When you live in the deep interior West, sometimes you have to pay people to come visit. Fortunately, the Salmon Arts Council paid the folk/roots trio The Good Lovelies to visit Salmon last night. Arts venues are in short supply in Salmon so in winter months, the Elks Lodge is known to double as concert hall. These Canadian girls were fabulous and seemed to find the appropriate amount of humor in the stuffed trophy elk staring at them from every possible wall surface. Even though they had just days before been notified they’d been nominated for a Juno (that is Canadian for “award”) for best Roots and Traditional Album of the Year, they were incredibly good sports about playing at the Elks, visiting our schools, and maneuvering the tour bus around wildlife.

I like it when Canadians joke around and are pleasant and don’t complain about Americans who don’t know anything about Canada. Just in case, I was prepared to shout out “Stephen Harper is the prime minister!” after an impromptu quiz in British Columbia where I guessed the Queen of England was the president of Canada and nearly got my ass kicked. Then why is she on all your money? We were in Costa Rica several years ago and found out the reason Canada has such a low density population is because they were all hanging out in Costa Rica. We struck up friendships with a few couples that always ended up with the Canadians trying to get us to admit that our imperial American scheme was to get our grubby hands on their Canadian wheat fields. Clearly, if we wanted the damned wheat fields we could have  seized them while their citizens were loafing around Central America.

The Good Lovelies should be credited with not only sweet harmony, but elegant diplomatic relations. Long live the Queen!