#baby Skipper will never grow old to me | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

leglesstv · 4 years ago

Photo

THE DARK DAYS BACK– 2021

I have been struggling with how to start this piece. I guess I should tell you a little about myself.

What I do for a living is not who I am, yeah, I get to blow shit up and its super fun but it’s not what defines me.

I have been a water baby all my life from growing up on the beach to commercial diver.

The ocean or the ocean’s rhythm ebbs and flows within me.

Surfing has been the biggest part of my life for longer than I care to remember. For sure I have been out the water for extended periods before while working on projects overseas. Always with the knowledge that I will be getting wet again, sometime soon. I have never before been concerned that surfing will not be an option. I have always just figured I would surf till the day I die.

October 2019 we were still basking in the glory of a once in a lifetime trip to the Ments. 10 Kneelos on a boat sailing around the Mentawai’s. Absolutely what dreams are made of. Red, Giggs, Lester, Larry, Craig, Steve, Johan, Andrew and myself. Jason the skipper of Switchfoot made it 10 chargers in total.

We had also had a run of solid swell at the local, which for me was all time as my new Kneeon that Nick had shaped for me had arrived. Nick and I had chatted over the phone, had a few video calls and bam!! this magic carpet arrives. Oh my sack, I have never been happier with a stick. My surfing went up in leaps and bounds. Never been happier in my life.

Around this time, I started to get pains in my left hip which radiated down the leg. Initially it wasn’t too bad but it got progressively worse. It got to a stage where I literally couldn’t walk anymore. Thinking it’s got to be the hip, off I went to the hip specialist. Had some photos taken of the hip, back to the clever guy’s office and this is where things started to go south.

Mate, as hips go, yours look beautiful but I recommend you go see a neurosurgeon.

Your spine doesn’t look good at all.

You can imagine, I’m thinking “what the fuck, are you sure you’re looking at the right X-rays.”

So, at least by this time I was on crutches to help me get around and waddled off to see Dave. Dave is a neurosurgeon that had done some work on my spine before.

Same sort of story, pain in my shoulder, radiating down my right arm.

True as nuts, I had gone to the shoulder clever guy who had told me exactly what the hip guy had just told me. Anyway, a long story short, Dave did a decompression on the C7 and T1 vertebrae.

I was booked on a boat trip to the Maldives with my good mate Guy. He is a stand up but I love him anyway. I manage to get on the plane without really having tested the neck or having had time for rehab of any sorts. Probably not my brightest move. We had solid swell the whole trip, but truth be told, I was in constant pain.

Once back in SA, I was off to see Dave again. X-rays and CT scans followed, and Dave said unfortunately we going to have to fuse the C7 and T1 but we will go in through the front this time.

Absolutely no problems whatsoever and I was back in the water 3 months later.

Dave, howzit I’m back. More scans and X-rays (starting to know everyone by their first names by now) followed. Yip, pretty much the same story, crumbling, degeneration of the spine.

I was booked in for a decompression on the L4 and L5. The procedure was pretty standard and uneventful. Unfortunately, just as with the neck, the decompression was not successful. A week later, I was booked in for a multistage fusion, L4, L5 and S1.

So, they going to open me up again along the same incision line, not feeling great about that but hey, there are worse things in life. Waking up from this op was a rude awakening. Fuck me this shit hurts. Trying to move was pretty tender for sure. Anyhow the drugs did their thing and a few days later I was able to get out of bed and lose the dreaded catheter. Walking was fair interesting to say the least, I had to laugh at myself as I looked like a mummy.

Little shuffles with my hands out front but hey, I was mobile. The day they let me out rolled around. Crap balls I felt like shit and was fair tender. It felt like someone was taking a mallet to my head.

I remember battling to get into the wheelchair to get me to the car. The nausea was just incredible, I thought I was going to throw up all over the place. Between the porter and Jo (my wife) they managed to get me into the car.

The ride home is not too far but I was deteriorating at a rapid rate of knots. Got home, Jo managed to get me onto her “throne” where I just passed out.

Through the rest of the day and night I remember fleeting moments of being awake. Couldn’t move, didn’t know what was going on. Basically, a vegetable on the couch.

The next morning Jo realized that this wasn’t good. Somehow or other she managed to bundle me into the car. I have a memory of the gardener holding the car door open with a look of concern on his face. The next thing I was on a gurney at the hospital with Debbie staring at me. Debbie is Jo’s business partner and one of my best friends.

Tests and more tests.

Somehow or other I had picked up Bacterial Meningitis.

Jo had literally just saved my life. A few hours later and it wouldn’t have turned out well.

Some serious antibiotics and medication I can’t even pronounce later, my infection levels started coming down, but the headaches wouldn’t go away. Back into the noisy tube for some more scans. Was good to see all the guys and gals in radiology again.

Crap balls I had a rupture in the thecal sac. Basically, it’s a sac that runs up your spine and over the brain. The sac contains cerebrospinal fluid. When leaking the sac “collapses” on the brain causing insane headaches, headaches that are just next level. Think migraine on steroids.

Back into theatre to patch up the leak.

Once again, they opened me up on the same incision. Success at last, once again freedom day arrived and was bundled into the wheelchair again and back into the car.

Was great to be home with the animals for sure. Jo had made a bed for me in the lounge as walking at this point just really wasn’t an option. To say I was tender would be a bit of an understatement.

A day later, I got this incredible pain down my left leg. Kinda like being hit with a cattle prodder. I remember screaming as the first one hit. Absolute agony, pain like I had never felt. It would last for about 30 seconds but in that time, I couldn’t move a finger for fear of escalating the pain. I just screamed and screamed. Over the next two days, it got worse and more frequent.

This was an incredible low point. I remember crying like a baby. I was emotionally drained by this time. I remember thinking I just want to be normal again. Remember, I can hardly walk, can’t even get down on the toilet to take a dump. I hadn’t had a shit for as long as I can remember.

My wife was washing me and dressing me. It was taking its toll.

This carried on for two days until it got to a point where I just couldn’t move.

An ambulance and crew had to come and peel me off the couch eventually. They dosed me up, got a stretcher underneath me and carried me out to the ambulance.

Jesus, what the fuck!! But hey, could be worse…right?

Back to my favorite people with the noisy machine. Hi everyone, true as nuts I’m back. Another scan revealed that the crushed bone material that they place between your vertebrae was leaking out and catching the nerve going down my leg.

Another twirl in theatre to clean up the debris, by this time the clock on the wall and I were good friends. I used to watch the seconds tick by as the anesthetic started kicking in. I woke up from here being wheeled into high care. Now I have to tell you this was by far my worst experience.

The following morning two nurses came to wash me. I was in absolute agony and they kept moving me and turning me. I was screaming in absolute agony, but they wouldn’t stop and no-one came to help me. To this day I can’t understand it.

Couldn’t wait to get out of there and back on to a ward. Or so I thought…

From there they wheeled me into an isolation ward. Apparently, I had picked up the dreaded hospital Super bug. My infection count was in the 400’s (8 being normal) and to make matters worse, the headaches were back. I had sprung another fucking leak in my Thecal sack. FUCK!!!

