John Hiatt and the safety cake

Five of us ventured into the rain tonight to see John Hiatt, a long-time favorite of mine, perform at the outdoor amphitheatre at the North Carolina Museum of Art. There was, however, one big obstacle: it was raining heavily and steadily. We ate dinner from the hot buffet at Whole Foods and pondered the situation. After much thought, we realized there was only one solution.

We had to buy a safety cake.

A safety cake is one you purchase as insurance. You buy it so the world knows that even if it keeps pissing you off--in this case, by raining--you will have a good night, because, after all, you have cake. So, the world has no choice but to relent.

The safety cake worked wonderfully. They decided to go on with the show unless lightning started. During the opener, the rain stopped. John Hiatt performed for two and a half hours, and the show was big fun. He played many of his hits, including "Slow Turning" and "Perfectly Good Guitar" (which he used to start the show), as well as a wide variety of songs old and new. The audience didn't know it, but they had us and the safety cake to thank for their show.

Afterward, though, we faced the one problem of the safety cake strategy: we had a cake.

Fearless and self-sacrificing people that we are, we took this giant chocolate and raspberry concoction to Jennie's and ate half of it while watching an episode of Burn Notice that we had missed. The other half will make its way to tomorrow night's party.

I should also mention the annoying sentence of the night. On the way to dinner, we noticed that a builder had the unfortunate name of Beezer. We then turned onto Ebenezer church road. This semi-rhyme situation led us to construct a sentence fragment about an old man with breathing problems doing a commercial for a cooling device specifically built to chill tweezers in a house from this builder on that road, or, to sum it up, the

wheezer geezer Ebenezer Beezer tweezer freezer teaser

Don't blame me; I just report the news.

FLASH UPDATE

Sarah wishes to announce the following song recommendation:

"Bleeding Heart Show," The New Pornographers

Check it out on pain of her cake-fueled wrath.