Weekend At (Baxter) Birney's

I have just returned from another Meredith Music Festival, the annual celebration of the 80s' best sitcom matriarch.


"Sha na na na"

Well, quite.

Actually, the festival is not really about Meredith Baxter Birney, brilliant trashy 80s serial mom sucked into post-Family Ties actorly oblivion, now useful only for daily scragfights with similarly marooned Joanna Kerns about which mother was superior.


Formerly the luckiest dreamer

But the event is no less trashy. It is basically Derby Day over 3 days, replacing fashion with bogans, music and a temporary suspension of personal hygiene.

In a symbolic mirroring of regional weather conditions, my recollection of the festival's latter stages is best described as hazy.

However, I can confirm that Augie March, The New Pornographers and Dallas Crane were the highlights, together with the entirely incongruous but rather sublime inclusion of "I've Had The Time Of My Life" at the end of Datarock's set. It was an 80s throwback of which Meredith and Joanna would be proud.

The absolute lowlight was the excruciating contribution of Angry Anderson, who is surprisingly not dead but should be. Fronting his band Rose Tattoo, he managed to refer to the crowd as "brothers and sisters" approximately one million times, belting out tuneless, screeching dirges for almost an hour and causing many in the audience to silently wish for immediate death.

Presently, I feel like my own is imminent. Sleep calls. Alrighty then; buh-bye.