The Sunshine Man

As any entrepreneur will tell you, one of the most rewarding aspects to creating an entity is the humans who become involved in the project.  If it’s a store like the Subterranean Circus, that includes the customers, the people who supplied us with inventory and, most of all, our bizarre array of workers.  I loved them every one, even the six I fired.

Though the store was usually busy, the occasional lapses made a bored clerk appreciate counter-leaners like Big Tom Mizell, who came in daily to proselytize against the government, Rod the Biker with his hairy tales of Valdosta and Glinda the Crotch-Grabber, who…well, you know.  Over the course of a given day, we had drug dealers who stayed out of jail by helping the government smuggle arms to the Contras, we had exhibitionists who boldly tried on dresses without the aid of a changing room, we had teenyboppers on the lam from home in Opa-Locka, looking for love in all the wrong headshops.

And then, there were the employees, our co-collaborators who pulled up each morning in the clown car and came in to see how much havoc they could wreak.  Dick North was the first, a co-resident of the fabled Charlatan house on Sixth Street.  Dick favored the Eastern religions and was disposed toward Buddha, exceptional marijuana and the body-painting of runaway girls in the blacklight room.  Fifteen-year-old girlies with rucksacks would poke their little heads in the door and ask, “Is this where Dick North teaches?”

Ricky Childs, a gay, black young man, was a Circus employee of 18 years.  He dutifully went to church with his mother on Sundays but raised merry Ned in the local bars the other six nights of the week with co-hellraisers Debbi Brandt and Michael (Jagger) Hatcherson.  Ricky was also a member of the famous Circus Posse, which tracked a bad-check writer to her apartment, climbed in through the transom and recovered the ill-gotten goods, not to mention a lid of grass she had resting in the refrigerator.  Cheaters tax, we’d call it.  I told Ricky we brought him into the clan to cover all our minority hiring requirements.  Mr. Childs was also responsible for our sponsorship of a candidate in the transvestite Miss Gainesville contest at one of the bigger bars in town.  Don’t think that wasn’t a barrel of laughs…those girls have no regard for the sizes clearly written on dress labels.  When “Patricia” won the local contest, Ricky came rushing up to tell me she was now eligible to compete for Miss Florida laurels.  I told him he was on his own, I’d done my time.  And then, of course, there was the star on top of the tree, Daniel Levine, the Pride of North Miami Beach.  Every store should have one.

Danny Boy 

My Circus partner in crime was Pamme Brewer, known coast to coast as The Nude Coed.  Pamme was an Art major, thus ran across a broad cross-section of lunatics on a daily basis, not the least of which was one Daniel Levine.  “You should hire Danny,” she advised one day, “he’s funny, he has a great personality and everybody likes him.  And he was a clothing salesman on the Miracle Mile in Coral Gables.”  Any side effects?  “Well, they locked him up in San Francisco for awhile because he was confusing himself with Jesus.”  Oh.  “But he’s better now.”  How much better?

Pamme brought Danny around and he turned out to be a very engaging fellow.  Moving directly to the elephant in the room, I asked him, “Danny, are you still crazy?”  Nope, he said, “that’s all done with.”  I hired him on the spot and his first day on the job he reorganized the clothing department, sold fifty (count ‘em—50) pair of bluejeans, made coffee, and got a cutie to try on the forbidden Red Dress, a fairly transparent creation she came back to try on five more times.  Everyone in the store was deeply chagrined when somebody else bought the thing and it disappeared forever down the blacklit corridors of Circus lore.  C’est la vie, as they say in Montreal.

I have had very few male roommates in this life.  The first was Gordon in East Bennett Hall at Oklahoma State during my freshman year.  Gordon was immediately homesick, constantly pining for his high school girlfriend back home again in Indiana.  The gleaming candlelight still burning bright through the sycamores finally drew him back.

The next guy, Buck, also at OSU, was more of a housemate since we shared several rooms but had our own sleeping quarters.  Buck was a rodeo rider and a drunk, who was always broke but told great stories.  One night, a large member of the Cowboy wrestling team tracked me down at home to pay me back for an ornery article I’d written in the campus newspaper.  Highly offended by this breach of etiquette, Buck picked him up and threw him through a window.  Best pane of glass I ever paid for.

There were a couple of months spent in Austin at Gilbert Shelton’s condemned apartment where I slept on his hair couch while Gilbert and his half-brother Steve occupied the bedrooms.  That was more like living in a war zone, with drunken wall-painting parties, phantasmagorical peyote extravaganzas and violent water-balloon fights with merciless antagonists.  Finally, also in Austin, there were a couple of months in Wally Stopher’s atrium located in the infamous Austin “Ghetto,” which featured numberless mattresses on the floor, the tangy odor of feline urine and madwomen grappling on the stairway.  Taking note of all this, I decided to cast my lot with females in the future, and I did.  Except for one formidable stint with the irrepressible Danny Levine.

Dick North, left, John Buckley and Danny Levine, right, work on Subterranean Circus booth at the Atlanta Pop Festival.

Glory Days

After I spent five days in Alachua General recovering from a massive plaster-dust-induced asthmatic attack in 1968, my doctor thought a change to a relatively dustless environment was in order.  I found a decent two-bedroom place at Summit House Apartments off Archer Road and Danny moved in with me.  He was a fine roommate, except for a nasty habit of leaving odiferous wine bottles in the sink, and we got along famously.  We might be roommates at Summit House today if Danny hadn’t fallen madly in love with a local highschool Lolita named Charlotte Yarbrough, who visited him at the crack of dawn most mornings before roaring off to classes on the back of his noisy Kawasaki.  Apartment dwellers like nothing better than being roused at sunrise by the revving up of motorcycles, thus we lost our lease, alas.  No hard feelings, though.  Shit happens when you’re having fun.

Opening the Subterranean Circus door each morning at ten was like going to a new musical comedy every day.  You never knew who was going to show up and in what condition, but whatever happened you knew Danny Levine could relate to the issues of the customer.  He was a combination of Class Psychologist, mentor of the young and innocent, loyal friend to the confused and depraved.  He was also a certified minister of the Universal, having sent in his 29 cents and two boxtops from Quaker Puffed Rice.  Now and then, he’d trek out to some woodsy glen and marry a starstruck couple of hippies while their friends released terrified doves into the sky.  He was a man for all seasons, a cheerful bon vivant, a lover of art history, a daring motorcycle racer, a sucker for any crazy new plan.  Once, in Manhattan, he took me to the Metropolitan Museum and I learned more about Art in a few hours than I’d assimilated in the rest of my life.  Danny was like Norm in Cheers; everybody perked up and smiled when he strode into the room.  All good things come to an end, of course, and so did Danny’s multi-year sentence at the Circus.  He was direly needed elsewhere, especially at Art’s Kawasaki Shop, so one day he picked up his rolling papers, love beads, Indian mandalas and got on his motorcycle for a final drive west.  “I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places,” he promised, then sped off into the night.  But not before leaving us this gleaming silver bullet, a token of his reign.

