Andrew Heine traveled north to show recent artwork and perform at Red Rock in Mountain View. Here he documents and recaps his trip up to the Bay Area.
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It was good to be up in the Bay again. Over the years, a handful of Sezio family members have moved up there, and it felt good to get together once again to throw a show.
We played a place called Red Rock in downtown Mountain View to a crowd that seemed to soak up the lyrics. It was like they had cue cards - they laughed at all the right parts. Lindsey Cook opened up the night with a guitar and her voice.
She moved from San Diego up to Sacramento a few months ago, and has used the time since to write some great new songs to add to her body of work that is also her autobiography. She even sang some of them (literally) straight out of her journal. I followed her up with a solo set of my own on acoustic guitar.
Of course, it's not a Sezio show without art, and Bay Area artist Eric Taggart and I managed to bring it. Our work complemented each other well. Eric featured an array of pieces, with his thoughtful and rustic style of collage and mixed media where each piece seems to make an integral part of the whole.
My work hung across the room, three simple paintings of brightly-colored quirky representations of the human form. Our art careers have paralleled each other's for years now, and seeing the work side by side made our progress apparent and quite tangible.
With the show out of the way, the rest of the weekend was spent wandering around the Bay - up to San Francisco, over to Berkeley for the day to see Gretchen's alma mater, and back to San Francisco to take a walk through Japantown and find something to eat. We didn't have a car with us, but the Bay Area's public transit is remarkable. The BART rolls into Berkeley, and the CalTrain runs back down to Mountain View.
The trick was finding a way back to San Diego. Dustin suggested we look for a rideshare on Craig's List, which sounded to me a bit like online hitchhiking, but we were heavily steeped in the spirit of adventure and gave it a go. We ended up with a UCSD student named Kevin who's studying foreign relations and naturally, we spent a good amount of the eight hour drive talking global politics and listening to the political podcasts I have stored on my iPhone. Yeah, I know - you're green with envy.
I marked the trip as a success. We had a good show, got to see our family and friends up in the Bay and had a couple of good meetings with the Sezio's NorCal component about how to develop the scene up there - something we've been looking forward to for awhile now. I came home happy, energized, and broke - but mostly the first two.