Photo: Matt Blum
Paul and Storm’s fame has been growing by leaps and bounds in the geek world recently, mostly through their touring with Jonathan Coulton, their appearances at PAX Prime and East, and their awesome w00tstock series. As someone who’s been enjoying their music for several years, I’m glad to see them start doing more concerts by themselves, because they really have a big enough repertoire to draw from and certainly have proved themselves terrific public performers.
So last night my wife and I were thrilled to attend their performance at Jammin’ Java, a local restaurant / coffee bar / venue for independent artists. We’ve seen Paul and Storm there enough times that I’ve lost count, but last night I was particularly excited to go, because my very talented and wonderful wife Jen had made geeky gifts for the two of them.
I’ve written before about the crocheted dolls called amigurumi that my wife makes. But she really outdid herself this time: in her spare time over just the four days between when we got back from our vacation and the concert last night, she made amigurumi of Paul and Storm! We delivered the dolls to the guys before the show, and they were very taken with them — they even brought them out on stage with them to show the rest of the audience. You can see the dolls in the picture above.
Photo: Matt Blum
The concert itself was a lot of fun, as any concert with Paul and Storm always is. They even managed to soldier on despite the curious (not the first word that came to mind) choice of one family to bring their seven-year-old and four-year-old to the concert, and a woman in the audience who for reasons known only to her shouted a sarcastic “Oh, please!” at several completely inappropriate times during the show. Seriously, folks: Paul and Storm’s music and stage patter are just not appropriate for little kids, and, silly though they frequently are, Paul and Storm are talented professional performers and deserve a certain measure of respect. If you can’t get a babysitter or you can’t keep your mouth shut except when audience participation is (frequently) called for, you just shouldn’t go to their concerts, period.
But I digress. The concert was excellent, and we were even treated to Storm’s debut performance on a ukulele (see the photo evidence to the right). I guess Molly Lewis has been rubbing off on him.
