My other brother and his wife journeyed north last week, from their beautiful world in the country, to take me out and about. We were belatedly celebrating our birthdays with our all-time favorites. Enjoying the best curry in town featuring an 11 flight-high view, then an acoustically perfect concert with John Prine. Since my brother just hit the milestone of 50!!! years; they spared no expense with getting the best seats possible. After all, we've loved John Prine and his music for over 35 years now. Wow.
I heard the show was sold out. Everything was going well, until a woman sitting behind me started singing. She sang out loud, very badly and didn't know the words as well as she thought. Clearly this woman had been drinking something that has a very long drunk factor. Okay, I let her enjoy the first two songs, as everyone was so excited; then I gave her the "Please...!" look. She got it - but only for a few minutes, as she was one of those no-short-term-memory drunks. So between songs we had a talk. I used some of John Prine's kind of empathy and, well... I made a new friend. She tried to control herself as best she could then proudly took to "high-fiving" me after each song. I don't do "high-fives" well; I'm always awkward, but I was willing to do whatever it took to enjoy the show. After all, I'm far too familiar with what could go wrong with overly drunk drunks from my spending 13 years intoxicating them in the past. This was obviously some serious time-delayed karma from my younger days. So I dealt with it, the best I could.
With three-fourths of the show over, he sang a sad song. My drunken friend started to sob. Out loud. Through the entire song. When the song was over, she left. Without even a goodbye.
So the next morning when I awoke, I reflected on the show and wondered if my drunken friend remembered it at all. A few days later I read a very favorable review of the show in the RFT where the author states he sat in front of a very loud drunk. His drunk not only sang out loud, he also hollered a lot. Again, friends should NOT let friends sing drunk (in public)!
You know… the older I get, the fonder I am of public stockades.
(The drawing is a cleaned & colored scan from a rough promo I had done for a local band... oh, about 20 years ago. I revised this to show "X" generally marking my brother's little piece of paradise.)
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