I walked out of there in a less-than-good mood, not only for spending half a beautiful summer day at a postage stamp ceremony, but also because I was struggling with the irony of honoring so much humility amid so much excess.

I’d never been in the church before Sunday. That was odd, considering it is the area’s big shrine of the religion of my birth and heritage. The place, as you might expect, is all gold leaf and fantastic artwork and lots of Jesus and Mary, including an enormous mural behind the altar of the scariest Jesus I’ve ever seen. Staring down at me all through the ceremony was Angry Jesus, Get-In-Line Jesus, I’m-Crushing-Your-Head Jesus. I could definitely see how the right priest and the right sermon against that backdrop could scare…well, the living Jesus out of me.

In addition, beautiful little chapels fill every little nook and cranny of the lower floor, along with a second basement church of absolutely jaw-dropping gorgeousness, and there is wall after wall covered with the engraved names of donors.

And that brings me back to Mother Teresa. Amid this projection of wealth and authority was an event honoring a woman who dedicated her life to the humble and poor. She walked the walk for more than half a century — most of it amid her little-known doubts of her own faith.

I can’t even imagine the fortitude it must have taken to do that. I also can’t help but wonder what she would have thought of this whole event. After all, gold leaf is expensive but merely costs money; compassion is free but takes effort to give.

I don’t pretend to know all the rules, but I’m thinking that the latter is a lot better than the former if you want to swing open Heaven’s door.

Ernie Hayes has always played the mighty Wurlitzer at Busch Stadium, including the last Busch Stadium. He’s as permanent a part of my St. Louis memories as the Arch. But at age 75, with the once-dominant role of the organist as the crowd motivator at a baseball game largely gone now, Hayes has decided it’s time to step away.

Cardinals games won’t be the same. Here’s Hayes playing the Budweiser theme (yes, there is one), which you always hear at the park:

I bought a half-dozen season tickets out of someone else’s plan back in February, and those are the only tickets I’ve purchased at retail all year. I will admit to paying *above* retail for one game — I paid an extra $10 to see Strasburg’s debut and that was the best $10 I’ve ever spent — but I’ve been to a bunch of Nats games this year where I paid far below list.

Unfortunately, the best source for those tickets is one I can’t share with you. The Nats offered employees and friends of its corporate partners, whatever that means, a chance to buy field-level corner seats for most games for $10 in the back half of the year. The usual scam fees bring the ticket price to $17, but since my wife works for WTOP, I’m eligible for those. I’m going to my fourth game Wednesday using those tickets, and I haven’t sat any more than eight rows from the field, down the line.

There are other perfectly legit sources. You occasionally can find someone dumping a seat on StubHub, although tickets there usually are listed *above* retail. Here’s some RetailMeNot codes that will knock 40% off the price of selected Nats tickets. Goldstar Events has discounted Nats and O’s tickets for selected games (and right now, they’ve also got some seriously discounted Cirque du Soilel tickets for some upcoming midweek D.C. performances). And of course, there’s always Craigslist.

Nobody’s really talking about the fact that the Nats appear to have regressed and the O’s have progressed in the last couple of months. In part, this is because both teams are still so bad. But they’re the closest thing you can get in this area to major league baseball, so you might as well buy your tickets at a discount.

So, over the years you learn how to pack your gear to keep it as compact and as portable as possible. For example, here’s my rig for a typical gig:

Here you see one (1) guitar amplifier, one (1) backpack and one (1) microphone stand. Most importantly, this rig allows me to make one (1) trip from my car to the stage, with the backpack going over my, um, back and the amp and mic stand going in my right and left hand, accordingly.

But don’t think this is a light load. Together, the parts in this basic rig weigh about 60 pounds. That’s four pro bowling balls, for you playing along at home.

The amp shown here is a tweed Fender Deluxe clone and it’s relatively light by tube amp standards, weighing in at about 30 pounds. But the backpack…well, that backpack is sneaky-heavy. Look at how deep it is:

There are four major compartments in this backpack. Let’s look at what’s in there.

There’s almost nothing in the outside compartment — just a flat, pocketable LED flashlight that’s great for stage work and a tube that holds earplugs. I do everything I can to avoid using earplugs on stage, because it’s very very hard to play harp when you’ve got plugs in your ears. When you’re wearing earplugs, the harp, which is basically hotwired to your jaw, goes “WAAAH!” in your head and it’s almost impossible to hear anything else:

There’s almost nothing in the second compartment as well. Here I have an extension cord, a multi-tool and two door stops. Here’s an old-musician trick: Door stops are the perfect way to put an amp on the floor and point it up just enough to make it easier to hear on stage. The multi-tool, meanwhile, can solve a lot of problems without taking up a lot of space. The built-in and very usable pliers make it a better option than a Swiss Army Knife:

These two outside compartments don’t contain much because the inner compartments are jammed to the gills, compressing the space that would be available to open the outside flaps. The inner compartments are where the heavy and/or bulky stuff goes.

