A Thief, Sting, a Lady, McGraw and Botti . . . have ear will travel

Hi guys, Tink here, and you're totally . . . No where man? Just getting musical after the John Lennon Lithographs. Since I'm totally a literary character the term applies to me much more absolutely. 


This summer has been a musical happening for the SOG (sick old guy) and me. I've been totally trying to give him some bounce to his step. Wished they sold pogo stick insoles at Dr. Scholls. Which starts you thinking with all that work and experimentation on shoes and human's feet, what must Dr. Scholl's house smell like. Especially if he brings his work home. Maybe his wife would rather he brought home the bacon, smells more appetizing.
When he shakes your hand, does he leave a foot odor behind? Can you get athlete's hand, or hoof in mouth disease, as is virulently present on this blog? 
Instead of using a Swifter Mop on the floors, does he use a wet odor eater insert on a shoe horn? Do the meals stink like the inside of a humid human shoes? Filet of Sole anyone? Baked I'll Ask Her why the food is so tough, but I don't want to be a heel. That be the sole of ingratitude for a free meal. Something smells fishy to me and we need to stay focused on feet.  
Is the house air freshener an anti-fungal spray? Is it heaven for their canine where he can tear anything and still think it is an old shoe? No Fido, stop chewing the piano, it's not that old or worn out. In fact, its foot pedals are bare, not a insole in sight.
The vaudeville routine is not over yet. Too bad huh?
For exercise, does Dr. Scholl's pound the shoe leather? Was his favorite Jockey Willie Shoemaker? His favorite newspaper Cartoon - Shue? When there are bats in his belfry does he tell them to shoo? And here is a fitting shoe ending to this horrible haberdashery hoedown: when the ghost of his friend Foo haunts his house, resting on his couch, - this one is a really bad - when the Foo sits is he aware of it? Something are totally better left unsaid.


You don't have to sing my praises, because all summer, SOG - ole Mad Mutt - and I have been visiting musical happenings. Mutt is musically challenged for any tune written after 1955, except for the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, and the Doors. Oh and maybe Janis Joplin. They all have someone who is gratefully dead, but SOG isn't playing with Gerry Garcia and that moribund group yet. Me, I'm musically ignorant of Brenda Lee, Lesley Gore, Bobby Vinton, and to me no one should be named after a large yellow taxi, Chubby Checker.   


We started out with Sting and the Philharmonic at the Garden State Arts Center. The summer had barely begun, and flowers were blooming, but still old Mutt calls one of my favorites Stink. He says he doesn't like the register of his voice, "Male altos upset him. They remind him of the male choirs from Italy." He means twenty year old castratos that don't yet shave and sing in registers higher than the Empire State building. 


While Sting aka Stink is not that bassally challenged, Mutt offered to buy him a pair of woofers, to place in his joc so he could masquerade as something other than a capon. The SOG complained during his performance at the Arts Center that his raspy cat mating calls made him scratch around his male parts ("just taking inventory"). Not an exciting itch, but the kind of itch you get after sitting on foreign (not well cleaned) toilets. "That's the type of crab I don't enjoy steams, or boiled." He absolutely thinks that is funny. Not! 


Next he surprised me with a tailgate party and concert at the Arts Center. It was called Thunderfest. Monmouth county's Country Music Station W-eat-my-grits sponsored it. We didn't know there were totally so many hillbillies in Monmouth County. When we tried to buy tickets at the window that afternoon, we were told it was absolutely sold out. However, we lucked out, and bought three tickets wholesale from a person in a Land Rover. No they weren't scalped, in fact they were sold for under the face price. Sometimes, when the Foo sits you are aware of it. So we tailgated and sat on the lawn.


Mutt wanted to know "whats with all the girls wearing denim/leather mini skirts, cowboy hats, Stetsons no less, draw string shirts or bustiers, and boots to the knee in the soft wet muddy grass of the lawn?" It looked like a teenage dominatrix convention without the riding crops or whips. A few may have been hiding handcuffs. 


Yelling "Yahoo," and "You tell'em Tim" during the performances? They even yelled "you tell'em Tim" during Lady Antebellum and Love and Theft when Tim McGraw wasn't in the county, much less on stage. The beer stands sold liter sized cans and everyone was chugging and lugging. I think the Coors Light people made out real good. You betcha. The stand attendants kept saying, "Y'all come back now ya hear." 


