You know what? Let’s skip ahead to the musical insert: 

So, Weldon’s fingers can suddenly move on the neck of his guitar, and I didn’t notice it at first because I expect people’s fingers to move when they play the guitar. Then I remembered that Weldon is a puppet and usually his fingers don’t move, and then I got freaked out. It was exactly the feeling I had the first time I noticed Lips’ fingers moving on the valves of his trumpet. 

So that was all very interesting, and then the vocals were just insanely awesome. It made me wish that Weldon could appear at JazzFest, but then I remembered that JazzFest got cancelled even before the pandemic, and I don’t know if it’s ever coming back. (It’s a Sioux Falls thing; I don’t expect you to get the reference.)

I wasn’t part of this episode, and if anyone is wondering, it’s not that I didn’t want to be. It’s that priority was given to people who hadn’t called before, or if they had, it wasn’t recent. I completely agree with that. I don’t want to become obnoxious by taking more turns than I should, and I imagine that if people wanting to call watch past episodes and hear the same people all the time, they might just think, “Well, it’s always the same people, so I shouldn’t bother trying,” which nobody wants.

Nevertheless, if I had known ahead of time that I could only participate in either June’s or July’s episode, I would have opted out of June in favor of July because I didn’t really have anything to talk about in June, and for July’s episode, I really wanted to talk about something legitimately miserable that’s happening here in South Dakota within a matter of days. Then again, though I’ve been anticipating the misery for months now, the thought occurs to me that it might be better to wait until after it has happened so that I can talk about it in concrete terms. And fortunately, it will still be timely at the end of this month if I can get in early enough to talk next time. Anyway, Weldon did answer a question of mine, so I wasn’t entirely absent.

Lélé’s attempt to teach French to Weldon was not only a highlight of the episode but of the entire series thus far. I can’t watch it without laughing even after seeing it several times now. It reminds me of a story involving two of my brothers, which I could tell but I’m not sure if it would be as funny to you as it is to me. It might be one of those had-to-be-there things. 

That reminds me; maybe Anne will favor us with a comment upon her story, which was actually a conflation of three different stories, as I understand it.