Last Sunday, Anitra and I went on the annual Old Seminole Heights tour, which gave us the chance to see the insides of some of the houses in our neighborhood. One of the houses on this year’s tour belonged to Susan, our neighbor across the street, whose house turns 100 this year. She and her tour assistants dressed up in 1920s clothing and a local antique car enthusiast brought his 1916 Ford Model T to display in her driveway.
I was chatting with the car’s owner for a little while when he asked if Anitra and I would like to sit in the car. We’ve seen Model Ts before, but we’ve never been in one, so of course we said “yes!”
You can find out more about the Old Seminole Heights Home Tour here:
Wednesday is “open mic night” at Bayou Bistro, where anyone can hop onstage and play for the patrons. Since there’s no guarantee that anyone will bring an instrument, most open mic nights feature a “house band,” which in Bayou Bistro’s case is the Tropical Sons.
While Bayou Bistro is a short drive away for most of the other band members, it’s a fifty- to eighty-minute drive for Yours Truly, depending on the traffic. I can’t do it every Wednesday, but I try to play when I can.
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Bayou Bistro is a charming down-home bar. If you drive past it, you might not even realize that it’s a bar — it’s hidden away by the water, and you could easily mistake it for a fishing shack. But it is indeed a bar, with friendly staff, and sandwiches that don’t disappoint (I’m fond of their mahi mahi, shrimp, and banh mi sandwiches).
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As you might expect, a band called the “Tropical Sons” has a sort of uniform, and in our case, it’s aloha shirt and shorts with optional hat. For last night’s gig, I went with my “Disney Polynesian” shirt, which is one of my favorites. It’s a gift from my friends Natalie and Eldon, who somehow found it at a market in Ottawa:
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We played from about 5:15 until 8:30, with a break to get a bite in the middle. Here’s what my view looked like at the start of the gig…
A short while after, we started our second set, also known as the “Sunset Set.”
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And we played on into the night, wrapping up around 8:30 (Bayou Bistro closes at 9).
Once again, a fun gig! I’m going to be busy for the next couple of weeks, so it may be a little while before I get a chance to play at Bayou Bistro again.
The fun starts at 5:30 and wraps up around 8:30. If you’re in the area and like seafood, beer, and great live music, come on over! It’s an open mic night, so if you feel like playing with us, bring your instrument!
Here are some scenes from the last time I played there, a few weeks ago:
Tampa Bay Ukulele Day takes place this Sunday in downtown Dunedin! It’s a day of workshops where you can hone your uke skills, a “strum and stroll” event where you can see scenic Dunedin while playing, and see local talent, including Tom Hood and the Tropical Suns, which includes Yours Truly on accordion!
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The schedule
There’s a lot going on, and it’s happening all day. I’ll be with Tom Hood and the Tropical Sons at Dunedin Brewery at the start, then moving to Pioneer Park later on in the day.
Improve your skills with these workshops hosted by The Flea Bitten Dawgs, a band who describe themselves as “ukulele jazz Americana!” The fee is $30 per workshop, or you can attend all three for $60:
Plays Well with Others (10:00 a.m.): This workshop is created to help a group of players playing the same instruments to sound exciting to an audience. The challenge is to become a group with individuals playing separate parts of a song. We’ll break into different groups, with each group learning their section of the arrangement, and we’ll then put it all together to create the song.
Finding Your Inner Chord (11:30 a.m.): This workshop is about think of chords as sounds instead of a form on the neck. You’ll learn how to make your songs interesting and how to get away from the habit of just strumming through a song. If you write songs, you’ll find a better voice for your chord progressions. While this is not a class about theory, we will touch on the basics of chord construction.
Percussion Workshop (1:00 p.m.): Explore how different beats give a song its character. Learn how beats move the music and engage better with the audience. We’ll start with basic rhythms and work into more complex ones. Our goal is to move away from strumming four beats to a measure and dig into the structure of the song. While this is a percussion workshop, you can use this knowledge with any instrument you play. We recommend you bring a shaker, or small hand drum, but tapping on your ukulele will work. This workshop comes with take-home lesson sheets.
Their song list crosses ten decades of music. They mix originals in with the covers they love. One of Thom’s songs was recorded by Supe Granda of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and two of David’s songs were recorded by the group for the Narrow Boat Sessions, Great Britain’s premier folk music organization. PBS produced a segment of Thom’s involvement with the ukulele which featured The Flea Bitten Dawgs.
Raffles!
You can buy raffle tickets — $5 each or 5 for $20 — to win one of the following:
And of course, I’ll be there, with a couple of accordions, playing first at Dunedin Brewery from 11:30 until about 2 or 2:30, then at Pioneer Park around 4:30. Join me!
I volunteered to help out at Masterminds Tampa Bay’s booth at the Synapse Summit 2023 conference yesterday, where Masterminds team moderator Vadim Davydov worked his photographic magic creating professional headshots for a long line of VIPs. It was my job to help get them registered and lined up for their sessions.
Masterminds Tampa Bay is “The Other Bay Area’s” Mastermind group, a peer mentoring group aimed at entrepreneurs and techies looking for connections, support, advice, assistance, resources, and so on. Many metro areas have Mastermind groups, whose name comes from The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill, a book that’s nearly 100 years old, where he defined the Mastermind Principle as:
“The coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people who work towards a definite purpose in a spirit of harmony…
No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”
If you’re interested in the rest of Napoleon Hill’s definition of the Mastermind Principle, it’s summarized pretty well in this article. If you want to hear it in Hill’s own voice, watch this video:
Vadim’s lighting setup is a key part of why his headshots look so good…
…but more important are the instructions he gives you as you pose:
“Follow my finger!”
“Close your mouth!”
“More sexy! Okay, too much sexy! Less sexy!”
“Stretch your neck! Think turtle! Turtle, turtle, turtle, turtle!”
“Squeeze your butt cheeks! Shake your booty!”
The instructions may sound nonsensical and hilarious, and he gets you into poses that you’d never do naturally, but they work. I kept telling people to just do what he says and to trust the process. And he kept cranking out gorgeous result after gorgeous result.
At 4:27 p.m. after nearly 8 hours of shooting, the last person in line had come and gone. That’s when I asked Vadim “Can you do one more — namely, me?”
He smiled and obliged. The official photo isn’t done yet, but every photo he took was displayed on a couple of screens in the booth. I took a couple of shots of these screens, and even these previews are great:
I can’t wait for the official shot! In the meantime, these are my new profile pics.
Thanks, Vadim, and thanks, Tampa Bay Masterminds for taking me on as a booth volunteer!
And once again: if you need to look great in a headshot, you want Vadim Davydov!
