Hot Rock,Cheek-to-Cheek,and Dusty.

Hot Rock Cafe. Warm ambience, excellent lighting,stage set up and ready,sound system tiptop. Darren, my brother, has played as a band at this cafe once with a couple of friends and he said it was a nice place. Hence the visit. First mistake: left my keyboard in the car. Second mistake : brought mom. Coz' my family knows the people who run the cafe, who are [by the way] Philipino graduates who've come to start a ministry with uni students. Which also means they're young and excited people. Bringing mom meant that she'd catch up with them after introducing me and then later tell them to get me to sing onstage. And "get me" they did. The keyboard was carried out, set up and MIKED up too before I had even agreed to sing!Next thing I knew, I was being introduced onstage to the lil bunch of Thais and mat sallehs who were cafe-ing there. I sang a OneTreeHill song first, then one of my own songs "Touched". They wanted me to go on but I just "couldn't think what to sing" [heehee], so one of the girls took out a songbook they have and together [I felt better with the company] we sang a few more songs like Emotion, Someday We'll Know, Kiss Me, and so forth. It was fun,really. We intro-ed ourselves as TheBandWhoHasJustMetAndWe'llSeeWhatHappens. And the audience was enjoying themselves too, it seemed. Anyway, we ended our roll, were applauded, and sat back to chat a while more. Mom gets up to pay the bill, and discovers that one of the white guys who was watching us sing and had left after we got offstage, had paid our bill!! *stunned* See, THIS is what I call a proper and easy-to-accept Thank You. *chuckle* But seriously, call me ja-kun but I thought it was quite interesting, lor. Oops,proper English, Joni, proper English. Lol. So anyway, before the trip to Hot Rock, we'd been invited by another cafe-owning friend to lunch. And we usually sing a little at his cafe coz he likes jazzy stuff and all. His cafe is named appropriately Cheek-to-Cheek.It really is cozy inside,and he's a pro-photographer so there're loads of pictures mounted all around [found my face stuck up there too from the last visit I paid!]. It's also a nice homey place. And before that, [going backwards through the day for some reason], we'd gone to this American couple's house. Warren is a professional ventriloquist. I mean, he's SERIOUSLY GOOD. And his puppet,Dusty, is like, one of the best in the production line/world. He was telling us some stories of shows he's done and I'm just sitting there enthralled by Dusty coz the whole time he's telling us stories, Dusty's just sitting on his lap quietly blinking and looking around and he looks so darn real. Warren rocks. Too bad the weather here made Dusty's wooden mouth part swell and so he couldn't talk today. But even with him just sitting and looking around and answering yes/no questions, it was absolutely amazing. I stand in awe. *stands*. All this,however, brings me back to the miserable fact that I don't have a digital camera yet. I SOOoo want you all to see these things/places/food/people/creaturefeatures I'm seeing too! I'm a-gonna save up for a digital cam, I am I am I am. *determination*