The Latter Years

Like rambling Hank Snow, Danny Levine has been everywhere, man, traversing the world in search of merriment and mirth.  Exploring through Europe and Asia, he’s expressed an appreciation for the kindness of strangers, with a particular fondness for the Irish and the Thais.  His favorite place on Earth is Italy, which seems a natural for a professor of Art History, but it’s the food that won him over.  “Best in the world, not even close,” he swears.  He’s finally settled down in lovely Savannah, the genteel city of parks and greenery where he taught for 17 years at the Savannah College of Art & Design.

Not too many years ago, Mr. Levine was dutifully swimming laps, as some of us do in the interests of self-preservation, when he came upon an irritating problem---a temporary loss of ability to use one of his legs.  After traipsing down several blind alleys as often seems to happen in neurological cases, he finally got the correct diagnosis---Parkinson’s Disease---an ugly game-changer.  “I use to feel sorry for myself,” he says, “but one day I got some kind of unexplainable revelation.  Now I’m just happy to be here.”  Welcome to the club, Dan.

Danny made the drive to The Last Tango, but it’s a scary four hours each way on the road for a fellow who is never sure when the next body part will temporarily opt out.  Still, he perseveres.  A recent brain stimulation procedure at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville gave him a boost and last Winter he gave us a call.  “An old friend of mine wants me to go to Italy for a couple of weeks in December.  I think I’m going to go,” he said.  And he did.  Despite a few minor issues, the trip was such a great inspiration that this November he picks up his backpack and heads for the tulip fields of Amsterdam.  We’ve no doubt that he’ll make it.  He’s a Circus boy!  He’s a magic-maker!  And he’s  strong to the finish ‘cause he eats his spinach, he’s Danny the Sunshine Man!

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com       

Take Me Out To The Ball Game

I don’t like funerals, and I really don’t like wakes.  Too much weeping and rending of garments.  One day, however, the subject of music at funerals came up in a macabre discussion with a wilting friend.  “What song would you like played at your ritual,” he asked.”  I didn’t take five seconds to answer.  “Take Me Out To The Ball Game,” I said.  Considering where I would be at the time, that seemed like a brilliant alternative.  He eyed me disapprovingly and indicated I should choose something more sacred and depressing.  “Nope,” I said, “that’s it.”  Aside from the inevitable Star Spangled Banner, “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” is the song I’ve heard most in my life.  It’s a cheerful little ditty, evoking memories of the good old days at bustling Fenway Park, where everybody puts down their beer and sings along no matter the pending fate of the home team.  Despite several changes to the game over the years, the song steadfastly hangs on, played by organists and sung by fans at every major and minor league park in the country and most college venues, usually before the home team bats in the bottom of the seventh.  Not everyone sings the national anthem, but to a man the crowd belts out “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.”  Anyone who abstains would be shunned and in some cases have lighted matches thrown at them.

I mentioned my predilection for the song in a column one day.  My younger sister, Kathy, read it and said she’d remember when the time came.  A little presumptuous, I thought, but her heart was in the right place.  If you’re wondering, and I know you are, the lyrics to TMOTTBG were written by a guy named Jack Norworth in 1908.  Jack was riding the NYC subway and was inspired by a sign which screamed “BASEBALL TODAY---POLO GROUNDS!” which is where the old New York Giants used to play.  The words were put to music by Albert Von Tilzer.  Neither of the two songwriters had ever seen a major league game and wouldn’t for decades.  The song was first sung by Norworth’s then-wife Nora Bayes and popularized by many other vaudeville acts.  It was played at a ballpark for the first time in 1934 at a high school game in Los Angeles and later that same year during the fourth game of the World Series.  “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America as one of the 365 “Songs of the Century.”  The first recorded version was sung by Edward Meeker and his recording was selected by the Library of Congress as a 2010 addition to the National Recording Registry, which selects recordings annually that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”  So there.  And while were at it, the correct lyrics are “take me out with the crowd, not “to the park,” so get with the program, you Philistines.

Ex-Gator David Eckstein, all 5-6, 170 pounds of him played ten years in the Major Leagues and won a World Series title with the St. Louis Cardinals.

“Size Doesn’t Matter.  No, Really.”

“No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.”---Paul Gallico

When we were kids, baseball was The Game.  There were no hoops in the neighborhood, not everyone could ice skate and football had yet to ascend to its later popularity.  Skinny white kids could play baseball just fine even if they couldn’t  run fast, jump or dribble between their legs.  You could be a four-foot shrimp like Joey Pappalardo and still play a mean shortstop.  You could be a blind fat kid like Paul Brooks and still roam unbothered in the mellow meadows of right field.    Well-padded Walter Babish couldn’t hit a beach ball with a canoe paddle but he knew how to walk into a change-of-pace pitch when the occasion required.  Eddie Ledwich was a lousy first basemen except for that one day a year he pulled off the hidden ball trick.  Can’t afford your own bat or glove?  Don’t worry, we got plenty.

You didn’t need a fancy venue or exotic equipment to play baseball.  We had the ratty old B&M field at the end of Boxford Street, where a ground ball to the shortstop occasionally traveled off course after bouncing into an errant rock and some undisciplined hitter might occasionally take out old Grandma Middleton’s bathroom window with a misplaced line drive.  But hey, everybody couldn’t fit into the four-team Little League, which was populated with the sons of doctors, lawyers and divorce attorneys.  We could beat them, though.

We had neighborhood teams back in the day.  We got on our bikes and traveled all over town to play kids from the other nabes.  Once, on the Fourth of July, we were called in to replace a uniformed Junior League team at the neighboring town of North Andover’s big holiday whoop-de-doo picnic.  As the old advertisements used to say, they laughed when we sat down to play the hometown heroes, we of no uniforms, half a dozen beat-up bats and a catcher with home made equipment.  They laughed some more when the homies jumped on our pitcher, nervous little Joey Trepanier, for three runs in the first inning.  That just pissed us off.  Next time up, I smoked one off the gazebo’s roof, routing the mayor’s party and we went on to win the game 7-3.  Nobody was laughing then.  Just to rub it in, most of us ran in the ensuing mini-marathon and finished near the front of the pack.  Just a bunch of average-sized, unmuscled ball-playing pack rats who didn’t need enhancements to play the game well.  All things are possible with baseball, where size doesn’t matter.  Ask Pee Wee Reese.