Back to my old friend on the wall with the ticking second hand. Again, opening me up on the same line. This time I wasn’t friends with the clock on the wall.

Dave patched me up as best they could.

What the actual…

My new home turned out to be a glass box in the ICU. In isolation in intensive care. Jesus, this isn’t good.

Nurse and doctors were putting gear on to come into the glass box. “What’s going on???”

Machines were everywhere beeping and hissing. “Fuck me, this isn’t good.”

Waking up at 4am with people sticking needles into you to draw blood loses its shine after a while. I think all I ate for the two weeks was watermelon in the morning that Debbie used to bring me with a cup of coffee. When I say bring, I really mean bribe the porter.

Now you must remember I have basically been bedridden for 6 weeks and not had an appetite at all.

I could see the concern on peoples face when they came to visit, as much as they tried to hide it, it was there.

Nights were the worst and the tears used to flow. So as not to let the pressure in the Thecal sac become too great, they drained it every few hours. This as I’ve said to you before brings on insane headaches.

Morphine and I were no longer friends. It made me incredibly sad and depressed.

I came off the morphine by choice and gritted the teeth. Absolutely worth the pain.

Lester and Marco organized a live feed for me for the warmup session before the SA Kneeboarding Champs. What legends.

Once again, I cried like a baby, but these were tears of joy. It was so good to watch my mates surfing and everyone saying “hi” on the feed made me feel like a million bucks. The brotherhood is strong here in Cape Town. Love these boys.

At this point I was literally skin and bone, but my infection levels were coming down and I had managed to get out of bed and make the few steps to the toilet. The sun was definitely coming up for me. For the first time in a long time, I thought I was going to make it.

Fuck, the thought of dying in that glass box haunted me every night there.

Freedom day was like no other. Getting out of there into the sunshine and colors and breeze was a sensory overload, but hey, I was out and feeling good…ish.

My mates, Debbie and Sian had kept me going. Sian is my office manager and best friend.

She tried to feed me all the way through to no avail, true as nuts she used to arrive with bags of food.

God it was good to be home.

Reality starts to kick in pretty quickly. Fuck me am I ever going to be able to surf again, am I ever going to be able to sit on the toilet again (it’s the little things hahaha…)

Time to reset the mind from “fuck me, I don’t want to die in here to I need to get in the water again”.

Enter the amazing Lara, the physio that is a gift from the angels. I remember that late December day shuffling and shaking my way into her office. By this time, all my muscles had wasted away and just holding my frame up was as much as I could muster. I could do about 2 minutes before all my muscles started shaking from fatigue and I was still shuffling like a mummy.

The question Lara asked me off the bat was “what do you want to get out of this.”

“Just get me back in the water please,” was my response.

At this point it was a fantasy I had to believe in, physically I was a mess, but I think mentally I was scarred and the mental trauma was real. But fuck it, if I could survive that, I can achieve anything. The will to get back in the water was incredible and became all consuming.

Walking around the house became my exercise routine initially and braai tongs my best friend (in case I dropped stuff as bending was not an option). I had to hold on to everything at first as I walked along, eventually I could skip the kitchen counter on the way to the TV room and skip the chairs on the way to my room, and so it went on until I could just about walk the whole house without holding or resting.

Lara had given me gentle low impact stuff to do, just to tone the muscles and stretches to get some life back in the buggers. Everything hurt. This was a continuous process that I did all day every day for a few weeks. I was starting to feel more stable on my feet which did wonders for my mental wellbeing. Progress was gradual but I started noticing results which made me feel like a million dollars.

Getting behind the wheel again was a massive boost for me. My buddy Kante who is a running coach, walked with me from my local to St James, what a joy being next to the ocean again, mind surfing every bump that came through. I steadily built this up over time. Eventually I could make it to Muizenberg and back (5 kms). Everything ached at this point and the thought of shortening every walk was ever present. 4am wake ups every day can be a challenge and for sure there were mornings I couldn’t bear the thought of getting up. Sore back, sore hips, it’s dark and it’s cold, fuck this shit. On the odd occasion that I didn’t manage to get going, that feeling of worthlessness would set in. What the fuck is wrong with you, don’t you want to get back in the water? That’s not a cool feeling. I have probably missed 3 days in the six months I have been rehabbing. A 45-minute 5km walk followed by an hour of rehab back at home. I can’t begin to count the many lonely hours I have spent in the dark, walking and processing thoughts and priorities.

My weekly visits to Lara are always a highlight. My flexibility is measured as well as my strength. Some weeks just like some days are better than others. Lately there are a few moments of some days that I am totally pain free. These can quickly be followed by days and moments of crappy pain, but I will take the good ones for sure. Setbacks some and it’s natural to be bummed by them. Thinking “end goal” always helps. Watching Billy Kemper’s story after that crazy injury in Morocco has inspired me tremendously and there is a kinship that forms in adversity.

To keep the spirits up, I have ordered me a new board from Nick (Kneeon) which should arrive any day.

Jedd has also shaped me a 5’4 twinny that looks more like something that should be flying in space rather than the water. Can’t wait to get these beauties wet.

The daily grind continues relentlessly and it’s not always easy to appreciate the reasons for the dark hours one spends with oneself on the rehab trail. I want the prize now. Sheesh, it’s a constant battle upstairs. Here’s the weird thing, the closer I get to the end of April (paddle out day…hopefully), the more fearful I become. Will I be able to, and can I still?

All this and more just keeps swimming in the head and there’s the self-doubt.

Fuck it’s terrifying.

I have gone over it a million times in my head, do I just paddle out at a gentle beach break and see how it goes. Na, that scares me more. Soft waves are hard work and the amount of torque on the spine terrifies me. What if the nuts and bolts pop out?

There is no way in hell I am going back to that building with the big red cross on it. This drives me harder for sure back on the road, back to the floor and core exercises.

Lara assures me the hyperextension of the back I have obtained through this time will definitely be fine for paddling.

The torque and pressure on the lower back coming off the bottom and turning off the top, is what scares the crap out of me. The reef and I are intimate, god knows I have bounced and scraped along her so many times. I have certainly paid my dues.

Wiping out doesn’t scare me, it’s that word again “TORQUE”.

Perhaps I will just go straight on the first few. That in itself presents a bit of a problem at the local, but that’s where my head is.

I know you will all understand this, “what if a section just presents itself, just asking to be slapped”.

It is so ingrained in each and every one of us, that muscle memory just takes over. Going to have to be ever vigilant.

I have swum out to the peak just to be out there with the guys. The first time was not great. It took me so long just to get to the water. Jumping off the railway line so not an option. Doing the walk around and trying to get over the rocks was tricky to say the least.

Feeling the water over my feet was an absolute delight, but crap balls, had the water got colder since the last time? As soon as I laid in the water, it dawned on me that this is going to be quite the journey.

