Infinity Sock

This weekend marked a big milestone for Roan - his first concert. Gustafer Yellowgold's Infinity Sock was playing at R2D, a small venue just outside Union Square.

This was our first foray into the kindie (kid + indie) scene, which I've just recently become aware of. I must admit, kindie has some advantages over its bigger brother, indie. First of all, it's nearly impossible for the musicians to become too intoxicated to perform at 11 in the morning. And given the audience's limited attention span, there are no opening bands to wait through. There were seats (we sat in the second row!) Instead of beer, the venue was stocked with booster seats designed to look like phone books.



The show itself was fantastic. In addition to music, there was a screen with animated sequences. The songs were part of a larger narrative arc. Gustafer has a pet eel who loves to wear socks, so he had to round up all his socks to wash them. He spotted a stray sock on the window sill, and when he grabbed it, he saw that it went out in the yard and into a tree. It was a really long sock. He went on a journey to find the end of it, and made some bizarre and fabulous pit stops along the way - in a bee hive to see a bee band play, to a secret snake prom, to visit a cat that may not have been a real cat after all.

Roan was riveted, for about half an hour. Most of the kids got antsy around that time. It's good to have a general idea of Ro's attention span for these things.

His look of Disaffected Youth. It will take a lot to impress him.

As we left the theatre we saw Gustafer Yellowgold himself, in the flesh! It was super exciting for the older kids, who seemed to be long time fans, but we hadn't prepared Ro for this, so he was suspicious.


I bought a poster and hung it in Roan's room. His first concert poster! We would have saved the ticket stub, except they were online tickets that we printed out ourselves. He is very proud of the poster and tells us a few times each day how he went to the show. He even told his friend all about it, gesturing at different parts of the poster to explain what happened. He wants to go again. In spite of this, Wagon Wheel remains his most requested song.

I don't think Jay and I have ever been cool enough for the indie scene here. Maybe we'll have better luck with the kindie scene. Ro, on the other hand, is a natural. We'll just say we're with him.