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Critic's Review
William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
After stints on Philo and Shanachie, Christine Lavin returned to making her own records with this, her second live album, recorded November 22, 1997, at the Blue Moon Coffeehouse on the campus of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington. Though she had no idea the show would be recorded until she was introduced, Lavin made an excellent decision to issue the result. Her mixture of comic novelties and sentimental ballads is best heard before an audience, complete with her entertaining introductions. Possessed of the same bubbly insouciance that makes Rosie O'Donnell a successful talk show host, Lavin is immensely likable onstage, which helps put across the novelty songs that examine small domestic concerns -- losing your glasses, trying to kill a bug -- and intriguing fantasies such as being replaced by a clone ("They Look Alike, They Talk Alike ..." and "National Apology Day"). The serious songs are useful as changes of pace, but are less impressive, the major exception here being the lengthy "The Wild Blue," a factual description of kamikaze pilots based on a documentary that is one of the best songs Lavin has ever written and should prove a breakthrough for her.