Of Fathers And Sons (reprinted from TFP, May 31, 2018 article, The Faithful)

“That’s one of the great gifts of this, the greatest of all games, baseball: it allows you still to lose yourself in a dream, to feel and remember a season of life when summer never seemed to die and the assault of cynicism hadn’t begun to batter optimism.”---Mike Barnicle.

My father promised me that when I was old enough to start grade school he would take me to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.  I thought about this all the time.  When you are a tiny child, iconic shrines like Fenway are like castles in the sky, fabled heavens where the gods live, where battles of incredible importance take place, where feverish radio announcers sit in rapt attention, delivering the blow-by-blow to the outside world.  Like everyone else, I had seen pictures of the Red Sox palace but it still seemed like a place beyond the bounds of Earth, to which acceptable guests received invitations written on gilt-edged stationery.

Nonetheless, the day came and Tom Killeen led me down Winthrop Avenue to the Boston & Maine railroad station.  The train ride was a little more than a half-hour, then on to the subway at the Boston Garden, one change at the Common and on to Kenmore Square.  The imposing light towers were visible almost immediately as we made the short walk to the park. I don’t know what I expected but my first view of Fenway was disturbing, a mix of confusion and disappointment.  I knew what baseball fields looked like and this red-brick facade wasn’t it.  My father smiled and cautioned, “Wait….”

We handed the gatekeeper our tickets and walked inside, now part of a huge, milling throng traveling in all directions in the half-light of Fenway’s bowels, eventually reaching our entrance ramp directly in back of first base.  I walked up the ramp until the entire field was visible and stopped dead in my tracks, paralyzed by the view.  There was the enormous left field wall, the iconic little scoreboard, the greenest grass in the universe…just like in the pictures.  The Red Sox uniforms were so impossibly white they must have been created in some alternate universe and delivered by mystical beings.  My Father, of course, had seen all this before and merely guided me to our seats.  “Wow!” I said.  “This place is great.”  My father looked back at me with the hint of a smile.  “Billy,” he guaranteed, “this is the best baseball park in America.”  Seventy two years later, just about everybody agrees with him.

The game with the Cleveland Indians was a mess.  The Red Sox fell behind 12-1 and Tom Killeen developed a dour expression.  “Looks like I picked the wrong time for your first game,” he lamented.  “It’s only the fifth inning,” I told him.  “We could catch up.”  Tom’s resigned smile signaled otherwise, but he was wrong for once.  Boston battled back and won 15-14 in a game for the ages, a contest in which the Indians used pitchers Bob Feller, Gene Bearden, Mike Garcia and Bob Lemon to stem the tide, all to no avail.  Every so often, baseball offers up an unexplainable souffle, a completely illogical combination of ingredients and winds up with the perfect meal.  “Don’t expect this to happen all the time,” my father warned me.  “It’s one in a million.”  I nodded my head, but I knew better.

On the way into the park, my father told me I could pick out one pennant to buy.  I chose a white one with Red Sox scrawled in large red letters.  He said we’d get it on the way out, avoiding the nuisance of carrying it around all afternoon.  Alas and alack, on the way out there were no more.  There were a million alternate choices but I sulkily turned all of them down.  Tom Killeen was probably irritated but he was also a man of his word and come hell or high water he was going to find that damn pennant.  When we got home, we trooped over a Merrimack River bridge, the opposite direction from going home, and all the way over to a novelty store on Broadway, a good two miles.  The shop didn’t have pennant, but the proprietor promised to find it somewhere.  Two weeks later, my father came marching home from work, evasive pennant in hand.  You’d think it was the Hope Diamond by the reaction of my mother and me.  We proudly hung the thing immediately in my small bedroom and it was still there 15 years later when I returned home from college.  I wish I had it now.

Little more than ten years later my father was gone, but the memories lingered on, recollections of sitting on the floor by my dad’s chair listening to Red Sox-Yankee games, arguing the relative merits of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, complaining about the shortcomings of various Sox managers, wondering if we’d ever win the pennant.  We didn’t have much in common, me and my father, agreeing rarely, battling often.  He was a difficult man to fathom, a hard one to please, cast in the ways of an earlier time.  There are no stories of roughhousing in the clubhouse, frolicking on the lea, not a lot of hugging or pats on the back.  But there was baseball.  I could see the game through his eyes and he through mine.  We had one common cause and that would have to do.  I never wept at his funeral at the age of sixteen, merely went through the motions, comforted my mother, stiff upper lip.  But when we got home, I went up to my room, sat on the bed and looked up at the fading white pennant with the team name emblazoned in red.  Thanks, Dad, I said to myself.  And finally, I cried.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com 

 

Sasquatch Mania

Why now?  Sure, everybody likes mysterious eight-foot-tall creatures who live in the woods and smell bad, but usually they’re bears.  Suddenly, you can’t even go to a garden show without seeing metal cutout silhouettes of Bigfoot littering the landscape.  Even my wife---a sensible woman by all measures except for a pact with the Devil concerning chocolate---is on board.  She asked for and got her very own giant Sasquatch for Christmas and now it stands menacingly outside our little guest house, scaring off uninvited guests and property appraisers.  People tell me I’ll learn to love him.  “Not Yeti,” I reply.

You can get information from the horse's mouth at the Harrison Hot Springs Sasquatch Museum

Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?  What Are You Thinking, Steely-eyed Joe?

Wild tales of hairy, forest-dwelling, bi-pedal primates have persisted for centuries in coastal Canada and the northwestern United States, but the evidence is feeble.  Somewhat akin to UFO photographs, rare pictures of the creatures are fuzzy and amateurish, even with the explosion of Apple cell phone cameras to aid in the hunt.

North of the border, from a lookout above the Harrison River Valley in southwestern British Columbia, dense forest stretches all the way to the snow-capped Coast Mountains on the Pacific shore.  Thick with towering western red cedars, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees, the wilderness continues almost uninterrupted all the way north to Alaska.  Beyond the roads and hiking trails, the terrain soon becomes impossible, punctuated by steep mountains that plunge into glacier-carved lakes.  This remote valley 81 miles east of Vancouver conjures up an ancient land filled with mystery and possibility and many call it the home of the world’s most famous cryptid---Sasquatch.

Bhima Gauthier, who leads tours to spots in the region where sightings have been reported, is on the fence.  “I can’t say for sure that they are real, but I have a gut feeling that there has to be some truth behind it.  There are too many testimonies to ignore…especially around here, where we have a very rich mythology.” 

There have been 37 notable Sasquatch sightings near the town of Harrison Hot Springs since 1990.  Most often called Bigfoot in the U.S. and Yeti or metoh kandmi (wild man of the snows) in the Himalayas, Sasquatch is always described as very tall, extremely hairy and inevitably reluctant to be approached.  The creature is considered sacred to West Coast First Nations, particularly the Sts’ailes (sta-hay-lis) who have lived in the Harrison River Valley for at least 10,000 years.  The word “Sasquatch” is the anglicized version of sasq’ets, which means “hairy man” in Halq’emeylem, the Sts’ailes upriver dialect.  “The word comes from a mountain called Sasq’ets Tel, the place where Sasquatch gather,” according to local official Kelsey Charlie.

