The Ottoman Lounge in Medicine Hat is a surprise. It’s a pretty sophisticated and classy little lounge with stylish dark seats and red lighting, and the highlight of the venue is a fantastic curved stage with a colourful light-up disco floor and back wall. Apparently it was a strip club in its previous incarnation. You can see where a pole used to be mounted in the wall, but that’s the only other evidence, and considering that anyone spinning on the pole would end up doing a faceplant into a large pillar, I suspect there have been some modifications to the venue since that time.

A TV plays trippy visualizations along with the lounge music. I tossed our ARCTIC banner over top just to see what it would look like, and the results were so cool that I now want to carry a huge flatcreen TV with us everywhere:

It was a major contrast from the night before in Canmore where we found ourselves watching Ultimate Fighting on their TV from the stage as we played.

For some reason Marcus was on a comedic roll. This had started earlier in the day, when he reduced a bank teller to tears when she asked if he wanted his cash in big bills, and he said, “Yes, but not so big they won’t fit in my wallet.” During the show he entertained the crowd with a story of running a truck into an igloo, and tried to convince a table of girls to start their own band. He also held a raffle in which he asked if anyone in the audience already had a raffle ticket for something. One fellow brought up a raffle ticket for a local charity benefit. Marcus read through the list of potential prizes ("A new Saturn? Cool, but you ain’t getting that from us. $500 cash? Pfff - we’re musicians") and awarded him an ARCTIC t-shirt just for having the ticket.

Once again tonight it was just us on the bill, and we played two longish sets with some improvisations. I loved playing on that disco stage. We had a great night and hung around for quite a while afterwards talking to people. I think just about everybody there signed up to the mailing list and bought at least one or two CDs. I’m actually going to have to make more t-shirts once we get to Ontario, as we’re going to run dangerously low at this rate.

We stayed a few blocks away at the Medicine Hat Inn, which unfortunately didn’t nearly match the Ottoman for style and class, but was good enough to get us through the night for the drive to Regina. This is a fairly dull drive and I have spent a large portion of it napping.