BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

I like to sing.

Now, please take note – I did not indicate in any way that I am good at singing. I simply said that I like to do it. Therefore, you aren’t about to find me in a Karaoke bar, belting out Bon Jovi or Heart tunes and downing Kirin with a bunch of visiting Japanese businessmen. For one thing, I never have occasion to be socializing with the aforementioned Asian moguls. Just doesn’t happen in my line of work. Maybe someday a Japanese publisher will pick up the foreign rights to the Rowan Gant Investigations and do a translation, but something tells me by the time they were done, he would end up being a Mystical Samurai Pokemon or something of that sort, so I’m not really sure how I feel about that prospect. I guess it all depends on how much Kirin I’ve had, and how much money is on the table when the offer is made.

But, let’s get back to the story…

The truth is, it really doesn’t matter if they are Japanese businessmen, or a visiting friend from the FBI, since the latter actually does happen. You still won’t find me hanging out in the Karaoke bars, because even though I like to sing, I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, even with help and I know that. I didn’t used to have this problem. Once upon a time I could cart a tune around in a brown paper sack with no backup whatsoever, and sound pretty good. But, at around age 13 I was afflicted with a bad case of swimmer’s ear. (I bet you thought I was going to say hormones… Well, that’s a different blog…) At any rate, both of my eardrums were perforated by the blistering, which left behind a whole mess of scar tissue. As I have grown older the extent of my frequency hearing loss has worsened considerably. So, no matter whether we are talking brown paper sack, plastic bucket, or galvanized pail, I can’t carry a tune.

Still, I like to sing.

Just ask Anastasia, good friend and co-founder of the “Murv’s Stalkers” fan club. She and her husband are regular visitors to the “Murv Cave,” and were here for the Yule Bash 2007. They were also here for Yule Bash 2008, but 2007 has more to do with the singing thing… You see, that was the year of the 14 inch snowfall type blizzard storm that struck on the very day and evening of the Yule bash. So, Anastasia actually got to witness me shoveling the back deck – repeatedly – while I was holding a Vodka-Tonic in one hand, and belting out my own renditions of A Fairytale of New York, Run, Run Rudolph, and countless other holiday tunes. What I’m trying to illustrate here is this – I am likely to start singing at the drop of a hat. Especially if alcohol is involved, but while it is a good impetus, booze definitely isn’t a pre-requisite.

Such was the case just the other day. And, no, this time there was no alcohol involved.

You see, I had just picked up the offspring from school. We returned home, and following the usual schedule the short person set about doing her homework while I started fixing dinner. After all, E K would be home in just a little over an hour and we all know what happens if I don’t have her dinner on the table when she walks in.

So, anyway, it had been a fairly good day, I was feeling somewhat chipper,  and I was far enough ahead of the game with fixing dinner that I could reasonably assume E K wouldn’t beat me and lock me in the closet that evening. Well, at least not on account of dinner being late, that is… Therefore I started bellowing out some Traveling Wilbury’s tunes. I happen to like the Traveling Wilbury’s. Not only are their songs catchy, but also they’re a lot of fun.  If I remember correctly I started out with Tweeter And The Monkey Man then flowed right into Handle With Care. I think Last Night might have even been in there somewhere as well, although I’m pretty sure it entered the mix a bit later. I left Margarita out of it because it doesn’t sound nearly as good without the 4-part harmony.

Somewhere around the time I was taking a breath before launching into the chorus of one of the above songs, I was cut short by the offspring calling out to me from the dining room…

“Daddy!” she yelled.

Well, it didn’t sound like anything was terribly wrong… Parents kind of have a sixth-sense about that sort of thing believe me. What it sounded like was that she was simply trying to get my attention before I started bellowing again. I made the logical assumption that she might need some help with fractions or some such. She absolutely despises math. It’s not that she’s bad at it or anything. She just hates it with a passion for some odd reason.

Anyway, I stepped out through the kitchen doorway and asked, “What’s up?”

She looked at me, and with all the seriousness she could muster she asked, “Daddy, are you going to be a Pop-Star?”

