Indianapolis is a city in Indiana whose name literally means Indiana city. Amazing. And perhaps Indiana was named after Indians, which were erroneously named after India. And India was named after some ink. It is also the home of a famous car race where drivers demonstrate their amazing ability to turn left for an entire day.

But I’m not here to talk about Indianapolis. Not this time. I’m here to talk about a wedding.

A Wedding

My reason for swinging all the way down to IN, which otherwise wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense, is because I was playing piano for the wedding of my good friend from WU, Mr. Sam Leo.

Sam and I lived together back at school, played together in bands, and have stayed in touch since then, so when he asked me to play piano for his wedding I was stoked. Like a fire.

They had a bunch of bizzarre songs they wanted me to play, like Dancing Queen, Stayin’ Alive, songs by Coldplay and U2 and Cake and the Foo Fighters, and even Christmas music (in case you didn’t know, it’s July). Also, they wanted the first song after the wedding to be “Let’s Get It On.” Weird, right?

Fortunately for them I specialize in weird. Look at how weirdly I was playing:

Yep, that’s pretty weird. I also snuck in a couple Shiina Ringo songs, because she is weird too (not to mention probably my favorite songwriter). Flash forward: when I got to the reception, I realized that Sam and his awesome new wife Arlee are just about the coolest people ever:

Remember earlier, how I said Love = Donut? It’s true. I even taught my students in Korea with a simple picture — a heart, an equals sign, and a donut. Love equals donut. And now here are Sam and Arlee with a donut cake at their wedding. !!! I repeat, !!! Their love is definitely something special. The donut shape symbolizes eternity, did you know?

I also hung out with some other excellent weirdos that I knew from back in my WU days. In particular, Dave Costenaro and I had good times playing with candy, and the others had good times taking creative pictures of us playing with candy. We seriously were quite entertained by this.

All the pictures in this post were snapped by my good friend who you will meet in Chicago later, Karyn Kim. Thanks Karyn for being a picture-taker.

That was Saturday. It is now later than that and I’m still here.

“Why, what are you doeeg?”

Sorry… who are you?

“Oh, I’b Attractib Girl.”

I didn’t recognize you.

“I’b fighteeg off a code.”

Sorry to hear that. Hope you get better soon!

“…”

Oh yeah, well, due to some fun connections I’ll tell you about next time, I’ve met about 60 musicians in town, all super busy with a project, and I kept thinking they would have a window of free time to record with me. Most of them ended up not having time, but some of them actually tried to make some time but still couldn’t do it. A tiny handful of musicians were still able to record though.

Next on Hit the Road, Zach: I’ll introduce you to my awesome IN hosts and the awesome IN musicians I was able to record. Stay tuned!