A Big Update (for a lot of lost time!)

WOW!
What a wild wonderful few weeks I've had – wait has it really been OVER a month?! What happened to JULY!!!

Well, here's an update that's slightly out of order. I just got back from a whirlwind trip around our great beautiful country. First to LA for a show with Moby, and then to Athens, GA for a spectacular cultural experience. Before this one of my best friends in the world was visiting me, Kyshona Armstrong.

The Moby show was for the LA radio station, KCRW. It was really cool concert in two parts, techno and live. KCRW actually recorded the show with cameras, and you can watch it if you'd like to. It is divided into 2 parts. Part one is the electronic techno portion, and part two is the live band portion. If you only have a little time, I think my favorite section was part 2.
Click here to see Part 1
Click here to see Part 2
It was really fun to play again and see some of the old gang. Also the performance was in Malibu, so seeing the Pacific ocean was absolutely a marvel for my eyes. GORGEOUS, and so very different from the Atlantic!

The Pacific


The show



The whirlwind trip to Athens was for my "family" and friend, Yelenia Joselin Casas. She turned 15 years old (when I met her she was 3, ahh!!!) and celebrated her quinceanos (spelled with a ~ over the "n") in the most grandiose birthday party I may have ever attended! A quinceanos is more than a sweet sixteen. It is, in the Mexican culture, when a girl becomes a woman. There was a formal dance, where Yelenia was escorted by her 11 male chambelanes (kind of like her chapperones or posse), and she took turns waltzing with each of them, dancing around them, being lifted into the air by them, yeah. Then 8 young girls dressed all in white with big green bows around their waists danced around Yelenia and the chambelanes, as Yelenia received her last doll, and her father put on her first pair of high heels. And boy those things were HIGH! I was impressed that she was able to weild a hoop skirt between 11 men while walking on pencil thin 5 inch heels and not tripping on the little half-pint princesses running around her legs… WOW!

Maria Reina Casas. The reason I was at this quinceanos.

I started teaching English to Maria when I was a freshman at the University of Georgia. It was a volunteer program organized through the Catholic social services, where once or twice a week I would go to Maria's and teach her English with the ultimate goal of her being able to obtain a good job. This was in 1996. Maria had recently immigrated to Athens, GA with her 2 children who were 8 (Irving) and 3 (Yelenia), to join her husband, Jose, who had already been working in the US for several years. They had followed all the immigration rules and Jose was months away from a candidacy for US citizenship when I met him. Oh I was delighted to learn that they were the very sweetest family! Always Maria would serve me some kind of Mexican delight as a thank-you for her English lesson. It was in her kitchen I first tasted gorditas, tamales, real Mexican-style guacamole, nopales, homemade salsa verde. Yum. She is a phenomenal cook and we still joke about her opening up her own authentic Mexican restaurant, because her food tastes better than any Mexican restaurant food I have ever tasted! Over the years we became very close, and it was absolutely thrilling for me to learn so intimately about another culture while sharing mine with them. So beautiful! Now I feel like they are my family, and even though I don't see them as often as I used to, I always try to make a visit for Christmas, and really special events - like this Quinceanos!!!

La familia


The Princess and her Princesslettes (I think Yelenia looks like a true princess! And her favorite color is green, so she had a totally green-themed party, how fun!)


The traditional dance


Presentation of Yelenia's last doll, while her dad puts on her first pair of high heels


Dancing around the last doll


After all the traditional festivities the room became a dance. An 8-piece Mexican band performed on a fully equipped stage, and everyone who had been sitting down during the formal dance rushed to the dance floor! Oh let me try to describe the HEELS these women were wearing! Absolutely amazing how they could move so quickly and gracefully in shoes so pointy and high. It was a true display, a feat of balance and posture. I spent most of my time with my mouth wide open staring in horror as I felt my own feet start to hurt inside my sandals - and I was sitting down!
Here is a zoomed-in shot of a few of the shoes I was astounded by:


Los padres de la princesa. Parents of Yelenia, Maria and Jose, during the dance.


A chat between dances.


Oh look how gorgeous she is! A true young lady!


And now for the final update, Kyshona Armstrong. She performed not one but 2 shows in NYC! She blew away the Bitter End -they were asking her why she doesn't live up here by the end of the night! And I had the pleasure and honor of performing a few songs with her at the Red Lion. She again had people walking out oo-ing and aah-ing, over her performance. Gooooo Kyshona! I am so proud of you! Check her out! And go to her myspace page and hear a sampling of some songs off her new album, Music.
myspace.com/kyshona

Soundchecking


In Action!