To sate a growing curiosity and perhaps make a buck from tourists, Harrison Hot Springs opened a Sasquatch Museum inside its visitor center in 2017 and worked with Sts’ailes member Boyd Peters, who provided input on the original tribe acquisitions, including a drum and replica wood mask of Sasquatch.  One museum display explains the Sts’ailes belief in Sasquatch as a caretaker of the land and totem for their nation (he’s even on their flag if you’d like to buy one).  The exhibits are juxtaposed with casts of Sasquatch footprints, news clippings about sightings that date to 1884 and a logbook of reported local encounters.  Since the museum opened, tourist numbers to the visitor center have doubled to 20,000 annually and the resort community received a CAD $1 million government grant to build a greatly expanded  museum and visitor center.  So who says Sasquatch doesn’t exist?

In addition to visiting the museum, visitors can take a tour with Gauthier’s Harrison Lake Nature Adventures or walk the Sasquatch Trail or even show up for Sasquatch Days, which have been held in town since 1938.  The area has become, perhaps, the world’s primary magnet for those seeking answers, including the 26% of all Canadians who believe cryptids are real.  “I realize I have a financial bias,” says Bhima Gauthier, “but if you heard some of the compelling stories I have, you would certainly reassess your thinking.  These people are not crazy fools, they’re just ordinary folks with nothing to gain by making stuff up.  And they’re positive they’ve seen a Sasquatch.  So who am I to argue?”

Kelsey Charlie personally witnessed two Sasquatch drinking water from Harrison Lake in 2002.  “It made my hair stand on end,” he swears.  “My grandpa used to say the slollicum is a shapeshifter and can walk in the two realms, the spiritual and the physical.  And that’s why you’ll never catch him---when you get too close, he disappears.”

Good one, Kelsey’s father.  That cleverly negates any requirement for evidence.  “No, officer, that was definitely not me.  I was walking in the spiritual realm when the crime occurred.”

Canadian author/researcher Thomas Steenberg with his trophy

Whoomp!  There It Is!

The FBI has had a file on Sasquatch since 1976.  Director Peter Byrne of the Bigfoot Information Center and Exhibition in The Dalles, Oregon, sent the FBI “about 15 hairs attached to a tiny piece of skin” that year, hoping the Feds might analyze it.  Byrne was one of the more prominent Bigfoot researchers at the time, according to Benjamin Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine.  “In the 1970s, Bigfoot was extremely popular,” claims Radford.  “That was when the Six Million Dollar Man ran a cameo of Bigfoot.”

That was also after Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin released their famous 1967 video footage of a Bigfoot in Northern California, which launched the craze.  Many observers thought the creature in the Patterson-Gimlin film was a costumed prankster but Byrne was certain the footage was real.

Jay Cochrane, Jr., assistant director of the FBI’s scientific and technical services division, sent the hair sample back to Byrne in 1977, telling him “The hairs are of deer family origin.”  The mere fact that the FBI was analyzing possible Bigfoot DNA was enough for believers, however.  Radford says “The Bigfoot contingent loves the idea that there’s a smoking gun in FBI files.  ‘See, look, Bigfoot must be real, otherwise the FBI wouldn’t have taken it seriously.’  No, the FBI didn’t send out a team of investigators to look for Bigfoot, they merely agreed to analyze 15 hairs.”

Nonetheless, thousands of people claim to have seen the hairy hominoid, including a small but vociferous number of scientists.  “Given the scientific evidence I have examined,” says one of them, professor of anatomy and anthropology Jeff Meldrum of Idaho State University in Pocatello, “I’m convinced there’s a creature out there that is yet to be identified.” 

Investigator Jimmy Chilcutt of the Conroe Police Department in Texas specializes in fingerprints and footprints.  He has analyzed the more than 150 casts of bigfoot prints that Meldrum keeps in a laboratory.  Chilcutt says that one particular footprint found in 1987 in Walla Walla, Washington has convinced him that Bigfoot is real.  “The ridge flow pattern and the texture was completely different from anything I’ve ever seen.  It certainly wasn’t human and of no known primate that I’ve examined.  The print ridges flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints which flow across.  The texture of the ridges was about twice the thickness of a human, which indicated that this animal has a real thick skin.”

Meanwhile, Meldrum says a 400-pound block of plaster known as the Skookum Cast provides further evidence of Bigfoot’s existence.  The cast was made in September of 2000 from an impression of a large animal that had apparently laid on its side to retrieve some fruit next to a mudhole in the Gifford Pinchon National Forest in Washington State.  Meldrum contends that the cast contains recognizable impressions of a forearm, a thigh, buttocks, an Achilles tendon and heel.  “It’s 40 to 50% bigger than a normal human,” he says, “and the anatomy doesn’t jibe with any known animal.”

There are a surprising number of academics and certifiably sane observers who believe Meldrum is right.  Prominent among them is renowned chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall, who last year surprised an interviewer from National Public Radio when she said she was sure that large, undiscovered primates such as the Yeti or Sasquatch do exist.  Oh.  Well, then. 

“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull that mask off that old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jane.”

Close Encounters 

Matt Moneymaker, a lawyer who runs his own marketing agency in Dana Point, California, once came eye-to-eye with a Sasquatch.  “It was 2 o’clock in the morning and the moon was a quarter full,” he recalled.  “Suddenly, there he was, an eight-foot-tall creature standing fifteen feet away, growling at me.  He wanted to let me know I was in the wrong place.”

There are a surprising number of academics and educated observers who allege they’ve been up close and personal with Sasquatch.  Teacher Steve Pavlik got a double-shot of his Bigfoot love.  The first incident took place on September 23, 2009 in Bellingham, Washington as he was loading his truck for an early morning trip out of Seatac International Airport.  “It was pitch dark outside, a cold, crisp, beautiful and almost cloudless morning.  I was carrying my travel bags when I heard it, a sudden piercing cry that was so loud and clear it literally shattered the stillness of the morning.  It came from the woods behind my house, maybe 50 yards away.  It was one long, flowing sound that lasted about five seconds, paused for two or three seconds and repeated itself a second time.  It woke up every dog in the neighborhood, and they all began barking like crazy.  I waited to see if there would be another howl, but whatever made that sound was now quiet.  Instinctively, I new it was a primate but I didn’t think of Bigfoot right away.”

