What Old People Do For Fun

Have you ever seen a band that was so bad they were fun to watch? I did recently. They were playing at the senior hall monthly luncheon---four scruffy looking brothers, all old enough to collect social security. The lead singer/guitar player came hobbling in on a peg leg. He was wearing Bermuda shorts, a Hawaii shirt and a straw gambler’s style hat and his unruly, gray hair was longer than any woman’s in the room. But he had the most expressive, dark eyes I’ve seen in a long time and they twinkled with mischief the entire time he performed. He even danced a jig to everyone’s laughter that reminded me of a pirate from a Disney movie.

His twin brothers didn’t look much alike but you could tell they once did. One was bald and skinny and he played the keyboard. The other was fat, had a ridiculously long, white handlebar mustache and a long ponytail but no hair on the entire top of his head. The latter played the flute and a saxophone and the top of his head turned beet red when he was playing. A few times I worried he might pass out from the effort.

The forth brother, you could tell, though he was still pretty cool but he needed to ditch his Mom jeans and to learn not to blush so much at his brother’s teasing. Every time one of the guys would screw up a cord or the lyrics Mr. Peg Leg would wink at the crowd and say, “That’s the way we rehearsed it” and once he remarked, “Wow, we got through that whole chorus without a mistake!” which made the blushing brother red enough to match the top of his horn playing brother’s head. At one point they were all laughing so much they stopped playing, and one of the guys waved a hand in front of his face while saying, “Be at one with the song” and then they’d continue on playing as if nothing happened.

At another point the lead singer wanted us to sing along to a song that turned out to be a tribute to Amelia Earhart. If you shake my family tree she’d come tumbling out but surprise, surprise none of us knew the words…not even me. That didn’t matter to the band. Next they invited us to sing along to Knight in White Satin which I vaguely remembered from the ‘60s. They had better luck with audience participation with Old Time Rock N’ Roll. Obviously there were a few old Bob Seger fans in our group because we were belting that song out with the best of them. The last sing-along was You Are My Sunshine and you'd have to be brain dead not to remember that one from our youth. The sequence of sing-alongs was a good example of the band's quirky sense of humor.

A few ladies at my table of sixteen were wadding up Kleenex to stick in their ears and a couple ladies experimented with taking one or both of their hearing aids out. When the band asked if they were playing too loud, half the crowd yelled “No!” and the half yelled, “Yes!” so they didn’t change their volume one little bit. The whole show was so campy and corny and I had a great time and all that for five dollars including the food and door prizes which I never win. Once in awhile, though, I'd feel sorry for the band because hard of hearing people tend to talk too loud and I was worried the guys heard some of the negative reviews their music was getting. For me, it was fun watching the guys have so much fun and the screw ups didn't matter.

A nice thing also happened at the senior hall that day. Another widow asked me for my contact information so we can “do lunch” sometime. She’s a down-to-earth type and easy to talk to. Her husband died more recently than mine and she’s been fighting with her kids over purging the house of her husband's things. They want to go at it faster than she does which makes me grateful that I had/have the ability to set my own pace without pressure or input from anyone. ©

Get Your Kicks on Route 66

If you ever plan to motor west,
travel my way, take the highway that's the best.
Get your kicks on Route 66.
It winds from Chicago to LA,
more than two thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route 66....

In the mid 1940’s I was still a toddler when Nat King Cole first sang the song above. It was written by Bobby Troupe, a former piano player in the Tommy Dorsey Band, and one of my earliest memories of my mom is of her dancing in the kitchen as this song was playing on the record player. She loved her music. She would hand-copy the lyrics off from records, playing them over and over again until she got all the words down on paper. I still have her black notebook filled with lyrics. When my brother and I were old enough to do dishes, that notebook was propped up in the window sill for us to sing from as we worked. Later in life, Mom told me she had us singing because if we were singing we weren’t fighting.

Lots of people in my age bracket have romanticized Route 66 in one way or another. As kids some of us saw the movie inspired by John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath novel about the Dust Bowl immigration and we got our first introduction to the Mother Road. Some of us might have taken vacations along Route 66 back when it was in its heyday of motor courts, camp grounds, cottages, restaurants, souvenir shops and tourist traps. Even as late as the ‘60s, a TV show tried to immortalize the Route 66 highway.

Don and I got caught up in Route 66 history via way of map and gas station memorabilia collecting. Route 66 and the evolution of the gas station go hand-in-hand; you can’t be a serious collector without having acquired a couple of books devoted to the architecture along Route 66. One year in the late '70s or early '80s---before the historical societies along the Mother Road started working to preserve what they could---Don and I tried to follow as much of the old Route 66 highway as humanly possible. Even though parts of it were gone or deserted, it was still a memorable trip. We’d always gotten a kick out of interacting with people along the back roads of heartland America. We’d planned on taking the Corvette back to Route 66 to one of the Vette rallies the historical societies sponsor. That was a pre-stroke dream that in our “wheelchair era” never came to pass. Big sigh here.

Up until a few years ago we had a Route 66 shower curtain in the bathroom. I made it myself and I still have that curtain. It’s a back drop to some of Don’s collectibles now and it’s going to be hard to see it go to make room for the next chapter in my life. I’m too sentimental for my own good. But I’ll probably keep our Route 66 books. You can never have too many books.

It’s funny how our pasts and presents connect. I’d sung hundreds of songs as a kid. I’d taken a dozen vacations with my folks and even more with Don. I’d see thousands of TV shows including those in the sixties when Martin Milner and George Meharis rode the Mother Road. Yet with all those choices out in the world---all those paths to walk---I still find the re-occurring themes in my life to be the best. And when you get a chance to share some of those re-occurring themes with your soul mate you know you've had a little piece of heaven right here on earth. ©

Now you go through Saint Louis
Joplin, Missouri,
and Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.
You see Amarillo,
Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Don't forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernardino.

Won't you get hip to this timely tip;
when you make that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66.