Oh wowzers, I've been infected with countritis encephalitis - I'm speaking in tongues, country tongue. It's a disease associated with a Fecal Encephalopathy, known as shit for brains. There is a very close association between the two, and one diagnosis almost always accompanies the other. It causes a drawl in your y'all and grows a stalk of alfalfa between y'all's front teeth. It is often associated with a dumb shit-eating smile.  :) 


Oh my god. The antidote is reading anything. Even the label of the beer can held by the redneck that bit you. Pardon me while I read a Chekhov short story. . . .   


201 Chekhov short stories
A Lady with the Dog


I'm like absolutely back. Let's, like totally, hope I don't have a spontaneous relapses and become incommunicado due loss of vocabulary, while holding onto the rifle in the rack by the rear window of my Ford pick'em up truck. 

Is there an antibiotic for this disease? Like Urbanicillen? Cosmopolitanomycin? Culturisporin? Is there a Northern-pharmacist in the house?     


Back to music and concerts. I'll make a concerted effort to stay musical. 
Love and Theft had a great drummer and their songs rocked, especially for a country group. Lady Antebellum has won an Grammy and they were worth the price of admission. By the time Tim McGraw got on stage, everyone was tired. The girls with their boots hung off the tattooed arms of the guys with cargo shorts at half-mast exposing the top half of their boxers and sometimes the crack where their brains resided. Of course, their brains are cracked, no one would look or act that way if they had a quarter wit about them. These urban guido cowboys had already hung their wife beater undershirts on their belts and stood bare-chested in the shadows of the lawn, like some gorilla in the mist. All the while wearing cowboy hats, because they were probably bald. The hat ain't no brain protector, they'd have to sit on the hat for that function. 


I'm sorry I insulted gorillas. They aren't dumb enough to drink till you-wobble-when-you-walk, and then try to drive home from a parking lot filled with other silver backs in a similar condition. 


We left before bumper cars started. Tim McGraw looked and sounded like he envied our early departure. He sung half the lyrics to his songs and then pointed the mike at the audience and let them sing the rest. He barely broke a sweat. I guess he was saving himself for the after party, with some of the left over dominatrix girls and their stetsons. He was  animated in a family like country way. Animated was his aunt nym, totally like no relation.


Next I dragged the SOG to see Chris Botti at the renovated Count Basie theater in Red Bank New Jersey. That is another complete misnomer. There isn't a single fiduciary institution in the town that even hints of being in the red or structural is red. Looking at the signs "you are now entering Red Bank." You think you have mis-read the name. Even the Raritan River which runs by the town has no red banks. So where did the name come from anyway. 


Oh yeah, Chris Botti and his concert. He got his start with Oprah. Apparently he dropped out of Indiana University to play with Frank Sinatra's forty-fifth comeback revival band. Mutt liked him immediately. Then he started to play music with his talented group. Each instrument, bass guitar, bass, lead guitar, keyboard, piano, drums, and Botti on the trumpet played their hearts out. Their style is Coltrane/Davis jazz. If only they had practiced or at least communicated with each other what piece they were playing. It might have worked out better. Everyone of those guys can play, but just not together with anyone else. Occasionally and randomly they actually played in short bursts that sounded good. Then they realized they had reached a harmonious cord, and did their best to forget how that happened. The rest of the time, loud, atonal, inharmonic and competitive would best describe the conglomerated noise put forth as music. 


Guest appearances by a talented violist, and a singer with the range of air force troop transporter, added talent and some order to the music. The singer was only slightly smaller than the troop transporter.


At the end Botti admitted that he hired his drummer to receive compliments from Stink who is his good friend. That's when the SOG wanted to go home. His ears had received enough abuse and so we left. 


Mutt says the coming of fall is music to his ears. Between the invasions of the islanders from the north and the music from the south, and Stink from over seas he's ready to lie on the chaise in the back yard near the pool and listen to Diane Washington, or Billie Holiday, while drinking a Murphy's Stout. No wife-beater, no stetson, no cargo pants, and I ain't a wearin' no cowboy boots, (Sorry short relapse of countritis). He wants a baggy swim suit and sleepy eyes till the air clears, and the foreigners go home for the fall. 


This is Tink, saying like totally so long for now.
Don't let the sun catch you cryin'. 

Yoko O No "In My Life"

Sunday Tink and I visited Long Branch. It is a short drive up from Spring Lake. The sky was clear, after morning showers, and the beach was white. The people were abundant. 