On the following Saturday, September 27, Pavlik went hunting at nearby Lake Terrell.  He returned with some birds he’d shot and set about to cleaning them between his house and the woods.  “Then, all hell broke loose in the woods less than 20 feet in front of me.  A large tree began to swing violently from side to side.  I would estimate the trunk of the tree was about ten inches in diameter and something was shaking it like it was a sapling.  Branches and leaves began falling from the tree and others around it.  I could hear a loud cracking of wood, as if someone was breaking branches over their knee or beating the ground with them.  I grabbed my knife, not knowing what the hell to expect next, and ran back to the house.  I have no doubt at all this was a Bigfoot encounter.  There’s no alternative.  Most animals shy from humans, but whatever I encountered that evening was definitely not fleeing.  I think it was a clear intent to scare me off and it worked.”

One of the most famous Bigfoot sightings occurred on Mica Mountain in British Columbia in 1955 when William Roe claimed he saw “a partly human and partly animal” creature while hiking.  He swore an affidavit in 1957 that the critter was about six feet tall and covered in brown, silver-tipped hair, with thick arms reaching down to its knees, broad feet and breasts.  “As I watched the creature, I wondered if some movie company was making a film at this place,” Roe wrote in his affidavit.  “However, as I continued to watch, it became obvious that it was real.  It would be impossible to fake such a specimen.”

The Ape Canyon Incident of 1924 was more of a battle than a sighting.  A group of gold prospectors testified they defended their cabin against a number of “gorilla men” in a gorge on the side of Mt. St. Helens in Washington.  One of the miners, Fred Beck, shot at a solitary Sasquatch during the skirmish and his target returned the same evening with a few of his hairy brethren for a little payback.  The Sasquatch invaders pelted the cabin with rocks and boulders and one of them got close enough to reach an arm inside.  The miners survived and the attackers retreated at sunrise, possibly after Beck shot one.  This incident was exceptional in Bigfoot lore as most of the other sightings called the creatures “non-confrontational.”  If you go to Mt. St. Helens today, you can visit the impressive Ape Caves on the caved-in side of the mountain.  If a Sasquatch shows up, exhibit a big smile and hand him a sack containing several small mammals, a couple dozen mushrooms and some needles from coniferous trees, then try to get a selfie for the Harrison Hot Springs Sasquatch Museum.  You’ll earn great fame, enjoy the eternal gratitude of Bigfoot fans everywhere and get free admission for life.  Just throw away those letters written in crayon.

Now they're moving in next door

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com 

  

 

       

It Might As Well Be Spring

It’s been coming for awhile now, slithering through the marshlands, tumbling down the hills, filling up the creeks, painting smiles on human countenances.  Say goodbye to the hardships of Winter and the promise of Spring, which flushes faces, increases heart rates, spawns restlessness and sparks the wildest of daydreams.  You can truly do anything you think you can and in Spring you think you can do anything.  You’ve got The Fever.

“Spring fever is not a definite diagnostic category,” says Michael Terman, director of the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia University Medical Center.  “But I would say it begins as a rapid and yet unpredictable fluctuating mood and energy state that contrasts with the relative low of the winter months that precede it.”

Matthew Keller, a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics in Richmond, studied 500 people in the U.S and Canada and discovered that the more time people spent outside on a sunny Spring day, the better their mood.  Such good moods decreased during the hotter Summer months.  Keller claims 72 degrees is the optimal temperature for bliss.

Of course, Spring brings other benefits as well.  We feel…well…zippier.  Our biological clock, alias the suprachiasmatic nucleus, sits in the hypothalamus of mammals and monitors light through a pathway to the retina and conveys information about day length to the pineal gland.  This pea-sized gland tucked at the base of the cerebrum controls the secretion of melatonin, dubbed the sleep hormone because it is only released in the dark or in dim light.  The duration of melatonin release changes with nocturnal length, which is longest during winter, thus it is thought that our increased energy in the spring months is somehow linked to the decreased duration of melatonin production due to shorter nights.  Maybe, but personally we think it has more to do with the beginning of baseball season.

Shovel Me Out To The Ball Game

When we were kids, Spring meant the beginning of another glorious six months of baseball .  The Red Sox schedule started in mid-April in those days, despite bone-chilling temperatures and occasional snow.  In Lawrence, Massachusetts, our baseball season started even earlier.  Sure we might have to shovel off the baselines and wear mittens under our gloves but sacrifices have to be made in the interests of the greater good.  Baseball in the snow, of course, requires certain adjustments.  You cannot use a regular spheroid because it will be destroyed in minutes, you must use an old coverless ball wrapped in black electrical tape.  In addition to its much longer lifespan, the taped ball provides the additional advantage of being much easier to find in the snow.  We once attempted a game with an actual new store-bought ball and the first kid up smacked it into deep right field, where the nearsighted Paul Brooks is still looking for it 73 years later.

One largely unrecognized advantage of snow baseball is the ease of sliding.  In normal baseball, the kid heading for second base often begins his slide two-thirds of the way there and flames out five feet short of the base.  In snow baseball, he slides right on by it.  Of course, the bases can be a little difficult to find in the snow.  Once, my pal Jackie Mercier rummaged through his mother’s closet and found some colorful crocheted pieces to put on top of the bases to aid in location.  It worked out great for everyone but Jackie, who was sent to his room for a week and made to clean the house toilets with his toothbrush.  To the chagrin of everyone, Jackie promptly switched to lacrosse.

Love Potion Number 9

“In the Spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”---Alfred Lord Tennyson

Got your sights set on that special someone?  Wondering how to get him or her to take a ride on the YouTrain?  The Flying Pie is here to rescue you from your inert state and hurl you headlong into the fire.  Just pay attention, it’s not merely a matter of pushing a button.

According to clinical psychologist Bobbi Wegner, Psy.D., three components are necessary to achieve “passionate love”---attraction, lust and attachment.  “Attraction is what it sounds like,” says Wegner, “a curiosity, interest or liking for someone.  Lust is a strong sexual desire for someone, and attachment is an emotional bond between two people.  As two people become emotionally closer, they seek that intimacy and feel more secure with the other person.”  But we already knew all that, right?  So what exactly drives those three components?  You can’t force things like attraction and attachment.

The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships identifies 12 precursors to falling in love.  Those are Reciprocal liking, Appearance, Personality, Similarity, Familiarity, Social influence, Filling needs, Arousal, Readiness, Specific clues, Isolation and Mysteriousness.  What makes people fall in love according to therapist Ken Page LCSW, is “a mixture of true vulnerability, desire, sexuality and romance that creates a blend of safety, excitement, availability and shared love.  That’s really what we’re all looking for.”  But it’s tricky.  According to Page, “The degree to which you hyper-focus on whether someone likes you is the degree to which you will self-abandon.  It’s far more important to get clear on how this person actually makes you feel.”

