2. I like taking my violin to places it shouldn't really be going, and playing tunes in those places. I took a violin to the top of Mt. Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa, on research sailing ships in the Aleutian Islands and the South Pacific, while ice fishing on a fly-in-only lake in Western Canada, and while playing for a few seconds at -50 degrees while wearing a swimsuit and standing in front of a temperature sign in my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska. This is a crazy tradition Alaskans have when it gets very cold!) I always wonder whether my violin loves the adventures it goes on, or hates them!

Three things about my band:

1. The Come From Away band is very unusual in that includes players, and instruments, that are authentically traditional - fiddle, Irish flute, whistles, Uilleann pipes, and bodhran. This is one of the things I love most about my show - the Music Director was very insistent on having authentic music and musicians to represent the traditional music in the show.

2. Ben Power, the flute player, and I share a mutual very close friend (from Ireland) whom we both met well before meeting each other in NYC. That friend was a primary reason I started playing Irish music - he was a bodhran player, singer, and engineer who worked on the North Slope in Alaska. Ben and I met in NYC when I first moved here, then Ben moved away and we reunited in Seattle for Come From Away many years later, having lost touch. This is something I love about traditional music - it has made its way everywhere in the world, and it's like a language - once you can play it, you can go anywhere and be part of a network of people who "speak the same language" as you, regardless of whether they actually speak your language. In other words, it allows you to "Come From Away" and be met with a welcoming community, just like in Gander.

3. Well....we are a very silly group of musicians. We sometimes place little jokes or notes on each others stands, and the nerds among us who sit on the left side of the stage (what we call "The Treehouse") like to observe and track slight differences in the show each night. When you play a show a thousand or more times, you notice the slightest little things - even one wrong note or one missed beat - we love to call each other out and also congratulate each other on music well-played. We're definitely a family.