Strange weather. You would think that drought weather this time of the year would be consistently sunny, hot, dry. Rather, I’m sitting here at my desk in the East Bay and the weather is overcast, chilly, windy, and just enough precipitation to tease and fool us. Right about now, I start looking at the long range forecast from the NOAA website for the middle of June at 11228 McCourtney Road, Grass Valley, California. So far no surprises are forecast for June in Grass Valley, just the usual above average temperatures and probably no precipitation. So it is shaping up to weather-wise to be a nice FDF week. Now the wild card of course are forest fires and hopefully, even though the woods are tinder-dry, there won’t be any close enough to Grass Valley to threaten the festival directly or indirectly by bumping us off the fairgrounds if the CDF needs the staging area. So far, so good though.For those of you who are dog people, and I am in that crowd, I’m thinking of boarding my pooch, Batso, up there this year. The kennels near the fairgrounds are a pretty reasonable price and it would allow me to sneak out and spend a little bit of time with Batso during the festival. One reason that I might do this is because this will be the first festival for a few years where I won’t have to return back to the bay area during the week to give final exams and teach. The finals for Cal State East Bay are scheduled for the week before the FDF, and I took the festival week off from my other teaching gig. Yeehaw.
We are going to have a couple of interesting projects running that week. The JD Rhynes cookbook is scheduled to be released at the festival and I hope that we can get JD to sign a couple first editions. Ted Kuster, who thought up the cookbook project, has been collecting recordings of the recipes (yep we got some national bluegrass acts to put JD’s recipes to song), got the book edited and to the publisher. Ted and I have a bet as to how fast we’re going to sell out so ya’ll need to get to the Cookbook booth and snag your first edition copies and get that old dog JD Rhynes to put his signature in it.
What else……..we’re going to have a coven of mandolin monsters converging on our little festival. Let’s see, we’re going to have David Grisman, Mike Compton, John Reischman, Roland White, Chris Henry, and I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody. But I have to imagine with all that mandolin power in one small geographic location that we might have a critical mass, some spontaneous combustion, an out-of-mandolin experience that with one giant chop would momentarily stop the rotation of the earth and send a beacon into outer space. And then the alien ships would descend………
You get my slightly over the top drift here. We got the ingredients for this to be a very special festival. Add a little hair from some mandolin monsters, a couple of hot guitar picks, sprinkle in some banjo dust, a fiddle-de-de, a dash of dobro, a dollop of high lonesome tenor, and mix it all up with the essence of bass and simmer slowly for 4 days. What I want to know is what’s for dessert?
