Christie and I have very similar tastes musically, so it's natural that one of our favorite musical haunts in the Bay Area is the Monday night session at O'Reilly's pub in North Beach. This is where the free-spirited Maine-born fiddler Brian Theriault plays his heart out. He takes Irish, Scottish, Cape Breton, American, and even Rock tunes and re-invents them into playful worlds of texture, mood, and color. This delicate balance of melody and improvisation is common to New England fiddle players, and Brian is one of my favorites!
Just before I left for the East Coast, Brian mysteriously disappeared. With a little poking around, Christie found out that Brian had gone back to Maine, and since that was only a few hours away from where we were in Connecticut, Christie and I hatched a plan to drive north in search of our friend.
After hours of driving, we stopped in South Portland at an Ihop and reminisced about Rustic Roots. This somehow lead to the idea that we both needed melodicas. It's a cheap, light keyboard that you can stuff anywhere; why didn't we think of this before? We were in a strip mall with a Guitar Center. No luck there, but they recommended we go to a little shop called Buckdancer's Choice Music Company. Like two silly teens drunk on life, we giggled our way to the local music store like it was the rock concert of the year.
Buckdancer's did not disappoint, with four flavors of melodica to choose from! By this time our enthusiasm over melodicas had waned, and we were now considering our choices carefully. Christie left without a melodica and I left with a copy of The Portland Collection. How could I resist buying The Portland Collection while in the other Portland? While leaving, we left a little trinket for a soon-to-be red-head at the front of the store.
We continued on north, stopping in Freeport for the night, then continued driving to the town of Brunswick. Brunswick is a very sweet town with a lovely natural foods store where we stopped for lunch, indulging in the mythically delicious wild blueberries of New England. Topsham (pronounced “Top-sum” by the locals) is a beautiful little town just to the north of Brunswick, and the town where Brian ran off to. Christie dropped me off at a Starbucks to do some computing while she went off to meet Brian and suss out the situation.
She called me a couple hours later to let me know that she was coming to pick me up and we were all going to have dinner at Brian's place. We pulled up to a quaint little red house with an attached garage, and walked around back. Strings of christmas lights hung around trees illuminating some lawn chairs and a fire in small brick fire pit. Hunched over the fire, fastidiously turning meat over the flames, was Brian Theriault.
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