At the Red Lion


More to come, so much happening these days!
Love always,
Luci

Rockin'

Pics from The Little Death show Wednesday night. It was good. Hard. Rock. And very hot.
The rest of the week went by in a blur, work has escalated and I'm back to writing looooong papers, first time since college! Ah!
I'm sure some thoughts will surface soon, today I am thoroughly exhausted. :)
Love always!
Luci

Moby, donning the latest in lower east side moustache trends:


Cherie is my new back-up partner in crime!


It is absolutely impossible to get a shot of the whole band at once, but here's a good effort, with a LOT of action happening!


Aaron rockin' the kit


True romantic love:


My favorite part is when I get to play the tambourine!

Solstice Came Summer's In

Hello!
So what a fantastic day it is! It's SUMMERTIME! Oh just the word gets me excited! So some really fun things have happened this week. First, to take up where I left off last Saturday, I DID take the challenge and go down to the Seaport while thunderstorms were threatening in every direction. The show was at first postponed and then cancelled. But it was not a wasted trip! I got to see, while SITTING OUTSIDE, one of the most spectacular Thunderstorms I've seen in NYC! My backdrop was the masts and ropes of an ancient pirate ship (or at least that's what I was telling myself as I lived out this adventure).

Thick lightening bolts and loud crashes of thunder were happening right above this majestic ship for a good 20 minutes. I was sitting under the corner of a rooftop, but with the occasional gusts got pretty drenched in the power and fury from the heavens. Ohhhh exhilarating! I was completely taken away from the concrete jungle and thrust out on the open seas, like I was fighting the roughest tempest in history with my mates tying down the deck and running starboard to port, and foodbags sliding from left to right, furniture roving in every direction, a shout from the captain to tighten up the sails....... Just before my imagination got too carried away, Alison greeted me and said the show was cancelled. I was like, "really? I just watched the most riveting show I've seen in weeks!".

Us pondering the weather before it became the show - just look at that cloud behind us:


So Friday night was another maritime adventure! To the lost kingdom of Redhook. Brooklyn. Via water taxi! Why? To scavenge the uncharted territory of the newest Ikea in America. HAAA! I only spent 15 minutes in Ikea (not including the checkout line), so the water taxi was really the highlight. Here we go leaving at dusk with the skyline getting smaller and smaller.


So the solstice was on Saturday, and there was a big yoga day in Times Square. Although I didn't participate, I did walk past and snap this shot. Amazing that THAT can happen in such a mayhem overloaded tourist-filled area!


Finally, I was fortunate enough to experience the very best sunset I've seen on NYC streets EVER, on the very day of the summer solstice, how amazing. The sun was casting the orangest light on the pavement and walking in that magical orange light was my goal until the sun set behind a cloud just over a building. The sunsets from a street perspective in NYC are interesting. You have about an inch of skyspace view between the tall buildings and skinny streets. But I tried to capture it on the camera in my phone. It's not totally accurate with the COLOR of the orange. Imagine the light on the street as way more oranger, and you will get an idea of how unique and beautiful this moment was.


Finally, I came across an old clip of a fun event we played for during the lost, unblogged-about months between the LuciOnTour posts and these new ones. We were in Austin Texas at the South By Southwest music festival in March. The show was a tribute to Lou Reed, with many different bands playing creative versions of his songs. Moby was asked to be the final act, so we did 2 songs and the last one was Take a Walk on the Wild Side with Lou Reed himself. It was really special to watch the avid Lou Reed fans crying in the front rows, in all-encompassing awe as they watched their lifelong idol perform one of the best songs in music history. I was honored to be on stage with him, singing doot-da-doots. Click here to watch the clip: Lou Reed and Moby at South By Southwest


More to come as life unfolds!
Love,
Luci

Thunderstorm

Ok, so I have just been lying on the bed looking out the window at the flooding rain during a most pleasant New York City thunderstorm. Amazing. Here is a view of what I saw.


I tried to take a picture from exactly my vantage point, but the window was closed and it came out very muddy. So just for the sake of art I opened the window and took this one. It was flooding in, but as soon as I cracked the window that smell of summer rain burst into the room and it was all worth it that my pillows got wet!

So watching the rain plummeting down and hearing the thunder (which has such a unique sound up here, very different from the thunder over the coastline of Savannah) I started thinking about energy. It is amazing how much energy is conveyed by the weather. On a sunny day, especially if it hasn't been sunny in a few days, you can physically feel the energy from the sun rays. It is warm and if you stop to notice how your skin feels, or how your breathing feels, or how your heart beats when it's sunny, you can tell there's an energetic difference than on a cloudy day. I think that's why several days in a row of overcast drizzle really feels like it sucks the life out of me. I imagine that's absolutely as low energy as possible that the sky can convey in the daytime. The clouds block the sun's vigor, the drizzle falling keeps everything feeling "down", and there isn't any wind. Ohhhh, the wind is so energetic. Those days in March, or when there's a windstorm in the winter, what ENERGY is felt when air suddenly starts moving so strongly! Out of NOWHERE! I love wind. But a good downpour, even without lightening and thunder, conveys nice energy too - driving, beating, pushing, grounding. Ohh, and lightening, how exciting! Every time a flash of lightening happens it's like it zaps me with a little zing of power. And in the evenings, when there's heat lightening, or even streaks, ohhh I can hardly contain myself. It's as exciting as fireworks for a five year old on the 4th of July.

