Friday. It’s okay. Sunday and in Ft. Worth? Check this out!

July 23, 2010

Fri­day. What a concept.

I once lived for Fri­day to arrive. That is when I worked, roughly, five days a week. My record on such a sched­ule was rather spotty up until the last 20 years or so. That is, if you don’t include those four years I spent in col­lege, dur­ing which time I mostly worked full time at a rate of 24 hours on and 48 hours off, which was a 56-hour work week. Now there was a concept!

These days, I no longer work full time. Well, some­times I do and some­times I don’t. When I do it is usu­ally more than a 48-hour work week. I had no illu­sions that work­ing as a writer was going to be easy and, sure enough, it hasn’t been easy. In fact, I tell peo­ple these days that my part-time job “sup­ports my writ­ing habit.” I’m not lying much when I say that.

Still, I remem­ber Fri­days. My friends Rob­bie, Judy, some­times Tonya, Brenda, Delia, Rick, Beth or whomever. Mostly Rob­bie, Judy and I — the Yel­low Dogs. Long story. We’d go one place or the other for a mar­garita. Some­times Judy’s artist hus­band would meet us and he and I would design water tow­ers for small cities which looked like a large mar­garita glass, except it would be lean­ing. Like Pisa. Those were good times. Some­times we didn’t even wait for Fri­day. Some­times it would be a Yel­low Dog Day — a day I’d describe as com­pa­ra­ble to a day you’re sit­ting back watch­ing the evening news and see your name as a cam­era pans down a law­suit. Yikes!

I’m such a ham. I wasn’t going to write about much and already look what you’ve done.

Okay, I will do some good for a change on this blog instead of writ­ing about pol­i­tics or the weather or the crazi­ness that passes for life. I will pro­mote my old buddy Jonathan’s gig in which his trio, the Jonathan San­son Trio will be record­ing a new, live CD. Jonathan just sent me an e-mail about it, albeit a mass e-mail, that’s what you do when you are a famous record­ing star in Fort Worth. Right, old buddy?  Just bust­ing your chops. I was going to buy some chops for din­ner, but I didn’t. So right now, I’ve got no other chops to bust. So you’re it, pal!

The Jonathan San­son Trio, fea­tur­ing Dan Tcheco on drums, Chris Carfa on bass and Jonathan on piano and vocals will be record­ing Sun­day, July 25, at Eddie V’s Lounge in Fort Worth. Too bad they couldn’t wait a week, since I will be head­ing for Den­ton exactly one week later. Hey, can’t you guys post­pone every­thing for one week, just for me? Yeah, and pigs make sched­uled flights between IAH and DFW!

I have heard some of the group’s record­ings and I look for­ward to hear­ing them live some day. Jonathan and I are old high school chums who lived across our family’s field from each other. Later, we hung out dur­ing our mil­i­tary days, he in the Air Force and me a Navy squid.

Jonathan says that every­one attend­ing will get a free copy of the CD the group is to record. The CD will come out, hope­fully JS said, in Sep­tem­ber. The great piano man also reminds every­one of the happy happy hour prices, if you like that sort of thing.

If you men­tion you heard about this on Eight Feet Deep, Jonathan might buy you a drink or he might gar­rote you with a piano wire. That’s his call. So if you are in what my friends from that area call “The Metro Mess” dur­ing that time, check it out.

This all happens:

6–10 p.m.

Sun­day, July 25

EV Museum Place

3100 West 7th Street

Fort Worth, TX 76107

817.336.8000

Open daily at 4:00pm.
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Tired? Turn to the obit page.

October 20, 2009

Three mat­ters both­ered me this morn­ing when I trav­eled to the Hous­ton VA hos­pi­tal for an EMG, nerve test, on my feet and legs. Noth­ing that was a bother had any­thing directly to do with the test.

First I woke at 4:50  a.m. I did so to catch the shut­tle van from the local out­pa­tient clinic to the hos­pi­tal. As it turned out — my being the fill­ing between almost 500 pounds of vet­eran sand­wich in the van ride — my own drive to Hous­ton with morn­ing rush hour traf­fic and all might have turned out to have been more pleas­ant had I dri­ven my truck instead. So the hour at which I awoke, the uncom­fort­able ride to the hos­pi­tal and deal­ing with some of the VA’s most accom­plished bureau­cratic assh**es while try­ing to work out another mat­ter com­pletely were what made my day much less than perfect.

The EMG itself, per­formed by a friendly doc with a heavy Latino accent wasn’t really much of a prob­lem at all con­sid­er­ing I would get my legs or feet shocked from time-to-time. The shocks weren’t like get­ting shocked when one grabs hold of a live wire. Believe me. Been there done that — ow, ow s**t!!!

Mostly it was the early morn­ing rise that got to me. Even though I some­how man­aged to sleep most of the way back from Hous­ton sit­ting upright in the van, I still feel halfway dead. As such, it is most appro­pri­ate that I pay trib­ute here to a great man whose obit­u­ary I noticed today.

