Rita Heywood Gave Good Face

• 17 Dollar Friday A Sign Of The Times

It was good that I dragged myself out there on a Friday night, I made the above amount, which basically resulted in that amount being upon my coffee table this morning, when there would otherwise have been some ashes and a coffee stain.

I had caught up a bit on Harold's food and gotten some coffee off of the 17 Dollar Thursday night.

Right: A skeezer waits to see if I am going to pull out a cigarette or the money that I am going to need to get on the bus when it comes, preparing to skeeze...

When I pulled up at the Lilly Pad and was locking my bike, I espied a white Styrofoam container sitting atop the trash can outside Lafitt's being walked past by people too well dressed to even think about even looking inside it to see what was in it.

What was in it was a full po-boy sandwich, a seafood type one. I stashed it in my backpack and began to play, comforted by the fact that I would be able to stuff my face regardless of whether or not I made anything.

I played pretty hard for the whole hour and a half that I did, and managed to practice music in preparation of "going into the studio" and recording it.

I'm getting ready to put out some kind of "release," and am talking with Jacob Scardino about "i-tunes" as a possible way to upload my music to somewhere that people would have to pay 99 cents per song to get at.

This would give me the incentive to make recordings that are at least worth that amount.

Thursday night, I sat in Bobby's apartment watching it, while he went out and looked for a girl whom he had lent his truck to. The key to his apartment was in the truck, on the key ring in the ignition, so he couldn't lock his place up to go look for his truck.

He was pretty sure that she had wound up at the house of someone she knew a few blocks down the street from us, and that's where he found her.

But, in the meantime, I was able to play his electric guitar while I house-sat, and had pulled my laptop out of my backpack and brought up the Audacity editor and recorded myself, albeit through the built in microphone in the laptop and at a lesser quality than I would have gotten with the Snowball microphone.

This convinced me that it would be easier for me to record my music using an electric guitar. It's something about being able to turn the volume of the guitar up enough to be able to sing at full volume, or to find the sweet spot somewhere just short of that.

With the acoustic guitar, the battle had always been to place my mouth a certain distance from the microphone in relationship to the distance away from it that the guitar was, so that the guitar would be at the right level to back up the vocal, without drowning it out.

The solution to that would be to use two microphones, one a foot away from the guitar and the other a few inches away from my mouth. These could then be balanced using a mixer before being sent to a track on Audacity.

But, I only spent a couple dollars of what I made, on cat food and a candy bar, with the po-boy sandwich having kept me from spending anything on food.