I'm recovering from the weekend.
Saturday progressed from rather droll to nervewracking to embarassed to relieved to drunken to sleepy.

Saturday was the JET community's talent show. I mentioned before that I got roped into it somehow, well actually with the aid of some beers and flattery, I was involved. We left for Matsumoto, the cooler twin sister to Nagano city, about 60 km south early-ish in the morning and went through the obligatory practice, set up and whatnot. Things seemed to be going fairly smoothly (well not that bad at least) up until the show actually began and one of the performers began his drunken merriment. Leon, an alchoholic englishman who was supposed to be playing guitar in the middle of the show, had been up to his usual (so i've heard) stuff. Rather inebrieated at the outset of the show he was up and down all during the show drinking and yelling. When the time came for his act, he was actually supposed to be yanked since he was so drunk, he got onto stage yelled and wandered a bit and then proceeded to bang out some songs and then afterwards stomped his guitar to bits. It was a shocker to the japanese let's just say that. This was made worse by the fact that the Emcee, Tiffany, was pretty much inable to do her job effectively and kind of got into a tiff with the drunken Leon.
On the other hand:
Jennifer's act went pretty well. She and a host of other people in Nagano had been practicing a STOMP-like performance and they got through it with only a few minor glitches and the audience, which to this point had been full of rudeness, gave them good reactions for the first time.

I was up second to last and I was surprisingly not so worried once I actually got up onto stage. I kind of remembered the old rush from highschool plays and I just enjoyed hamming it up a bit. I did my introduction, sang my songs and had a nice time up there with the power of the microphone in my hand. There's something nice about having a mic. I think its the fact that no matter what some idiot yells at you, you can be louder without even really trying.

Afterwards, we packed it all up into Lara and Shane's car and headed over to the pub. See, matsumoto is cool enough to have an honest to god English pub. Certainly the beer is ridiculously priced, but hey, it's good beer. They had Kilkenney, Guinnes and Tetleys on tap and we also sampled from their selection of ciders.
Overall the night ended on a good note, I even ended up finding out that Leon's not really a bad guy, just a goddam alchoholic. It made me feel more sorry than angry with him. I was actually more pissed at the rest of the foreigners in the crowd, many of them having smuggled drinks into the auditorium and gotten drunk, would yell things at some of the acts. What a great impression to give to the Japanese people in attendance.

At least the whole sordid affair is over now. I'm happy to say that I don't have anything like that to do for a while.