Deregulator: Alive since '85!

This time most years, we’d be making final checks to see if we could spend a weekend in my hometown of Wilkesboro and attend  Merlefest , the unofficial kickoff of the bluegrass/Americana festival circuit. The checklist involves time off work, pet boarding, and money (see pet boarding). Merlefest started in 1988 as a benefit honoring Doc Watson’s late son Merle. It’s gone from a two-day event staged on a flat-bed truck to a four-day festival with more than a dozen stages and 100 acts, attracting 75,000 people or more to the Great State of Wilkes. COVID-19 ended Merlefest’s 32-year streak, along with dozens of other festivals and thousands of live music performances worldwide. To be sure, the pandemic silenced plenty of other music events. Coachella and Stagecoach, April festivals in the California desert drawing hundreds of thousands, were canceled last year and this. The massive Bonaroo festival near Nashville was postponed last year, then cancelled. It’s tentatively set for early...

Saturday afternoon, eight or 12 or 20 or so people will park at a church in North Raleigh. Each of us will take a chair and a music stand and an instrument to a socially distanced spot in the parking lot. After exchanging greetings and catching up on how we’ve been, we’ll fire up our tablets, put on our masks, playing ukuleles and singing for a couple of hours. We’ll play some Dylan, CCR, Buddy Holly, and maybe some Queen or Bruno Mars or Dolly Parton. Occasionally, we’ll play well. But we’ll have a great time. We’ll joke and share stories and enjoy each other’s company. And we’ll tell each other (perhaps silently, but probably not) how much we’ve missed being together in person, and how much we look forward to doing it regularly again. The group is the  Raleigh Uke Jam,  an informal outfit that, before COVID-19, met twice monthly in a meeting room at an Episcopal Church. And played at senior centers and street fairs and a bar. We’ve been together 7½ years. But for the past 12...