I went to my first Little Salon on Tuesday night, at a condo in Parkview (a neighborhood near Columbia Heights that I didn’t even know existed before Google Mapping my directions).

There were some very nice paintings (okay – ‘mixed media,’ but can we just say they were things on canvass with paint and other stuff? because the term ‘mixed media’ makes me think there should be some electronics in there; actually, she was going to bring some music and computer accompaniments, but apparently there was some theft/car break-in thing happening, so that didn’t happen) by a Casey Snyder.

Bellwether Bayou, aka Laura Schwartz played violin and sang – using a loop machine to create a background and plucking her violin like a mandolin as much as she played it (or maybe it’s nothing like a mandolin; I have no music talent and while it might look like similar techniques to me, perhaps I’m just dead wrong).

Then a bit of a short story from a Lily Meyer and up to the roof deck to listen to a New York City based band called Rookin that has a lot of songs based on scraps of things by nineteenth century, Civil War era folks (note to Rookin: Drum Taps was by Whitman, not Melville). And they closed with Amazing Grace and that’s always awesome (the lead singer had one of those soft, fairly high pitched but still masculine voices that goes very well with something like that).

My only complaint is that it would have been nicer had been better half been around (she would have loved it, too).