Many may not rec­og­nize the name Vic Mizzy right off, unless you watched the run­ning gag with the tele­vi­sion cred­its which opened the 1960s TV com­edy “Green Acres.”  Mizzy, who died in Los Ange­les Sat­ur­day at 93, wrote the theme for Eddie Albert-Eva Gabor farce. The Gabor char­ac­ter would make some bizarre com­ment about the open­ing cred­its which would fea­ture Mizzy or other crew’s names, some­thing one would hardly if ever see on any other TV show or movie.

But it was prob­a­bly another of Mizzy’s TV songs which is more widely known, how­ever, that being the theme of the “Addams Fam­ily,” com­plete with the song’s fin­ger snaps.

True, Mizzy may not have cured can­cer or polio, or have won a Nobel Prize (no com­ment please). But some of his songs help us remem­ber some of the zani­est TV pro­gram­ming that aired dur­ing a time that cried out for hilar­ity, the 1960s. Those themes remain catchy and appeal­ing today.

Snap, snap. Keep Man­hat­tan just give me that countryside …

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Did you know it’s raining? No but if you could hum a few bars …

September 11, 2009

 The rain con­tin­ues, on and off, here in the upper cor­ner of the Texas Gulf Coast. It’s been like this for a cou­ple of days. The weather peo­ple say we’ve got our­selves a:

COMPLEX WEATHER SITUATION WITH A COASTAL SURFACE TROUGH/WARM FRONT LOCATED OFF THE SOUTHEAST TEXAS AND SOUTHERN LOUISIANA COAST.

 I’m sure that it’s a heck of a lot more com­pli­cated than that, but it’s good enough for me. The local weather folks out of the NWS Lake Charles office say that any trop­i­cal for­ma­tion “seems unlikely at this time” and the National Hur­ri­cane Cen­ter gives this sys­tem less than a 30 per­cent chance for any type of cyclonic activ­ity. But hav­ing slept through Hur­ri­cane Hum­berto, which formed two years ago tomor­row, I can tell you that these pesky lit­tle sys­tems which stick around in the Gulf and build can jump up quicker than a jackrab­bit with a fire­cracker up its wazoo and com­mence to giv­ing objects ashore a sense­less thrashing.

 So hope­fully this — sys­tem — will just be a rain event. And in such event, one needs a lit­tle back­ground music. For that, I found this Web page com­piled by a per­son with even more time on his hands than I have. He has put together a list of rain-related songs. I will show some he listed a few of mine too, in no par­tic­u­lar order, and then you can look at his page and go wild. Stay dry.

A few rain songs: From the “Rain Songs” blog and a few off he top of my head.

  1. Rainy Night in Geor­gia — Brook Benton
  2. Let it Rain — Derek and the Domi­noes (Eric Clapton)
  3. Rainy Night House — Joni Mitchell
  4. It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ — Folk song
  5. I Can See Clearly Now (the rain is gone) — Johnny Nash
  6. Blue Eyes Cryin’ In the Rain — Willie Nelson
  7. Fire and Rain — James Taylor
  8. Can­dles in the Rain (Lay Down) — Melanie (Safka)
  9. Rain­ing in My Heart — Slim Harpo
  10. Thun­der Island (about being caught in the rain while … ) — Jay Ferguson
  11. Have You Ever Seen the Rain? — Cree­dence Clear­wa­ter Revival
  12. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall — Bob Dylan (not the kind of rain you’d want)
  13. Here Comes the Rain Again — The Eurythmics
  14. Rainy Day Woman — Way­lon Jennings
  15. Who’ll Stop the Rain? — Cree­dence Clear­wa­ter Revival
  16. Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 — Bob Dylan
  17. Texas Flood — Ste­vie Ray Vaughn
  18. Louisiana 1927 — Randy Newman
  19. When the Levee  Breaks — Led Zepplin
  20. It Never Rains in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia — Albert Hammond

Of course, there are tons and tons of rain songs. It would seem peo­ple write almost as many songs about rain as they write about love. And of course there are those songs which have to do about lov­ing in the rain (“Thun­der Island”) and lov­ing the rain (“I Love a Rainy Night” by Eddie Rab­bit, which is not listed above because I don’t par­tic­u­larly like the song.) I am not a big fan of No. 20, about it never rain­ing in So. Cal. either. I listed it because I was sit­ting some­where to avoid a August 1977 rain­storm in San Diego where I heard on the TV play­ing there that Elvis had died. I thought about the irony of the Albert Ham­mond song and it rain­ing like hell as I found out the King was dead. Oh, and there’s Elvis’s “Ken­tucky Rain.” It was an okay song, but I liked his much older stuff better.

 Oh well. Here is music to drown by. Just don’t drown.

 

 

 

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