A Mudshow Season

Two weeks feeling miserable, now I understand why people get flu shots.  Anyway, that’s over now.  Yesterday walking up the steep hills in Ithaca I managed to cough up the worst of the crap in my lungs, and today I actually felt like a full-fledged human being again.

BJ Hebert drove up to Hugo from Goree, TX and reports that at the Culpepper WQ Scott Moss is busy getting the trucks ready for 2010.  There’s work on the seat wagon to be done, and another new floor for the candy wagon, but before Christmas most everything will be prepared for another season.

In recent years I’ve spent time in New York State with Carson & Barnes and Kelly Miller, seen some great towns booked by guys like Jim Mead in Owego – but driving around central New York and northern PA it amazes me just how many towns that were once regular stops for Wayne Franzen, or  extended KM tours in New York, but there are others that haven’t seen a tented show in ten years.  And not just small towns.  Carson and Barnes comes to the northeast only now and then, and in recent years Mr. North’s Kelly Miller moves through the state quickly on the trek from New England into Ohio.  Everybody knows how complicated the regulatory picture is in New York, though it’s certainly no worse than California… but regulation alone isn’t a great explanation for why New York seems to have fallen off the map when shows still play Michigan annually season after disappointing season in the likes of the Thumb.  I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that there are thirty days of goof outdoor dates in New York and the northern tier of PA.  What I don’t know is if anybody will ever book and play them.