Busted Guitars and Injured Players

      The locale for watching the Wolves/Mavs game Monday night was Patrick's in St. Peter, as fine an Irish-style establishment as any in southern Minny. My friend J-Dog and I decided on Patrick's because it was the only place around that had an open-mic music deal going on on a Monday night. When we got there, the music was blazing, a number of accomplished-looking guys jamming away on stage--a four piece band, actually. I later met a couple of the guys, friendly characters all. One of the guys, Dave, a bassist formerly of the band Libido Boyz, was especially gracious and interesting to talk to. J-Dog and I signed our names to the grease board and sat down for a cool one.
     I didn't catch as much of the game as I'd hoped there in Patrick's mainly because, long about halftime, I discovered a malfunctioning input/peg on the bottom of my guitar, one that could be fixed only if we could find a person with a skinny enough forearm to fit it inside the sound hole. See the nut had come loose from the input rod, and it needed to be screwed back on, gently. After three or four people tried sticking their arms in my sound hole and nearly got them stuck, I was about to give up.
Thankfully, a bonnie young lass name of Kelli Jo, also a server at Patrick's, had the forearm for the job and eventually fixed the problem.

     The entire third period elapsed by the time my guitar was taken care of, but I noted that the Wolves had kept Dallas at bay. I read later how Big Pek rolled his ankle and left the game during that fateful third quarter. Bad luck, all those injuries.
     The fourth quarter was another Rick Adelman Showcase as Alexey Shved, Andrei Kirilenko, Dante Cunningham, and Luke Ridnour stepped up to carry out Coach's plan and keep the Wolves on top. Shved, in particular, gets props as he was the Wolves catalyst in the fourth quarter, and this bodes well for the Pups when the time when injuries subside.
     Finally, after some friendly discussions with the regulars, including an interesting and impressively-bearded young feller named Tom Leonhardt who works at the excellent St. Peter Food Co-Op and who somehow remembered me from teaching him in Composition class at MSU some ten years ago, J-Dog and I hit the stage. We gave 'er hell for about four songs, and though I don't know that we sounded all that great, it was fun.