Last Saturday was “my” day. I had a very clever plan. The Marvel superhero movie Thor was in its opening weekend, and so I thought I would take Mer to see a movie. She would think it was Thor, and I would surprise her utterly by going to see a documentary on big cats called African Cats. Magnificent plan. The only problem was that Mer had never heard of Thor as a superhero, but only as the Norse god of thunder. Thus, she had no idea that I would have any real desire to see that film. Ah, well.

African Cats was cute. It focused on a pride of lions and on a mother cheetah and her five cubs. It was produced by Disney, and so had a lot of personification provided by the narrator, Samuel Jackson. Still, the narration was more entertaining than distracting, and the photography was amazing. What beautiful creatures cheetahs are. We both enjoyed the film very much.

Later in the evening, we headed to Akron, back to the music club Musica. Even though I keep swearing off Musica, our friends’ band, Bethesda, was having a CD release party for their new EP CD. Since we are very fond of Eric and Shanna, we went back to Musica to hear the group.

Mer and I were delighted in that we actually got two of the very limited number of seats in the place, and these right next to the stage. Being that close and off to the side made for slightly more musical distortion since we were behind the speakers, but it was still fun to be that close to the stage. Bethesda was headlining the show, and their were two bands on before them The first band had really good harmonies from the three vocalists, but it was the second band that really shone. They had a cello player, a double-bass player, a guitar and ukulele player, and a drummer who had some unusual drums along with the standard drum kit. They were excellent musicians, especially the bass player, who also took a turn on uke and on guitar. They had a lot of energy, and were a lot of fun.

Bethesda did a great job. You could tell they were excited for the CD release, and they clearly had a ball on stage. They interspersed the songs with several clips that told the fictional stories reflected in the songs, and that was well done. They sound was mixed well, which was a nice thing, and they had a great evening. The house was very full, and had a lot of young people in it to be enthusiastic. Since Eric teaches at CVCA, there were about six or seven of us CVCA folks there as well, including Dubbs, who found us about halfway through Bethesda’s set. Keep an ear out for Bethesda – I really think they have the sound that could get them on college and alternate radio stations across the whole country.