Since the day that our son was born, the daughter (also known as the teenager) has been jealous of the attention that his birthday gets. Costumes and free candy on your birthday, how do you beat that?
15 years ago today, I became a parent, and started marking that officialanno parentitime. If the full truth were to be told, I’ve been raising children since I was a child myself. The children I raised weren’t my kids, but sometimes you get handed a job that you didn’t ask for. As the eldest in a single parent household, you spend a lot of time herding the younger ones. You can always look forward to mom getting home at some point later in the day, and then you can quit pretending you know what you are doing and get back to being a child yourself.
Once you are mom (or dad) things get a little more complex. The early experience helped, though. I knew how to change diapers. How to feed a baby, hold a baby, a thousand different things. But at 2 in the morning, when it’s your turn to rock the baby, you find that you miss the days when mom would come home and take over. Well, not really. But just for a minute there…
…And they grow so fast, too. 15 years? It couldn’t have been that long. But then, she’s a good bit taller than she was when I first saw her. Then, I could hold her in the crook of one arm, a little over 6 pounds, light as a feather. I’m still taller than her now, but I don’t think that will last much longer. I can remember taking her to the Montessori School for the first time. I can remember her learning to read, and then talking me into reading books that she liked (I’m hooked on Harry Potter and it’s her fault) getting me hooked on anime (especially Hayao Miyazaki) Discovering she has quite a talent for art in her own right. Trying to encourage her to explore her talent, without pressuring her to ‘do something’ with it. Dropping her off at the High School for the first time; wondering out loud if I “should walk her in…” The disgusted “DAD!” that I got in return was the first clue that she was growing up much faster than I was really ready for.
I think they’ll have to sedate me for the next birthday. I don’t think I’ll be ready for 16, dating, driving.
After the boy was born, we took to telling her that “well, your birthday is Lincoln’s birthday too…” That didn’t work. She could go here and see a full list of the famous people who were also born on this date. I doubt that would be good enough either. Maybe, if she’s half the artist I think she can be, she’ll end up on that list as well.
She’s already on an exclusive list of one in my book. That’s a good enough reason to celebrate the day all by itself, without needing costumes and candy. Wouldn’t you agree?
Gaelic Storm restores the mood of the day. Yeah it’s still a grim mood, but if you can’t laugh at your own problems like this song does, then you really need to seek some counseling:
I just checked the bank accounts. Not even going there. The teenager is frustrated. I’m not going there either. The range is on the fritz. Re-queue that song, quick. I better finish quickly while I can.
…Still
…Finish
Postscript
One of those rare times that I talked about music and the emotional effect it can have on me on the blog. Meniere’s took most of my love of music along with the bass parts of my hearing. Music has become largely soulless for me. It is a select few songs that speak to me now, if I haven’t heard them and learned to love them already. If you already know the work, your brain will play it back for you provided you can still hear anything. Luckily I still can hear some parts of the music.
…and it’s music from Marc Gunn’s Irish & Celtic music podcast too. I’m glad. He needs more listeners. I knew I’d been listening to that for a long, long time. I hadn’t realized how long until just now.
The Brobdingnagian Bards serenaded me on my birthday at an Armadillocon one year, I forget which one. I have followed them, Andrew McKee and Marc Gunn, ever since that time. Their music, and the music that Marc plays on his podcast, are about the only music I try to follow any longer.
The passion has gone out of it for me. I never did obsess about following trends like most people seem to do, and once I became detached from music what little I did catch that was trendy was lost. Now I’d rather hear Marc and Andrew sing Lily the Pink than I would try and understand what passes for music these days.
A friend sent me a link to a music and humor blog the other day thinking I would get a kick out of the references to days gone by, inside jokes that only us old people would find amusing. What they didn’t know was that the Janis Joplin music that the blog was playing would remind me of Janis staring down on me from the wall of the Janis Room at Threadgill’s. Not a pleasant memory of my youth but of the location where we used to hold a weekly Libertarian Toastmasters (Politimasters) meetings and the terror I went through pretty much every week that I was expected to give a speech there. The kind of thing that should carry a trigger warning, if I believed in those kinds of things.
Anyone who’s ever tried to speak in front of a large group of people can probably commiserate with me here, if not completely understand what I’m talking about. It wasn’t just fear that I felt, standing there trying to speak, and stage fright is too dismissive to cover it. Perhaps topophobia would describe the feeling, if only I could get a definition that wasn’t the (current) generic fear of certain places or situations. But stage fright might explain why Janis (and so many other performers) resorted to numbing herself before getting onstage. I know the politimasters meetings went better when alcohol was served beforehand (at least they seemed to) How can you be expected to be entertaining when you can’t shake the feeling that you’re going to melt (or explode) at any moment? Heart racing, a feeling of the darkest dread, the desire to run away and never stop running? Is that entertainment?
