It was real cool playing at the Grape Street in Philly last Friday. It's a full-on club: the complex has two music stages, a DJ booth/dance floor area, multiple levels and a semi-outdoor space out on the river with a weather-proofed gazebo bar. (That's the area that got the worst of the flooding; if our excursion had been scheduled for the Friday before, our show would've been cancelled.) The management runs the place real on time and professional. I enjoyed being a part of the circus of entertainers, and I got to catch parts of several other acts. It'd be a great place to go and get tipsy and wander from room to room as you certainly get a lot of party options for one cover charge. Our sound guy was a peach. He recorded a CD off the board for us for $5 and it came back tracked with each song numbered and no empty space at the beginning or end. Really though, I think a large part of this weekend was about bringing my band back home to meet my family in an effort to show my relatives a little more about who I am, and what I'm doing with my unconventional life. I'm not sure my effort was fully understood, but we Wheels all got along smashingly, and certainly had fun after the show listening to ourselves from the board tape and from Andy's mini-disc digital recorder and from Joe's tape player, and then delving back into digitally-stored Yacht Club and Tap Room sets while drinking in my parents sun room, the only rock happening in the quiet wee hours of the Swarthmore suburbs.