I couldn’t swim on my stomach as the pain was intense, but fuck it, I was going out. I swam on my side and back. Eventually I made it, the guys cheered and whooped, I felt like I had just won the lottery.

It was so good to be part of the conversation out there again, it was so good to hear how stoked the guys were for me, life was good.

I fed off this like I had been starved of life for ages.

Today being the Saturday before the Wednesday that I go back to Dave (the surgeon), brings turmoil to my emotions.

I’m not sure what I am scared of more, being told you aren’t ready or yeah, go get in the water. I am so scared of not surfing to my full potential again. Every day closer brings more panic. I just want it to be over now.

Wednesday morning dawned (but not really), up at 4am and back on the road. Usually, I am thinking about the workday ahead but this morning not so much.

My head is swimming with what ifs. What if there is still something wrong, what if I can’t anymore, what if, what if…

On the drive to see Dave, the surgeon, my heart is beating at a million beats/minute.

It’s good to see Dave again in a weird type of way, he really is a very cool guy.

Anyhow, he sends me off for some more pictures of the spine. Gotta say I was staring at the radiologist for some clues, but nothing.

The stress is killing me, and I feel like my heart is going to jump out of my chest.

So, back up to Dave with the thumping heart, I can hear it in my ears.

It all looks brilliant mate. What… I could not believe what I was hearing. He took me through the X-rays explaining what he was looking for and everything was just right.

There’s no use putting off the inevitable he says to me, go get in the water…but don’t be stupid. I wanted to scream it to the world!

Obviously, the doubts started kicking in hard right about now, but hey, I had gotten the green light.

Thursday morning I was off to Lara for physio. I couldn’t wait to tell her the good news. The muscles on the left side of my back had been in spasm for two weeks now, so as thrilled as she was, there was the don’t be stupid again.

I had coached myself in my mind for months now, high tide, small waves and just go straight…right.

Friday morning and the reports started coming in. There’s a bit of a wave at the local.

“It’s go time.” With my heart in my mouth, I started packing the car.

Sweet Lord, it had been a while, I had to keep double checking I had everything packed.

I don’t think I noticed any other cars on the way, I was mind surfing all the way through to the local.

I got there a few hours before the high just to get my head straight and check the lineup.

There were some chunky 4 footers coming through, but I wanted some more water on the rock. I watched my mate Dave paddle out and get some screamers.

Steve finally arrived, “I thought you would be in your suit already” he says.

This is it, heart in the throat again, off we went.

Sheesh it was so good to feel the waves crashing over my feet and legs again.

Jumped on my board and started paddling.

Woooohoooo absolutely no pain. Got out to the takeoff zone and everyone was cheering and welcoming me back. How humbling.

Mickey Duffus, a local big wave legend was out. Everybody back off he bellowed, this man hasn’t surfed for 6 months.

For some reason, this made me relax and just enjoy the moment.

Something started standing up out the back, Steve was sitting in the channel waiting for me to have my first ride.

“You going Mick?” I heard someone ask.

Yip I heard coming out my mouth, I spun and went.

Muscle memory and familiarity with the wave kicked in. I made the drop…Fuck I couldn’t believe it came around the section and just flopped off my board.

Steve and Dave had the biggest smile on their faces. The emotion of the occasion just swept over me like a wave, and the tears started flowing. All I kept thinking about was lying in ICU thinking fuck, I don’t want to die in here to taking off on the first wave.

Well, for the rest of the session, I absolutely sent it, trying to take off as deep as possible on the gnarliest set waves. All the coaching I had done in my head for the last few months went straight out the window.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

Damn, I felt so alive, without a doubt, the happiest man on the planet. When I got back to the car park, all of the Kneelo crew were in the car park and boy were they happy for me.

Sean Thompson was there too, shooting my waves and recording the moment.

How blessed am I. Nothing was getting the smile off my face.

When I lay in bed that night, I kept thinking of the months of rehab and hard work I had gone through. The many lonely dark hours of the mornings, but I had done it.

The next morning, we were on it at first light with the Westside boys coming through as well. The Kneelo brotherhood in Cape Town is tight. I am so humbled by all the good wishes and thoughts from everyone.

Just want to mention Lester, who kept me sane in the last two months. We chatted every day for the last while, sometimes a few times in a day. He kept me motivated and hungry and for this I will be forever grateful.

There are so many people to thank for getting me through this period. I think you know who you are, and I will get to everyone individually.

It’s good to get wet again.

I started writing this piece to help anyone in similar circumstances.

Stick with your plan and give it everything no matter how hopeless your situation may seem.

At the end of the day this was such a therapeutic exercise for me. Something I didn’t expect.

The trauma was and is real and this has certainly helped me face it and deal with it.

If this helps even one person get over and through a rough period of hopelessness, its job done.

Mickey Kirsten

Legless Contributor

SA Kneelos

#leglesstv #kneeboard surfing #mickey kirsten #health #sakneelos #lester sweetman

5 notes · View notes

thehuskerrumble · 4 years ago

Text

The Way Things Ought To Be...

For some reason these photos look eerily familiar to the 2019 season

Before we embark on the 2021 Husker Baseball season, I feel it is important to take a look back and bring some closure to the 2020 season that might have been. The Huskers were returning several key starters to a team that finished 2019 with an outstanding record of 20-3, and I think that we can all agree that expectations for this group were at an all time high. But alas, it wasn’t meant to be, as the Coronavirus robbed these young men of what was sure to be a monumental season in the history of Higginsville athletics. But fear not, for I have been blessed with the uncanny ability to see not only what might have been, but also the way things ought to be. So please walk with me as we journey through space and time, and revisit the 2020 Husker campaign, through the eyes of an alternate universe….

Coach Figg is so impressed with Nick Herrera’s sleeves, that it calls for a fist bump

Preseason

Coach Landon Figg embarks on his first campaign as head coach, and is immediately impressed with the talent and depth of his inaugural Huskers squad. Thirty-two players show up on the first day of training, and each and every one of them is equipped with full sleeves on their practice shirts. It is also important to note that not a single player is wearing “Hey Dudes” instead of their required baseball cleats. Drama is at an all-time low, and almost no one gets mouthy with the new skipper. It is obvious that senior leadership is taking control of the dugout.

The old fences, before Higginsville went and got all fancy

Early Season

The Huskers get off to a hot start, posting victories in their first eight contests. They have outscored their opponents by an astounding 74-3 margin. Mason Rumsey, Mason Gash, Noah Iles, and freshman Cade Limback become the first players in Higginsville history to hit back to back to back to back home runs in a single game. Fans travel from miles around to marvel at the fences and dugouts at the newly renovated Fairground Park. They are also equally impressed with the size and quality of the Husker concession hotdogs. Everyone agrees that it is hands-down the best bang for your buck in the entire conference.

