For Valentine's day I surprised Keegan with two tickets to see one of his favorite bands, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones at the Germantown Performing Arts Center in Germantown, Tennessee. This band is such an awesome mix of different styles of music.
Wikipedia says, "Frontman Béla Fleck plays acoustic and electric banjos, mixing a bluegrass and folk sound into a modern improvisational style. Fleck has received Grammy nominations for performances in the jazz, bluegrass, pop, spoken word, contemporary Christian, gospel, classical, and country categories—more categories than any other musician."
We got to see the original line up of the Flecktones: Béla Fleck, brothers Victor Wooten and Roy "Future Man" Wooten, and Howard Levy. Casey (I don't know his last name,) their fiddler and merch man also came out for a few songs.
Béla played the banjo, Victor played the bass, Future Man played the drumitar, Howard played the piano and harmonica and Casey played the fiddle.
All I can say is I was amazed by the show. All of the musicians are masters of their instruments (Future Man even invented his,) and it really showed. Howard played the harmonica like a horn, Victor played the bass like a piano and the things that Future Man does with his drumitar are amazing.
Nope, that's not a horn playing, that's a harmonica!
The best part of all of this? We got to meet the band! We *thought* the might do a signing after the show but there was no mention of it at the end of the concert. We ran into the director of GPAC and asked her if the band was signing autographs. She said they were supposed to but since they played such a long show (they played for almost 3 hours!) they were too tired. We walked outside and were about to head to the car when the director ran out to catch us. She said the band decided to sign autographs but we needed to get inside quickly before they finished. We ran back inside with our CD and got everyone's autograph! The director told Howard that we had driven from our small town in Missisippi all the way to Germantown (basically Memphis) just for the show (about 3 hours) and he was sincerely thankful that we had come out for them.
(I had to piece together two pictures so the part by Béla's shoulder looks kinda weird, but you get the idea) We're going to get it framed and put it up on the walls of our office where all of our other signed band things are.
I totally got this shirt. Who doesn't want a hippo in a beret? I decided not to get it signed by the band because sharpie doesn't hold up well through the wash.
I'm so glad that Keegan and I went to see them. It was another instance where Keegan showed me a whole genre of music that I didn't know about!
Before the show, we went to the Melting Pot. I had never tried fondue before but really wanted to, so we decided to splurge a little. For about $35 we got a swiss cheese fondue with bread, veggies and apples as well as a chocolate and peanut butter fondue with Rice Crispy Treats, red velvet cake, cheese cake, strawberries and bananas. I wasn't a huge fan of the cheese fondue we got because the base of it was white wine and I'm not a wine fan at all. I'm also not a huge fan of swiss so next time we go, I think we'll get the cheddar cheese fondue. The chocolate fondue was to.die.for. Seriously it was amazing.
It was really nice to be able to have a date night with Keegan. At dinner it felt like we were at the beginning stages of our relationship where things were all new and exciting. I'm so glad that we got to go to the concert and eat awesome food even though we didn't get much sleep (we got in at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning.) It was totally worth it and I'd do it again in a heart beat.
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