A wedding in Soho, a club in Cleveland with a vintage shop in the basement (where I got an amazing pumpkin-colored handbag for $12), a bar in DC next to a bar with an eight-legged stuffed goat in the attic, my parents’ backyard in Baltimore, a club in Philadelphia around the corner from Ben Franklin’s house, and many, many miles of highway.

This is where the white van has taken Golem in Week One of our three-week, three-leg Fresh Off Boat Tour. Yes, it’s a lot of travelling. Fortunately we have matching track suits, so comfortable that they render some of us mute, and plenty of free time to sew golden letters on the backs to spell Golem. We’ve also found some great audiences in three brand-new (to us) cities. And now we’re back in our city for a couple days before setting out again.

Week One contained some pleasant surprises. I wandered into a kickass folk-art exhibit at the Smithsonian Portrait Gallery, and I realized that you can actually make microwave popcorn at rest stops at 2 a.m. But my favorite parts of week 1 were the last-minute visit to the ancestral Rabins home in Baltimore (thanks Mom), and a very pleasantly surprising tap on the shoulder from my old friend Alicia Lin, at the Philly show.

In Baltimore I got to show the band the teeny tiny little violins that my sisters and I started out on. Which segued perfectly into the surprise visit from Alicia later that evening, because Alicia and I both started playing on those teeny violins together at age four, and then grew up playing on progressively larger instruments. When we were in high school, we got our very first professional gig ever, playing violin duets for Wednesday afternoon tea at the Towson Borders Bookstore. I have no recollection how that started, but I remember being very impressed to make $25 and a free cup of hazelnut coffee. Come to think of it, not much has changed, except now I can get whisky with my drink tickets.

And now dipping back into Brooklyn, where the season is just on the verge of changing. Maybe by the time we get back from Week Two, it’ll really feel like fall…