O.C. People

Here's a song each of us have running through our heads:

Tony: Bring on the Dancing Horses - Echo and the Bunnymen
Hillery: I Will Posses Your Heart - Death Cab for Cutie
Spencer: I am Trying to Break Your Heart - Wilco
Aaron: Juicy - Notorious B.I.G.
Tom: Odyssey, 2nd Movement - Incubus

Elizabethan Report had no idea the O.C. had so many interesting people. Yesterday, we had dinner with Sam and Liz Lambson. Liz, who just graduated from college, has recently begun 'the experiment,' basically she went and got a job at the local McDonald's so she could find out what kind of people really work there. You can read about it here. After one week, she says it's starting to wear on her. Anyway, she cooked us some really fine stuffed chicken, and then we were off to eVocal.

We are such pleasant company.

After we unloaded our stuff, we met Matt, the singer of Sweet Sweet Thing, a band on the bill later that night. He told us about his five solo albums, with songs about wiener dogs and pissed off punks. One of the highlights of Sweet Sweet Thing's set was Matt's one-note solo. Picture an almost Jack Nicholas-esque smile on the frontman's face as he plays the same note over and over again for about a minute.

Later that night, as we were about to leave, we noticed Hillery was missing. After a minute, we got a call from her, saying she was still inside the venue, but apparently they had locked up the place while she was still in the bathroom. Luckily one of the charming Evocal workers was in the neighborhood, and he recovered our Hillery unscathed.

After the show, we went with Ghost Town Jenny (another band on the bill) to Alejandro's across the street. There we met José, who rides the biggest, longest street cruiser any of us has ever seen, complete with six blinking blue and red lights, and a stuffed bear stuck on the middle of the handle bars. It's like the bike version of one of those huge choppers you see in sixties TV shows, except more frail, and tricked out by a Mexican. José told us he welded his own reinforcement beams onto it. He also said it was very difficult to ride. "If any of you can ride it, I'll give you the bike." Aaron took a stab at it, narrowly missing curbs and wobbling uncontrollably. No Mexican beach cruiser for Elizabethan Report. José said he was going to ride it to Pasedena later that night. "It's been four days. I miss my five month old daughter." What was this guy doing at midnight riding to Pasedena? And is his baby's momma cool with him stopping in just...whenever? I'm sure they've got something nice figured out.


Today we hung out with Kim from Ghost Town Jenny. She's a sweetie, and she's got a song with a really great hook called "Without You" that we all loved. She plays with a lap steel player and a banjo player, but she envisions her music with french horn, trumpet, and mandolin added in too. You can hear her here. We went to the beach with her, where she played us Beirut on her ukulele, and then she invited us to her mom's trailer to eat generous amounts of meat, which we did.