Assembly Hall, Champaign
There are three facts that are important about today:
1. The venue is a huge dome that looks like a grapefruit squeezer. The backstage area is a large underground bunker that looks like the Rebel Base at the end of Star Wars where all the X-Wings and Y-Wings are preparing for their attack on the Death Star.
2. In the dressing room we have been provided with the biggest bowl of tortilla chips I have ever seen.
3. In the middle of the afternoon Joe du Fray gets the phone call which everybody dreads, saying that something had happened to one of his family, and leaves immediately for Denver. It is a recurring nightmare of this kind of life that every time you go away, you're somehow bringing a disaster closer to your home, that inevitably awful things will happen to the ones you love at the time when you are least able to reach them.
Everyone is a bit shaken up, and for a while it's unclear what's going to happen next. Finally we get word that tonight and tomorrow's shows are cancelled, and the stage starts being dismantled.
We stay at the venue till late playing frisbee and sitting on the grass. There's something very strange about a venue that should be full of music and life standing empty and dark. Something worryingly karmic.