The afternoon begged for us to walk the boards. The temperature was hot enough to leave no ponds behind on the shore or puddles on the roads. Walking, you really appreciate the intermittent breeze, as a caress ten degrees cooler than stolid air. 
Tink encouraged the SOG (Sick Old Guy) within me to take a leave of absence for an hour, and we walked. Long Branch's boardwalk is unique, as it goes up and down over the undulating roadway of Ocean Avenue. 

The mix of people made for a gallery of anthropological proportions from the Orthodox Jewish family with five kids - one pushed in a stroller, pregnant-mother, father, and grandparents all in shydels and yarmulkes to the Russian speaking couple, of whom the lady's large silver East Orthodox crucifix tilted upwards from her protruding belly with a pierced popped navel. 
We watched a mother and two young daughters sneaking under the railing onto the beach while a police car sit not thirty feet away. The police man stared at his in-vehicle computer screen as if he were on the Internet looking at porn while the women sans beach badge stole their space on the beach. Life is good, if not great.   

When we finished the walk, I had both a secret agenda and a plan. My plan drew us to 78 Ocean Avenue – the former? site of Atlantic Books – for an exhibit of John Lennon’s lithographs. Although Lennon’s zenith as a performer pre-dates Tink’s musical awareness, she had interest in the show. I remember rock n roll prior to the Beatles, but that is another story that we will get to later. I serve as Tink's pre-historic knowledge reservoir. Yes, I am her personal dinosaur.     

The showing presented 30 to 40 of Lennon’s sketches most of which involved pictures of his family or himself or both. (I didn't remember he went to art school in London.) Family means Yoko and Sean. Julian Lennon was disowned by this collection, as might be expected since Yoko is involved with the production. The lithographs were for sale as well, although some of the selection was already sold out. 

We wandered the exhibit with each litho having a caption. You did not realize the propaganda behind the captions until you used both your brains and your eyes to appreciate his work. Lennon is a good sketch artist. His best works do not involve subjects that are related to him or his family. Yet a majority of the showing was just that. Was this because his works usually involved himself - artist's ego? Or was the selection process biased towards these drawings that might be more saleable? 

I realize that an artist, song-writer, author, and sculpture must have an ego the size of the earthly atmosphere to succeed. So I ask again, did he mainly draw self-portraits or did Yoko select his auto-biographical works disproportionately? 
Even those lithographs that were of animals and other things non-Lennon were put into the Lennon-esque perspective by their captioning. One was meant to show Sean this philosophy or attitude, and this drawing was meant to teach Sean that. Everything Lennon and nothing separate as pure art. Yoko please remember that the essence of Lennon's Philosophy is simple, All You Need is Love. Not singularly self-love, but love of everyone.   
You don't need captions to control the viewer's mind. What does it says about the artist and his work if it has to be explained? If the art requires an explanation, then it is not communicating. 
How much of a control freak does that make the captioner, Yoko? 

Who the hell am I to make these insights? I am the audience, the one being manipulated. I mean the one being communicated with. 

Most of the "drawings" that weren't involving John directly were etching of lyrics he wrote. How amazing that he composed the lyrics for his songs using the lithographic-etching process. No note pad, and no corrections, and no doubt more money earned by the reproduction. I know, this is Dr. R. Cynic poisoner of thoughts talking. Even more amazing were the lack of strike throughs and cross outs in that material. Don't you want to own a lithograph of lyrics as written by John and reproduced by ?? I can write them out on parchment and sell them to you too. All You Need is . . . Guile. 

As to the propaganda, several of the later drawings show John with Sean walking through Central Park, and associated with them is a third person. The caption says, that is the ghost of a younger John. They intimate that Lennon had a premonition that he was going to die soon after drawing these sketches. If John knew that wouldn't the ghost be an ethereal presentation of his older self, the man walking with the child, not the teenager gesticulating at the "old man."

John more than likely drew the young-self ghost, because as all parents do, he saw his youth in the presentation of his son, Sean. He missed the days of his youth. He relived his days through his son, when life was simpler and maybe happier for him. I can't believe he knew he was going to be shot. Here I choose to ignore the untimely death of his mother when he was age nine. Or maybe he thought he was doomed for the same ending? That isn't explained because Yoko probably does it want it that way. Another woman competing for John's love, impossible for her to allow. She wants us to remember the clairvoyant, poet, who meditated and wrote song. The only person alive who really knows the depth of John's talent and ego is the Walrus, Paul McCartney. He won't talk because it will take away from him, so . . . 

