Drove up to the City this afternoon to review some of the Vienna Teng East Coast Tour footage with a crew from Voice of America, who is doing a segment on Vienna. While Vienna and Jim worked on some new recordings, I reviewed the tapes with Lily. Overall, the footage was decent, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Fortunately, the sound came out pretty well, thanks to one of the cameras being plugged directly into the sound board.

Afterwards, I hung out at Eric’s place, watching him clean his 1Ds sensor before going to dinner at Alice’s in Noe Valley.

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I’m writing this on a plane that is 229 miles away from the San Jose International Airport. Following the Vienna Teng tour, I made a stop at my hometown of San Diego. I spend the past few days with the family, resting and recuperating from the two and a half weeks on tour with Vienna and Jim.

On Monday, I met up with my cousin, King Ming, who’s finishing up his studies at UCSD. I convinced him to drive me to my old high school, La Jolla Country Day School, where I met up with a number of my former teachers, including Mrs. Boston (Art), Mr. Perrotti (Chemistry), Madame Thornton (French), Mr. Simms (Physics), Mr. Newell (English), and Mr. Fleischacker (History). I’m coming up on my 10 year high school reunion! Dang, it’s been a long time since I graduated from high school!

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19 performances and a number of television and radio appearances later, we’re at the end of the East Coast Tour. Vienna’s tour began on March 27 at the Kendall Cafe in Boston, MA and today, April 17, it ended at The Basement in Nashville, TN.

Nashville, as one might suspect, is a music town. I wasn’t prepared for the silence that came whenever Vienna performed. Kathy and Tom, proprietors of Linden Manor, the bed and breakfast inn where we stayed, told me that the crowds in Nashville are really respectful of musicians Certainly Mr. Clap and Snap from Eddie’s Attic would have been eaten alive by the crowd had he been at The Basement.

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Television studios are cool! This morning, we headed to the Fox 5 television station for a morning interview and performance. We when arrived, they were filming a segment on a group of junior Atlanta Falcon cheerleaders. I must admit that it was weird to see them performing live and on television at the same time. Their parents were all beaming with pride and joy watching them dance. Their red and black uniforms, however, bore the old Falcon’s logo, not the new, more menacing one.

As with the radio show a few days ago, the television interview and performance went by very quickly. We spent more time mingling with the staff after Vienna’s performance. It was fun to sit in the same seats as the news anchors as Jim snapped away with the camera. I have to admit that it would be cool to be a newscaster for a day or two!

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Today was the first (and only) day off during the entire Vienna Teng East Coast Tour. We spent the evening at a very suspect Day’s Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. We had a nice lunch at the Chinese Noodle House right in the center of the town. The beef noodle soup that we ordered was very well prepared. Compliments to the chef and special thanks go out to Tinto, our helpful and cheery server.

Before heading to Georgia, we stopped by the Warren Wilson college in Asheville to get some literature on one of their Masters programs for Jim. Asheville reminded me a lot like a cleaner version of Berkeley, complete with hippie-looking students. We had a little 8fps fun with the swing at the college before beginning the three-hour drive from Asheville to Athens, where my friend, Ahn is studying business at the University of Georgia.

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Vienna was on WNCW Radio this morning. We were listening to the station during our drive, and they mentioned how Vienna was going to come on at 1:00 pm! I used to think that there was so much prep time needed for a radio or television show, but we arrived about 20-25 minutes before the show, which only lasted a few minutes.

Minutes later, we were out on a grass field overlooking the radio station, tossing the frisbee around. Since Vienna didn’t have any shows for the next day and a half, we took our time getting to our next location, Asheville, North Carolina, where we would stay the night. Tomorrow will be the first true day off for the tour. Vienna’s been playing non-stop since the end of March!

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This afternoon, the Lights took Jim, Vienna, and me out hiking at this trail nearby their house. The sun has finally broken out from the rainy and snowy conditions of the past few weeks. It actually feels a little bit like California now!

Life is a little bit more relaxed when you don’t have to drive 300 miles to your next location. Tonight’s performance will be held at the Temple Ball Gallery where the Tori Amos Tribute Show occurred last night.

The hike was a fun change of pace from the constant touring the past couple of weeks. I must have looked funny wearing cycling pants with backpacking socks and dress shoes! I guess I didn’t anticipate some off-trail extracurricular activity on this trip!

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In the evening, after our wisterious hiking adventure, we returned to the Temple Ball Gallery to hear Lisa Ray, Denise Barbarita, and Vienna Teng perform. The crowd was much smaller than the one at the Tori Tribute the previous evening, which allowed us a little more freedom to experiment and have fun. Vienna had Jim come up to play drums on The Tower, Gravity, 1,000 Oceans (Tori cover), and Undone. I even got into the act, detailing the story of Vienna’s inclusion as prime booty music from SI Online.

Here are a sampling of pictures from the evening’s performance. It’s too bad that I didn’t bring the video camera and plugged into the board, as it would have been great to have recorded Jim and Vienna jamming together. I especially liked tonight’s versions of Green Island Serenade, Homecoming, Signalfire, and In My Arrival. I’m still waiting to hear Mission Street. We’ve got a couple more dates on tap for the tour, so I’m confident that she’ll squeeze that in. If Vienna’s feeling especially adventurous, she might even want to tackle Passage.

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The morning was spent sleeping. Sleeping is good when you’re traveling non-stop from city to city, day by day. The Viennasaur hibernated until well past noon, waking up from her sweet slumber around 1:00 pm. We hung out at Connie’s place for a couple of hours, which we spent looking over some of her prints from Paris and surfing the Internet for mapping directions. Traveling is so much more convenient these days with Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest, ain’t it?

Our first stop from Charlotte was to pick up Jim from the Enterprise Rent-A-Car near the Raleigh airport. Next, we headed back to the Lights house in Carrboro before driving to the Temple Ball Gallery where the Tori Amos Tribute Show was to be held later in the evening.

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Charlotte, North Carolina, home of the Carolina Panthers and the former Charlotte Hornets. Charlotte was also the site of Vienna’s last performance at The Evening Muse, a performance space and restaurant similar to The Point in Bryn Mawr, PA and the Six String Cafe in Cary, NC. Vienna had a full schedule during the day, doing not one but two radio shows and a television show before her evening performance. I stayed at the home of the Lights throughout the day, catching up on my taxes and some business work.

On the drive to Charlotte from Carrboro, which took around 3 hours, the Lights and I ate at a Cap’n Stevens Steak and Seafood Restaurant. In the South, they have a curious affinity for eating fried cornmeal, which they call hush puppies. They’re called that because people are too busy to talk while eating them! I first tasted a hush puppy at the Western Sizzlin’ a few days ago, but these hush puppies weren’t in the form of a ball, they were shaped like onion rings!

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