7. Woman Driver Makeup Soap Opera Shopping (Landrum, Nolan) "once there was a thespian who wished she was a lesbian" Don't keep track of the chronology, I'm not sure it checks out. But the Montgomery County Strawberry Festival was back in full force, and we were set to join the highly unpopular "Teen Night" entertainment. Actually, we were listed to open for a Stay-In-School covers band, but only Everdown made the promotional material. We made up our own flyers and scheduled ourselves to play at "the skate ramp", even though there wasn't a skate ramp at the park. "Halfpipe, due. Halfpipe," said Michael. So we "brought our skateboards" and set up next to a patch of cement and an outdoor grill, where I promptly fired up some lowfat summer sausage. The lowfat garbage never cooks well on the grill, take choice ground sirloin for instance. You stand there forever guessing whether or not it's cooked unless you have a meat thermometer. I once talked about buying a meat thermometer and Michael asked me if I was trying to run a Kentucky Fried Chicken. We borrowed a microphone and two monitors, and we sort of grilled out and played at the same time. Jason and Michael made their own strawberry shortcakes at some booth and Tim and I started playing a cover of "Plantman" for people walking by. We were situated en route to a cluster of dumpsters. We pushed through "Plantman" for a long time until some guy parked next to the dumpsters blaring "The Unforgiven 2" on his Chevy Corsica's FM radio. At this point we played along with the radio. Metallica was followed by something even worse, then we played along with the commercials, which was much more interesting. Some retired gut on a Honda Gold Wing kept watching us and for some reason invited his other retired gut friends and their aging mistresses over to check out the crazy guys. Dwid from Integrity, when addressing things like Holy Terror and all that, would always say a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I have no idea what chain this guy was linked to, but he was without question the microcosmic weak link. A man with no identity after retiring at the age of 55, other than a plaque reading "I worked a CNC Lathe for 27 years" and the plaque on his false teeth. And a hot orange muscle shirt on hot dog skin. As the evening wore on the Wing Whiners all settled in, begging for quirky entertainment to set them apart from the RV retired, though there is no difference other than the degree of tanning on hot dog skin. The RV retired were busy for the evening at the antique auction on the other side of the park. The Lions' Club retired were too busy facilitating the festival, calculating how they could balance their time between social leisure and spending my annual income mowing small lawns that don't need mowed with lanmowers that will outlive them. But there they were in incoherent outfits, some plastered in Harley leather, some held together by Country Friends sweatshirts. I'd think about this gathering again the next night in Advance, when we would play at the Advance Homecoming Fish Fry's H.E.M.P. booth. That's right, but it was eerily similar, watching the group of YOUTH CULTURE whatever, also in incoherent outfits, some plastered in Spring Break Sex tight things and others slouching around in System Of A Down shirts and bad facial hair. All gathered together to celebrate the infinite uses of hemp, like making rope bracelets and making rope things for a person to tie his/her hair with and making rope to hang things with. The H.E.M.P. booth show ("Harvesting Enlightened Movement toward Political change to legalize marijuana) didn't amount to much since we only had two acoustic guitars and a ghetto blaster. I kept asking the "crowd" (six stoned people "working" at the booth) whether or not we should change our name to "The Dudes Of Darkness", the actual name of a gang composed of three guys in my sixth grade class. We received no clear answer, but we thrilled them by claiming to cover a Bongzilla song, in which Jason played a techno cassette on the ghetto blaster, Tim and I tried to add guitars, and Jason sand these provocative, subtly political vocals: "We're livin' in/A messed up world/Talkin' 'bout/A messed up world/Scarin' the crap outta me man/Maybe anarchy like ain't so bad/You know wut I'm talkin' 'bout/like the gover-ment's all crazy man" And so on, Al Jourgensen's nightmare, talk about social things and use a blender in the "song" and journalists everywhere call it INDUSTRIAL and talk about Ministry from eighty years ago. His was the only good scene in that A.I. movie. It took a few tries to match up the rhythms, but no one was really paying attention anyway and Jason kept assuring them it "Would be awesome to the max once we [got] it worked out." Bongzilla is a real band. So are Hot Stove and Dumptruck. But I guess I should say Bongzilla ARE a good band, right? I can never get this new universal grammar