Friday, May 22, 2009

Careers In Air Guitar

I forgot the best part of the Gorge concert: rockin' ASL signers!

Throughout the entire show there were two women, taking turns, at the end of the stage who not only signed the words to the songs for all the deaf concertgoers (and can there really be that many?) but they also played air guitar, air drums and air keyboards during all the instrumental breaks. And not just a little tame air guitar...they were vigorous air guitar playing professionals. Their job seemed to consist more of rocking out then for helping the hearing impaired get the insightful lyrics to "China Grove. Well, one ASL girl was rocking out more than the other. The other one kind of looked like she was either Joe Cocker or she was having an epileptic fit; which is kind of the same thing I guess. I am sure there were some super-baked people in the audience who just thought they were either part of the band playing bizarre instruments or the world's least sexy go-go dancers.

The funniest thing though was that between the Allman Brothers and their almost wordless set filled with 15 minute rambling jams and The Dead with their many, many long instrumental breaks these women spent almost eight hours just playing imaginary instruments. No actually sign language involved. That might be either the coolest job in the world or it would make you feel like a world class tool.

1 comment:

Kath said...

I'll have to tell my interpreter friends at work about this! I bet they'll be jealous. : )