"More Thinkwalking"
I don't do any power walking.
I do sort of a daily mosey to escape the computer monster.
At first, I was amazed to find a real world out there...
full color and high definition!
The birds and squirrels do their best to get me excited,
but my brain still wanders away to other places,
past and present.
* * *
Over the years,
at times when our records weren't hot.
we had to play small clubs, motels, and restaurants.
We went through some hell for not doing the popular songs of the day,
and we often got fired.
Don't get too creative at the Ramada Inn.
At a club in Houston we finished a set,
and after we got a good round of applause
a woman shouted out:
"They didn't play even one song I know!"
This shows that she was listening,
and if she ever hears us again,
maybe she'll know our songs.
It was a rough go
but we knew we had to stick to our own material
and our own style.
Cover acts get more work on the small time circuits,
but they never achieve real success
Misty and I developed our duet style in the late 1960's
and it's become us, and vice versa.
It's the only way we can sing a song now,
so it's too late for us to be a copy act.
* * *
In the mid 60's
my mother and sister were driving from Miami to Jacksonville.
It was night, and they were in the Palm Beach area
when they saw lights just over the eastern horizon.
They were in a cluster shaped like a bunch of hanging grapes.
The lights seemed to follow the speed of their car,
staying parallel with them for over a half hour.
That week there were stories in the newspapers
about a lot of people who reported seeing the same lights,
same shape.
Misty and I saw something one time
that was so bizarre that we never tell anybody.
It was about 100 feet above us
at 3 AM, by the Opa Locka airport,
the home of planes lost in the Bermuda triangle.
* * *
I once asked Grandpa Jones how long he'd been doing his act.
He said:
"I started doing Grandpa when I was 26
and I've grown into the part."
* * *
I have false feelings of being socially acceptable.
* * *
Misty was an abused child.
Under age, she ran away and got married to escape from home.
The groom turned out to be a violent and dangerous character,
and the abuse continued.
She finally got away from him,
but not without him burning her car and belongings.
After Misty and I had been together a couple of years,
we read in The Miami Herald that he had been found murdered
in an unrented room at the Voyager Motel,
on US 1, in North Miami Beach.
He had been shot to death,
and was still clutching handfuls of rare coins.
It's a mystery,
but something like that was bound to happen to him.
* * *
I've been falsely accused of frivolity.
I don't have a frivolic bone in my body.
If I do have Frivolic Bone,
I don't know where it is.
Copyright © November 7, 2005, Jack Blanchard. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission.
