I went to see Patti Austin give an outdoor concert at the local county park the other night. She was pretty good, still a diva at age 55 (and not ashamed to admit her age either). Maybe she talked a little too much, trying hard to be \u201cpersonal\u201d with the crowd; if she had cut it back by 3 minutes, she could have gotten another song in. But hey, when you pay zero for admission and get up pretty close to the stage, you can\u2019t really complain. <\/p>\n
I could have stood to the side of the stage and had gotten a really close look at Patti at work. But I decided to step back about 200 feet, so that I could also watch the backup singers. Those three girls were singing their hearts out. They did a soulful round of \u201cshu-bop-shu-bops\u201d during Ms. Austin\u2019s cover of Little Anthony\u2019s \u201cI Only Have Eyes For You\u201d. And they were out-of-this-world during the encore, supporting Patti\u2019s cover of Aretha Franklin\u2019s \u201cRock Steady\u201d with a machine-gun barrage of \u201cwhat-it-is\u201d refrains. <\/p>\n
Backup singers always go unappreciated. Whenever I watch a concert now (mostly on TV, unfortunately), I always keep an eye on the backup singers. They\u2019re the ones that make the star sound good. To all you backup singers out there, you\u2019ve got a fan right here.<\/p>\n
Oh, as to the Space Shuttle \u2013 I\u2019ll be back about that later in the week, once they\u2019re getting ready to come home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to see Patti Austin give an outdoor concert at the local county park the other night. She was pretty good, still a diva at age 55 (and not ashamed to admit her age either). Maybe she talked a little too much, trying hard to be \u201cpersonal\u201d with the crowd; if she had cut […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}