flat5

From late 1979 into 1983 I was living in San Francisco (again).
Besides working in electronics I was also working as a jazz musician.
One of the sub-sets I was involved with was "Dixieland", roughly speaking.

#1)
Anyway, a street band I worked with regularly (Medicine Ball Jazz Band)
Got a gig in San Jose playing Big Mac's 14th birthday party for managers of MacDonalds.

To make it short, we had to follow a cart with a birthday cake and play "Happy
Birthday" Dixie style.

This took place in a conference room in a big hotel. The brilliant manager who
thought of this routine bought the cheapest sparklers he could get and put
fourteen of them on the cake. He eventually got them lit. We start playing as
the cake is rolled into the conference room.

The sparklers were giving off so much smoke that alarms went off throughout the
hotel and everybody had to evacuate. We played about one minute.
How to impress your bosses, indeed! We were paid and laughed all the way home.

#2)
Playing warmup for Rod Stewart (who requested strolling Dixieland) in the Cow
Palace we moved through the bleachers packed with perhaps thousands of 14 year
old girls totally ignoring us. I'd like to do that again.