You see, the offspring is all about that Cyrus kid… The one named after a state…  And the somebody or another brothers… And Denny Tomatoes, or some such… You know, the latest Disney sensations, most of whom probably won’t have the staying power of an Annette Funicello… But, that’s just my opinion… Either way, she is so all about these “Tween/Teen Idols” in fact, that she has abandoned her grand plan to become a Doctor and has decided instead to become a “Pop Star” just like them. When I was her age I think I was planning to be an Astronaut. Shortly after that it was Oceanographer, closely followed by Veterinarian… So, my point is, I’m not worried about her current career choice. I’m sure it will change soon enough. As a matter of fact, she has such a gift for gab and penchant for arguing with us, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see her become a trial attorney. I mean, I hope not. Then when people at the old folks home ask me what my kid does for a living I’ll have to make up a lie and stuff… But, I digress…

So, the kid had just asked me if I was going to become a “Pop Star”…

I looked back at her and chuckled as I replied, “No, honey, I write books for a living. You know that.”

She pondered my answer for less than a heartbeat before replying, “That’s good, because you don’t sing very well.”

Critics. They’re everywhere. But, at least I know my kid is honest, so that gives me some hope that she won’t become an attorney after all, and it should definitely keep her out of politics.

As for me, I guess I won’t be quitting my day job.

More to come…

Murv

If you have been following me on Facebook in recent months, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I posted a whole slew of pictures from my high school years. This was brought about by the fact that I happened to stumble across a Facebook Group devoted to KRSH FM 90.1, (Now KRHS FM) the school radio station where I cut my teeth on broadcast media and moreover real, hardcore Journalism, at the direction of a fantastic teacher and faculty advisor, Martha Ackmann. But, I’ll babble on about that in a different blog. (Yeah, just gotta love chasing those chickens, eh?)… You see, the only reason I even brought that up is that it ties in with the fact that I was an avid photographer as well and I worked for the school newspaper and yearbook in that capacity… But, now we are running after a rooster… The deal is, I actually made myself a side business out of photography in the early to mid 90’s.

E K and I were partners with some other folks in a Saint Louis based sound recording studio… Yeah, yeah, I know… What does sound recording have to do with photography? Well, actually that’s an easy question to answer. Recording studios draw in bands; bands need publicity photos and CD artwork. See where I’m going? Yeah, it just sort of made sense… Therefore, we came up with the idea that having it all under one roof just might work. So, I dusted off and reassembled my darkroom, invested in a bit of updated equipment… Well, it was updated back then. Now, not so much. But, I digress… Anyway, back to the story, toss in setting up a couple of wholesale accounts for supplies, and there you go. We had ourselves a part-time photography business.

Well, the story behind the studio and how it eventually fell into financial ruin is a blog unto itself, which in order to protect the innocent will probably never see paper, electronic or otherwise. Suffice it to say, we had ourselves a good run while it lasted, and we actually did quite a few unique, fun, and even at times profitable, photo sessions in conjunction with recording sessions, bands, and even their groupies.

But, here’s the thing… I had pretty much pushed a lot of that completely to the back of my mind. I honestly hadn’t remembered how many shoots we had done until the other day when I was searching out pictures to scan for the whole KRSH thing I mentioned earlier. The whole mess came flooding back to the forefront when I found myself sifting through a 4-drawer file cabinet full of contact sheets, stripped proofs for publicity photos, and tons of negatives.

Yeah, a lot of pictures, both printed and unprinted… Fortunately, they were organized and labeled, which is obviously something I did back before I returned to my natural state of “messy desk habitat”…

Now, just to be annoying, I’m going to switch gears on you. Chase a different feathered fowl so to speak… Trust me, the rooster and the chicken eventually meet up and make cute little yellow chicks. Just give the egg a minute or two so it can hatch… I promise, it really will…

Some of you may remember from the “Mahwage” series of blog entries that I had mentioned E K being on the drill team when she was in high school. Well, because of that I have a tendency to refer to her as having been a cheerleader, to which she always replies, “I wasn’t a cheerleader, I was on the drill team.” It’s not that she has anything against cheerleaders… She just likes to clarify things.  She’s very direct like that… And, she’s evil… Anyway, it would seem that at her school at least, there was a hierarchy. Cheerleaders first, followed several rungs down the ladder by the Drill Team. Kind of a “cool kid caste system”… Okay, I’ll give you that… We had our own “caste system” when I was in high school, and I was right near the bottom of it… Actually, I don’t think I even qualified to even be on it… I think I was on the waiting list to get on the last line of the caste list, or something like that… So, what I am saying is that I get it. Cheerleaders were apparently “cooler” than the girls on the drill team.

