45th Anniversary

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Saturday night, August 2, and the notorious '63 Monroe are playing at the Richmond Tavern in London with Limits of Approach. For those who might be keeping track, today is our 45th wedding anniversary, and we went to see '63 Monroe this night 45 years ago at the infamous Cedar Lounge (which, had it survived, was just a block away on the corner of King and Talbot). We had the band play for us at our 25th Anniversary and we simply must see them again tonight.

We're not long ball hitters anymore and worried that the band might not come on stage until midnight (bars are open to 2:00am these days). We're in communication with Peter, Markii and Scott. Scott tells us we're in luck as they're doing a first set at 9:00pm, followed by Limits of Approach, and then they do their last set close to midnight. So it's a go, we'll come and take in the first set.

We arrive in good time, I'm worried that the room might fill, but we get a good seat near the stage and have a parking spot right in front of the hotel. Peter visits with us for a bit and, as the band tunes up and does their sound check, we are centered out as the happy couple celebrating 45years who came to see them on their wedding night. They open with "At the Boot" which they dedicate to us. The Cedar Lounge was sometimes known as "The Boot".

It was a fun way to celebrate our anniversary. We ought to have stayed to the bitter end but would have paid dearly the next day. We met with several of the old gang (one of the pictures is by Olivia Rose Cairns — the daughter (sic!) of Debbie, a young friend from those days. She's off to Scotland shortly and we tell her a bit about our recent adventures in Glasgow.

Here's another summary. Kate writes to our friend Alison in Winnipeg (she was with us 45 years ago; Neil, our photographer has passed away):

It was great to see them (it was our 25th when they played for us). They did two sets with their first set at 9pm so we were able to see them and be home by 11! We didn't stay for the middle band although they were supposed to be pretty good. Pete got up before they started playing and pointed us out in the audience and talked about how we used to feed them and give them Reg's homemade beer (which was kind of him — I didn't think we fed them that often — but he was a kid — just 19 at the time). Scott even dedicated the first song to us ("At the boot"). I think they were quite chuffed to be reminded that we went to see them on our wedding night and that they are still playing 45 years later (to the day). They have done other shows but we felt that we had to go to this one. We've invited the three guys from the band that we know to our anniversary party.

The really sad thing for Reg was that he came home and immediately loaded the pictures onto his computer from his camera and as he was messing with them, he accidentally deleted them all. He spent hours trying to get the photos back but no luck. 

Most of the pictures in the photo album Kate took with her cell phone, some are cribbed from others (Amelia and Olivia) who posted on Facebook. I took a lot of pictures on my Canon t6i with a flash and I'm sure many would have been great. However, I managed to accidentally erase all them from my computer and could not recover any! Oh fur Dumb! I was up for hours trying to recover pictures from the memory card and from my computer to no avail. There's a moral here: don't erase memory card or computer copies until they are all safely in the cloud.

Kate asks if maybe I ought to have been shooting film?