With all that said, if your interest in someone is genuine and you want to encourage feelings of intimacy and closeness, here’s what the experts suggest, along with some cautionary advice from The Flying Pie.

1. Gradually deepen intimacy, which is done via shared vulnerability and time spent together, combined with letting the person know you like them. (But don’t slobber over your target mate.  It’s unseemly and counterproductive.)

2. Use body language.  Things like eye contact and sensitive touch cultivate feelings of closeness and amp up desire. (However, avoid crotch-grabbing at all costs.) 

3. Get out of your comfort zone. Experiencing adventure together is a great way to deepen your connection with someone.  Page posits that “doing things that are kind of on the edge is exciting and will help people bond.  It illustrates that you are interesting and alluring, which is an important thing to cultivate.”  (But definitely go light on the tandem bungee-jumping.)

4. Remain your own person. Even when you’re in love, it’s important to stay true to yourself, not ceding authority and all decision-making to the new partner.  If someone is attracted to you it’s for the person you presently are. (So yes, it’s alright to wear your gorilla suit on Halloween, but that’s it.)

5. Understand the other person’s needs. We all want to be seen and understood by our partners and it’s equally important to see and understand them.  Whether it’s bedroom gymnastics or how their attachment style manifests in relationships, try to get a handle on when and how your love interest feels best in the relationship and create space for those things. (But no screwing on the police department steps.)

6. Small acts of kindness go a long way.  Some of us are kinder to others than we are to our own mates.  Little things reflect love and caring.  Bring a coffee by their place of work unexpectedly, top off the gas in their car, do some chore your partner detests doing. (Ten coffees a day is way too much.)

7. Be patient. True love takes time, so take it slow.  Page advises that whether it’s sex, the amount of time spent together or how quickly you become intimate, there’s no need to rush. (If she keeps the bedroom lights off for more than two months, however, you might want to find a perkier partner.)

Got all that?  Good.  Don’t forget to invite us to the wedding.  If things don’t work out, please don’t mail us any small, dead animals.

Here Comes The Sun

Spring!  It’s happening in a neighborhood near you.  When else can you get stuff like the following?

The U.S. Wildflower Rampage.  Across the country, the hills are alive with the sounds of blooming, and so are the deserts.  The Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve (above photo) in California’s Mojave Desert is home to perhaps the largest and most dependable crop of orange California poppies each Spring.  You’ll be treated to similar glory in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains, filled with multitudes of Mexican poppies and lupine in Springtime.  Texas is your venue for acres crowded with the state flower, the bluebonnet.  Thousands of visitors trek to Ennis yearly for their spectacular Bluebonnet Festival (this year’s occurs April 14-16).  In late April, Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park puts on a great show with the arrival of more than 1500 wildflower varieties, making the place world headquarters for wildflower pilgrimages.

In early Spring, the Great Whale Migration takes place on the Pacific Coast of the U.S. as gray whales and their calves can be seen near the Big Sur coastline and just off the coasts of Oregon and Washington.  These animals, which can grow up to 45 feet long and weigh as much as 33 tons, are heading from Mexico to their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic and Bering, Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

On the Spring equinox (right now), Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico hosts a spectacular display called the Casa Rinconada Celestial Alignment.  The ancient great kiva (or round structure), which was probably used as a community gathering space, was built by the Chacoan people with two doors situated exactly on the north-south axis.  The equinox sun stunningly rises in the center of the two doors.

For a brief period from late May to mid-June, Synchronous Fireflies light up in unison rather than emitting their usual intermittent twinkle in Great Smoky Mountains N.P. in North Carolina and Tennessee.  The males flash in unison so that the females, who flash their response, can be sure they’re responding to their own kind rather than another riff-raff species, some of which are predatory.

Spring is a great time for wildlife viewing at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming since visitors have an excellent chance of spotting a range of new baby animals, including black bear cubs, bighorn lambs (May), elk, and bison calves, pronghorn antelope and even gray wolf cubs.

As warm temperatures arrive, Monarch Butterflies which flew south in the fall become more active and start to breed.  This marks the start of their northern migration back to North America.  On Nebraska’s Platte River, the annual Sandhill Crane Migration arrives---usually in very early March---along with millions of other migratory birds such as ducks and geese.  This is one of the country’s greatest wildlife spectacles, with about 80% of the world’s sandhill cranes descending on the area, covering vast expanses of sky with millions of flapping wings.

If you’re up for a little travel, the Southern Hemisphere has its own aurora, the Aurora Australis.  The best place to see it?  As far south as you can go.  Try Tasmania’s Mount Wellington.  Like the Aurora Borealis, the southern lights are visible when electrically charged solar particles and atoms in Earth’s atmosphere collide with oxygen and nitrogen.  Maybe that gadfly David Hammer will take you along in his sidecar.

Don’t worry, be happy.  It’s Spring and you’re alive.  And don’t forget to send us postcards, it’s the only chance we get to see The Firth of Forth.

That’s all, folks….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com 

  

Tales Of Mexico, Chapter Two—The Day That Don Jose McCallister Jumped Off The Moctezuma Bridge

On our first two trips to Mexico, we took the bus and left the driving to them.  After all, the native drivers knew the way to San Jose, had experience dealing with sheep in the roadways and had lived through many bouts with the dreaded eight-lane traffic circles called circulacions.  The best thing I can say about the experience is that we survived despite taking several mountain curves on three wheels and being pummeled by free-ranging goats and chickens who refused to stay in their seats.  Mexican bus drivers have no fear of death by rapid descent and few limits on livestock.  They will also stop along the way to discuss world affairs with passing compadres.  I decided to put my faith in Jesus and give Mexico driving a try. 

On my first trip solo, I opted to rent a vehicle from Nacional.  A six-cylinder car, at least, so I could make it across the mountains from Guadalajara to Puerto Vallarta.  “We only have small cars, Senor, but you can drive to Vallarta no problem.  My sister does it all the time.”  Well, then.  I can do anything your sister can do.

Remember the story of Little Black Sambo, where a quartet of vain tigers chase one another around a tree until they turn to butter?  That’s what it feels like to be on a Guadalajara circulacion.  You will never get off until, after forty or so rotations, you scream Banzai! and cut across seven lanes of traffic to the first outlet you see.  It’s like being inside a drier at the lavenderia and hoping your owner will rush in and rescue you.

Once free of the city, the drive to the coast is very pleasant.  At least until your tiny car overheats and leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere.  This was in the pre-cell phone era, so nobody was being summoned to the rescue.  Less than three minutes after catastrophe struck, however, a carload of Mexican revelers came wheeling around the turn and noticed my dilemma.  There were no gangs kidnapping gringos in those days but I still didn’t know what to expect.