Public speaking is one of the most common human fears, and this was confirmed by my own experiences within the Politimasters group. The group itself died from a lack of participation. We just couldn’t get enough people. Ten people were all we needed. Ten people, and you can run an effective Toastmasters training group. We couldn’t even get 10 people in the city of Austin interested in meeting every week to practice their speaking skills in front of an audience. That is how prevalent the fear is.
Toastmasters and stage fright in turn remind me of my high school speech class and the dreaded speech class project, another instance (and another trigger warning) of getting up in front of an audience and performing in front of other people. The teachers decided to do a mock version of The Gong Show (this was the 70’s after all) in front of the entire school body as well as guests. To make matters worse they decided we would determine in advance whether we were going to be gonged or not (I think they missed the point of audience participation a key feature of The Gong Show) A friend of mine convinced me that we should try and do Abbott & Costello’s routine Who’s on First, and we (she) decided that we didn’t want to be gonged. I went along with the plan lacking even the slightest idea what I could possibly do that an audience would find interesting. [I’ve written a piece more recently, Coping with Dysgraphia. It might shed light on why it was that I was convinced I couldn’t be interesting.]
I memorized the routine. I read it every day for more than two weeks. I performed it in front of family a number of times. I could do it backward by the day of the show. All that practicing amounted to nothing. It didn’t matter because when that curtain rose, I couldn’t remember word one of the entire thing. I am, to put it bluntly, speechless, in front of the entire auditorium. Both of us end up reading the routine from cards that we carried on stage with us. There is no other way to describe what we were doing other than bad, and we should be gonged for it. The audience wants us gonged, and can’t figure out why the judges don’t go along. I remember the feeling of thousands of people in the audience wanting my blood (although I’m sure the auditorium in Stinnett didn’t hold more than a few hundred; and ‘wanting blood’ is a bit of an exaggeration. Just a bit) when I walked off that stage I swore I would never do anything like that again. …And Janis is looking at me from across the room. “You had a speech prepared for Toastmasters tonight, right?” Pure terror.
Postscript
I ran across another former citizen of Stinnett while looking for a link to represent Stinnett in the article. I’d never heard of Jim Foreman before, but he’s got some interesting stories printed on his site. I identified with the sentiment in The Graduation, which is where I found the picture.
He also had some photos of the old railroad station in this story about going home. I remember how my buddy John Thompson and I used to go prowling around the old cotton mills and grain silos near the station, and how we caught and raised pigeons that were nesting there. I wonder if it still stands?
March 2017. The website/blog that stimulated this trip down memory lane removed itself from public view a number of years ago. I searched for it using different text strings and even went to archive.org and looked for a record of the blog in the archive. Not even the URL was preserved. This gaping absence in the beginning of the story forced me to rewrite the opening paragraphs for this piece. Having then embarked on a major re-edit, I decided to do a few other wordsmithing edits while keeping the feeling of the piece that I had intended to communicate intact.
Well, that’s true as far as it goes. The real reason I’m editing today is because Chuck Barris died this week and as much as I hate to admit it he had a real impact on my life, as is partially related above. My family watched The Gong Show every day if my memory serves me right. The show was on in the hour after we got out of school and since we only had one TV and two channels back then, I cringed my way through most of the stupid on it. There were occasional gems to be found but I don’t think love or like are words I would apply to The Gong Show. The show was more like an inoculation for stupid than anything that I might remember with affection.
If you haven’t seen Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and you are a Chuck Barris or Gong Show fan, you might want to give it a chance. It is a very strange film about a very strange man. I personally would rate the film as meh. I know that is what I thought because it made so little impression on me that I barely recall it. The vast majority of films that I’ve seen rate a meh. So while that’s not a glowing endorsement, at least I didn’t gong it and send it back unwatched. There have been quite a few of those over the years. Too little time, too much to watch. The Wife and I wanted to see it because Sam Rockwell plays Chuck Barris, and he does a credible job of channeling the man and the madness that was the 70’s as seen through the rearview mirror. Personally, I’d rather look at the 70’s through the lens of Barris’ eyes than mine. He was always more charitable to the stupid than I could ever be. It was his saving grace.
