INTRODUCTION

Consonance 2003. What a hoot!!!

Y'see, Interfilk asked me to be their guest at Consonance. 
They paid my travel & hotel bills, & Consonance comped my membership,
and all I had to do was filk. Talk about a dream deal!  Thank you,
Interfilk & Consonance!

Thanks, too, to Alan Thiesen and his wife Alta, for picking me up at
San Francisco airport, feeding me, and putting up with me ////////////
putting me up Thursday night. And thanks to Lynn Gold for the loan of
her guitar El Kabong, sparing me from lugging my own Lady Epiphany
across country. (That would have been not only rather risky and
troublesome, but quite a strain on me, since I had surgery less than
three weeks ago. The doctor has cleared me for travel and airplanes,
but I get tired a lot more than I used to, sometimes quite suddenly
and unexpectedly. This should pass... but meanwhile the carved walking
stick I bought about five years ago at King Richard's Faire in
Massachusetts, because it looked cool and I like to walk, is proving
extremely useful. But that in one hand and the handle of my wheeled
suitcase in the other, with my loaded backpack on my back, is a full
load already without a guitar as well.)

As an Interfilk guest, I'm expected to...

 - participate in programming as the con asks. ("Singing for my
supper" so to speak).
 - act as an ambassador for my home filk community.
 - on return home, share my experiences about the community end
visited.
 - in future, continue as a friend of Interfilk, assisting in auctions
or other fundraising, suggesting future candidates, and generally
promoting the cause.

(adapted from Interfilk's page)

Singing for my supper (guest dinner, and con membership, thanks to
Consonance; and room and travel, thanks to Interfilk): As if singing
were a chore! I've been corresponding by email with various of the
concom, mostly Alan Thiesen and Lynn Gold I think, for months, and
besides my concert I'm slated to moderate three theme circles: Bawdy,
Religion, and Linguistics (together with fellow linguist Heather Rose
Jones, one of many people I'm looking forward to finally meeting).

Ambassador: Since September I've been working in Philadelphia and
living there mostly, but my family is still up in Massachusetts, where
we've lived for 20 years, and M.A.S.S. F.I.L.C. -- or MASSFILC, as we
usually write it -- is my home filk community. I'll try to sing a
number of songs by other MASSFILCers, and to publicize Concertino '03,
this year's instantiation of the Permanent Floating Northeast Filk
Con, July 18-20 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Worcester, Mass.

Share my experiences: You're reading them. I started keeping a log on
my PDA on Thursday morning, when I flew out from Philadelphia to San
Francisco, & I was tapping & scribbling on my "auxiliary memory" all
through the con. And, since I didn't bring a camera or a sound
recorder, this is going to be my own scrapbook of the con as well,
which I will treasure, so writing it hasn't felt like any burden. (I'm
also editing it and inserting retroactively.) Some of it is
disconnected observations, which I will try to connect as best I can
before my memory fades, and a lot of it is song lists because after
prior cons I've found myself racking my memory for "who sang *that*
song? And who's it by? Did I really hear it at the con at all?..." And
so on.

(It's pretty long, mind you: over 52k! I've split it into seven
parts to post.)

Friend of Interfilk: 
Since October 2000 I've been carrying a tin can to MASSFILC meetings
and to filking at cons, asking for voluntary punfines to be donated to
Interfilk. So far it's raised $120, not counting a few months during
which it was seconded to a 9/11 relief fund and raised something over
$130 for that. In my pocket are two NERO coins, one "gold" and one
"silver", that I got at that LARP organization's table at one of the
recent New England gencons, either Arisia (for which I was filkczar or
assistant filkczar for a number of years before my move to
Philadelphia made it impossible) or Boskone. In my luggage are
items for the Interfilk auction: a bag of 100 old fan buttons, with
almost certainly fewer than 10 duplicates, and a box of Vermont pure
maple sugar candy. The buttons are part of a stash of about 800 that
came to my family to be put to some fannish use. They're mostly by 
Nancy Lebovitz, by the look of them, and she's given us the OK to sell 
them at filk cons. And last weekend I brought five more bags like it
to MASSFILC's meeting/housefilk chez Spencer Love and Persis
Thorndike, who are our local Interfilk reps.  And I intend to keep it
up, some way or other. How else can I thank them for this? except by
repeating: THANKS! Bol'shoye spasibo! Efharisto para poli! Multan
dankon! !Muchas gracias! Satlho'qu'! Vielen Dank! Xie4xie4! and so on,
and on, and...

(Do I ramble? Very well, I ramble; I am vastly tired, I contain masses
of fatigue poisons. *Good* con!)

[The original version of this report, posted on rec.music.filk on
2003-03-15, has elicited a number of welcome corrections and
amplifications, which I am incorporating in this web version, often
silently. Thanks for these to (in no particular order) Harold Groot,
Gary Ehrlich, Heather Rose Jones, Sheryl Gere, Lee Gold, Tim Ryan,
Joey Shoji, Gary McGath, Lynn Gold, Dan Reitman, Chris "Keris" Croughton,
Ben Newman, Rick Weiss, Bill Laubenheimer.]

Song titles and such in this report: In parens, it's a line or
description; in square brackets, it's my guess at the title. If I give
a title or ID but no author, it's often (but I won't guarantee) by the
singer. -- Well, that's what I meant to do, but I don't think it's
consistent. You should be able to figure it close enough, anyway.]

> There...
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