The new me, just for you

World's Greatest

[Brandon, Manitoba]
Song of the day: Best of Me - (Covered by a currently unnamed band)

Last night, I tasted the silver medal.

Some of you may know already what that means, but for those of you that don't, follow me around the room:

It all started after Aaron Check and I won a karaokee contest. It was pretty bunk cause there were only 8 of us, and because of such a small number of contestants, the owner of the bar didn't want to pay the cash he promised to the winners. So we got some cheap beer stuff (a cheap can bag and an even cheaper scarf) instead.

Somewhat disgruntled, we moved to the house of one of the guys in our party. We sat around for maybe 15 minutes before we all started talking about the guitar hanging on his wall. Now this guitar was straight 80's hairband. Triangle body, everything. So we pull it down, plug it into the amp that happens to be in the corner, and Aaron starts playing little riffs and diddies, and his best friend Graydon (one of the best drummers in the country) keeps mini beats on his lap.

So I get antsy and ask to play the guitar. I play for 5 seconds and Aaron starts talking:
"Alright, screw it. When are we jamming. Tomorrow morning?"
At this point, I leave the room (mentally) because I've got this amazing guitar in my hand. I can hear that what they're talking about, but it's not registering. Finally, I come to and hear Aaron:
"Cuffer, how are you not getting excited about this!!"

And then I realize what they've been talking about.

We move from the house to Brandon University (which happens to be a block away) and we pull our Hoja van up to the back door of the music building. From there we proceed to have the President of the Music College (who just so happens to be Jeff, the guy who's house we were at) flash his name to the security people and enter the building (at 2:36am) with complete ease. From there, we load ALL of our sound equipment into a huge rehearsal studio. One vehicle (with me in it) leaves for the Check house to grab my two guitars, a bass amp, any patch chords we can find, and a couple of hats and shirts to make a video.

We return to the University to find our system set up and ready to plug in the amps and guitars.

So here we are. Aaron Check, Graydon Kramer, and Brennan Cuff, all in our element, jamming to a few different songs. We spend 5 minutes fooling around on one song, 3 minutes on another, and we finally arrive at 'Best of Me'. Aaron and I have been playing this song since the start of the year, so we fall into our rythym like falling off a log. All it takes is to play through it a few times, let Graydon in on all the change-ups we usually use, and get photo cameras, digital cameras, video cameras, and phone cameras all running as we rock out to a couple of full songs.

We were there from 2:30 until almost 6 by the time we loaded all of our stuff back outside and into the vehicles.

I was on such a high all night, it felt like the middle of the afternoon. I'm so glad that we have videotapes of the event dubbed 'Rockin the school'.

There were an uncountable number of times when I had to double check that this was actually happening, and then remind myself that this is just an event, and that I'm not really a rockstar.

But I tell ya. If some power-that-be was to come and say that I was never allowed to participate in musicals for the rest of my life.....

... that silver medal would still taste pretty sweet.

Brennan "We never grew out of this feeling that we won't give up" Cuff

posted by Leah Wilburn @ 12:46 PM