Today the organization that Cat works for held a small party at a local church, and she asked Bryan and I to play music while the guests were arriving. Bryan enlisted his far more talented friend, Matt (err, no, wait, this is the picture I meant to link to) to play with us. Matt is about to graduate with a Music degree, so his skills added a lot to the ensemble.

The three of us picked a few Christmas carols and arranged them for three acoustic guitars, then spent the last three days practicing them. We picked "Away In A Manger", "The First Noel", "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" (which came to be known as 'Oh God', a title fitting to the song's difficulty), "Angels We Have Heard On High", "O Come All Ye Faithful", and "Greensleev"— err, "What Child Is This." (What crap is that, retitling the song to turn it into a Christmas song? It's Greensleeves, dammit, and it's a perfectly good song as it is.)

I really enjoyed these arrangements, because I finally got to write and play the types of harmonies I've always liked so much. On most of the songs, Bryan and Matt would each play either the backing chords or the melody, and my part would often harmonize with whomever was playing the melody. I personally think these songs actually sounded pretty good, although that was usually due in large part to Matt's freakishly complex chords.

Today was the big day, and I'd say it went fairly well. Not so much because we made no mistakes — oh, we made plenty — but rather because none of the guests seemed interested in the least in what we were doing. It was basically a little informal jam session like any other, only this one happened to take place in the near proximity of strangers. And, although part of me had been hoping for something like that to happen — I didn't feel that I knew my parts well enough to play for an audience yet, and I've never enjoyed being the focus of attention anyway — it felt like kind of a letdown, after all the time we spent arranging and practicing the songs. About the only dedicated fan we had was Matt's son Jayden (who, by the way, is now an insatiable high five monster). But Jayden's enthusiasm (and dancing) more than made up for the rest of the assemblage's indifference.