:: Los Angeles Feb 17-21, 2005 :: The main lesson I came away with from the LA trip is: life, love, family and friends are what matter most. We were having a great time, and eating wonderful meals, and having fun performing at new places, and one morning I got a call. A lady who was a dear friend of mine had died, and her son told me he was glad that one of the last memories he would hold of his mother was her listening to my music (he brought her to a show of mine, just before Valentines day) and the pleasure it brought her. The emotion in his voice, the sorrow, cut through everything. Then 2 more days passed, and I got a call from my stepdad that a family friend had stepped out of his car and had been struck by a car in a hit-and-run accident. Luckily he was alive, and so here we were, L.A. Peter, his parents from North Carolina, and Jacksonville Rebecca, all together in an LA hospital room. Us all coming together and the gratitude in their eyes for the effort -- i'd taken a train and wandered through the dark streets of downtown LA to get there -- made a big impression on me...... That was the substance of the trip. Sweet Chad picked me up from the airport in his cute Karmann Ghia. Having gone months without playing together and no time for rehearsing, Michelle and I performed at the Talking Stick, the coziest of coffee houses. Put it this way, the same guy who runs your sound is the same guy who makes your coffee. It was such a fun show, and the audience couldn't have been better! But we've performed so much together in the past, that everything fell into place. We sent chord charts via the internet and did a little bit of phone rehearsing. I love technology..... ummm, no reason for this other than that I have a song I wrote called "Dolores" Michelle Payne + Rebecca Zapen = Selma Pat Ciliberto got some friends together so we could have a Django jam. It was great to be playing violin on those tunes again. Pat and I met in 2002 in France at the Django Reinhardt Jazz Festival, in Samois. Busking (a.k.a. street performing) is pretty popular in L.A. Michelle had to get a permit to busk. We were able to run a P.A. and it was powered by a car battery! Busking on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica I met my cousins Michael and Larry for the first time. The terrain is so different from Florida. This photo doesn't even begin to do it justice. If it was this beautiful with nearly endless rain, I can't wait to see how beautiful it will be in the fall with their normally dry weather.