Author: Joey deVilla

One year ago yesterday, I made my first posting on The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. It wasn’t anything big or ground-breaking:

First Post!

This is the very first posting to The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. I won’t report anything right now, other than that this blog is now up and running.

Since then, a lot of crazy things have happened, and the bloggable ones have all been documented here — go flip through the archives if you have some time to kill.

Much love to all of you for reading all my self-indulgent silliness as well as everyone who wrote in and said they loved the blog, and to everyone who linked to me (especially Cory Doctorow, the best damned unofficial publicist I’ve ever had).

I was going to create a giant list of my personal favourite postings, but since I have to continue my job hunt, I thought I’d do something simpler. In honour of this blog turning one, I thought I’d simply celebrate it with my other favourite one-year-old, my nephew and godson, Aidan William deVilla-Choi.

Before I forget, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who came to the party. My only regret is that with so many people, I wasn’t able to spend as much time with each and every one of you as I wanted!

I hope you had as great a time as I did. You guys rock!

More photos soon!

Here are the first 14 shots taken by Jai Johnson at the party. Jai got some killer shots, and this first set has shots of the bathtubs when they were still full.

If you haven’t seen them yet, check out an earlier installment of photos from the party.

Updated (captions added) on Monday, November 11th at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

Folks, I’m too exhausted to caption the photos right now, but here are my photos from the party. Other people took some — if you have any could you please send copies my way?

Aftermath

It was the longest, loudest, most crowded, latest-running bash ever held at this house, with the dining room functioning as dance floor and the last guest leaving at 6:30 this morning. I’ll post some photos as soon as I’ve:

• had breakfast
• cleaned up the mess

Thanks to everyone who came!

Playing music on the street involves more risk than playing on stage. You have to contend with Mother Nature, the grande dame of bitch-mistresses who always sets the thermostat too low or too high and can send out millions of creatures to bite or ooze goo on you. There’s the matter of outdoor acoustics; storefronts weren’t designed for optimum audio reflection, and there’s also noise from traffic both vehicular and human. There’s also the matter of a transient audience — you don’t have them nicely corralled the way you would at a club or concert hall.

Another problem is etiquette. Etiquette varies with surroundings. Put people in a well-appointed symphony or opera hall and dress them in formal wear, and they’ll suppress their coughs until the intermissions. At a jazz concert, people will keep their conversations down to whispers or low murmurs. A bar has to be incredibly divey before anyone would even dream of hopping up on stage and joining the band (WARNING: Not safe for work — nudity and general sleazy content).

The street is something else entirely. There’s a kind of tragedy of the commons that applies to etiquette out there — the street doesn’t belong to anyone, so any kind of behaviour generally goes. For the most part — and this goes double for Canada, double that for a busker-friendly city like Toronto and double it once more for Queen Street West, where I’m reasonably well-established — street audiences are pretty good. They’re friendly, they’ll chat with you, they’ll even apologise if they haven’t any change to spare and if you’re a very lucky accordion player, you’ll even get smooched every now and again. With tongue, even!

You will also get the occasional jerk. It can’t be avoided, and it’s something with which you’ll eventually deal.

Most can be talked down or dismissed. There’s the person who’s miffed because you don’t know the chords or words to their favourite song. There’s the street kid who feels that you’re interfering with his God-given right to the spare change in everyone’s pockets. There’s the bald guy who wanders up and down Queen Street yelling about Jewish/Arab conflicts. There’s the skinny dude who is always convinced that I have in my possession a pound of weed and why couldn’t I be a dude and give him some?

Then there are the assholes. Once an old Eastern European woman looked at me with eyes of fire and said that a “Chinese should not be playing the accordion. Only Polish.” She even gave me the finger. Kiss my dupa, ma’am.

And last night, some guy who was a combination of angry drunk and frustrated drunk (when he wasn’t giving me a hard time, he was annoying a woman for not giving him an easy time) kept walking up to me and asking me “Why are you doing this, man? You’re annoying me. Stop it.”

To which I replied: “Hey, jackass — do I go to where you work and slap the dick out of your mouth?”

(Thank you, Mr. Show, for that line.)

His friends got a good laugh out of it, dragged him away and gave me a fiver.

Never underestimate the value of a snappy comeback.

Looks like we’re going for the record for “number of people that have occupied this house”. 102 people responded with a “yes” to the eVite for tonight’s birthday party, and yeah, I know most of them.

I don’t know how many people will be here simultaneously. This is the party season, so my guess is that people will be coming in at various times throughout the night. That should ease the congestion a little.