I spent this week on the road doing shows. Monday was the Summer Music Clinic up in Madison WI, Tuesday and Wednesday down in Evansville IN, and then Thursday back up North to Skokie IL. It would’ve been nice if I could have had better routing so I didn’t have to do so much driving, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

The show in Madison was a lot of fun, as I expected. I actually asked to come back to this one after I did it a few years ago. As a part of the intensive week-long music clinic for middle-school kids they also bring in entertainers so that the kids can learn to be good audience members, and therefore be more appreciative when they have a good audience themselves. It’s a really nice theater packed full of kids, and it’s always a great show.

Evansville was a lot of work (five 45 minute shows at five different locations in 2 days) but it was a great time. It’s always interesting to see how different the shows are when you do a series like this one. Some of them were packed, outrageous riots, and some were more low-key, calm, lightly attended affaris. The shows were great, and something I didn’t expect at all was that there were a bunch of kids who came to more than one show. One kid came to three! One show on the first day, and two on the second.

At one point in my show I tell a story with yo-yo tricks, and one of the tricks is the Runaway Dog where you throw a fast spinner, take the string off your finger, and the yo-yo rolls away from you. I always aim this trick at a specific kid so they can grab it and throw it back to me, but sometimes they miss the yo-yo as it rolls by. At one of the shows on the first day in Evansville, the kid missed the yo-yo so I asked for someone to go and get it. About 6 kids got up and sprinted for it. As they did, I sarcastically said, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Fight over it. And see if you can knock some teeth out while you’re at it.” I’m not used to people taking me seriously. The kids actually started fighting! No teeth were disloged, but neither were any parents. I had to go over and break up the fighting kids myself. It was very strange.

It was a slow drive back up to Indianapolis that evening, but I had my Berries & Cream Dr. Pepper so it was ok. I LOVE that stuff! It tastes like cough medicine. It’s awesome.

I REALLY didn’t want to have to get in the car for more driving on Thursday to go up to Skokie. The show ended up being delayed a few hours because of the rain, but that actually turned out to be good since I got to have lunch with Harper and some of the threadless.com guys. After lunch there was a short Half-Life video game session where we played in a level that Ivan had made to look like the threadless office. It was really cool.

Since Monday I have driven over 1600 miles. Yow.