All Aboard!

Got to see Jim and Llouise Altes on Friday. Jim and Llouise love music, enough so that they arrange about ten house concerts a year. They recently moved to Pittsburgh from the DC area, and have brought with them a bracing sense of possibilities.

Although they aren't musicians themselves, they've been involved with the Folk Alliance. A couple of years back the annual conference was in Vancouver. Jim said that he'd heard that arrangements were being made for a train trip, and he and Llouise were among the first to sign up. Apparently they weren't the last. Sixty-five folk alliance members did, too. They pretty much had the run of the train. A rolling dining car with a non-stop hoot making its way across the Canadian prairie. Festival Express comes to mind. A few weeks ago Jim and Llouise gets a call from one of their fellow riders, Eric Schwartz, who was looking to find a gig on his way home from Cleveland. So this Sunday we'll benefit from strangers who met on a train. Send an e-mail to altes at potomac.net to see if there's any space left for what I believe will be one of the more raucous house concerts this year.