You can’t spell Noah Iles without several K’s

Mid-Season

Higginsville continues their torrid start by rattling off wins in their next 10 games, and stretching their streak to 18. Payton Boehm sets a school and state record by striking out 21 batters in a single game. But unfortunately the milestone was short lived, as Iles bested the feat two games later, handing out 22 K’s (he struck out four in one inning due to a player reaching first on a dropped third strike.) James Wilkson completes a personal best, by swiping four bases in one contest, while Dawson Kouril runs his season total to 14 outfield assists. Logan Warren hits a deep line drive to center field, but this year, instead of hitting the fence, it clears the barrier by at least 50 ft. Jonah Dotson and Ethan Rankin each pitch in with pinch hit walk-off doubles to seal Husker victories. But probably most impressive of all, is the fact that the Higginsville coaching staff never had to remind a single player to go after a foul ball.

Records were made to be broken

Late Season

The Huskers finish their regular season campaign with a perfect record of 25-0, winning the Conference title. Mason Gash sets the school record for most home runs in a season (21) and career (whatever that math comes out to be). Jace Kerley prompts the creation of a new category in the record books, by being hit by a pitch 42 times. Nick Herrera finishes the season with an on base percentage of .800, due to an average of two free passes per game. Cade Limback, Josiah Golden, and Jackson Kouril share rookie of the year honors, while Iles and Boehm are co-Cy Young award winners. The Huskers pitching staff of Iles, Boehm, Kouril, Kelan Ernst, and Garrett Pemberton, combine to sport a ridiculous 1.75 e.r.a. Coach Figg is forced to ponder his future, as multiple D1 coaching opportunities come pouring in.

Post Season

Higginsville does the unthinkable, by sweeping the post season and taking home the Huskers first ever baseball state championship. And to make the victory that much sweeter, they bested Lamar 18-0 in the championship game. There were accolades galore, as the Huskers swept the all-conference and all-district awards. And in an unprecedented move, MSHSAA decided to name the entire varsity squad as All-State. Mayor Knehans declared May 31st as annual Husker Baseball Day, and a massive parade was thrown in the team’s honor. Even the Shriners made an appearance as they used to do in the previous Higginsville parades. There were Shriner clowns, Shriners on horseback, Shriners in ridiculously small cars, Shriners just walking and throwing candy, Shriners on motorcycles, Shriners playing bagpipes, Shriners on a pirate ship float, and oh yeah, tractors, lots of farm tractors. It was truly a sight to behold, and one that will live in Husker lore forever.

Where are they now?

The 2020 class had several contributing seniors, all of whom will be missed at Fairground Park. Let’s take a quick look at where I imagine a few of them might be now.

Dawson Kouril

After high school, Dawson joined the Marine Corps and worked his way into special forces. He was last seen in the jungles of Cambodia, training freedom fighters in the use of left-handed weapons.

Noah Iles

Noah Iles is currently undergoing rigorous training in his bid to become a valet at the Gateway Foundations first ever space hotel, set to open in 2027.

Payton Boehm

Payton Boehm grew his hair out, started his own religion, and is currently growing “medicinal” marijuana on a commune in Boulder, Colorado.

James Wilkson

James Wilkson decided to take his talents to Hollywood, and make a name for himself on the big screen. You can catch him on season 73 of “Dancing with the stars.”

Mason Gash

Mason is single and lives at home with his sixteen cats. He enjoys collecting Beanie Babies and considers himself a master of Pokemon Go.

I know, it’s a lot to process, and amazing that these guys have accomplished so much in just a few short months out of high school. Of course, absolutely none of this is true, and it’s all just a figment of my bizarre imagination and sense of humor. Please do not send the health department to Mason Gash’s home, I am certain that he has no more than one or two healthy pets. In all seriousness, these young men are all doing great and I’m sure will be moving on to bigger and better things in their future. I really enjoyed watching them throughout all of their Husker athletics, and each of them deserved to finish out their senior year on their own terms. But since their high school career was ended so abruptly, I just felt that it was important to acknowledge them one last time, and bring some closure to the great 2020 season that might have been. Covid-19 has affected each and every one of us in one form or another, whether it be through lost opportunities, or the unthinkable, the loss of a loved one. For me, the return of baseball is almost therapeutic, and hopefully signals a return to some sort of normalcy. I appreciate you taking the time to read this ridiculous article, and look forward to better times ahead for all of us.

1 note · View note

subtleshenanigans · 4 years ago

Text

Just something I wrote - probably won’t do anything further with these characters.

In Bloom

————

Birch Brickpaw, mother of the dibbuns of Redwall. Brickpaw for her speedy cuff and sizable paws.

Badgers don’t name in clans like otters, not in a traditional sense. They like codes and riddles and secrets to share. It’s about fitting a long name, a meaning, into something simple. Like Hares, but not broadcasted.

Birch had grown up in the plains, in a humble home. Her mother grew flowers and herbs, her father farmed. It was a simple life.

“My little garden,” her mother would say. “See the flowers? They bloom in their own time. But the week you were born, my oh my! It made no sense. Borage, Iris, Rosemary, Catnip, Hyssop - they all bloomed with one another, so I named you for them.”

“I thought daddy said I was named after a tree,” Birch had asked in puzzlement. They looked over to where her father was splitting logs.

Her mother had winked. “Well, that’s what he thinks.”

It was happy, and simple. Her father called her ‘little sapling’ and marked as she grew. Nights were warm in summer, they holed up in winter at Redwall Abbey, came back for spring and sent gifts from autumn harvest.

Until one day they went to Redwall in late summer, and her father and mother kissed her brow, worry etched on their features.

The Abbot held her paw as they watched them leave, with the Skipper of otters and his entire crew.

And the door shut behind them.

And her parents didn’t come back.

———-

She would always be thankful for the otters, who under a new skipper, had tried their best. They hadn’t hid what had happened to them, and she was thankful for that as well.

Abbot Verum wasn’t that old, even as she was full-grown now. He had raised her, and trained her, and though she still held a temper after losing her parents, she was a kind, loving creature.

It was customary to have a Badger Mother at Redwall, and while Abbot Verum assured her that she need not take the position, she found caring for the little ones soothed the hurt in her heart. Even with the add-on of Brickpaw, she was gentle, and kind, and never raised a paw in anger. Discipline, don’t punish, and only if truly needed was her motto.

Many dibbuns were under her care throughout the seasons; the mischievous and the shy and the clever and the kind. She took in orphans and helped raise those who had parents. Life was beautiful, even if the hurt never truly left.

So when Skipper Wagrudder and his crew came one somber day, five rescued oarslaves and an orphaned babe, who was she to say no?

Until she found out it was a rat babe.

“Birch-“

“No, Verum.” She growled. That thing needs to be taken out of the abbey, immediately.

It was the first time Abbot Verum had ever been mad at her.

“That thing, as you put it, is a babe, with no family, and no home. He will be staying at Redwall Abbey, regardless whether you take him on or not.” He folded his paws into his habit sleeves, and his gaze softened. “I know you’re angry, and you have every right to be. But my child, don’t blame him for what happened.”

She watched him leave, the hurt aching.

—————

He’s a rat! Vermin, he’ll grow up one day and murder us left and right.

. . . but he’s also just a little baby. Will he really?

All vermin are the same!

. . .but, art they?

