After I found out that the game wasn't on ESPN, and after trying to watch on the computer, but being frustrated by the fact that A. the screen was just blank most of the time, and B. the Red Sox just weren't scoring against the Satan Rays, I did what anyone would have done. I went to the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater to see the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.

When I got home, I found out that the Sox had lost in extra frames, with the Schilling experiment costing us actual games, and to Tampa Bay at that. Terrible job. Let's get our heads in the game. Now. Pull away from the yanks and O's instead of giving them false hope.

That's it for baseball in this post.

This group, the aforementioned Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, is pretty damn weird. They find old slides and write songs about them. And then they play those songs while the slides appear on a screen behind them. The dad is the singer/keyboardist/guitarist, and is kind of like the emcee of this familial freak show. He talks a mile a minute, despite his slight stutter, describing each song and it's visual companion piece. He's the type of guy that makes you laugh every time he speaks. And when he says something that no one laughs at, you end up laughing at the fact that no one laughed. The mom makes their costumes and has the probably under-appreciated job of running the projector along to the songs. The daughter looks just like my ten-year old neice. Which makes sense, since she's also ten. I played drums when I was that age. Only instead of playing shows all around the world, I played "Solo Flight II" to a bunch of senior citizens. One time. On a drum pad. I did have one snare drum, but my dad sold it to a kid named Yader. Oh well, Yader probably needed it more than I did anyway. Besides, today you know Yader as the drummer of The Hives. Well, not really, but I like to think he went on to great things in the field of drumming. Maybe an extra in "Drumline" or something. Where was I? Oh right, TFSSP. They played a bunch of songs based on a bunch of slides, mainly from the seventies, and it was really funny, like I said. One set of slides was shots of executives, each next to a quote. It was from an advertising company used by McDonalds, in June 1977, called OPNAD. So the dad says, "Not only are we showing you these slides that weren't meant for public viewing, but we wrote a six-song rock opera to them." And another set was someone's trip to Japan, which ended with a picture of a man being taken to a public execution, or so it seemed. But they made even that seem funny somehow.

They only had to go to the back-up projector once. It was a really good show. Bring the whole family. Especially when your team is shitting the bed against the Devil Rays.


The T-burgs in a state of rest. Photo most likely by a French person.