Thursday Night Gallivanting

I love the word gallivant. I should use it more.

An Eye Weekly photographer came to my house on Thursday evening to do a shoot for the paper's House Call feature. Eye usually comes out on Thursdays, but, since that's Christmas Day next week, it will be available on Tuesday. You can check out my digs in the issue.

My friend Leslie then came over and, being swept up in the spirit of the season, I gave her a scanner.

With my good deeds done for the day, I headed towards Parkdale and The Beaconsfield, where SOCAN held a party to celebrate IllScarlett's All Day With It being certified gold and having their "Nothing Special" video hit #1 on MuchMusic.

There was a disproportionate number of good-looking women with not-so-good-looking guys in the club. There was an open bar and I had a Guinness to give myself a solid base before moving on to rum and Cokes. There was also some great food, including shrimp, oysters, vegetable and cheese skewers, nachos and salsa, calamari, chicken skewers, French onion soup and steak on toast. The party started at 8 p.m. and the bar tab was at $1.964.61 and rising when I left 85 minutes later.

I continued west to Mitzi's Sister for the opening of my friend Mira MacRae's new art show. She has some cool paintings of musicians as well as some abstracts and landscapes. Her T-shirt designs were also for sale. You should check out her work.

Another friend, Heather Morgan, performed a short solo set with her guitar. She's a very talented singer/songwriter — with murder ballads being her specialty — and also covered Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing In The Dark."

The Legendary Dirtbikers, who I've talked about in this space before, were up next and wore suits in honour of Mira's opening. I keep liking the band more every time I see them and I'm especially fond of their song titles, or at least their choruses, including "Until I Write A Good Song, This Will Have To Do," "First Dog In Space," "I'm Sure I Didn't Drink Any Cold Piss" and "Deliberately Foxy."

Backwoods Justice, who I've never heard of, closed the night. They also wore suits and all of their songs were about Christmas, which made sense once I was told that their previous gig was last December. One of their songs could be considered turkey porn, and another used the tune of Musical Youth's "Pass The Dutchie" and sported the charming chorus "Pass the turkey from the left hand side/Dinner rolls."

There were lots of friends in attendance and it felt like a party, but Dirtbiker Fred Robinson — who co-owns Mitzi's Sister — said it wasn't a Christmas party. Therefore I can't rate it as one like I have with these seasonal get-togethers, but it was a good time. And thanks to Fred for the pints. It's hard to beat a St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout on a cold night.

Above: IllScarlett's Alexander Norman and Swavek Piorkowski show off their SOCAN #1 Awards for "Nothing Special." (photo by Pete Nema)

Below: IllScarlett with their gold awards for All Day With It. (photo by Pete Nema)