day 2 in toledo

After a restful night of sleep (much needed after catching only two hours before leaving at 4 a.m. yesterday), lunch was with Murray, my old boss here in Toledo. He’s a really great guy — besides his days editing, he spends his free time running a non-profit mentoring program for kids in trouble. He obviously cares about these kids a lot; he told me about the problems the kid he mentors is having (not the least being he’s in jail at the moment). I admire the hell out of him. A reminder: Dallas ISD is launching a mentoring program this year, and they’re looking for 1,000 people to give one hour a week to mentor an at-risk freshman. I’m signed up (although still going through the background check process) — please consider doing it yourself. As some one who has researched the dropout problem far more than any human being should, I can tell you that mentoring programs are just about the best way to keep kids in school, and it’s often a load of fun for the adult in question.
(Speaking of the dropout problem, I had another [kinda boring] story in yesterday’s paper about it. Probably for JB completists [and dropout-data-crunching gurus] only.)
Two signs spotted in the last couple of hours:
– Outside a Marshall Field’s women’s dressing room (yes, Kelly roped me into some shopping): a sign warning that “for your security and ours,” the dressing room may be staffed by “female Asset Protection” investigators. I know female is lower-cased, but I had this vision of a corps of Female Asset Protection agents, wandering the earth, searching for anyone threatening the protection of Female Assets.
– On a street sign, across the street from a fire station: “Stop here on fire run.” Unfortunately, it’s an old sign, and the bolt that fastens it to its pole is rusted, and years of rain have made it look just like a comma. So it reads as “Stop here on fire, run.” Which sounds like a good set of suggestions to me. (Although wouldn’t running just fan the flames? What ever happened to stop, drop, and roll? Okay, I’ve taken this too far already.)
Tonight, we’re up to Detroit Rock City to see one of my favorites, Sloan, at the State Theater. (Fans of the very fine movie Out of Sight may remember the State as the site of the boxing match where Snoopy and Jack meet up. And, as an aside, if you don’t have the movie’s soundtrack, you’re missing out on a great party CD.)
I first heard Sloan in 1996, when I was an intern at the Toledo paper. Toledo radio is abysmal, so the only decent station to listen to was 88.7 CIMX, out of Windsor, Ontario. At the time, they played a ton of great Canadian bands, like Jale, the Super Friendz, and Thrush Hermit, and I really got into the Halifax early ’90s scene, which produced a lot of great music. (Unfortunately, the station now just plays the same unlistenable stream of Korn-derived crap every other formerly cool “alternative” station now does.)
Sloan was clearly the giant standing bestride the whole Confederation. One of the few benefits of living in Toledo was easy access to Sloan: on tours they generally stayed in Canada, but they’d usually dip down for shows in Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland. So I think this’ll be my sixth or seventh time seeing them — they’re great fun live. (If you’d like to sample some, this site has several MP3 concerts saved. I recommend the Atlanta 1999 show, and was at the Toledo 1998 show — see if you can hear me in the crowd noise.)
I’ve also started a bit of a crusade to get Sloan to come to Dallas. I interviewed the band once for a story, so I had their manager’s email address. I let him know that there’s actually a Sloan cover band operating in Dallas; that at the Built to Spill show a few months back, they played all of their fourth album, Navy Blues, in between acts; that I’d bring all my friends to the show; and that I really really really really wanted them to come to Dallas. But what do I get for my efforts? Bupkis. Maybe next tour.