The Flying Pie

The 100^th Blog

On June 17^th, 2010, motivated by circumstances elaborated below, I sat down to write the first of these little columns.  I wasn’t too sure of what I was doing then and, some might argue, that hasn’t changed a whole lot.  Over the course of time, as the stories I’ve most wanted to tell have dwindled, I have considered concluding the columns and reclaiming my Thursday mornings.  Once, I even wrote a final column on a Sunday morning and put it in the drawer for the following Thursday.  When Thursday came, I had a couple of ideas for another column so I put it off for a week, then another.

An old friend of mine, Lee Shaw, on leaving what everyone perceived to be a great wife for a new girlfriend, was asked the reason for his action.  “Well,” he said, “I’ve told her all my stories.  I guess I have to find someone else who wants to listen to them.”  A great and honest summation.  Unlike Lee, however, I wasn’t looking for a second audience.  Most of the people I cared about—or would ever care about—were in the first one.  I called my Spiritual Leader, Pat Brown, and gave her my thoughts.  Pat said I wasn’t allowed to stop the column because writing was my “gift” and without The Flying Pie I wouldn’t be using it.  Great as they were, Pat said, it wasn’t the stories themselves that were carrying the blog. It was the treatment of those stories, the presentation, the manner in which the story material was handled.

“You can write about anything,” Pat said, “everyday stuff….what you had for dinner last night….and it will be good because you are a superior writer.”

About the same time, I got a letter from Leslie Logan, which expressed many of the same sentiments.  Irana Zisser sent along a note saying she appreciated my often antagonistic positions on things everybody else considers wonderful—like sea cruises, for instance.  I decided to plod along awhile longer and see what happened.  That was several months ago and I’m still here.  Remarkably, without even noticing until a couple of weeks ago, I have made it to one hundred.

Over the course of time The Flying Pie has been extant, many great changes in our lives have taken place.  We lost Stuart Bentler and then the great Pat Brown, herself.  People like these—and the earlier mentioned Leslie and Irana—are primary among those for whom the column is written because they get it.  They understand the nuances, the subtleties that escape most.  The invisible joke is apparent to them.  They know the answers before you are finished posing the questions.  It is hard to lose even a single member of such a limited audience.  For those remaining, however, we will soldier on….for a month or a year or however long we have it in us.  After all….who else is going to do it?


The First Blog


The other day, one of my best friends from childhood tracked me down after 48 years of noncontact, displaying admirable perseverance and unexpected detective skills. Shortly thereafter, a girl I met in the sixties called to tell me some articles I had written years ago and passed on to her recently had brought a smile to the face of a man hard to amuse. She also scolded me for no longer writing. Ergo, I've decided to be a little more visible and productive, hopefully on a weekly basis. This column will undoubtedly metamorphosize a few times before reaching formulaic status, if it ever does. So, with that....


When we last left you, King White was suing the Charlatan for $40,000. That he was awarded $80,000 by an outraged Gainesville jury lends credence to the old adage "He who represents himself in court has a fool for a client." We would have continued the magazine under a different title but then the Subterranean Circus came along. The store turned out to be so lucrative (and so much fun) so quickly that, for a person who had always been poor as a church mouse, there was little choice to be made. The business lasted from 1967 to 2000, when the anti-paraphernalia laws became so onerous it was no longer very profitable or very much fun. Fun has always been a major consideration to me. Anyway, by then I was in the horse business.


There are two kinds of people in the thoroughbred business. The first is people who have been doing it most of their lives and have a pretty good idea what they're doing. The other kind is me. And others like me, who, due to good financial fortune, find themselves jumping onto an alien planet, with no particular knowledge of the geography or the language. You figure it out as you go along, until you go broke. Or, in a minimum of cases, succeed. If you are lucky enough to be successful early (like me), there is the colossal danger that you will then think you are very smart at this (like me). You will be wrong. If you make many mistakes in the horse business, you will become very poor, very quickly (like me).


Fortunately, at a low point, came two horses who bailed me out, Vaunted Vamp, winner of 21 races and $420,000 and Juggernaut, winner of $225,000, including two $100,000 stakes races. When these kinds of things happen, the thoroughbred business becomes great fun. And you know how I feel about that. So the beat goes on. This is the time of year the new horses, the two year olds, go to the track, so there is great anticipation and hope. There is an old adage in horse racing...."Nobody ever committed suicide with an untried yearling in the barn." I think that's accurate. And I think that, once immersed in this business, only death or insolvency will let you escape. And I'm not real sure about insolvency.


Old College Magazine joke (from 1965):


A young man about town approached an office supply counter and asked the cute young thing, "Do you keep stationery?"


"Well, up to a certain point," she replied, "Then I just go all to pieces."


That's all, folks.