right. This is the stupidest thing ever written. Anyway, Michael ended the show by telling people Everdown had car trouble and asking "Could somebody please spell refrigerator?" But the Strawberry Festival came first, and we essentially just made fun of our leech audience with impromptu songs in between reprises of "Plantman". We even nicknamed one of the guys Plantman to his delight. His aging mistress gave him a big kiss and it was hard to watch. But let's see...at one point, Tim went up to one of the guys' Gold Wings and honked the horn. "HONK, HONK!" Tim yelled in a sing-songy voice. They loved it. "You must like Honky-tonk music!" Michael added. It killed, and we broke in to a country song to fuel the flames. I made up the lyrics, something like "My Motorsickel Has A Cupholder For My Grilled Chicken Sandwich/I Drive Until I Remember I Have Nowhere To Go" and so on. I think I ended the song by shouting "What? Destination: FOOD!" After that we were out of ideas, so Jason grabbed the basketball in HOG and started up some trick dribbling. "Who wants to play some BALL?" he asked, and he "shot" the ball toward the dumpsters and it just rolled down the alley out of sight. It all brought to mind the time Jason and I were camp counselors at a camp in West Lebanon, IN. After four nights of tropical humidity we went into delusions and fits of dementia while sipping coffee or something at 1am. In one episode, one of the campers and his buddy came running out of the camp dorm, shoving excrement into his mouth, screaming "JASON! JASON! THIS ISN'T FOOD!" In another episode, we found ourselves on the asphalt basketball court at high noon, failing to make layups after failing to wiggle our ears at "The Camp Idiot-Freak Show". We blamed most of the episodes on a malfunctioned showing of The Great Banana Creme Pie Caper, a movie almost eaten by the movie projector. Scene 1: Imagine children from the sixties riding around double speed on bikes to anime squealing and distorted bells. Scene 2: A German art film, some bound and gagged man in a back alley, screaming as he throws trash cans against the wall to ominous scratching and drumming. It all actually happened. But they did finally fix the projector. The sixties kids ended up saving the day, getting all the pies delivered in time even though someone fell off a ladder and the cattle got loose. We learned, as usual, that when the going gets rough, love is still more important than homework. But our show for the night was pretty much flat and we'd grilled everything we had, so we decided to check out the "Teen Night" entertainment, just to see what would happen when Everdown was supposed to play. It was in a big shelter house with some balloons, and the thumping bass at our arrival informed us the other bands had cancelled and been replaced by some DJ service. The guy told me he was glad Everdown didn't drive all the way out from the east coast. "Yeah, it's probably good. They might have been disappointed." Michael always seemed to know exactly what to say. None of us really had a clue, though, seeing how we'd never driven out of the state to play a show. Jason and I did, however, once drive four hours to see a nine minute show. We timed it all and it was absolutely worth it. The band was called Warhammer and it's still one of my all-time favorite events. They opened for another band we didn't stick around to watch. I can't make this stuff up. All in all, food dominated the evening even in conversation, and we ultimately decided we needed to refocus for the tour's last few shows. "We may as well be sitting on a sidewalk playing saxophones for loose change," I observed. "It's time we insisted on playing somewhere air-conditioned. "I hot shit agree," Tim added. "And it'd be nice to get paid again, seeing how I quit my job to do this horse's ass tour coordinated by my damn brother's middle school 4-H friends." So we consulted with Jeremiah Dawg at a gas station/Subway in order to avoid becoming Zoobilee Zoo rejects. "It's too late," he said through violent laughter, sipping Pepsi. He then kept laughing, but we finally came up with changing the tour's name to, of course, "THE THIS ISN'T FOOD TOUR, 'NAUGHTY SIX", in hopes we could make more creative flyers featuring things such as colored ink and crayon. We also agreed every show should start with at least a ten minute soundcheck, which was how all our recording sessions had begun. In fact, we'd always listed the soundcheck as an independent track as a means of padding the dubbed cassette I mean producing the album. That's it, and both ideas weren't even Jeremiah Dawg's, so we made him buy us some nachos. But the revamp turned out to be exactly what we needed, along with a viewing of the famed "Unkle Roy's Klubhouse," which ends with old mean poor Unkle Roy screaming "Play, Boy! Have fun!" at someone sitting at an organ. intro 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 index