September 2019.The Texas Standard ran a segment on Texas’ Woodstock a few days ago, an event that featured a Saturday night set performed by Janis Joplin. The webpage and the audio on it are all worth listening to. It was apparently quite an event; an event that the Texas of the time was embarrassed about and tried to make us all forget. Janis got the last word. Good for her.
On the first day, Sam and Dave and B.B. King got the crowd moving despite the heat. Chicago played. They were still called Chicago Transit Authority back then. But the act that got the crowd’s biggest ovation was one of their own: Janis Joplin. She closed out Saturday’s show with a set Hayner remembers as electric.
“Texas had been pretty hard on her and so what I remember her saying is that she had really felt kind of nervous about being there but we really made her feel like she was welcome and part of us,” he says.
And she was part of them. Janis Joplin had to leave Texas to become the Janis Joplin everyone now knows. For most of her career, she stayed away from her home state. Texas was a place where she was bullied, ostracized for who she was. That experience left her, like so many in the crowd, caught between worlds that were often at odds with each other. But now here she was – an icon of the counterculture. The crowd clapped her and the Kozmic Blues Band back on for two encores. And then, as concertgoer Billy Kirby remembers it, she had something to say.
“Her band was walking off the stage, she was walking off the stage. The lighters were up, people were screaming ‘Janis, Janis, encore, encore.’ Well she comes out and everybody goes crazy again and she just kind of quiets the crowd down a little bit with her hand movements,” he says. “And she leaned to the microphone and said ‘Thank you very much. But what I want to know is where the fuck were you motherfuckers when I needed you a few years ago?’ And left.”
“She never talked about how hard she worked to get to where she was and become the musician she was. And suddenly, I hear her coming up with guitar parts, figuring out different tempos, new arrangements of the songs. She was really calling the shots.”
I should have been paying closer attention to what Janis was singing about back in the days when it might have saved me more time. Freedom isn’t something that you conserve. Freedom is a state of nature that admits to no tomorrows.
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
April 20, 2020. Threadgill’s is no more. The end of an era, and the end of my access to the food that I had grown to love over my decades in Austin. COVID-19 claims another victim.
Wilson opened a second location, Threadgill’s World Headquarters on Riverside Drive, in 1996. That space, also a music venue, closed in 2018, but Wilson kept the spirit alive at the original restaurant known as the Old No. 1, the walls papered with posters that told the history of the city and culture he loved.
The closing of the North Lamar spot, which Threadgill opened in 1933, marks the end of an era for old Austin, the traces of which can be hard to detect around town these days.
It just so happens that the version of White Christmas being used to backup the animation is one that I have always liked since I heard it featured on The Santa Clause a few years back. Me being the curious foot chewer that I am, I wrote the following:
So who is singing that version of the song? I don’t recognize the singer.
I should have known what kind of response I would get:
not sure who that is????….sounded/looked like santa to me, with a reindeer accompaniment???????? 🙂 but i realize there are a lot of santa impostors out there….nothing is sacred anymore it seems….everyone trying to cash in on holy-days seasons…..aloha
Yeah, I really set myself up for that one, didn’t I?
So who is the voice behind the big red guy? Well, I tracked down the singers on my own. It would be The Drifters. I’m going to put it on my to buy list for next year. Have a Funky Christmas.
The top Tour acts of 05 have just been reported. I’m not sure how this should be interpreted. I’ve always been a fan of U2, but I thought they were going to retire a few years back. I guess the lucrative concert tours have made them change their minds.
So too with the Eagles, which I could have sworn have been doing farewell tours the last two years running. I guess it’s one of those extended goodbyes. Like the slow dances to their songs with high school girlfriends, you just don’t want those moments to be over. The next thing you know you’re 40 and have a gut that you wouldn’t want to show on stage. I noticed none of them seem to have that problem.
Coming in 9th is Jimmy Buffett. Way back in ’76 I can remember singing “lost shaker of salt” and wondering why you would need one for a place called “Margaritaville”. That guy started when the Eagles did, released albums and toured through the entire 14 years that they “went their separate ways”, was probably touring when Bono decided he was only going to have one name, and he’s still grossing in the top 10 acts of 2005.
I knew I was a parrothead for a reason. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
That line still cracks me up. If you’re looking for reality, look somewhere else. If you are looking for some laughs while watching a group of impossible characters attempt what should be a simple task that turns out not to be simple at all; a quest that leads to getting shot, mutilated or run over by a truck (sounds horrible, don’t it? It’s a hoot) This is the movie for you.
The Wife can be seen sitting at a table in one of the restaurant scenes. It also features a rare appearance by John Mellencamp. Yes, that John Mellencamp.
