The Extended Mis-Adventures, and Loss, of Wallet

What do you do when you’re waiting in an airport procrastinating? You play with toys write a blog!!

I’ve lost my wallet. Yeah, it sucks. I haven’t seen it since Friday, and only today came to terms with the fact that it was, in fact, missing, and not hiding under piles of piles of crap in my bedroom. Not only did it have my debit card, my credit card, my library card, possibly my CareCard (heaven forbid, ’cause it costs a lot to replace those) 10 dollars, 10 pounds, and shitload of change in it; it had a load of souvenir-y type things like bus and train tickets from England and France. I think it also had a load of ticket stubs from plays and shows I’ve been to. All of that, AND I loved that wallet. It had Audrey Hepburn on the front.

After much ponderation, I’ve pinpointed pretty much exactly where and when I lost it–but it doesn’t help me much, because that means it fell out on the road. How did it end up on the road, and what did it fall out of, I hear you ask (or not)? Well. I could give you the short answer and say that it fell out of my over-full bag on my walk to work, but that would be boring.

Let’s backtrack a little–to Thursday afternoon, to be precise. At exactly 1:15 pm, Wallet and I were in the music room, waiting for my music teacher to tell the jazz band kids that he had to go. By 1:19 pm, the 9 of us (Me, Wallet, music teacher, and the 7 other music students in the performing arts program that I am in. For the sake of brevity, let us call this program PAP. *gigglesnort*) were piled into the beige minivan that awaited behind the music room. And we were off–to Vancouver. The journey was quite lengthy, but we managed to fill the time by fangurling (even the boys) over John Mayer the whole way, timing things with the handy stopwatch feature on my iPod (i.e how long we could hold our breath, and how long one of the girls could go without mentioning John Mayer, which was, incidentally, about a minute.), and waving at truckers and screaming when they looked at us.

Our journey took us to the Cellar, a tiny little jazz club which is the kind of place you can only find if you know about it. It’s dimly lit, with red walls that are adorned with portraits of famous jazz musicians. There are about 8 or 10 tables, which face towards a tiny little stage at the front of the room. Our reservation was for the table right in front of the stage. Us included, there were only about 30 people in the room. We took our seats, and the tattoo-illustrated waitress took our orders. Mine was tortellini in a mint cream sauce with mushrooms et al; it may have been the best thing I have ever eaten. Wallet, however, was ill-equipped, as I found out when the bill came; I had to bum from one of the other PAPs…irrelevent.

We were there to see a singer-songwriter called Tyler Summers. However, he wasn’t to play right away. Up first was someone called Crista Couture. Poor Wallet had to block its ears. I, however, was not hidden in the safety of a canvas bag so I couldn’t perform such an insulting action. The woman had a pretty voice, but the guitar was turned up way too loud so it was impossible to hear a thing she was singing. Her songs had no real melody, rhythm, hooks, or discernible meaning…and they all sounded exactly the same. She also never failed to point out the mistakes she made, whereas otherwise we would have quite happily not noticed them.

Anyways, enough about her. When her set finally, finally ended, it was Tyler’s turn. And from the first note he played, he had us hooked. He was incredible. He put so much…everything into his playing. He started off by beatboxing into a microphone that was attached to a loop tape, looping it, and playing piano on top of it…it was awesome. Who needs a band anyways. He also swapped piano for saxophone a few times. Even someone who knows absolutely nothing about saxophone technique could see that he was brilliant. About halway through the concert, he introduced one of his songs by saying “This one is kind of John Mayer-esque…”

Well. We’d only been talking about the guy all freaking day…Our reaction was explosive. Being that we were the table closest to the stage, Mr. Summers noticed, and said with a grin, “Well, you can scream for me like I was John Mayer, I don’t mind.” We did. We got dubbed the ‘John Mayer Table’ for the rest of the night–which included Tyler playing my two favourite Billy Joel songs of all time, ‘Vienna’ and ‘And So It Goes’. I cried during the latter. Wallet rolled its…eyes? Zippers. But enjoyed it as much as I did.

After his set, we kicked into full fangurl mode. Most of us bought all of his releases and lined up to talk to him/get his autograph. When it was my turn, I told him about loving Billy Joel, and he got quite excited. He asked me what other music I liked, and when I mentioned Coldplay he told me how much he loved Viva. I think that was when I fell in love with him. (Not really.) I said, “One day, I think that people really will cheer for you like for John Mayer.” But that was not all…we managed to con our teacher into letting us get a photo with him, and the baristas into letting us take it behind the bar. (It’s quite cool back there…)

The result being that we got back to the hotel at midnight–a healthy hour, especially when we had to leave at 7:30 the next morning.

Holy crap, this is really long. And I still haven’t fully explained Wallet’s loss. Well, on the walk home from drop-off point, it made a bid for freedom and fell into the ditch somewhere. Thing is, it is no longer there.

I fully understand if you stopped reading about 900 words ago. I’ll shut up now. Goodnight.

~ by automaticbrainchild on October 3, 2008.