We spent the day wandering around Little Five Points (I think that’s what the area is called), which is the section of Atlanta in which the Variety Playhouser is located. It’s a classic, hippy/punk/counterculture oasis in the middle of a big-bad city. You find these little enclaves all over North America: lots of tattoo parlours, organic food stores, head shops, second hand cd stores, t-shirt joints, and lots of action on the street. The amazing thing about Little Five Points is that it has survived all these years. These areas are usually gobbled up by developers once a city begins to grow like Atlanta has over the past decade. But Little Five Points has survived…long live the iron-on T shirt!!

The Variety has always been a good venue for us and Atlanta has always been a welcome tour stop. The venue and the city didn’t let us down. An excellent audience and a decent show, lots of energy which made up for the occasional mental lapse.

*****

We haven’t been to Charlotte in almost 13 years, which is pretty hard to believe. It use to be a regular stop on our schedule, and the venue, Spirit Square, is a beautiful place to play…so go figure….. We had another excellent audience and another very, very good show. We must return before 2020.

The city itself has grown enormously since we were last here. The downtown used to consist of a couple of modern-ish looking office buildings surrounded by not much of anything else. The city now has a most impressive main boulevard; tree-lined, plenty of public benches, fountains, public sculpture, dozens of restaurants and museums and most importantly the streets are filled with strolling families on this warm Sunday afternoon. But there is something that doesn’t feel quite right about the place. It almost feels like a film set or something that Disney would create for one of its theme parks: the “Big City Boulevard” tour.

The only problem is that I don’t think that the dozens of homeless people that are camped out on all of the public benches are paid actors. The juxtaposition of all this new money dripping from the surrounding buildings against the, mostly, black, destitute, male bodies wasting away on the benches is a bit troubling. It may look like a perfectly planned city on the outside, but not everyone was considered in the planning.