On the evening of February 15th, ThorpeWood hosted Eef Barzelay at our beautiful timber-frame lodge for his opening tour date! The lodge was decked out beautifully with old Clem Snide (Eef’s band) merch. ThorpeWood’s property manager, Jeff Isaac, is a fan from way back and had many old CDs, posters, and t-shirts to really immerse the lodge in all things Eef. At the check-in table, Clare and Katie greeted folks and gave people their tickets. At ThorpeWood, we don’t do normal tickets, of course. Instead, we opted for pun-tastic tickets: ‘Eef Leafs’ and ‘Folk Rocks’ (rhododendron leaves with Eef’s name written on them and rocks from our stream with the word Folk written on them to denote the folk-rock music we would be enjoying that night). After attendees picked out their ticket/silly keepsake, they headed over to our popcorn and candy bar and settled in. We were delighted that Eef mingled with everyone before the show started! One particular attendee was a longtime Eef fan and had been searching for a show to attend…when he saw our poster, he signed up right away and commented that ‘the watershed provides.’ We ThorpeWoodians agree – the lovely mountain top provides all that we need – even delightfully quirky musicians!
Once the singing began, we were endlessly enthralled by Eef’s lyrics and on-stage stories. There were many ‘you-had-to-be-there’ moments that would be too hard to capture in words here, so let’s simply say that Eef won us all over with his charm and silliness. After the concert was over, Eef lingered and chatted with the crowd before retiring to our Little Pond Cottage where he spent the night. The next day, he headed down to Richmond, VA for the next stop on his tour.
Before Eef left us, he made a request of the leftover Eef Leafs and Folk Rocks. He asked us to release them into the stream, where the water would take them away and slowly erase the words. We were, of course, delighted by the request and honored it the following day. We hope to host Eef again someday!
