The Concert

Boothbay

Thursday night

We just returned from a concert on the lawn of the Boothbay Public Library. (Woops, they pronounce it libary here.) What fun we had!

The Woodbury band has been playing on that lawn for 57 years. 57 also appeared to be the median age for band members. It was sort of like a geriactric junior high school band, both in composition and in quality of the music. Nevertheless, they played lots of John Phillip Sousa and songs from the Music Man and turn of the (20th) century standard tunes. It was very enjoyable.

The lawn was packed with ordinary people. The kind of people that looked like they should be our friends.

A special attraction was that the band invites all the children in the audience to take turns coming up to the podium and directing the band with the director's little wand. The kids were wonderfully cute and they had great fun doing it. Most adorable was a young retarded girl; the type like we know from ARC. When the music played she swung her arms and her head and her whole body. When they asked for kids to conduct, she was first in line.
When she conducted the band she had a huge smile on her face.

A man next to us brought his dog -- a golden labrador. When the music played the dog would roll on his back and beg for his tummy to be scratched.

I must say that was the most enjoyable show that we've seen since the day that Bob and Carol deMello took us to the amateur theater in Essex, NY to see Little Shop of Horrors.

Rowing back through the harbor after the concert was also very nice. It was totally still. The lights of all the buildings surrounding the harbor made it pretty. We rowed slowly just gliding along amonst the moored boats. At 2100 the church sounded two bells. Aha, the church keeps ship time, just like we do on Tarwathie. How charming.

I take back what I said about Boothbay earlier. It is not entirely given over to tourism, there's still a lot of charm here.

My plan is to leave here tomorrow, but we're somewhat reluctant to leave because it's so nice. We also haven't decided to sail to Bar Harbor or to Portland. Libby also wants to visit the so-called outer islands where it is said that the whales frolic and the puffins occupy the land. We've never seen a live puffin. Maybe we'll sail tommow and maybe not.