December cameos

While I'll be absent from the hustings for most of the winter and into spring, just puttering around the house, shoveling snow, and fixing elegant lunches, I will have some limited exposure later this month for you, the public, to relish and savor.

On the 11th I'll sit in with the Flat 5, another of their Monday nights at the Hideout in Chicago, Ill.

On the 18th you can see me in New York City at the Town Hall where, once again, I'll join with SNL cast members and other hilarious humans in a benefit for the ACLU. If you don't like wearing pussy-hats, supporting the ACLU is a practical gesture and a way of saying, in this polarized time, "I'm right here on this side." Also it says to the progressives: "You will never build a bubble so strong that country music will not penetrate it somehow." I'll be accompanied for this show by the masterful Matt Munisteri, and I couldn't be more thrilled by the prospect.

On the 22nd I'll be at SPACE in Evanston, Ill. to perform a couple songs with Steve Dawson and Diane Christiansen amid Dolly Varden's gala show. The three of us are fondly remembered by pious locals as The Jesus Christ Trio, under which moniker we delivered classic hymns at the Hideout in years gone by.

On the 28th through 30th I'll be a small but shining cog in Cathy Fink's annual Hank Williams Tribute. This year she and Marcy have lined up Robin and Linda Williams, Patrick McAvinue, Mark Schatz, and me to have at the Hillbilly Shakespeare. On the 28th we'll be in Harrisonburg, Virginia, at the Court Square Theater. On the 29th it's off to Chambersburg, Penn., where we'll be at the Capitol Theatre Center. (Why not "Centre," or "Theater"? Let's rub this lack of consistent adherence to huffy Anglophilic orthography right in management's faces!) And we finish on the 30th at that bastion of Washington, D.C. Americana, the Birchmere, with a final blast of the twangy klaxon.