She remembered something her dad said once.

“Well, sapling, vermin are vermin, it’s true. But I knew a weasel once, and he wasn’t so bad. He made tools for cooking - I can tell you he shocked me right out of my fur when he first pointed that knife at me! But he wanted me to try it out. Gave me some of our nice spoons and ladles too. Said if I cooked him something and he liked it, I could keep the tools. Odd weasel, just liked making useful things I suppose.”

————-

The babe is wrapped in a shawl, chewing on the fabric and making it wet. It’s fur is gray with a blueish tinge. It doesn’t look too different from a mousebabe.

“They called him Houndstongue, according to Skipper,” Sister Fallow says, rocking the babe. The Abbot sits in the great armchair. Cavern Hole is empty this late at night, except for them, and Mother Birch, who watches from afar.

“Hmm, well we should change that. A new name for a new start,” the Abbot looks right over his glasses at Birch. “Any ideas?”

He reminds her of a periwinkle. “Pervenche.”

She doesn’t realize it was even her who said that, until she flees, his voice echoing up the stairs.

“A lovely name, I think.”

————-

By time he’s toddling around, which isn’t too far off, her fears come back tenfold, as does her doubts.

It will kill everyone I care about-

But-

But he cries, the first time he sees a fire lit, and crawls to hide behind the Abbot. He’s scared to take food without asking, and even then is scared to ask.

And he plays, tentatively at first, but then joins in more. Skipping and twirling and giggling with the other dibbuns, who look at him no different from themselves.

He holds his tail in his left paw, when he’s nervous, and chews on his right. He wants to learn to spell, doesn’t want to learn to swim, and likes cloudgazing with the others.

And Birch grumbles to herself, berates herself, because her she was, judging a child. A child who will grow and learn, and who better than her to teach him.

“Everyone is able to love, as much as they are to hate,” Sister Fallow mused, that night he was named. Before Birch fled. She hoops his nose, and he sneezes. “And this little fellow needs a lot of love, I think.”

————

Seasons pass, and he is walking instead of toddling. He’s wary of Birch, but knows the other dibbuns trust her.

“Ma Birch! Lookit meeee!”

It’s Ringul the squirrelmaid, hanging from a branch by her tail. Birch gently plucks her off. “Naughty little Ringul, you’ll fall on your head.”

She sets her down. “Now go off and play.”

“Butter kite stuckina tree!” Edin the otterbabe huffs. Thankfully, Birch is used to hearing baby speech run together.

Sighing, she crouches down, “Well master Edin, I’ll have to go get Addle, but for now-“

There’s a tug on her dress. “Mama, I’ll get it.”

And before she can respond - it’s the first she’s heard his voice - he’s scrabbling up as well as any squirrel, and back down, slipping a bit but using his tail to wrap around limbs and branches.

She wonders, then, is it really only because they corsairs rats are good at climbing?

——-

Pervenche still calls her Mama instead of Mother Birch or Ma, and she, in bewilderment, allows it.

Pervenche is still scared of fire, too, so he turns his back to it to enjoy its warmth. He wakes in his sleep with silent cries, and Birch only knows because she checks on the dibbuns every night.

But as he grows, he learns. He gains good friends, finds a skill in penmanship; Brother Mells teaches him how to plant crops.

“All the dibbuns are shaping up to be fine abbeybeasts, aren’t they?” Abbot Verum comments, one evening. Most of the young ones are helping set up for a late summer supper; Ringul and Pervenche helping with the lanterns.

And Birch thinks about the hurt that has steadily begun to leave; about small, tentative smiles and how he snuggles in her arms as she brings him up to sleep.

He’s no longer a little babe, but the worries she had had long since faded.

He sees her and the abbot staring, waves a paw after elbowing Ringul so that she’ll join in too.

“Yes,” she says at last, “they really are.”

#Redwall #fanfic #long post #ocs #prejudice #species #headcanon #one shot #birch kept wanting to autocorrect #I love the idea of this dude #just shoves a knife in your face #but on second glance #he’s trying to hand them to you #and remembering safety he’s holding them by the habdle

3 notes · View notes

leovand · 5 years ago

Text

ARIZONA U is proud to introduce you to LEONARDO “LEO” VAN DOREN , the twenty-five year old, undergraduate fine arts major in his SENIOR year. most of their peers deem them as someone who is +eccentric , +intelligent & +self-sufficient but i know that some of their professors think they’re more -self-righteous, -precipitous & -self-destructive, maybe that’s why the police are still interviewing them on the reopened cold case. maybe it was because they were also A BAD INFLUENCE for NATALIA LINDERMAN. i mean that is just a little suspicious, but i only really think of scuffed black combat boots, a car that always smells like weed, and meaningless tattoos when i hear their name, not murder. but i could be wrong. — MAXENCE DANET-FAUVEL.

boo bitch i’m gin, bout to head out to work but tbh i’ll be around to chat n plot bc whew it’s boring there !!!! anyway down below you’ll find a terrible bio + some wcs so come hmu and we’ll plot some angst or give this a like and i’ll slide in ur dms woo ah

also a tl;dr is right before the wcs and above that is a brief description of his connection to natalia

trigger warnings for drug use/abuse, addiction, and infidelity

background info

leo was born in london to two very wealthy parents, richard and cynthia van doren. richard was something of an inattentive father (particularly when it came to leo) and from early on beginning to distance himself from the family, and while cynthia certainly loved leo, she’d always wanted a daughter, which she got two years later when his little sister victoria ( @toriivd ) was born. thus, it was from an extremely young age that leo began to feel like something of a black sheep in the family. richard was, unbeknownst to any of them, already having an affair with a woman in america whom he’d met on several business trips to arizona. all they knew was that he hardly seemed invested in their family anymore, let alone to take an interest in their lives. of course, victoria was a daddy’s girl, and though she often pretended not to see this happening leo knew perfectly well she was lying deliberately to herself. it was something he only pulled out when they fought bitterly, and they both knew it was a low blow when he did.

this was especially apparent in high school, when leo’s acting out turned to drug use, skipping school, and even trouble with the police a few times. richard was almost never there either to lend fatherly support or to discipline--the only time he was, leo got the tongue-lashing of his life as well as a slap in the face, and if he had to pick a specific event which led him to the realization that he hated his father, it would be that one.

even as things were looking rockier and rockier with their parents, leo was 12 when his mom got pregnant again. 13 when she had their baby brother, bradley. it was frankly a mess and for the first couple years leo was not at all good about helping. he resented the further attention drawn away from himself and hated his dad more than ever for his seemingly endless supply of bullshit

when he was 15, tori 13, and bradley 2, their parents finally got divorced. he and tori listened in on the final, blow-out fight from the stairs and learned that the reason their father had been taking so many business trips to the states all these years was in fact another woman, and even better, the two kids he had with her. tori had processed this in her own way, and leo had tried to be there for her, but his own self-destructive method of processing it made it difficult to do so. in other ways, however, the whole thing changed the nature of his relationship with his mother, which had always been a little distant. the fact of his father’s betrayal had the effect of inspiring within leo a fierce love and protectiveness over her, and in the rubble of their family the four of them found something much more intimate than they’d had before.