Still, when you get right down to it, E K was way up on the ladder in relation to where I was. If I can use my high school experiences as a benchmark, she was in the top 5% of coolness, whereas I was overheated in hell. And, by the same token, the young ladies on the drill team wore uniforms… And, what were those uniforms? Fuzzy sweaters, really short skirts, and saddle oxfords… Or, those little mini-dress looking things in the summer… Anyway,  I rest my case.  The simple fact is, to a zit-faced outcast nerd like myself, if it looked like a cheerleader, wore clothes like a cheerleader, and bounced around like a cheerleader, then it was a cheerleader… And, of course, was therefore the object of many an adolescent fantasy.

Believe me, I’m not trying to be pornographic here… I’m just telling it like it is. But, since pornography has been mentioned, anyone with two brain cells in their head can look at popular media references and see that the whole cheerleader fantasy extends to the adult male as well. Therefore, I really and truly am making an objective observation here…

So, my initial point being this… I may have been a zit-faced nerd in high school, but I married myself a smokin’ hot cheerleader, so bite me! Neener, neener…

Just kidding… Well… A little bit, but kinda serious too… In any case, that right there would be the subjective observation…

Okay, now let’s see if we can get that chicken married off to that rooster…

As I was going through the stacks of negatives in search of nostalgic shots of 16-18 year old journalism students collecting MIPA awards, prattling nonsensically into microphones, or just generally being teenagers who happened to have to good fortune of working at a high school radio station, I ran across a manila folder labeled “B&W Proofs – Kat in Advertisement“.

You see, during the old recording studio/photo studio days, one of our partners actually worked in the darkroom at a local advertising agency. Whenever they would have a local job we had the opportunity to bid on it. And so, one Saturday morning, I received a phone call from my friend, telling me the agency needed an “emergency product shoot with a model” for a big client. They needed proofs and slides by that evening and on top of that they had not yet hired a model. As it turned out, models and photographers were apparently hard for them to come by at the last minute, so they wanted to know if we could handle it. The specs were fairly simple… They wanted us to shoot a roll of Black and White Negatives and a roll of Color Transparencies, (AKA – slides), of a pretty woman, clad in business clothing, filling a tire on a nice looking car, using the client’s product. That product was, of course, a fix-a-flat in a can sort of thing.

So, we loaded up the equipment, ran my relatively new Cutlass Supreme through the car wash… The Cutlass was a company car provided by the computer repair outfit for which I worked full time back then… and then set up a shoot on the parking lot of the studio with our model….

And, as you can see from the pictures, our model was none other than E K herself. Yes… E K… In a matter of a 60-minute shoot and about 2 hours in a darkroom, the Evil One became the hands, face, and legs of “The Pump,” Pyroil’s fix-a-flat in a can. Yep, she was the “Tire Babe” in advertisements and promotional materials around the country. I often wonder if they did up one of those life-sized cardboard cutouts to use as a display in auto parts stores. If they did, something tells me some grease monkey somewhere has one tacked up on the wall in his garage…

At least, let’s hope it’s just the garage…

So, why am I telling you all this? Simple… Besides being one of those little bits of nostalgia that just happened to slap me in the back of the head, there’s an even more important point… An extremely important point, in fact, even if it is purely selfish and a tad bit juvenile… But hey, I’m a guy and it’s my job to be juvenile every now and then…

At any rate, the point would be the following… Not only did this zit-faced, klutzy, outcast nerd marry a cheerleader, he married a model… Yeah… Bite me again.

So, can I get a big ol’ “neener neener” from the crowd?

Yeah, life is good… And, I’m one hell of a lucky bastard… I know that.  But, it really is too bad E K doesn’t have that drill team uniform anymore…

More to come…

Murv