CLUB TRIP TO N.Y., 2002.

Rachel Trachtenburg moved to Manhattan in July, after spending her entire life in Seattle. Like most eight-year-old girls, Rachel didn't move for a job or a boyfriend or because she needed a change of scenery. She moved because her parents decided that the family's musical-variety act, the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, deserved a bigger audience than Seattle could provide.

The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players came into being two years ago, when Rachel's mother, Tina, who dyes her hair a bright pinkish-red and favors boxy vintage polyester dresses and spray-painted shoes, came home from an estate sale with an old slide projector. At the time, the Trachtenburgs were supporting themselves with a dog-walking business. At another estate sale, Tina found a box of old family-vacation slides, which were labelled "Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959." The next day, Jason Trachtenburg, Rachel's father, a struggling singer-songwriter, sat down at his Casio keyboard and wrote a tune (called "Mountain Trip to Japan, 1959," naturally) with lyrics that provided a story to accompany the slides. A couple of months later, the band--Jason on piano and vocals, Tina working the slide projector, and Rachel on harmonica--played at an open-mike night at a local club. Soon Rachel switched to drums, and the Trachtenburgs had discovered that elusive ingredient--like making Michael the focal point of the Jackson 5--which propels a band to greatness. They began scouring the city for boxes of old family-vacation slides and composing songs to go with them. By the time the Trachtenburgs left Seattle, they were arguably the best-known local act of the new millennium.

Onstage, Rachel Trachtenburg evokes both the "E.T."-era Drew Barrymore and Meg White of the White Stripes. She is at least as good a drummer as many indie rockers playing today, and her shuffling, occasionally mistimed approach is perfectly suited to her father's atonal singing and preciously weird lyrics ("This vacation spot is very wholesome / Suitable for Dick Enberg and Merlin Olsen"). While performing, Rachel seems to vacillate between mild exasperation and normal eight-year-old boredom. (Between songs during a recent Saturday-night show at Fez, she tried explaining to her parents what was wrong with the slide projector, which had started to malfunction. When they didn't listen to her, she sighed--unintentionally, it seemed--into the mike. The audience ...