he graduated high school in spite of all this but spent the following two years doing nothing productive; it was sex drugs rock n roll and rebellion, and through it all giving a huge metaphorical middle finger to his dad, who’d officially moved to arizona to pledge his allegiance to his chosen family. leo and tori eventually came to the morally questionable agreement to tell people that their father had died in a car accident rather than explain the truth, and for leo, it was as much an act of spitting on his father’s memory as it was a tactic to avoid talking about it.

it was when tori finally graduated high school that they formulated the plan to go to university in arizona, and while they were there to try and find their father. not because leo missed him, of course--it was closure he was after, and only seeing him and his other family would allow him to find it.

a year ago now, leo went back home to england for a month and a half to check himself into rehab, but the only person he told was his mom. it was for an opioid addiction that had gotten out of hand and he did indeed manage to get clean. he’s even managed to stay clean when it comes to the opioids, but he’s started doing coke now and then and dabbling in pills. mostly though it’s just a lot a lot of weed all the time.

he’s in his senior year of his bfa and has almost no prospects, although that’s mostly due to his screwing them all up by being high and careless about it. a part of him despises the whole idea of school and the work force and having a career and is lowkey self destructing bc he can’t handle the idea of growing up and having to act like an adult

personality

so for the most part, leo is super super chill, doesn’t take anything very seriously, is cracking jokes 24/7 (his sense of humor is so so so dry), almost always high, and if no one stops him will start rambling on about literally anything in his pretentious know it all way that he genuinely doesn’t realize is so wildly pretentious

he’s a fine arts major with a focus in illustration but he also does a lot of sculpting. so he doodles a lot, probably on things he shouldn’t doodle on, and he makes money on the sculptures here and there (which he’s telling himself he can sustain for his entire life lmao)

pansexual, tends to sleep around but genuinely likes being in a relationship. he falls in love rly easily and has little crushes on random people all the time and is prone to infatuations with people who don’t feel the same way. most relationships he’s had have failed bc of his drug problem interfering and/or becoming too much for his partner at the time to deal with

for everything he’s been thru, leo actually has quite an optimistic view of the world and people in general and he just really likes human interaction and being around people. he can come off as wildly eccentric and difficult to keep up with and sometimes makes it seem like he thinks he’s better than everyone and doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks but on the highest of keys he cares so much what everyone thinks and will probably admit that out loud tbh ftyegudhsujka

cares about his mom, sister, and little brother more than anything in the world and feels guilty as HELL about not being there while his brother is growing up

will lose his mind if u call him leonardo

connection to natalia linderman // natalia was the good girl, and that was certainly part of leo’s motivation to corrupt her—there was something thrilling about being able to effect such change in someone held in such high esteem on campus—but that wasn’t all of it. some part of him had developed feelings, too, and it killed him that she never saw him that way. the drugs and the class-skipping to smoke weed made him feel close to her, even when she was talking about other people. he eventually began to feel guilty for what he saw as poisoning her with his way of life, and he’d been working up the nerve to tell her this until she went missing. he now lives with the fear that whatever she got mixed up in that resulted in her death could be blamed on the drugs, and more specifically, him.

tl;dr // comes from a wealthy british family whose father left when he was 15 in favor of his second family in america; weed smoker, class skipper, pretentious art boy acts like he doesn’t give a fuck but actually gives the most fucks and readily admits it; surprisingly soft but will Fight for his mom and sister; spent two months that nobody knows about in rehab last year for an opioid addiction

wanted connections/plot ideas

this will have to be discussed with me n maia but !! a boy who tori was dating six months ago (for however long before that) who seduced leo and then told him he wanted to be w him instead, and then broke up with tori when leo said no and told her he cheated on her but not with whom fytsugeuhkdij so hmu if u wanna fill that and i’ll give u more deets 👀

the two kids!!! from their dad’s second family!!!! PLEASE!!!

randomly someone he was in rehab with showing up in arizona somehow???? more likely than u think !!

a few exes from arizona + any exes from back home in london would be cute

someone with a s/o whom leo is practically in love with who does not feel the same way back p l e a s e ideally they’d be rly close friends too

stoner buds thanks

gimme some of tori’s exes/suitors for leo to fight OR even softer.....to rly like and root for

a bad influence who encourages his drug use :/

good influences!!!

whew also someone who kind of.....had an idea of what he was doing with natalia and was Big Sus about it and maybe still is !!!?????!

#auhqintro #wow a mess but im abt to go check out all the intros so look out 4 me in ur dms :')

6 notes · View notes

counterpunches · 6 years ago

Text

Those The Mummy/Captain Marvel posts got me thinking about a Mummy AU.

Carol is obviously Rick.

But Maria is not Evie. She’s more of an Ardeth, as @itcameuponamidnightqueer commented, but that’s harder to work in with the whole ‘secret society passed on for generations’ sort of thing, so let’s go with Winston: A WWI vet, similarly scarred and adventurous, but with less of a death wish. At first I thought maybe Carol and Maria were WWI test pilots who volunteered to test planes similar to canon and Code Name Verity. Maybe the U.S. Air Service took on women to do tests for the craziest, most dangerous things that no one else would do and it was deemed acceptable because they were less valuable and more replaceable than men. Maybe they get involved as mechanics. Carol wants to disguise herself as a man to get in the air but Maria talks her out of it because honey, that’s just insane. Maybe Fury is involved as a superior officer, sees what Carol’s gonna go and is like hold up, skipper. There’s this super secret dangerous thing you could do instead. It’s risky, but that probably means its even more up your alley and tells her about the secret test pilot thing. Maria is like nah uh, I’m not that fucking crazy, and doesn’t believe her until Fury shows up and convinces her it’s legit.

But then who’s Evie, and how does the whole plot get moving? Plus, the ‘meet each other and fall in love’ thing is the best part so instead-

Carol isn’t a pilot. Maybe she’s just an adventurer. Ditched home as soon as she could, partly because she hated it, part because her bones cried for adventure. So she traveled, taking odd jobs, looking for ways to fill the hole of something inside, never looking back, never stopping, always moving. Further. Faster.

Her and Maria don’t know each other yet, but Maria is still a pilot. She dreamed of flying the first time she saw the headlines about Kitty Hawk. Crawled her way out of where she came from, fought and worked tooth and nail for every inch the world never gave someone like her. Scrapped and fixed planes, test piloted during the war with other women, deemed replaceable and less valuable than the men by everyone else other than themselves. She didn’t care as long as it meant she got to touch the clouds, which she did, and it felt like she didn’t start coming down to earth until the baby started growing in her belly. Suddenly the ground held a lot more interest.

After the war, Maria stayed. There were people in more shades like her here, and even if was still under the British, being an American helped her stand out in better ways than if she’d gone back home. Plus, it was the only place Monica’d ever known and the sky was a lot bigger in Egypt.

