Monthly Archives: September 2015

last night jenny & i watched a dean martin celebrity roast via youtube. the man of the week was johnny carson. jenny reminded me that she wasn’t allowed to watch the celebrity roasts when they originally aired in the 1970′s. everyone in front of the camera was smoking and drinking, and her parents didn’t like that kind of influence. i remember watching these roasts and laughing the hardest when foster brooks (above) got up to say anything. in last night’s video, he confused the word “innuendo” for an italian proctologist.

i know the blog posts are thinning out, but only because the beeping gigs have thickened up. last saturday beep goes the weasel was part of the backyard bash at the spencer museum in lawrence. the weather was great, and kids were swinging at acorn piñatas. we were on after à la poupèe and the chine-collès. they were a three piece band that played songs about printmaking. two wednesdays ago we were under the clocktower during the farmer’s market teaching kids how to play with food– and today we are returning to the scene of the crime! we’ll be back on santa fe in a few hours (10:30am). i’ll procure some produce from some hapless vendor and wire it up to a laptop again.

last week i bought two roland VT-3 voice transformers with money left over from the rocket grant fund. one is for angie (her birthday is in a couple of days), and the other is for me. we’re pushing beep goes the weasel further into a robotic realm. i made this recording friday afternoon by turning the pitch knob all the way down. i wanted my voice to sound like it was coming from to the deepest nether regions known to man.

mortified “celebrates stories revealed through the strange and extraordinary things we created as kids.” if you go to a live mortified show you will “witness adults sharing their most embarrassing childhood artifacts (journals, letters, poems, lyrics, plays, home movies, art) with others, in order to reveal stories about their lives. mortified is an experience that can be seen live on stage, or heard on a weekly podcast @ getmortified.com. at a recent show carmen nobel sang this song that she wrote back in high school to impress her chemistry teacher.

yesterday beep goes the weasel played under the clock tower in old overland park during the farmer’s market! this was the view from our side. a bunch of 5-year-olds from kiddi kollege were practically chanting “we want the show!” near the end of the first set we taught them how to play eggplant drums as we sang if you’re happy and you know it make a beat. let’s just admit it, playing with food is way cooler than clapping your hands. especially if that food sounds like a drum kit. i bought the eggplants from jarred juhl. he was one of the farmers selling produce under the pavilion.

angie came over to our house for a beep goes the weasel pow wow. that basically means that we made a list of songs to play for the next few gigs at the overland park farmer’s market, and the KU spencer museum of art. this is us practicing “friday i’m in love” by the cure. when we run out of songs, we’ll wire up produce from the culinary center, and invite kids and grown ups to jam with us at the end of each set.

i drove to the outskirts of johnson county and bought a used lawn mower for $50 this afternoon. it’s not very often that i can make an acquisition like this for the time capsule price that is stuck in my head. sometimes i forget it’s 2015, and that things cost more now than they did in the 80′s. in my deluded state i think that a car battery, or a traffic ticket, or a tow service should only run me around $50. today someone went along with my delusion. thanks craigslist. thanks harold.

the postman dropped off the last rocket grants check a couple of days ago. it made me think back to the awards ceremony where i received the first check from the charlotte street foundation. alot of things have happened since beep goes the weasel started last summer. we’ve done more than teach people how to play music and sounds with fruits and vegetables at a drive-in theater. BEEP GOES THE WEASEL is one of 10 projects that received a rocket grants award in 2014. angie wolford, matt hawkins and i started this project that same year at the boulevard drive-in. in 2015 we brought the beeps to grocery stores, libraries, and farmers markets! we play with carrots, squash, and cucumbers provided by the culinary center of kansas city, and we encourage everyone to play with our food!

last saturday was beep goes the weasel’s last performance at the boulevard for the summer. i picked up a few pieces of produce from the culinary center, and called angie but she wasn’t feeling well. so then i got ian mull to help me out. he did an outstanding job. that’s him in the plaid shorts wailing on his guitar while random kids are beeping on vegetables and playing the theremin in between movies. at times it got SO noisy i thought the management might unplug us… but hey that’s part of the fun.
it was also a night when open captions ran @ the boulevard for the hearing impaired community. they showed their gratitude, and presented wes and brian neal with a certificate of thanks.