Writing about Music is like Dancing about Architecture.



That is one of my favorite lines; it was the title of a column written by a friend of mine in Austin. Back in the day, she and I worked on a couple of columns for the local entertainment paper. I took wonderful photos of the stage acts and she slept with the touring bands and then wrote about them. She also slept with most of the staff of the paper, excluding me…..Seems like I was the only one that could get her a decent photo and besides, I was deathly afraid of her. Anyway; we had lots of fun and got great photos and did award winning stories. I think she is an editor for a real paper now. Most likely she is still sleeping with the staff and the old bands that are doing reunion tours….. I was reminded of the column because I was thinking a lot about Austin lately. That and the J.C. Penny’s women’s underwear ads that are running every 10 minutes on NBC tonight, but I digress…..

I had lunch with an old friend from Austin today. We called him Travis Redfish, after a slacker character in another column in the paper. When we all had hair down to where most people have butt cheek tattoos now, he had short hair and wore madras button down shirts from Sears. He did that mainly for his job, which was running moonshine from NC in exchange for recreational vegetable matter from Texas. When I met him through his brother, he was living with a stone fox that was a “Dead Head”. I think I traveled to 10 shows with them over a couple of weeks. Things get a little hazy with age….. Anyway “the Fish” had a thing for women whose chest size was at least twice their age. Paula certainly fit the bill. As did her sister, who we referred to as Cheech in honor of the Comic Book “Cheech Wizard”. All of the females in the strip were incredibly endowed and seemed to have protrusions that resembled the volume knob of a Marshall Amplifier on the end of the aforementioned protrusions. She got that name after she inexplicitly walked out of the shower and in front of the TV where we were all watching the Cowboys lose to the Washington Redskins…..In her haste to check on the score, she forgot her towel. After that the nickname stuck and we were forbidden to get within 2 miles of her by her boyfriend at the time. Ah, youth…..

Anyway, Paula left to get her PhD in botany and Fish got on an Asian Female kick. So far he has married a couple and just given his bank account to a couple of others. Somewhere in this transformation, Travis got me to work down on the coast with a towing company he was working for and helped me get my Captain’s license for Towboats, which are like tugboats, only much more dangerous. We were paid for stealing fuel out of the barges we pushed, so the owner could make payroll and take Hawaiian vacations. I have days’ worth of stories about trading Japanese Sailors, Playboys for beers, stealing the gangplanks off ships and other swashbuckling tales, but I will save those for another time.

Anyway, I set off to find my fortune in the Photographic World and the Captain stayed on the water to gather more tales for his memoirs and to make lots of Oriental women wealthy. When I returned to Houston, we connected again by ship to shore calls and have started talking every few days or whenever he has a new list of Coon-Ass Jokes that he delivers in dialect. Mostly, you would be too embarrassed to recite them at Vacation Bible school or because the punch line is so bad. Anyway, we keep up the gossip about the old gang and tell stories of our mis-spent youth.

He called the other day and said that he and the current Korean “Who wants to be a Millionaire” would be in Houston and would I join them for lunch and telling lies to make each other look good. I agreed and met them at some Korean Restaurant that had lots of consonants and very few vowels in the name. They were already there and on a table the size of my queen sized bed, were bowls of filled with things we have mostly yet to identify. In the middle was a large grill full of what I can only hope was strips of beef. His current GF, who was made up like Ming the Merciless in drag, but with a cuter rear end, was cooking the (hopefully) cow-parts. We did the intros and Ming-ette turned out to be very nice, even if I have no idea what her name is nor could I understand more than 10% of what she said.

After devouring many unknown but pretty tasteful substances, they brought out a large cauldron of steaming liquid that screamed “SPICY” and proceeded to pour in LOTS of miscellaneous unrecognizable seafood parts. Then they added whole shrimp with eyeballs and whiskers. Next they started opening shellfish and such. Even after SCUBA Diving for 20 years, they pulled rubbery flesh out of shells that I had never seen before! Then they topped it off with large lumps of tofu and noodles the size of my fingers. Maybe they were fingers…..Anyway, the ladled out HUGE bowls for each of us and recommended that we use Metal Spoons….. This is the part of the story were usually the author says; “and it was the best thing I ever tasted….” Well actually, it tasted like vinegar that shrimp had pee’ed in and was so hot it burned my eardrums from the inside… The only thing that would kill the taste and cool my tongue was the plate of yard clippings covered in sesame oil…..



To be continued



Next-the trip to the Korean Market