While Maria worked on the air strip (much quieter after the war, but steady enough jobs to keep them housed and fed), Monica spent her nights working as a server/shopgirl at one of the ex-pat cafe bars in Cairo and days as a clerk/assistant at the British Museum. She’s only 14 but whip smart, and already has a pretty good grasp on hieroglyphs, having read pretty much all the books in the place. If some of them had a little sand in them because she took them home to read on the strip while her mom fixed planes, no one was the wiser.

Carol is definitely the sort to get in some kind of bar room brawl and get locked up. Monica would play the Jonathan role, in that she’s the one who finds the key (unlike Jonathan, she wouldn’t steal it, never steal, her mother taught her better than that) so maybe Monica, cleaning glasses is in the back of the bar when the table overturns and the first punch is thrown. There’s lots of alcohol and memories from the war people are dying to forget, so fights are fairly common, but this one Monica remembers because the woman was drinking with the men, wearing pants with a weathered, dusty leather jacket and had a gun on her hip. She saw a lot of things working the bar, but never that. The key fell out of the blonde's jacket, and Monica slipped it into her pocket after the authorities dragged everyone out of the brawl and into the street.

Monica brings the key home, and while fiddling with it on the tarmac, it pops open and she pulls the map out. Maria notices, wipes her greasy hands on the cloth in her waistband and walks over, curious at what’s got her kid so suddenly excited. Monica tells her about the white girl who got in a fight.

At the prison, Maria is less than enthused by the gruff woman with unkept hair nursing a bruise on her temple and a split lip (but who’s kind of soft on Monica, but who wouldn’t be?). Monica asks about the key and the woman replies she’ll never go the hell back to Hamunaptra again, no way.

Maria didn’t take anything the dirty blonde said seriously (literal dirty blonde. She’s covered in dust and probably hasn’t bathed in days, long before she made it to the prison) - not the cockiness or the annoying smirk that never left her face - until that name comes out of her mouth. Maria heard about Hamunaptra from an old egyptologist she flew around who was looking for the lost city a few years back. It’s how she got Monica the gig at the Museum. She thought Dr. Carnahan was an old kook, but a nice old kook, who never treated her as lesser than (for being an American, for being a woman, for being black, you name it). Monica lights up at the city’s name, stories from her childhood as real as the metal key in her hand. Never one to deny her daughter anything, Maria says “You were there. You swear?”

“Every damn day,” the blonde replies with a smirk.

Maria bites her tongue but doesn’t stop her eyes from rolling damn near back in her skull. She doesn’t have the time or patience for this. “Do you know how to get there or not,” she growls into the bars.

“Sure do,” the woman says, before pressing her mouth forward and kisses Maria full on the lips through the bars. One of the guards clubs her and she groans, but stays on her knees.

Maria is stunned, then irritated. “If you’re serious, I can fly us there. If not, you’re welcome to rot here and let them play the bongos on your ribs,” she says, gesturing to the guards before getting up to leave. “C’mon, Monica. This was a waste of time.”

They’re already turned to leave when the woman cries ‘Wait.” This time a hint of awe and respect croaks through her voice. “You can fly?”

“Every damn day,” Maria says.

The smirk climbs back on the woman’s face, but admiration twinkles in her eye and softens it. “Carol Danvers,” she says, offering a dirty hand through the bars.

CUE TITLE CARD

#carol and maria #danbeau #captain marvel #carol danvers #maria rambeau #the mummy #oops

39 notes · View notes

professorandmaryann · 6 years ago

Text

MAG vs. MAP - Reasons why I don’t ship Mary Ann and Gilligan

I made a faux pas when joining the Gilligan’s Island fandom online. In one group, I asked if anyone else likes the Professor and Mary Ann together. According to a few of the responses, my opinion is ‘invalid’ and that Gilligan is the only acceptable mate for Mary Ann. Who would have guessed this was a touchy subject?

“IT’S NOT IN THE SCRIPT!”

Word for word? No. Mentally? Yes. Physically? Yes. Intentionally? Yes and no. You’ll have to hear me out.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Gilligan and Mary Ann. They are a sweet couple — especially in the early episodes when Mary Ann is so adorably crushing on him.

But...

Mary Ann matures as the series progresses. Gilligan… he has his moments, but he will always Gilligan. We wouldn’t want him any other way. More on this in a minute.

At the time of the shipwreck, we see Mary Ann fresh off the farm and tossed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. She is the most sheltered of the bunch, as in she’s had little to no life experiences outside of Kansas. She is not without a contribution to the group. She plays a vital role in making sure the castaways are eating proper meals and not just grazing. However, her skills don’t override her naivete. In his own way, Gilligan is also naive. If not naive, then happily oblivious. This is a quality she can relate to, and hey, Gilligan is super cute and the closest to her age. Given her upbringing, she is naturally going to gravitate toward him. They also have common interests such as butterfly hunting, taste in music, etc. They are a good pair and in many ways, Gilligan is any ‘Mary Ann’’s dream. He’s innocent and incapable of hate.

But he’s also insanely uncomfortable expressing any kind of romantic affection, going as far as to state in one episode he never wants to get married. Unlike Ginger, Mary Ann respects this. She has moments of pushing a kiss on the cheek but never tries to seduce him or force him into anything that makes him uncomfortable (’The Second Ginger Grant’ aside...). By the end of the series, Gilligan appears to accept Ginger’s overzealous flirtations and once or twice falls into her trance. With Mary Ann, he still retracts. Mary Ann is his friend. His best friend after Skipper. Romance doesn’t come into play for him.

Back to character growth… by season two, we already see noticeable differences to Mary Ann’s personality. Yes, she has maintained her innocence. Yes, she has held on to some of her youthful qualities. No, she is not the little bumpkin who needs to be protected. She was never weak, but all of the castaways are protective of her. Again, only natural given she’s the baby of the group. But overall we see a shift in her personality. A lot of the MAG implications drop, and a new prospect is introduced: The Professor.

Going through old posts and archives, I’ve seen so many MAG fans write off the MAP storyline in ‘Beauty Is As Beauty Does’ with comments like, “He only chose her because he felt sorry for her,” and, “The episode is only that way because Gilligan had to be the tiebreaker.” There are truths to this. I don’t deny it. However, The Professor prides himself on his intellect. He seldom shows romantic interest in Ginger. Though not quite as uncomfortable as Gilligan is with her advances, a romance with her is, at best, a superficial passing thought. She isn’t capable of a serious romance. Acting and Hollywood are her true loves, and she makes it known that she’s had more than her fair share of boyfriends. A strong platonic relationship is the only probability. Moving on… Mrs. Howell, of course, isn’t a prospect. So yes, in a sense, he was ‘stuck’ with Mary Ann when it came time to announce his vote for the most beautiful woman on the island (or world, to use his exact word). Obviously, the writers aren’t going to write out Mary Ann from the running. But as viewers, we shouldn’t only be thinking about why an episode is written a certain way. We see the plot presented to us and it is part of the overall story of the characters. However perceived, the Professor wouldn’t have said these things about Mary Ann lightly. As the most level-headed of the lot of them, he truly is able to see her inner beauty as well as the outer. He’s paid special attention to her from the start (keeping her safe in one way or another, generally spending time with her), so he is more aware of her growth than anyone else. And yes, we know Gilligan had to be the tiebreaker. We also know that he isn’t the kind of person to choose one friend over another. He appreciates all of them for who they are, no one better than the other. Another admirable quality, but I digress.

