Savages – Shut Up

There have been a lot of shows I have wanted to catch this year that I just couldn’t pull off but this is one I’m really regretting not making. They played their east coast dates right on the heels of the Feelies show and I had just been on vacation prior to that so I was short on time and money. They’re coming back in September but playing larger places, like the widely disparaged Terminal 5 in New York. I might have to do it as a birthday present to myself though because this kicks some serious ass.

A friend was trying to coax me into going down to Philadelphia the other night to see New Order with her. It was pretty tempting. I went so far as to investigate the cheap bus lines and the train but the whole package was going to run into more money than I felt a responsible mother of two ought to be blowing. Back when I was in my 20s and had no one but myself to worry about I would have made the trip and lived on ramen noodles for a week if that’s what it took. I perfected the art of cheap travel in college when someone clued me into the fact that you could hop the local commuter trains from our campus outside of Philadelphia all the way up to New Haven. All that was missing was a local option between Wilmington, DE and Baltimore, and from New Haven to Providence, and you could have (inconveniently and slowly) made your whole way from Boston to DC on the local trains.

I miss that, believe it or not. It wasn’t comfortable, it sometimes involved sprinting up and down stairs to get from one track to another and unless it was an express, you made a lot of stops. But it was a fraction of the cost and you could decide to do it very last minute. There isn’t much spontaneity in my life these days and every now and then I get a little nostalgic for a less complicated time when the biggest consideration was which train I was going to catch.