“Ah, you have a broken fanbelt, Senor, is what I think,” said the first rescuer jumping off the running board.  Apparently, this is an ongoing local issue because when the driver opened his trunk there were several fanbelts of every dimension in there.  They put one on, poured in some radiator water from a gigantic jug and waved adios.  Things couldn’t have gone any better if the Cisco Kid and Pancho had pulled up.  A few hours later, I saw the same crew in a rowdy Vallarta bar and bought them a round of beers.  In gratitude, the leader of the band went out to his trunk and brought me back another fanbelt “por si acaso.”  I kept it in my suitcase for the next ten years.  You never know.

Plaza of the Mariachis, Guadalajara

On The Road Again

Born to be wild, Harolyn and I drove all over Mexico on subsequent journeys, navigating the big cities and tiny towns alike, avoiding travel after dark following our first experience with a meandering herd of goats out for a twilight stroll.  Then one day, a fellow named Rick Nihlen, who owned a head shop in Tallahassee, suggested we rent a van, travel to several towns on their respective market days and haul the resulting load back to the States.  Sure!  What could go wrong with that plan?

Like Hank Snow, we’ve been everywhere, man. To Oaxaca and San Juan de los Lagos for blosas, to Taxco for silver, to Puebla for onyx, to Patzcuaro for little painted boxes and to Guadalajara for high-quality, low-priced leather jackets which sold like chimichangas to the Gatornationals crowd.  We swam in dangerous currents in Acapulco, haunted the fabulous shops and antique dealers of Tlaquepaque, got sick from bar ice cubes in Vallarta and slept in a straw hut in Yelapa.  And then there was the bridge on the river Moctezuma in the small town of Tamazunchale.

Finished our buying extravaganza and on the way north to the border, we reached a narrow bridge which featured the sign, “Un solo carril,” meaning the width of the span could tolerate only one vehicle at a time.  In the distance, barreling down the road from the opposite direction, was a determined, beat-up dumptruck the size of the Titanic returning to the local quarry for another load.  Despite being further from the bridge than us, the driver flashed his lights, which apparently means “I got dibs!” in Mexican driving etiquette.

Rick Nihlen ignored him and proceeded onto the bridge, which was habitated by sightseers and a lone fruit dealer with his cart of offerings.  Outraged at our lack of manners, the dumptruck roared onto the bridge and right at us.  “Move over as far as you can,” I warned Rick, “he’s going to hit us.”  Harolyn asked “Is it time to scream ‘Eeek! yet?”

Ahead of us on the bridge, chaos reigned as bystanders fled and the fruit vendor dived into the river.  The hills were alive with the sounds of pineapples and watermelon flying through the air, a substantial amount of it covering our windshield.  Needless to say, the vendor’s cart was transformed into smithereens and the back of our VW bus took a serious glancing blow.  Excited (sometimes angry) little Mexicans were running everywhere, stirred up by this unusual catastrophe.  Thankfully, the fruit man slogged out of the river in reasonable condition. What a mess!  And where was John Morgan when you really needed him?

Back Home Again In Tamazunchale

There were but two cops in Tamazunchale, neither of which spoke English.  Unaware of the flashing lights rule, we were furious with the idiocy of the truck driver, who was just as mad at us.  The police chief bade us all come down to the station to straighten this mess out and separated us from the trucker once there.  Sitting atop a desk at the  station was a local nino about ten years old who had learned English at a mission school and would serve as translator.  I delivered my diatribe and the chief replied.  “Chief says you will have to wait a few days until the circuit judge gets here,” advised the boy.

“WHAT?  I don’t think so,” I told the lad.  “We’re waiting for a substitute rental and we’re getting out of here.”  This bad news did not meet with the chief’s approval and he waved his arms and danced around a lot.  “Chief says if you don’t stop yelling at him he put you in jail right now.” 

Oh.

Well, I certainly didn’t want to be in there with mother rapers and father stabbers, like Arlo.  We decided that discretion was the better part of valor, as it almost always is.  The traveling judge, it turns out, would take three days to get to town, enough time to learn more than we ever wanted to know about the charming municipality of Tamazunchale.

The first thing we discovered is that our hotel had no air-conditioning despite the town’s average July afternoon temperature of 96.  Orchids hold conventions there and thousands of exotic butterflies show up for Spring break, so it’s hot.  Not hot enough, though, to stop the net-carrying lepidopterists from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.  The streets were full of them, bobbing and weaving as they chased the nimble butterflies hither and yon with only occasional success.

There was, you’ll be happy to know, one movie theater in town.  Appropriately enough, El Fantastico Mundo de los Jipis was playing that weekend.  That would be The Fantastic World of the Hippies at the Royal Park Cinema in Gainesville if they ever had the savoir-faire to show such art films.  I looked “jipis” up in the San Luis Potosí phone book and it defined the word as “scroungy, dead-broke American kids looking for mushrooms.”  That would be about right.

Otherwise, we slept, ate and complained.  Our hotel owner, a gracious American who had fallen on bad times and wound up with the hostelry, took us on a tour of the town.  We learned that Tamazunchale, which sat at the convergence of the Amajac and Moctezuma rivers, consisted of 354 square kilometers and the population inside the city limits was roughly 24,000 people and six vehicles.  The name of the town comes from the Huastec language and means “place of government.”  T-town was the Huastec capital in the 15th century, but in 1522 that rude Hernan Cortez busted up the party with his troops and Indian allies headed by a nephew of Cuauhtemoc, last ruler of the Aztecs.  Don’t say you never learn anything about the state of San Luis Potosi when you read The Flying Pie.

Metropolitan Tamazunchale

Here Come De Judge!

Just when we were about to jump off the Tamazunchale Bridge in a fit of boredom, the face of justice arrived in town.  It was only three days but it seemed like a butterfly’s lifetime and probably the sole occasion we ever looked forward to appearing in court.  There were no quibbling lawyers, no yawning juries, just us and the truck driver there to tell our stories.  And justice was served.  The judge, in a fit of enlightenment, ruled that both drivers were at fault and neither owed the other a single peso.  Both, however, had deprived the fruit vendor of his means to a living and each miscreant would contribute an equal amount to the reconstruction of the fruit cart and replacement of inventory.  Nobody complained and the fruit man danced a merry jig out onto the street.

The smiling police chief came over and shook hands with everyone, twice with Harolyn, who he was convinced was an unannounced American movie star.  The fruit peddler blessed us with the pineapple of friendship.  The American hotel owner delivered a large case of water.  The smiling and nattily-attired representative of the car rental company brought forth a shiny new bus.  The kid from the mission school was a temporary stowaway, but we dumped him off at the next pueblo.  Harolyn felt so bad about it, she opened her blouse and flashed him on the way out of town.  “Always leave them smiling,” she said.

That’s all, amigos y amigas….

