Thursday, January 10, 2013

Favorite Memory – Serenaded By A Stranger

janblogaday

I must say I’m quite proud of myself for making it to day 10 on the January Blog A Day challenge. Which…yeah okay, since I started the challenge 9 days late is technically day 2 for me…you know if you want to nit pick and all. But that in and of itself is a small miracle really. :D Especially since I’ve never been one of those blog everyday type of girls. But it’s a good way to get the creative juices flowing and get writing.

Today’s topic is “Memory”. One of my favorite memories involves two of my very favorite people, my sister, Cecily and my cousin, Pam. If you know anything about the three of us it’s that we love music, especially live music. We’ve gone to several concerts together over the years, more than I can count actually. And while all of these shows and the road trips to & from have created a lot of fun memories, the one that sticks out the most to me involves being serenaded under the April stars by a random musician we met in Dallas.

In April of 2009 my parents took the three of us to a concert in Dallas called The Rock & Worship Roadshow. It was an awesome show at the American Airlines Center where we, along with 19,000 others, rocked out to Hawk Nelson, Jeremy Camp, MercyMe, Tenth Avenue North, and Addison Road. We had a blast!

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(My sister, my cousin, and I outside the American Airlines Center before the concert in 2009.)

The next evening, after going out to dinner and indulging on yummy cupcakes from Sprinkles, we went out to the hotel pool, coffee in hand to start writing a review of the concert for our blog, The Waking. As we were writing, a guy comes walking out with his acoustic guitar in one hand and beer in the other. He walks over to us and asks if he could play us a few songs, we skeptically said yes.

He then asked if we had any requests and what were some of the bands we liked. We named off a few bands to which he asked, “Jesus music?”, ha! I suppose it was obvious. He asked “What about Glory Glory Hallelujah?” But instead of singing that song he just made up his own words and in turn really surprised us. For one thing we, in all honesty, weren’t expecting him to be that good lol. And then for a guy who wasn’t even a Christian to make up a really pretty worshipful song like that on the spot was rather impressive.

He had a voice reminiscent of Jason Mraz or G. Love. And while he wasn’t particularly handsome, he had a great smile and beautiful blue eyes hidden behind glasses. He looked to have been in his late twenties and was cute in a rugged band guy sort of way. He introduced himself as Rusty Reed and said he was in town to play a show later that night with Bob Marley's band, The Wailers.

We then spent the rest of the evening out by the pool with the cool breeze blowing talking, laughing, and listening to him sing us songs. Songs such as “Black Bird” & “Let It Be” by The Beatles, “No Woman No Cry” by Bob Marley,  a Snoop Dog cover done country style, per our request Britney Spear’s “Oops I Did It Again” lol (which was better than the original actually), and an original song inserting in all of our names, ha!

We talked about playing the guitar and how he used to play worship songs for a church youth group when he was younger. He had a really sweet kinda chill personality about him. And though I think we were trying to fight it the three of us were smitten kittens with this guy. Googley eyed and giggling way more than we’d even care to admit. It was the guy with the guitar thing, darn it if we weren’t suckers for that (Well I still kinda am… the other two are now married … to non guitar players no less ;))

It was getting kind of late and just about time for us to say our goodbyes. But before we did we asked if we could film him singing one of his original songs for our blog. He came up with a really cool song on the spot, we filmed it and then said our goodbyes. I had this video on my computer all these years but unfortunately lost it when my computer crashed this summer. Luckily, I’m pretty sure my sister has it on hers.

Rusty may not have known it but he made a really fun random memory for three girls who loved anything having to do with live music… and cute musicians. ;)

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