On July 7th, 2012 I woke up in a Hilton Garden Inn or a Holiday Inn or some such place in Saratoga Springs, following a night of Phish at the wonderful Saratoga Performing Arts Center and anticipating two more nights of the same (but different). And speaking (parenthetically) of “different”, I’d had a bit of an odd experience throughout the night when one of the people m’lady and I were sharing a room with accidentally crawled into the wrong bed after a bathroom break and snuggled up to me for a hug.

But that’s a story I’ve shared elsewhere so here’s another:

Following our pre-set plans for the weekend m’lady and I changed rooms (I insist this had nothing to do with the snafu I just alluded to). I’m pretty sure we were only able to book a room for the last two nights which is why we’d bunked down with Bernie and his girlfriend on night one. Anyways, m’lady and I checked into the new room and dropped our bags on the bed. I got to beering the fridge when a knock came at the door. “That must be Linda and Mike,” m’lady accurately predicted, opening the door and greeting her two long lost Phish friends who would be sharing the room with us for the remainder of the weekend. “Hi!” I blurted, bounding to the door and introducing myself. “Who wants a beer!”

“I’ll have one,” answered Mike. I eagerly snatched two bottles out of the fridge. Turns out they weren’t twisties but that was no problem, I knew a little trick. I angled one beer upside down so the lip of its cap was leveraged under the lip of the beercap I was intending to open. Then I gave one bottle a quick jerk with the other and voilà!

All hell broke loose.

(I’d like to quickly interject that I have since learned that it is crucial that one hooks the side and not the edge of the leveraging beercap underneath the targeted beercap. In fact, this was pretty much the very moment that I figured out this very important detail but alas, all hell had to break loose for me to learn it.)

Because I was leveraging one edge against another it was basically a 50-50 split on which cap would come off. It was like wishing on a wishbone, and I lost. To wit: when the cap of the leveraging bottle unexpectedly came off, the quick jerking motion I’d added gave just the right shake to the bottle to cause the carbonated contents inside to spray directly upwards and into my shocked face like I was staring down a water hose. The gushing beer careened off of my surprised face and into the surprised moustachioed face of Mike, who was standing right next to me, before continuing on to spray the ceiling and spatter the walls. Half-blind with foam-covered glasses I thrust the still unopened target beer towards Mike. “Perhaps you have a bottle opener?” I suggested, my face and hair drenched and dripping. I’m all about first impressions.

Amazingly, m’lady and I have gone on to share hotel rooms with Mike and Linda several times since then.

Getting to the Phish concert, once the show began deep in the forested Saratoga Springs State Park we were treated to another cover-laden night of groovy, dance-a-licious fun. They opened the show with their barbershop musical life-count tally Grind before continuing with a set that consisted almost entirely of personal favourites of mine: Possum>Golgi, Moma Dance, Torn and Frayed, Rift, Cities>Maze, Lawn Boy, Peaches, Bathtub Gin, and Good Times Bad Times.

You can’t argue with that!

And believe it or don’t, once the second set started the show got even better! Down With Disease went into Blister In the Sun and then went back into itself again before morphing into Boogie On Reggae Woman. In fact, the whole second set was one big unending stream of music, as the band went into-into-into through 2001, Mike’s, Contact, Backwards Down the Number Line, and another tear halfway through Blister In the Sun. And tons more of course.

And then – are you sitting down? – for the encore Phish played Sabotage for the fifth (and as of this writing, final) time, dedicating the song to Adam Yauch who had passed away two months earlier. Not to cast mirth after sombre, but Sabotage seemed like a perfect cap to my error-riddled day (pun intended, of course).

I can’t stand rockin’ when I’m in this place

Because I feel disgrace because you’re all in my face…

And I can’t even begin to tell you about all the aftershow shenanigoats.

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