King Biscuit Time Magazine - Road Kill Column
Saturday July 1st, 2006 @ 9:06 PM
Filed under: Everything, Publications
Hot Date for a Cold Mate.
What do you do when you love blues festivals and your mate doesn’t? I received an e-mail recently that addressed this issue. I’m going to quote liberally from the letter because this gentleman uses a unique voice that I think you deserve to read unfettered. I will remove only the subject matter that doesn’t apply to the purpose of this column. Unfortunately I have to tame some of the language as he was quite profane, but in a fun and colorful manner. I’ll try to leave the flavor of his prose.
“…anyways, Mr. Carl, I’m an old hippie with a bald head and a gray pony tail. Bad part is I got friggin’ freckles on my old noggin’ and pinkish hide around the freckles so I can’t look cool shaved like the black dudes do. That’s why I leave my ponytail intact, because it distracts people’s attention off my sufferin’ scalp. I usually wear a baseball cap out in public because my wife confessed to me that the lumps on my skull embarrass her when we see our friends. She says my ponytail is out of style, like I suppose a freckled lumpy head would be in style if it didn’t have a pony tail.
“When we were young and she wore flowers in her hair and had morals like she’d been snorting catnip (you know, the late sixties and early seventies), we sort of had the same degree of attractiveness. I had abs and could see my noodle when I looked down-and she had legs like a sprinter. They were hairy legs in those days, but you remember how ‘natural’ was supposed to be sexy back then?
“But nowadays, gravity has set in on my body and I have eye wrinkles like some wizard cursed me with petrifaction. She though, thinks she is Ginger Rogers. She wears four-inch stiletto heels and gossamer dresses, and with shaved legs and panty hose, she cuts quite a figure for an old gal, and she loves to dance.
“The problem we have is that I love the blues and she doesn’t. Going to festivals is my idea of heaven. I’m serious as testicular cancer when I say I’d rather be at a blues festival than in heaven itself. I bring a parasoled lawn chair and a thermos full of scotch and orange juice and plant my butt in much the same manner movers set down a grand piano. You get the idea that I ain’t goin’ nowhere.
“My Myrna can’t sit still for a damned second. She jumps around like she has fleas. Gadabouts, we used to call the likes of her. She thinks blues is boring and says you can’t dance to it. She likes that damned synthesizer crap with drum machines and disco beats.
“Anyway, we came to a compromise years back, that if she came to my blues festivals, I’d go to her Mary Kay conventions. Yeah, you heard me. She went from hairy armpits to wearing makeup like every day was Halloween. I went to one convention in some suburb of Minneapolis and they wouldn’t let me in the meetings, so I sat in the motel and watched TV with a bag of Fritos, and hated life. My wife learned that none of the gals brought their husbands and had way more fun without them, so we changed the agreement. She would come to the blues festivals if I promised to stay home during the Mary Kay conventions.
“I thought that was the best deal I ever heard of until she kept her promise and never missed a blues festival. She talks on her cell phone all through the performances and keeps giving me the phone so Peewee or Sheila can talk to their grandpa. Hell, I can’t even understand them when there isn’t a band playing. She even called a radio talk show shrink one year and the host insisted I come to the phone to “give account of myself.” I told the son-of-bitch to kiss-off, I was listening to James “friggin’” Cotton.
“We’ve been attending blues festivals for the last eighteen years together and she can’t remember the name of one blues star. She told her friend that we saw Jerry Garcia (she thinks she’s a big Grateful Dead fan). When I pointed out that Jerry was dead, she proved me wrong by going to the program and showing me a photo of Bob Margolin. That’s as close as she gets.
“Somehow, though, she can remember the names of fans that we see every year. ‘You remember Felina and Ralph, don’t you? They’re the ones with the Basset hound named ‘Horrible Herb’, you know the one with the splayed paws?’ How can she not remember Luther Allison and can remember Horrible Herb and his friggin’ paws? And we call this a marriage?
“In other aspects it is a good marriage. I mean how can I complain, when a woman looking something within the realm of Ginger Rogers still wants to jump these old bones? I look more like Fred Mertz than Fred Astaire. I guess I could get by without complaining if she just wouldn’t make me dance.
“She says ‘I didn’t drive in that blankity-blank camper truck of yours with no air-conditioning, all the way to Arkansas, just so you won’t dance with me.’
“Well, me dancing is just plain stupid. I have swollen ankles and a sour stomach. I wear coveralls over Red Wing work boots, for crying-out-loud. They feel good on my bunions. Hell, I have a railing on our bathtub. In fourth grade the music teacher couldn’t find anything I could do for the school program, so she made me be a cricket with some other pathetic nerds. All we had to do was snap our fingers. To this day I have never figured out how. So they made me be a tree and I had to wear a green lampshade on my head with leaves stuck to it.
“My wife, now, she’s another story. She’s one of those leaping creatures. I stand there like the mob has encased me to the ankles in cement, about to be thrown in Lake Michigan. She leaps around me like she took dance lessons from Spiderman. The only things lower than my spirits when this occurs are the corners of my mouth.
“Blues is not the kind of music one leaps to. Myrna doesn’t leap like she used to anyway. She thinks she does, but her breasts have become ponderous and much too heavy to elevate with any kind of grace. She still has the small waist and long athletic legs, but her feet seem to have grown long, or her shoes are too big or something. Anyway, her leaping resembles lunging in my husbandly opinion. But how do you tell that to Ginger Rogers?
“So there we are, listening to the Thrill is Gone, me doing a little hemoroidal bounce in my cement shoes, and my wife cavorting all over the room like an old ballerina occasionally stopping by my post to smile brightly and say “wheeeeee…” Somehow it just doesn’t strike me as bluesy…”
So what do we do when our mate isn’t into the blues festival? I have these suggested guidelines:
1) If your mate drinks, keep him or her drunk. You then have a good chance that the music will sound great to them, and the blues fans will turn into their “best friends”, or they will pass out.
2) If your mate doesn’t drink, then you be the one to stay drunk. That way the music will sound good, even if it isn’t, and you won’t be aware that there is bitching going on.
3) In the event that neither of you drink, then you must divide the strategy into male and female categories.
A) For the male who doesn’t like the blues, bring along a five inch TV with a sports schedule. Dogs, cats, and male humans all get mesmorized by balls being tossed or kicked around. Or:
B) give him lots of physical loving and tell him it is the blues that is turning you on. The only other solution for a man is:
C) Feed him. A smiling man on the verge of belching is always more amenable to your point of view.
4) For the female who doesn’t like the blues, you, the husband, can do either the obvious, or the subtle:
A) Get a new credit card you dub the “blues card” and set her loose in the shopping district. Or:
B) Don’t make advances toward her, and tell her it’s because the blues keep you revved and satisfied, kind of like a hot sports car. She’ll then be motivated to keep you listening to the blues, so you’ll leave her alone.
For you couples who share a love of blues festivals. Count your blessings.
Posted by Carl