memorial day

Ken and I are on our way out of Seattle, after a great Folk life festival.

We performed on two stages there yesterday and it went great.

I have a friend who has been watching the costs of the war, wondering if it will get to a trillion on Memorial day, and as a test, he monitored how far the costs would go while he played a recording of my song "american soldier", he then posted it on you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNFC3yldUN8

While my song played, the cost of the war went up a million dollars.

So we played it at the festival yesterday, and hope to post the live performance to youtube soon.

It was quite fun, in that the second stage was a Dolly Parton tribute stage and several of the performers has been asked to cover a Dolly Parton song. We chose "the cowgirl and the dandy", a story of a cowgirl and a dandy coming together in an airport when the planes had all been grounded due to poor weather. The reason we chose this song is that Ken and I met in an airport during a storm that had grounded all the planes. He was NOT dressed in a Dandy suit and I was not dressed in a rhinestone studded suit with cowgirl high heel boots.

But we did get a great video of that show, so hope to get it posted here.

We met with our sisters at the casino at Tulalip. I made a hundred and twenty bucks and so bought two of the lovely house coats that they had in the room (rather than stealing them :) )

We are heading back to Eugene to start a life there. We intend to go to Bandon often to perform both at the Bulllards beach amphitheatre and at the brewed awakenings.

One of the problems with this move is that I will be unable to work as a doctor in Eugene due to my qualifications. Ken has the same training as me but was able to be grandfathered in to family practice certification (we were both trained as GPs, which was what most docs in Canada did that that time)

So I am in a position now in that my departure from Bandon will also be my departure from medicine...... unless we go back to Canada. If we go back to Canada my qualifications will be fine.

For my health, I am going to try a life without medicine, and focus on the garden and the music, and we will see how that goes. I do truly miss it though. Perhaps we can go back to Canada for the summers ????

Anyways a whole new life. We have such a wonderful group of friends in Bandon, who have been SOOOOO supportive to me through all of this cancer stuff, I really hope to maintain a relationship with Bandon, so as to keep up with these people.

Love

Janet Bates

jankenb @ gmail.com