict and uptight about everything all the time. But the kids are still pretty cool despite the repression, so I managed to have a good time walking around being solicited into buying all sorts of crappy dangerous food. It seemed like they aren't allowed to do any real cooking either, only microwave stuff or boil water in electric teapots, because all the food was soft and crappy. At least last year they had crepes. The only people that sold out were the ones selling ice cream. So I bought a lot of random food, felt kinda sick for a few hours, and was still hungry by 4 o'clock.

The real focus of the day for me was our concert. The junior high guitar club has been working on (if by "working on" you mean, "thinking about practicing") 5 songs all summer. But since summer vacation ended, they actually started practicing pretty hard, and kinda came together as a group even though none of them really like each other. So the concert actually went pretty well. There were plenty of mistakes, and all the subtle parts of the songs just got left out, but they plowed their way through it and the audience really enjoyed it. We had standing-room-only audiences for all three performances, although we played in the club room instead of on the big auditorium stage in the high school. The audience was a mix of junior high students, friends of students from other schools, parents and younger siblings, teachers, a few high school kids who I invited, and a couple of random guys who looked kinda lost but seemed to like the show. Of course, cute little girls playing rock music is always cool, so they had that to their advantage, and I tried to stay out of the way as much as possible playing the bass on the sidelines.

So now that the concert is finished, it's back to the work of keeping the band together until the next concert. I am thinking that if I set up another concert soon, there won't be enough time for bitchy cat-fighting. So I am going to try to arrange a Christmas concert in the middle of December. That way, they'll be too busy scrambling to learn new songs that they'll have to cooperate. < /wishfulthinking>

Oh by the way, I made this designed new t-shirts for the band, and we ordered them and all wore them in the concert. They got a lot of positive comments, so I thought I would post them for sale here too. The band name is Dimension, so I spent a few dozen hours working that into an illustration. I was worried that all the stupid little details I like so much wouldn't come out well on the shirt, but they actually show up better than they did in the jpeg below. If you want to see a bigger version, I put it in my portfolio. Anyway, I have marked the price up a bit, so if you buy some t-shirts, the girls can get a little money to buy guitar picks or something. We all got black shirts, but they're available in a variety of shirt styles and colors, and look good in both light and dark colors. So get yours today!