July 28 Diary
Columbia, MD

This is one of the prettier venues by far, completeley surrounded by trees and lots of little hills and embankments. The "shed" sits snuggled into the side of a big hill and the catering area is a nice screen-enclosed wooden deck off the back of the stage. The only problem here is mosquitos.

This was one of those up and down days. Sometimes it was going real well and other times it stank. The food was really quite bland and undercooked except for breakfast, the veggie sausage patties were great! In the late afternoon it started downpouring and I was stuck in catering freezing because once it started raining the temperature dropped dramatically. Soon, everyone was running around in their green "lilith fair crew" ponchos we received at the start of the tour. Mine was on the bus at the top of the hill and I couldn't risk getting the equipment wet. I finally found a trash bag and put my camera in that so I could retrieve my rain poncho. By that time it had pretty much stopped raining.

I think this is one of our better venues in terms of ticket sales. We usually sell out. I don't know if we did this time because we usually get "swag" if we do but there sure seemed to be a lot of people running around. It was very hard to get through the village at one point. it can be very frustrating when you've got a job to do and you have to creep along with the crowd taking a half an hour to get from point A to B, where earlier in the day before people got here it took five minutes.

Okay, enough complaining. I have to vent somehow though and doing it throughout the day is too much of a downer to me and anyone around, we all have to get our jobs done.

The evening ended on a higher note. "Daiquiri Night" turned into "Margarita Night" and once again everyone gathered around bus #9 to sip on one of Tim O's fabulous concotions. It was Jess's (from the doc. crew) birthday the next day and she was leaving us for a few days so we had to celebrate right then. Someone started singing "Happy Birthday" and soon everyone joined in. Unfortunately we did not have a birthday cake for her. But we had all (except Elana who is now becoming famous for not being in pictures) gathered around for a group photo, surrounding Jess and pointing at her.

Later, our bus had a minor catastrophe in the form of absolutely no electricity. Bruce, our bus driver came back and could not figure out what to do about it at first. I was afraid we were going to have to ride on someone else's bus. By about three in the morning everything was under control and we were heading off to Philadelphia, PA for a day off.