In the third compartment is a tambourine, which is the biggest pain in the ass to carry around. This is a classic RhythmTech half-moon tambourine with a double row of cymbals. It can play really loudly if necessary, but it’s also a bulky space hog. I’ve had this for so long — close to 20 years now — that all of the cymbals have tarnished and/or rusted and/or have God knows what kind of gunk on them from too many nights of sitting at my feet on the stage:

The fourth compartment weighs more than the rest of the compartments combined and it contains a fantastic mountain of stuff, carefully compartmentalized. The contents look innocent enough…

But then you open everything up…

Here we have: 25 harmonicas, four shaker eggs, a harmonica case, and a roll-up tool case that contains half a dozen cables, three microphones, a delay pedal and a power supply. It’s the musical equivalent of a clown car.

Over the years, you learn how to pack for a gig. There was a time when my gear took a hand truck to wheel in. Now I have 80% of what I once brought, and it takes up less than half of the space. That’s what experience — and heck, age — does for/to you.

Previously: A few Paw Paw leftovers | Hokum home page

Here are a couple of audio clips:

I Wish You Would

Chicken Shack Boogie

Previously: Omar’s Coming! | Hokum home page

I already was sold on that series before I got this news. Steve Buscemi has the lead role, that of a political boss and rum-runner in Depression-era Atlantic City; Martin Scorcese is one of the executive producers and will direct some episodes; others in the cast include Gretchen Mol (recently in the American version of Life On Mars) and Dabney Coleman. But Buscemi and Omar? I’m there, and it’s great to see another good-looking HB0 series. This one opens Sept. 19.

Previously: The improbability of ‘I’m Not There’ | Hokum home

Sometimes, I come across a film I really enjoy and wonder how it ever got made. What was the pitch for, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? How do you explain that concept to potential financial backers? What about Moulin Rouge! or my all-time-favorite improbable movie, The Adventures Of Buckaroo Bonzai Across The 8th Dimension?

This is how I feel about I’m Not There, a fantastic film that must have been an incredible pain to get off the ground. I can’t even begin to accurately describe the plot, such as it is, but I’ll try: Six actors, including Cate Blanchett, portray what are described as “different facets of Bob Dylan’s persona.”

I also won’t attempt to explain how the film unfolds. Actually, it doesn’t unfold as much as meander in a wonderfully abstract way, and your enjoyment of the film probably will be linked to your knowledge of Dylan’s life story. If you know about Woody Guthrie, and the Village, and “Judas!” and the motorcycle crash and bein’ saved and Pat Garrett, you might love the film. Otherwise, you’re probably going to scratch your head and look at your watch.

I watched it again a couple of weeks ago and it’s one of the few films that stands up to repeat viewing for me. When Jim James (the lead singer of My Morning Jacket) sings “Goin’ To Acapulco” or the kid sings “Tombstone Blues” with Richie Havens, I’m moved every single time. And there are whole vignettes — particularly when Blanchett shows up on the screen or Richard Gere plays an older Billy the Kid — that are just miles above anything I’ve seen in a movie in recent years.

Go rent it. If you hate it, you’re only out a few bucks. If you like it, you’re probably going to want to buy it.

Now they’re nearly dead. They’ve been circling the drain, so to speak, for some time now — but Ad Age is proclaiming that The End Is (Probably) Nigh.

“Viewers these days want to dip in and out of shows, media analysts suggest, so talk shows, quiz shows, health-and-wellness programs and even infomercials might better fill the bill,” the magazine reports. It notes that the Big Three networks aired 18 soap operas in 1970-71 but are down to six now — with only one of those on NBC. Viewership of the soaps has fallen from 6.5 million during the 1991-92 season to 1.3 million in the 2009-2010 season.

Of course, there actually are lots of soaps still on TV — they’re just not called soap operas. They’re called “reality television” and they skip the writers and actors that once were used to make soaps soapy. “Big Brother,” which puts on hours and hours of programming almost nightly on Showtime, is a classic example; the ridiculousness of some shows is so rich that the inevitable parodies have arisen.

My fascination with the soaps I hate is simple: I can’t believe they’ve held on this long. Trace them back through radio (and heck, before that, through movie serials — and fakey travelogues and phony chautauquas and travelin’ shows before that) and you can see a line of soapiness that dates back for more than a century. I guess the taste for hyperinflated drama never really goes away.

Previously: Inspiration | Hokum home page