Blogging has been tough from the Road to Oprah. Too much going on, and when there is down-time we’re usually in the middle of nowhere with no email/web services.
Chapel Hill with North Carolina was amazing. First we got biodiesel at Larry’s Coffee in Raleigh NC and then we crashed at academy award winning documentary filmmaker Barbara Trent’s house. We ate fresh veggies from her garden, ate under the stars on her back porch, and had a good old fashioned musical hootenanny after dinner.
In Washington DC the whole trip became a grand success when Michelle Brown gave us a check for $10,000 at a house party and became our #3 producer and the top personal donor to The 1 Second Film. We also got some awesome footage in front of the Capital Building and the Lincoln & Washington Memorials.
Baltimore is an incredibly beautiful and desperate city. There were more boarded up buildings and run down/uninhabitable neighborhoods in Baltimore than there were in New Orleans. We happened upon an event where Montel Williams was speaking and tried to get some time with him, however, we were kicked out of the area when folks began to get more excited about The 1 Second Film and our Road to Oprah tour than they were about Montel’s free pharmaceutical drug program.
Linda Evans of the University of Baltimore got us hooked up with nice hotel rooms for the nice, which was super fantastic, then we were off to Philadelphia in the morning. We stopped at Baltimore Biodeisel, which shared a building with a truly fantastic Organic Market where we loaded up on some great juice, coffee, and B99 biodiesel.
Philadelphia was a beautiful town and Nirvan’s friend Rebecca from New College was a beautiful host. The place we played, Silk City Lounge, was a super cool renovated old 50’s diner. The night could have been planned a little better, ran WAY late, and had really slow transitions HOWEVER we still played a great show and rocked the house that we had at 1am on a Tuesday night. 
On to Brooklyn! The event at Vox Pop was a crown jewel of the Road to Oprah tour thus far. So many old friends whom I hadn’t laid eyes on in quite some time. It seemed almost everyone in the Evangenitals and Road to Oprah crew had some friends and/or family in New York that came out to see us on a rainy night in Brooklyn. Eric Talbert (who helped organize the event) and Webster from Golden Birds (the other band that played) are friends of mine from The European Graduate School in Saas- Fee, Switzerland and this was the first time that I had seen them on US soil! My brother (photographer Jaisen Crockett) came out, Dan Paquin from Dirt Bike Annie (RIP) whom I went to NYU with was there and gave me his new album of 15 second punk songs. Sean Lewis, performance artist extraordinare made an appearance. My favorite costume designer in the universe Irina Kruzhilina. Good people all around!
We slept in the bus on Flatbush Ave and right now we’re driving down Houston heading toward Washington Square Park. We just rolled by Ground Zero and saw the big hole in the ground. In a few minutes we’ll be heading up to Harlem to meet documentary film legend Albert Maysels, director of Grey Gardens and the first man to film the Beatles in the US.
More soon, I hope. The Road to Oprah is growing near the end!
