The Spares

Rachel Zylstra, Karla Reed, Jason Reed and Doug Zylstra in Savannah before our show at the Sentient Bean.

Thanks to everyone who came to Market the other night. And who learned the secret code. In fact, a special thanks is in order to those who both learned and did not make fun of the secret code. (That last category, for the record, includes . . . no one. The secret phrase, “Reading is FUN-damental,” is drawn from an NBA-sponsored educational program a few years back. My favorite related reference is from the movie Out of Sight, when Don Cheadle’s and George Clooney’s characters get into a fight in a prison library, and a guard confronts them, and Don Cheadle’s character says they weren’t fighting—just doing this “Reading is Fundamentalist” [stuff].)

Now, on to the second entry in our series of southern tour recaps. We played in Savannah, Georgia, on Thursday night, October 22, at a venue called the Sentient Bean. It was our second trip to the Bean, which, out of all the thousands of kitschy play-on-words coffeeshop names I have heard, ranks way up at the top. (If you think this is not a crowded field, just scan the list of past Spares venues . . . Uncommon Ground, Sacred Grounds, Neutral Ground, Joey’s Java Juice — that’s just from the last couple of months. It makes you appreciate the simplicity of a name like “The Acoustic Coffeehouse” in Johnson City, Tennessee — except that ‘The Acoustic’ turns out to be a bar.)

Anyhow, back to the Bean. We played along with Rachel Zylstra (who toured with us) and Lauren LaPointe, a transplanted Canadian now living in Savannah. Lauren is sort of the patron saint of local singer-songwriters, (except that she’s alive, and I’m not sure you can be alive and qualify for patron sainthood), and she not only put on a great show and filled the room, but she let many (5) of us stay with her on an island off the coast. It was a good show, and we are in Lauren’s eternal debt.

We also had time to wander around Savannah, which is really, really beautiful in an “antebellum charm” sort of way. (That’s right, I said it.) Doug, who for some reason knows a lot about General William Tecumseh Sherman, including why Sherman is not popular in the south, was able to supply to a lot of Civil War-era trivia, and we walked by the river in a lazy, touristy way—or at least as lazily as you can walk when you have about 45 minutes until sound check.