As we walked the exhibit, Tink viewed the lithograph from when John and Yoko spent a week in bed for world peace. It started her talking about children and babies, which she knew would only exacerbate our debate as her biological clock is ticking. I placed an arm around her shoulder and cautioned her that an old man like me would be in my seventies when the kids hit college age. I warned her a week in bed might leave her widowed before she was married. While none of this deters her, she was interrupted by a Margaret Dumont like matron, "You should be ashamed of yourself. She no more than a child. You should stay to your own age." She paused and smiled. "Some one like me." She placed a hand on her hip and threw it up and down. Because of her bearing she bumped two men who were holding hands as they studied one of John's lithograph.  

Tink stared daggers. "I'm 49 years old (a bald-faced lie, she added more than 15 years), you just don't know how to take care of yourself, and probably don't know how to take care of a man either." 

I leaned down and kissed the Pixie's cheek. It felt warm and looked pink.    

The lady huffed once, but could think of no retort. 

But Tink wasn't finished yet. "Doc, let go home and try to make a baby now." She slid her hand into the vacant back pocket of my Bermuda shorts, and directed me out the door. 

Matron Dumont took out her cell phone no doubt dialing Jerry Falwell or Rush Limbaugh for advice. She couldn't call the police because they were too busy watching the computer screen on their cruiser. Even the Moral Majority enjoys John Lennon's art. 

It was 4:30 and the sky remained clear. I thought about the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth but I liked Lookin' at Lucky and at 4 to 5, I'd do better blind investing in the stock market using the Wall Street Journal and a pin. He won easily as I watched it on television later that evening. 
My secret agenda was next. I strolled Tink down Ocean Blvd to Avenue. No, not Ocean Avenue, but the restaurant Avenue, which is top rated by New Jersey Magazine. We had never tried it before although Pam had dined their with Alex and said it was as good as any restaurant in New York City.

Here is the menu for Dinner.

Tink loved the meal and then we went home. We turned on Night at the Opera and laughed at Margaret Dumont while lying together in our pj's on the couch. 

This is the Mad Mutt substituting for Dr. M.T. Skull. Saying, it Shore was a great day.  

Tink is back and she mad. Never piss off a Pixie.

Oh Wowzer. I thought I would never get to write on this blog again. Doctors have a lot on their minds, and sometimes, well that mind is absolutely a sieve. 


Can't remember the pass word. How bad an excuse is that? Dr. Als Zymer remember to take a Tony Robbins or Tony Roberts course or something like that. Then graduate with a Tony Award, in some broad way, it might help your memory.   


Oh but absolutely I'm not talking about my dear doc, the Mad Mutt, he remembered the code and gave it to that other guy, doc half-wit. The one who runs this blog, and writes our stories, and thinks he's important. 


Mutt and I call him, Doctor M. T. Skull. Of course not to his face or you'd never hear from us again. He has a temper worse than Zambone's. The name he uses on the book cover, that's just a pseudonym. He is Dr. M. T. Skull. Or maybe he is Doctor R. Cynic (pronounce Syn-nick), poisoner of words and writing.    


You know the guy I'm talking about with the totally receding hairline. Nothing grows inside or out of that noggin. It's like a New Jersey landfill.  We need to call the EPA and warn them of his toxic thoughts. 


You thought that odor was just springtime in New Jersey and it would stop with Summer? Absolutely totally negativo, he generates it on a regular basis as he creates our new stories. His brain is like a diesel engine from a 1945 Mac Truck running in your garage. When he is dormant then the odor dissipates, like the ashes from a volcano.      


For the public welfare, Mutt and I have to help him with stories and writing, and proof-reading or we wouldn't exist, and you wouldn't enjoy, and he wouldn't ever be dormant. That odor would be constant. We are the expediters, writing's equivalent of the Clean Air Association.     


Imagine if there were a strong wind from Central New Jersey towards Manhattan, Manhattanites would flee to Massachusetts seeking health care and treatment. Noxious fumes that is a real problem, unlike the Real Housewives of New Jersey, who fume noxiously. 


Of course, with Obama-care we may wind up having the Massachusetts health plan for the whole nation. Worse for us in NJ since Christy is crossing party lines to screw up New Jersey's hospital system and everything else. 