The High Points

Almost everyone has exceptional periods in their lives where actuality rises up to meet—or exceed—expectations.  Adolescence, for me, provided such a playing field.  Chugging off to college a thousand miles from home, starting up the Charlatan and eventually winding up in Austin with an incredibly talented crew of friends and associates provided fodder for a thousand stories.  Traipsing around with a floundering 19-year-old folksinger gave me a rare opportunity—the chance to watch her morph into Janis Joplin.  The Charlatan provided me not only with amusement and sustenance and the opportunity to hone my skills as a writer, but also the tiny financial underpinnings to create the Subterranean Circus, from which all else sprung.  Throughout these and later times appear the unique individuals who light up the arena.  Without them, the world would be more black-and-white instead of full color.  Without them, you would have no one to people your blog, let alone read it.  So, today we celebrate the audience as much as the blog, for, in this unusual case, the audience IS the blog.  Remarkable, eh wot?

The Responders

Hard as it may be to believe, fully one-third of the people who read The Flying Pie each week do so within an hour of the time it is published….or, at least, they print it then for later consumption.  This percentage has been increasing over time.  Best of all, many of the early readers—and a few of the later ones—write back.

A week seldom passes that we don’t hear from old Circus employee, Irana Zisser.  Irana lives with her husband, Paul, in West Boca.  She has had replacements made of all possible joints but that’s not slowing her down.  She makes it to Gulfstream and Calder for more races than we do, even though she doesn’t own any horses.  Irana is one of those who understands the intricacies of The Flying Pie, from the layout to the use of white space to the unspoken subtleties of the subject matter.  It helps, of course, that she’s known me since 1968.  She is quick to praise and slow to criticize the blog so if she’s sees something amiss it’s probably our fault.  Anyway, Irana is our Number One responder.

Pat Brown and Stuart Bentler were regular repliers.  Despite her ongoing battle with breast cancer, which she grudgingly gave up earlier this year, Pat was always laudatory and enthusiastic about a particularly good column, but she was always a perceptive editor and not above constructive criticism.  Pat was a great artist and she held her creative friends to high standards.  If you slipped, she was early to mention it.  You felt you owed her your best.

Stuart was a big fan.  Even as he lay dying, he insisted he not be spared the barbs of the column.  Siobhan pointed out one time that Stuart had a terminal disease and he should be consulted about further mention.  His response was that the column was great and that we should continue, in his words, “full speed ahead.”  He also was a reader who delighted in bringing up anything he considered to be a mistake in the column.  Even though he was wrong most of the time, he was always back a week later with something else.  Stuart was another who got the joke before the punch line was delivered.  You can’t find those guys every day.  His celebratory interment, now known to the world as The Event, brought the largest audience to the column of any week ever due to the diligent work of his daughter, Katherine.  Who—like Father, like Daughter—doesn’t mind telling us we’re wrong every now and then.  Even though she’s almost never right, either.

It’s always fun to hear from Marty Jourard, an ex-Gainesvillean, now living in Kirkland, Washington for some absurd reason, and writing a book on Gainesville Rock History.  He’s not sure of the title yet.  He thought he knew but then he handed the thing to a critic who told him it wasn’t lively enough.  So now maybe it will be Sex, Drugs And Gainesville Rock History.  Anyway, Marty can always be counted on to bring an iconoclastic—or even profane—viewpoint to any column.   He was especially thrilled with the column on bums, reciting his own litany of experiences.  When we first heard from Marty, we remembered him as his chunky brother, who hung around the Subterranean Circus even more than Marty did.  When he protested these false assertions of girth, it led to weeks of criticisms, disclaimers and eventual surrender to his plight.  A very good sport is Marty Jourard.

Leslie Logan, of course, being a school principal—or whatever is the Montessori equivalent—is always an encourager.  She writes less often than some but always with something useful to say.  Our gym pals, Sharon and Barb, write often, the latter being especially enamored of horse literature.  My sisters, Alice (the Zip-liner) and Kathy drop the occasional line, particularly during health travails.  And occasionally, Alice will snap over one of my anti-Republican diatribes and resort to name-calling missives of dubious distinction.  We hear from almost everybody now and then but those are less frequent, and to each his own.  Keep writing, we like to hear from you.  Even you, Stuart Bentler.  Even though you’re always wrong.

The Great Proliferation Continues

Last week, 27 people from Russia read The Flying Pie.  Well, we think so, but you know how that is.  All we really know is that somebody showed up looking for us twenty-seven times.  It could have been a single goat-herder in Omsk with nothing better to do.  They never communicate, those Russians, just like the English, the Chinese and the Danes.  There’s nothing we can do about it.

We can report, however, that the exposure from Court Lewis’ radio show has gleaned us a whole passel of new readers.  We thought they’d bail after the first week with no horse news but they’re still around.  Court is still our Evangelist-In-Chief, working hard at new ways to spread the Pie, for which we’re grateful.  And who knew we’d ever be so popular in Johnson City?

Maybe, Maybe Not….

Siobhan is trying to put a photo gallery together with this blog, but so far she can’t seem to get it to register.  Don’t give up, though, if it’s not there today, maybe she’ll have a sudden epiphany or one of her wacky dreams where she figures everything out and it will show up days later.  If you see any extra photos up there, remember the drill and click on with your cursor to open up the gallery.  If not, forget we ever said anything.

Looking forward to the next one hundred….

That’s all, folks….