Speaking of fireworks, I was planning to go to the South Street Seaport tonight to see Alison play with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, where they shoot off fireworks at the end. Well, not sure about that now that the sky has opened up! We'll see.

Just a little insight to my afternoon ponderings. Here's a picture that makes me smile whenever I look at it.
Love! Luci

Lady Rizo's Girdle

It's a pleasure to be a part of the underground NY performer scene...
Click here to see a short clip of Friday's show

Hot times in NYC

It's hot and humid in the Big Apple. I LOVE it!! So, I have always wondered why NYC is called the Big Apple, and here is what I found out from an internet source:

"The term, the Big Apple, was first used by in the early '20s by stablehands to refer to the New Orleans race track, then the king of race tracks. The name was later borrowed by travelling jazz musicians to refer to Harlem, then the jazz capital of the world. The dance, "The Big Apple," was all the rage in Harlem nightclubs in the '20s and '30s. In 1971, the term "The Big Apple" was revived as part of a publicity campaign to upgrade New York's image and promote tourism."

It's amazing how much of language is dropped or forgotten or kept, and how it evolves over time. Wow. So this week a lot of crazy things went on, most memorably the first ever GIRDLE, a show featuring female performers hosted by the one and only Lady Rizo. It was a smashingly successful mix of comedy and music, I had the pleasure of playing a grand piano with such a great band (hopefully someone took pictures and I will post them soon). That was Friday night.

In between rehearsals, shows, and the music therapy job, I go to yoga. HA! I know that must sound so cliche-New-York, but I have to say, I love it! I am doing it more to get a grasp on my wild thoughts than anything. I have discovered many things about myself during yoga. One thing is that I hold tension in my face muscles when I do absolutely anything it seems! From the simplest yoga pose to washing dishes to painting my toenails! I saw an older lady at the pool in Cabo and was totally SHOCKED how she could not keep her mouth still while she reclined on her lounge chair. It was moving, chewing, tensed up into a frown, pulled into a tight smile, AH! It never stopped moving. I fear I'm headed in that direction if I don't CHILL myself out now! GUHTRUDE!! So, plan for this week, learn how to relax the muscles in my face while doing tasks.

That's about it for now, must get on with the muuuuuusic!
Love!
Luci

Welcome!!

Welcome to a new blog!

I'm not on tour at the moment, so I thought LUCI ON TOUR might need a little rest. Thank you Dave Akins for setting up that page so awesomely for me! So it's almost summer, my very favorite season of the whole year (how lucky are we that it happens EVERY year!!!) and I thought now was a great time to embark on a new blog. Obviously I've missed a little time since the last Luci On Tour post (August), so it probably isn't worth it for me to even attempt to catch everything up to date. I will start from now, and if a good story or memory arises as I'm reporting the present I'll be sure to put it in.

So, to start, I just got back from a trip to Mexico. Since none of my single friends are getting married anymore, they're all taking trips for their birthdays! That works for me, to helps me get my fill of seeing the planet. I went to San Fransisco with my Georgia girl Melissa for her birthday in October, and I went to Cabo San Lucas with my Chicago/NY girl Alison for her birthday last week! It was absolutely beautiful and breathtaking. Check out these pictures we took.

The pacific's crash


Our hotel


Some locals


My FAVORITE! And he had great conversation!


Shopping with Alison and her sister Jen


Our horseback ride through the pacific desert and coastline:
That's me and Chocolata!!! Look at that VIEW!


Alison and Pistola


The hombres - at our favorite beach restaurant, The Office


Happy Birthday Alison!


Ok, so what's been happening on the music front? Well, excitingly enough I have been writing! I love it! It is thrilling. I have been fortunate to work with a producer who is helping me record the songs so they sound a little better than I can do by myself, hooray. A myspace page is coming soon so you can check out the song drafts, see what you think. I still play with Moby on occasion, although he's touring now with 2 percussionists, no keyboards this time. His rock/blues band, The Little Death, has been playing lots lately. We performed at Sundance out in Utah, South By Southwest in Austin, TX, and many venues in NYC. And we have a show coming up on June 25th! It's a lot of fun.

Ok, so I've spent all day setting up this new blog. Now I'm itching to get on to working on a new musical idea. Here we go!

Love,
Luci