Anyway, we're all back, Mutt, Pam, Jayson, Darvesh, Grabowski, Frank, even Zambone is still alive, and sort of living, captive under the dome of M.T. Skull, the half-wit savant of New Jersey.


He's started working on our second adventure, which involves the death of my Ob-Gyn. As Mutt would say, Oh Boy- Got You Naked. It's so embarrassing when my Doc says something like that above a whisper. 


MT wants to name the victim Dr. Phil Anders, so I guess you know why he is dead. No I didn't give the plot away, only a pixelated joke from the Pixie. The murder mystery is a case of hit and run, with the police missing the point, and writing it off as an accident. 


Dr. Madison Muttnick to the rescue. He just can't leave it alone. A colleague's death, my doctor, you know he wants the right answer, even if it will kill him or someone else. Although Grabo threatens Mutt, it is a closed case, and the police can't stop him from investigating. He has time since his practice is slow.


We expected to know the ending of this story sometime in 2011, so absolutely don't ask questions now. We don't even know who did it yet, or the real name of my doctor other than Dr. OB-GYN. M.T. Skull will figure these things out later (with help from superior minds). 


Later this week, Mutt and I will take the night off and have dinner at Matisse in Lake Como (nee Belmar). Yeah like I could get my Mad Mutt to fly to Italy and be like George Clooney. He's more like Perry Como, than Lake Como & Joe Don Looney more than George Clooney. 


It would take Dr. M.T. Skull to send us there on a murder mystery, and he isn't known for spending a lot of money on us. He bitches and moans when he needs new ink cartridges for the printer. 


Maybe we can get him to write us a European vacation and find a dead body on the French Rivera. I can totally dream can't I? 


Back to the restaurant Matisse so Wowzers, look at the menu, click below.
 I can't figure out what to have, but everything looks delicious


Help me out, select a dish that looks really good. 


Throwing Pixie dust your way,
Rosemary Angelucci aka Tink, Mutt's Pixie. 

Sorry about being away

It has been along time since my last post. I am sorry, but I was recovering from a medical problem. And then I forgot my password for this darn blog. But Dr. Muttnick remember it, and so here we are.


In the interim, I have completed the murder mystery novel 4 Deaths, 2 Heart Attacks and a Stroke ... Then the Fatal Blow. My thanks goes out to the small critiquing group for making the story better than I could have written alone. They are christened Team Mutt. 


The manuscript is looking for representation as we speak or as you read. 


The main character is Dr. Madison Muttnick, an orthopedic surgeon who sees the evil in his community and wants to remove it. He believes the well spring of that evil is the VP of Medical Affairs at his hospital, Dr. Judas Ninestine. He plans to kill him and accept the consequences, in what he believes is a noble gesture.
Before he can act, another persons completes the task. However, with a taped phone threat from Mutt and the doc's blood on the murder victim, the prime suspect becomes the Mad Mutt. He must defend himself against the murder charge, so he investigates the real NJ boys, the Zambone Construction Co., and the administration of his hospital, which is heavily involved in No-Bell Billing. The No-bell enterprise is woven through out his hospital supplying security guards, as well as ancillary support for coding, billing and record keeping. He concludes the cause of his dying practice is No-Bell's involvement in patient referrals as they present to the Emergency Room of his hospital. 
His old enemy detective Jahn Grabowski is in charge of the murder investigation. And the FBI is investigating the construction business which dovetails into an investigation of Mutt and his Atlantic City visits. The money he wins, disappears, never banked and never declared.   
During this situation, his estranged daughter Pam appears on his doorstep with a grandson he never knew about. Divorced from a man Mutt never met, she finds him living with Rosemary Angelucci, Tink, who is barely older than his daughter, Pam. The four of them live in Mutt's Spring Lake shore home under an uneasy truce.   
The CEO of the hospital dies of cardiac arrest while talking in a closed room with Dr. Muttnick. Grabowski suspects and hopes he has the doctor for two murders. He arrests him and Dr. Muttnick is arraigned with Pam as his lawyer. For bail he puts up the shore home as collateral. 


If you are interested in how it ends, then follow this blog for events when and if this story is published. 
In the mean time, I am returning to the computer as the second in the Dr. Madison Muttnick series is rattling through my brain pan and echoing into an outline that will see him investigate the murder of one of his friends who is a physician on staff. 


Thanks for visiting my blog. 
This piece wasn't written by Tink or Mutt, but the originator, progenitor of Madison Muttnick MD.
They will be back later to write for you soon.