Cherish The Ladies St Patrick's Day Concert and Parks Whislte Walkabout

herish The Ladies came to Fort Myers, Florida for St Patrick's Day 2009 and I wasn't going to pass up that concert just for a gig or two. I sent Joanie Madden an e-mail ahead of time offering our sessions or general local knowledge if they were going to be in town for a while. Joanie said she was quite busy but would like to check out my whistles while she was here, and I should find her in the lobby after the concert. 

The concert was quite good of course, and afterwards I let the folks finish the meet-and-greet with Joanie. As she was returning to the hall I introduced myself and we had a chat with a few other people for a while. 

During a lull in the conversation, Joanie looks at me and says 

"Well, did you bring a whistle?" 

Of course I did. My sport coat was a virtual wearable whistle roll at the moment, with whistles in every pocket. I took out an Every Walkabout in it's pouch and handed it to Joanie. 

"That's a whistle?" she said with raised eyebrows. 

"Yep." 

Joanie liberated the whistle parts from their case and assembled the whistle, still looking at it with an interested but wondering look on her face. She played a riff on the whistle and her eye's widened. 

"That's good!" she said, and went back to more playing. 

"That's very good!!" was the declaration after a minute or two of playing. 

I'm sure I was absolutely beaming. Joanie said she really liked the whistle and would be happy to give me a recomendation. I asked her "How about a picture?" and she said OK. Of course I didn't bring a camera, so Kathleen Boyle the acordian/piano player in the group snapped a photo while Joanie and I played a couple tunes on my whistles. 

From Whistle Promos

Carey and Joanie playing a few tunes on Parks Walkabout whistles. (click for larger image.)

Later Joanie invited me up on stage to peruse her whistle roll while she packed up her gear. She had a great big Sassafrass Grove 25 whistle roll, with two complete sets of whistles, each one's key clearly marked. She mentioned she had the marked whistle roll made for her after grabbing the wrong key whistle from the formidable stack one time on stage. Nice job on the whistle roll Sarah!

When she was about all packed up she put the Walkabout back in it's pouch and said "I'm not going to put this in my roll, I'm going to keep it in my wallet." Yea, it doesn't get any better than that, eh?

So next time you see Joanie, don't be surprised if she pulls a whistle out of nowhere and composes a tune on the spot.