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

  

 

The Grand Finale

“My friends from over the ages, let’s take one more walk down the alley….join me for the Grand Finale.”---Bill Killeen

In September of 1967, two characters who didn’t know any better opened the Subterranean Circus in an old fertilizer warehouse on a nondescript sidestreet in Gainesville.  The dust was thick, the lighting poor and the electrical wiring was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but the rent was right---$75 a month.  Bill Killeen and Pamme Brewer stepped inside, parted the cobwebs and smiled in unison. “Paradise!”

And Paradise it was to the hundreds of thousands who dropped in over the next 23 years to buy hippie gear, solicit political support, find long-lost friends or barter for weed in the parking lot.  While runaway kids across the nation headed for The City by the Bay, Florida runaways lit out for Gainesville, the exotic psychedelic land of free love, cheap music, endless crash pads and ample marijuana.  The blacklight room in the Circus was the ultimate stoner shrine where wide-eyed hippies went to worship.  Wise men like Eastern-religion-favoring Dick North were available for life counseling and body painting, primo salesman Danny Levine, a certified minister of the Universal Life Church, could marry you on the spot, agrarian hotshot Chuck LeMasters would sit you down and explain why your crops weren’t thriving.

Then one day, the Circus opened a clothing store next door called Silver City and hippie males could suddenly dress as wildly as women, and they did.  The traditional clothing stores in town fell by the wayside, overtaken by young entrepreneurs selling bellbottoms, hiphuggers, Nehru and Cossack shirts, opaque angel dresses, sandals, beads and what-have-you, with the Sub Circus always leading the way.

All of this was not entirely approved by the Straight World, which attacked with scorn and derision, rocks thrown through windows, laws to prevent sales of drug-related paraphernalia and allegedly obscene books and posters…like, say, those from the obviously perverted Kama Sutra.  Police raids ensued, trials took place, but for a very long time the hippies always won.

Nothing lasts forever except for memories, and the ones possessed by denizens of those times are strong and steady.  They sharply remember those days of wine and roses and $15 lids and love in the afternoon, almost every afternoon.  They recall those surreal acid tests at the band concerts, the helter-skelter love affairs, the freedom to chart their own courses for better or for worse, the certainty that they had created a brave new world which would stand the test of time.  They remember, and now and then they return to spend poignant moments at the scene of the crimes, and they pause to wonder what might have happened to all those friends and roommates and lovers and ex-wives and husbands and one-night-standees.  And then, on one fine day in May of 2022, they got to find out.

The Last Tango

Bill Killeen, who missed the olden times and lost friends as much as anyone decided that the year 2020, a little over 50 years from the summers of love, would be a propitious time to empty his wallet  for a magnificent Homecoming of those old store workers and customers lost to the ages.   Then Covid struck, routing the nation and taking two years to settle down.  In the meantime, there was plenty of time to dot and cross all the appropriate letters, to lay the groundwork, to find a few bands to play music from a long ago era, to search out the right place to meet and greet, to find the right time between too hot and too cold and hotels too crowded.  Despite the slings and arrows of occasionally outrageous fortune, the long-awaited Last Tango In Gainesville finally dawned on May 20, 2022, and it was a hallmark day in the lives of those who were there.  They laughed, they cried, they slapped their foreheads in wonder as old friends emerged from the mists, some barely recognizable, as The Impostors played Strawberry Fields Forever or Nancy Luca sang American Girl or The Relics belted out Age of Aquarius.  Of all the places in the world one could be, none were better than this special afternoon and evening in swooning Gainesville, Florida.  If you weren’t there for the hugs and tears, you’re sad and disappointed and irked and penitent because such a day never was before and never will be again. 

Unless…..

The Grand Finale

After the ball was over, Heartwood major domo Dave Melosh congratulated Killeen on his great success and said, “I’m hoping you’ll do it again some day.” 

“Call me back when I’m 85,” replied the ringmaster.   “Let’s see if the boat is still afloat.”  Apparently, the vessel yet rides the waves.  Bill turns 85 in November of 2025 and Dave is waiting by the phone booth, contract in hand.  If all works out, he’ll get his wish.  But if The Last Tango is truly the last, what comes next?  Ah, what is that new sun rising above the mountain.  It looks like The Grand Finale to us.

Since the Last Tango was advertised as a reunion for crew and customers of the Subterranean Circus (which meant just about everyone who was in town in the Glory Days), there were some who were wary of showing up at the party.  Others, unaware of the event or oblivious to its sheer magnificence, took a pass and have been slamming their foreheads into the furniture ever since.  Now, everybody gets another chance.  The Grand Finale is a reunion for every lost soul, prodigal son, wayward daughter and criminal on parole who ever walked the special streets of Hogtown.  We’re asking all of our readers to get the word out to the four corners of the Earth; to California dreamers, to Sasquatch chasers in the Pacific Northwest, to hermits marooned on the Kamchatka Peninsula, to Marty Jourard, sleeping in Seattle.  It’s your last chance for a ribald hookup with Marianne in the back seat of your Studebaker, a final dalliance with the first guy who fed you LSD, a last look at the Old Town before it devolves into Sterileville.  If you’re wondering whatever happened to the nubile Shirley, Naked Jeannie, Rod the Biker or fey Police Chief Wayland Clifton, maybe you’ll finally find out.  True, we’re missing a frightening number of the old gang and more will fall through the gaping cracks in the next 26 months but others will hold on for dear life to make the journey to the ancient shrine.  If you’re short on weed, down in the dumps, living in a festering boxcar in a Montana railyard and looking for something to live for, now you’ve got it.  Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy, it’s the right time and the right place.  And as the bard once advised, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.  If you’ve still got any.

The Last Word

In the glorious wake of The Last Tango, people like Nancy Kay wrote suggestions on their Facebook pages that read “Let’s do it again and help Bill pay for it next time.”  That’s not a bad idea, these things don’t come cheap.  Instead of direct contributions to the cause, however, we’d like to sell out the next two Hogtown Oprys in May of this year and next.  All proceeds after the Opry bills are paid would go directly to The Grand Finale and would determine how big that event would be.  Make no mistake, on May 17, 2026, there will be a spectacle, but will we have a Noon to 5 p.m. celebration with a couple of bands or a blast that will stretch out late into the evening?  Will there be sword-swallowers and fire-eaters and merrymakers arriving in clown cars?  Will there be mariachis and loud explosions and doobie tosses and streakers running through the downtown streets, high on life and and/or psychedelic products?  The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.

That’s all for now, folks, but stay tuned.

bill.killeen094@gmail.com

Advisory: Yes, Marvin Nunley and the rest of you compadres, today was scheduled to be the second installment of our Mexican tale.  Pardon the interruption, but something came up.  We’ll be back next week with south of the border shenanigans galore.  That’s really all, amigos and amigas.