The Great Gig In the Sky

If you didn't know, that is the title of a Pink Floyd song. 

I (Erika) don't know much about Pink Floyd, so I couldn't tell you if I like them or not. 

I can however, tell you that I am impartial to The Echoes of Pink Floyd. 

During the summer in Howell, they do this thing called "Concerts at the Courthouse," and they get a bunch of almost-nobody singers and bands to come every Friday during the summer and perform outside for free. The music is usually semi-lame, but it's still nice to get out of the house and do something different. And free. And! We usually get Dairy Queen when we go too, loooove ice cream. :)

So this last Friday, we (and by "we," I mean my mom, Daniel, Timmy, Rebekah, and I) decided to go and see the Echoes of Pink Floyd -  a band who covers only Pink Floyd songs if you hadn't guessed that already. But, believe it or not, The Echoes of Pink Floyd were not the real lure to the show that night. They had been advertising a laser light show. Yess - Everyone loves laser shows, so we were psyched. 

We showed up at 6:30 - half an hour before it was supposed to start... or so we thought...

We claimed our spot, my mom ordered pizza, and Daniel and I started people watching. We were surprised at how few people were there, I mean this is The Echoes of Pink Floyd, after all!

We got our pizza, and the man who was in charge (who I'm pretty sure was a Hippie back in the day) approached us and handed us coupons (for the pizza place we had already bought pizza from) and "reminded" us that the concert didn't start until 9:00 because the laser show was going to happen at the same time. 

Goodness. No wonder there were so few people there. 

We had over 2 hours to wait still. Oh well, thank goodness for interesting people (the most intriguing being an overweight man wearing a button up shirt.... unbuttoned. Yikes.) in Howell to watch. And pizza. And Dairy Queen. 

As we watched the band set up and listened to about 10,983 mic checks, Daniel and I started wondering just where this laser show was going to be... there's really no place in downtown Howell to project lasers onto... so it was quite the conundrum. 

As it got closer to 9:00, we slowly started to realize that our definition of a laser light show:

 

was very different from the hippie-man's definition of a laser show: 

Yes. It's true. This man considered the multi-colored stage lighting a "laser show." If that's not false-advertising, then I don't know what is. 

Despite the laser disappointment, we still had a good time. I'll tell you one of the many great parts of the night: 

The Echoes of Pink Floyd had some backup singers (who were semi-ridiculous, by the way... but that's a different story), and for one of the songs, it was just her doing a bunch of oooh's and aaaaah's. The ooooh's and aaaaah's went on for a long time. Much longer than you would have expected. And she was ok. Better than me, but I'll put it this way - she wouldn't make it very far on American Idol. At all. After she had been singing for about 3-4 minutes, Timmy said very loudly, "Why is this lady still singing?!" Oh my. Needless to say, we got some looks from the people around us. But from the grins on their faces, he said just what everybody else was thinking. :) 

Also. I got to see Kate. And Nate and Missy. And the babies. 

It was pretty much the best ever. Be jealous.