Friday night found the band at America’s favorite neighborhood bar and, The Blue Grouch. It was a beautiful night to be on an outdoor stage and we are so thankful for the folks you came out to support us and enjoy an evening of music with Fun DMC. We were more than happy to be accompanied by Annastasia, a student photographer who had asked if she could photograph the band for a class project. It was a fun evening and the crowd was also treated to the show being closed out by Liz and Billy of The Mix performing “Handclap.”

On Thursday night the band received an unexpected message on Facebook. It was from our friends from the Mesa County Fair in Chatham Illinois. For those of you who don’t know, the Mesa County Fair is a neighborhood block party that is put on by the residents of Mesa Drive every July. In the past they have hired bands such as KFD, Big Daddy Jasper, and After Sunset. We were hired to play this event in 2015 and it was mentioned that there was a possibility we might be on the roster again for 2017.

Back to Thursday night, the band received a message from the event planner telling us that she was looking forward to seeing us all again on Saturday night. I have to say it came as quite a shock. I quickly went through my email history and found that the last correspondence we had was in late February and the email more or less said that they were in the beginning stages of planning and would get back to us. Months passed and Fun DMC’s schedule began to fill up and we never heard back. I just assumed that the organizers decided to go a different direction this year and we were totally fine with that. The Mesa County Fair is known for rotating a number of bands through their event and I figured we’d be back eventually. So you can imagine my shock when suddenly I was sent a message with a Facebook event page that had our name on it. It turns out that the organizers thought they had booked us when in fact they had not. I should clarify that this is not a reflection at all on the organizers or the event. The fair is a very well organized machine and occasionally these things just happen.

The miracle of all of this, however, is that Fun DMC actually had the availability to play this event on two days notice. If you haven’t been keeping up with us we are about to enter the busiest season of our band life. Having already had a show booked on Friday night, I think the rest of the band was looking forward to a Saturday evening off before heading into the chaos that is August. We all had a quick online discussion and it was decided that in keeping with the philosophy of Fun DMC to entertain at all costs, we would be there on Saturday night.

There was one other thing. If you’ve ever been to the Mesa County fair you know that it is a tradition to have several of the neighbors get up on stage to sing a song with the band. While we typically have advanced notice on this and plenty of time to learn a song that is not in our catalog, we had less than 48 hours to learn this one. The song was “Still The One” by Orleans. While most of us were at least somewhat familiar with the tune as something that we had probably heard in a restaurant somewhere, it was never anything that was on our radar as a potential song for our set list. And like most songs from the 70s, you can be sure that I had my guitar work cut out for me. But like we always do, the band powered through and put on a grand performance for all the residents of “Mesa County.”

We would like to give a special shout out to Hamburger Dan’s concession stand, who in the expert opinion of this author, makes the best lemon shake up to be found in this area.

This weekend we are on the road. Friday night we will be back at Champaign’s, Memphis On Main and Saturday we will be on the main stage at Decatur Celebration opening up for Bret Michaels. Let the games begin.