Therapy session

So tonight I said the hell with it and ran down to Artz Rib House, where The Therapy Sisters, a band I worked for as part-time roadie/sound guy for several years, were playing.  I hadn’t been to one of their gigs in two-three years now, not because I disliked them, but simply because after a band re-config, they didn’t need a roadie or sound guy any more; they can do it for themselves, and because life ended up pulling me away.

Lisa and Maurine as still as lyrically wicked as they ever were, which is to say they play wildly funny, politically liberal, out-of-the-closet numbers mixed with emotion-baring ballads.  Their instrumental work is even better than it used to be, because Maurine has developed into an accomplished bassist (in the late ’80s, when I first knew them, she was new, unadventurous, timid, and nearly inaudible as an instrumentalist) and Lisa still plays guitar just as hot as when she started out as part of a bluegrass band, in her late teens (thirty-<mumble> years ago).  Tonight they had a long-time friend from New Hampshire, Purlie Gates, sitting in on loaf pan and sandpaper, guitar, harp, mouth trumpet, and occasional vocals.  (While their sound is extremely good, I can’t help but miss the days when they were a quartet, in the early ’90s.  I liked the bigger group sound.)

While waiting to be seated, I looked up and discovered I was standing right behind Diane and her wife, Karen, both long-time Sissys fans.  I hadn’t seen either of them in forEVER, and Diane explained they’d “fallen off the edge of the world” for a while, living in far north Austin (nearly Round Rock, from the description), and only recently had returned to South Austin, where they’d just bought a house and were feeling much happier about it all.  Which doesn’t surprise me, because they both strike me more as South Austinites temperamentally.  Diane has just been “downsized” from Applied Materials, but got a tolerably decent severance package, so she’s not hurting badly for money yet.  She’s going to go back to college and finish work on her Licensed Professional Counselor degree/certification, having only lost about two semesters’ worth of time (fifteen hours) because the program changed its requirements to add more hours.  That’s not bad for having been away from a graduate degree program for several years, I think.  Diane’s a considerably intriguing person, for several reasons:  she’s a former distance bicycle racer (had to give it up because of allergies), a one-time SCA heavy-weapons fighter, and a post-transition TS, very out and active.  She’s intending to work with counseling TG people once she goes into practice.  She asked if I would pass along her name and phone for networking to Hands, and I said I’d do it.  After that we all spent a while catching up on one thing and another over dinner, and then settled down to listen to the music, because Lisa and Maurine have written a bunch of new material, and we were busily laughing and snorting at all the new songs we hadn’t heard before.

After the gig was over, I stayed behind and helped Lisa and Maurine break down and load up—I’m just like an old firehorse, I suppose.  They’re off on several weeks’ tour of the West coast, then come back to Austin for a one-night gig at Gaby & Mo’s, and then they’re off again to spend the rest of the summer in Provincetown, playing with a dyke band up there.  Lisa told me they’re going to be celebrating their twentieth anniversary as a couple in December, and intend having a big party to celebrate.  I intend to be there, the more so since I went to their tenth-anniversary party.

A squid eating dough in a polythene bag is both fast and bulbous.  Fnord.