You have to treat transit in Vancouer kind of like a mentally handicapped sibling. You can't hate it, because that won't change it, and since it's yours, you can't get rid of it either, nor would you want to. It can at times be irritating and gimpy, but that's just the way it is and it deserves more love, compassion and understanding than anger.
Regardless, due to the transit system's autism, Abby and I found ourselves sitting in a bus shelter a heavy stone's throw from East Hastings, watching the busses pass in all but the direction that we wanted to go.
You always meet interesting people in that neighbourhood. One man who didn't so much walk as flail himself about asked us for change, and when he didn't recieve any from anyone in the shelter he continued on his way. Halfway down the block his pants fell down, revealing the saggiest butt I've ever seen. People try to tell me that drugs are cool. I don't believe them.
Beside us two Playland employees began to fume about the lack of reliable bus service and how much they hated being assigned to the climbing wall at work, because it involves lifting lots of small children.
In spite of the transit delays, we managed to squeak into the doors of the Cultch before they closed to the public. We didn't have much luck finding seats, though and had to squish in with the people up in the balcony.
The Cultch is a small converted church, and the beauty of it is that there are very few places to sit in there without feeling close to the artist. It doesn't hold more than four hundred people or so, so it's nice and cozy and there was plenty of interaction between the audience and Matt Good, who we were there to see.
Melissa McLelland opened the show and we liked her almost immediately. It always bothers me that I listen to so few female artists but I console myself with the thought that the reason why is that not many women make music in styles that I like. But she's got a pretty voice and music with a nice folksy/blues/soul feel to it that I like so I made sure that her ep came home with me.
Because this was technically the last show of the tour and in his own hometown to boot, Matt played an extra long set and encore, interspersed with local humour that the rest of the country wouldn't get. We all had a big laugh at the song he wrote about Poco girls and had an even bigger laugh when one of the guys in the audience from Surrey just had to shout out that Matt was drinking Japanese beer, just after Matt himself had mentioned it. I'm never completely sure what to think about Surrey people. That's a lie.
An anecdote about how Van Halen used to pick up girls at concerts sparked the use of the catch phrase "it was the 80's" for the rest of the concert. As for a setlist, I honestly have no idea. He played for two hours. There were three things in there that I hadn't heard before and I don't know about the names of them. It was awesome, all of it.
There were two people sitting directly in front of me when I arrived, in the middle of four seats. They stayed like that throughout the opener and then at the beginning of Matt's set, they decided to move over and give up the two seats to a couple that was sitting on the floor. Ten minutes into Matt's set, the woman that they had been saving a seat for returned, already quite drunk and began to harass everyone nearby because she had lost her seat. Once in a while she left to get another beer and then she would come back and continue to try her damndest to make life as miserable as possible for everyone by singing along and talking loudly on her phone.
I wish people like that were able to see how incredibly asinine they look. I also sometimes wish that the Cultch had large men with anger problems instead of small soft-spoken women for ushers. Luckily she left for the encore.
Outside, Commercial Drive smelled of gyros as we made our way to the busstop, followed by a woman in a crushed velvet vest who was quite enthusiastic about how Matt played a lot of old songs in his new style, yet was upset because he hadn't played House of Smoke and Mirrors. I was distracted by the view of two people practicing acrobatics behind muslin curtains in an apartment above the shop across the street.
I love the Drive.
Picture courtesy of my sister.
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