My First House Filk

There is a story I relate about my wife talking to a Malaysian woman. She was shocked to find out that Keren was married to a Filipino male. One of the reasons was the amount of people Filipinos liked to have over every weekend. According to her, no white woman would stand for that. But my Dove is a very patient woman and now she knew that my desire to have small populations visiting my house was built in. What does this have to do with the post at hand? Read on!

A while back, I had a post on attending my very first Filk Convention. It was new, it was exciting, and I won a penguin. I wanted to continue my filking experience so I looked into attending house filks. Unfortunately, most filk circles also act as cat shelters. According to the National Digestive Diseases Information Clearinghouse, 90-100% of Asians are afflicted with allergies to cats. I could not verify that little fact, but I am about 90-100% asian and I am allergic to cats.

Undaunted, I realized this was a subtle way to inform me that most houses are better off Errol-free. But if I could get my wife to marry someone completely counter to the idea of an attractive and desirable male, I can certainly get myself invited to a House Filk!

To circumvent their cunning plans, I proposed to hold a filk at my own house and I banned people from bringing any type of advance weaponry of the feline nature.

Now most of the Toronto House Filks are held on Saturday. That’s a bad day for me because of my spoiled children wanting to do things like going to typing lessons and whatnot, so I held it on Friday. However, a lot of filkers around here are GTA filkers, they lived in and around Toronto. So that means getting to my house on a Friday is quite difficult!

However, a small group was able to come, and I was excited.

The night started at 6:30pm, and to my delight, Debbie Ohi showed up early. Gosh, that girl has so many websites I do not know which one to link to for her name. Anyway, she had mistaken the time for 6:00pm, and that was fine because she could babysit my kids while I tried to get ready for the night.

My wife went shopping and brought home some fruit and veggies for a platter. But she knew that I also like as much junk food as possible to cram into my decrepit system so she got three types of chips. Huzzah! And I bought a spinach dip too.

Soon, people began to filter in, and they settled in nicely. They brought their own instruments, their own stands, some snacks and left the cats at home.

I didn’t know how to start things, so I just waited. Eventually, someone mentioned that we just start singing. So I grabbed Jeff and we sang one of our songs, All My Skills Are Virtual.

Soon, everyone started to play their songs, and we went around in a circle. Well, more like disjointed points on a tesseract, but we did take turns! According to Jeff, there were a lot of sad songs about dragons. We should start a Dragon Emo band.

Anyway, I pulled out some songs that I hadn’t touched in a couple of years. That’s another thing I really enjoy about filk: I am free to try anything! It may not be polished, it may not be perfect, but if I keep on practicing it here, it will bound to get better. I hope.

And Jane gave me a challenge! She wants me to try out some songs by Mary Crowell. I bought the CD and good grief, that’s going to be hard. But I’m always up to improving myself musically, so I am excited by this.

The bunny was also a huge hit. He got a chance to get to almost everyone and didn’t maim a single person. Not seriously, anyway.

By about 12am, we rounded up. There were still a lot of food and drink hanging about, and no one would take it. That’s ok, the kids ate all the chips up the next day. I was feeling a bit peckish and all the snacks were gone. Rotten kids.

Besides that, I had a lot of fun! And Debbie Ohi has a ton more pictures on her flickr account! I definitely want to have more house filks and attend more house filks. Just as long as you don’t booby trap the house with cats. My saving throw stats for that absolutely suck.

Anyway, I’ll close with a picture of Debs and Debbie. They promised us an epic battle between their instruments. It didn’t come to fruition, but one day it will…. one day.