Easy come, easy go, little si, little lo....

It rained for Shakespeare Friday night. Because of course it did. Two years ago, they had two rainouts the entire season. Guess which two I was at?  So we just headed home after dinner in a beloved North Buffalo trattoria, and resolved to try again tonight. Not last night, even though it would have been perfect outside.  Because there were other plans already made.

The rain got worse by Saturday morning- witness Pepper's newest finds on her morning walkies-



- but was out of the area by late morning, when she had her first spa visit under our jurisdiction. Her previous groomer sounded a little pricey, so I checked the chains last weekend and found that Petco had a quite reasonable package- "face, feet and fanny"- so Eleanor took her and, after some stumbling over getting proof of her rabies vaccination, left her there for all three F's (she compared the feels to leaving Emily at day care for the first time #awwwwww), but Pepper got straight A's for behaving the whole time:)

Here's her post-spa pose:



(The bandana's off; I caught her in at least one bank-robber pose with it on.)

I did a little yardwork as the Big Dig nears its end, but we mostly readied to explore one of the Not My Buffalo Yet areas I'd scoped out the day before: Silo City.  Some of these are still in use for their original grainy purposes- General Mills is still here and "My City Smells Like Cheerios" is a Thing- but many were just abandoned. Developers have made occasional proposals ranging from repurposing to demolition- HEY! WATERFRONT CONDOS!- but one strip of them has become an out-of-the-way arts destination, even getting the city to rename the stub street going into it as "Silo City Row." Sadly, Siri has not yet been informed of this change, but I picked up on it the previous day on my test run, so we were able to get there in plenty of time for two readings and a musical performance....

delayed by half an hour, in part because the silo was leaking.  I did mention the rain, yes?

It didn't delay the picture-taking, though. 



Positively majestic structures from a bigger, stronger time- Chicago may have been the City of Big Shoulders, but Sandburg would've had trouble finding Buffalo unable to outlift it.   We headed into the performance space, and I had to look up into what was once grain from where we sat up to.... this:



No grain, nor grinding gears, fell upon us, but the previous night's rain did for the first halfish hour, but in time the first poet took the stage:



Marcus Jackson, an Ohioan (fitting for a venue off Ohio Street), with words that were true and real and covering a range of subjects and emotions. He read from his most recent book of poems and a few of more recent vintage; I got to meet him after his words, letting him know some of the venue's history and that Rochester, as well, has a group devoted to this kind of literature.  Maybe a seed was planted there.

The musicians then set up. Their instruments, purely electronic; their outfits, straight outta Devo; their performance, awesome:)



(UVB76, if you need them:)

We then got a genuine break, to restock our water (beer was also on offer), purch the merch, and stretch the legs. Eleanor took a brief opportunity to see if chanting in the silo would be as awesome as the mic-enhanced acoustics of the two performers (no, but nothing shabby about it, either:).

Then came Kazim Ali:




He apologized at one point: “I’m sorry I can’t explain any of these poems to you. It’s your tough luck.” We got enough- of their energy, their emotion, their closeness to the heart.

Then it was time to wind back through the little-known back streets to get to familiar turf and eventually home.  We did our own things this morning, bloody well little this afternoon, and still plan much ado about  nothing tonight.  All in all, it's been a week of what we refer to, inspired by an old New Yorker cartoon, "ART- AND PLENTY OF IT!"