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'.