The plotlines for MAP are mostly unspoken. But they are there. For example, interactions between the two can be quite intimate. They’re almost always standing near each other and grabbing each other’s hands and arms. We can assume an overlapping morning routine (i.e. their good morning exchange as he’s shaving) in which they are comfortable, Mary Ann helping the Professor dress as a woman in ‘Gilligan The Goddess’, swimming together, dancing together whenever there’s a party, and other similar moments. Then there’s the matter of the Professor’s horrible acting. He is stiff and uncomfortable rehearsing with Ginger, but much more natural and relaxed rehearsing with Mary Ann. The theory can be stretched, too, by noting in Gilligan’s dreams, his love interest is almost always Ginger. Mary Ann is his buddy, usually. The one defending him. Ginger knows how to draw out his sexuality more, it’s as plain as that, even if it is buried in his subconscious. She can only relate to him in an adult way. If Gilligan were to end up with either of the girls, my vote would have to go to Ginger for this reason. Likewise, I think Gilligan would be good for her.

Come season three, Mary Ann is on a whole new level intellectually. She expresses interest in the Professor’s experiments, is able to take charge in some instances, can hold her own, and for all intents and purposes, grows up. In season one she states she has nothing in common with the Professor. This is true here. By season three, they develop common interests. In addition to a growth of knowledge, her outward appearance changes a bit. We see the pigtails much less as well as a more mature wardrobe. She is fully adapted to the situation life presented her. Gilligan is more or less in the same place in which he started. Clumsy, big-hearted, and boyish. They are no longer compatible romantically. At some point in the second season, Gilligan and Mary Ann form a brother/sister-like relationship. (“Think of me as your sister,” Mary Ann says in Rescue From Gilligan’s Island.) And it works. They bicker and play together and love each other.

Censors or no censors, psychologically, if something romantic were to happen between Mary Ann and Gilligan it would have by the end of the first season. They were both young and in a new, adventurous surrounding. One or both of their personalities would have set something in motion, especially with the nudge of Mrs. Howell. Fact is that Gilligan just isn’t in a romantic mindset. He loves his job and he loves his friends. A wife doesn’t come into play. With Mary Ann, we’re left to assume she wants to settle down and have a family. While Gilligan would undoubtedly be a good father, he would in many ways be another child for Mary Ann to take care of. Dawn Wells has said herself that a romantic relationship between Mary Ann and Gilligan is improbable.

Another comment I’ve seen more than once: “MAP shippers only write FanFiction because they’re just writing themselves with the Professor.”

Well… yes. Isn’t that what writing is? Perhaps I’m taking it too literally as an aspiring author, but you have to put yourself in the place of your characters. Even in FanFiction. Especially in FanFiction. Why else would we write for someone else’s character? For the money? For fame? Our favorites, be it a single character, a group, or a ship, are our favorites because we connect to them. There’s a passion there. Some we connect to more than others or on more than one level. As a writer, it is your duty to put yourself in the place of the character you’re writing, even if you wouldn’t necessarily go after a Professor or go after a Gilligan. So yes, perhaps someone writing a story about Mary Ann and the Professor would like to and is imagining what it might be like to find someone like the other. When writing, it’s only natural that an essence of ourselves go into our words. It’s not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s extremely obvious, especially when the character strays too far away from their canon personality, but the solution is simple. Hit the back button. All of this can be said for MAG stories as well. Stated before, Gilligan is in many ways a dream match for the ‘Mary Ann’ personality type. He represents the innocence that has been lost in modern times. So really, there’s more fantasy surrounding him. A Gilligan isn’t as obtainable. He is a rarity that should be cherished. And there is nothing wrong with that. Overall, my biggest question about this comment is, why are you reading the story if you don’t like the pairing? Why are you wasting your time making someone feel bad for something they put their heart into? Move on.

For me, the chemistry was never there for Gilligan and Mary Ann. A deep, deep, friendship? Absolutely. Romantically, she is much better suited for the Professor, and vice versa. Mary Ann has a desire to learn things, the Professor has the wisdom to offer. And she retains it. Subsequently, he can protect her and she can nurture him. In a way, it makes sense Mary Ann would end up with someone older, though that is an entirely different matter I’ll save for another time. Finally, the actors’ real-life chemistry brings this pairing to life. As far as Dawn and Russell are/were concerned, the love between the Professor and Mary Ann was real. It was in their script.

I believe MAG was the intent of Sherwood Schwartz, however, aside from the musical (which, I’m sorry, I do not personally accept as canon, partly because I am a self-proclaimed theatre snob and there is no reason this or any other tv show needed to be brought to the stage), he didn’t take the opportunity to make this relationship a reality. Lord knows he had more than one opportunity to do so. I know Bob Denver liked the prospect of Gilligan marrying Mary Ann, but again, not much came of it aside from a comment here and there. Dawn has single-handedly created a MAP mentality and has been backed up by Russell, and for me, that’s half the fun of this ship: Watching these two friends make inside jokes about the love affair their characters had off-screen. It’s hard for me not to fall in love with the pairing myself.

“When people ask how I survived on Gilligan’s Island, I always tell them, ‘A lot of coconuts and Mary Ann.” - Russell Johnson

I didn’t write this whole thing out as an attempt to convince MAG fans that their ship isn’t accurate, ‘invalid,’, or that MAP is superior. I wrote it because I wanted to share my personal reasons for not being a fan of MAG (romantically) and to hopefully provide some reasons as to why people like MAP and/or what they see in them. (I also found it to be a good psychology piece. It’s amazing how many profound themes are hidden in a show that consists of dozens of pie in the face gags.) Will I have the guts to post this outside Tumblr? Probably not right now. I’m a newbie in the community though I’ve been watching the show off and on for about ten years. The MAG vs. MAP debate has been weighing on my mind and I thought I might as well put my thoughts into words. It seems strange to me that there is such a war between fans over something like this. Remember this show is first and foremost a goofy sitcom from the 1960s (that had almost no romance in it). Quite frankly, I’m appalled by a few of the comments I’ve seen on old message boards. I’m choosing to believe those dark days are over and fandom culture has evolved since the mid-2000s to be more respectful of other fans’ opinions… the aforementioned people I encountered recently aside. Gilligan’s Island is the definition of escapism... and the island is plenty big enough to home MAG, MAP, Pringer, and the rest.

13 notes · View notes

lilyissms · 6 years ago

Text

1) to all the new members, it’s a’ me! a’ may’rio! i’ve been stanned a lot. i’m a #goodmin. 2) to members new and old, i’m gonna pull a mona and make an intro 2.0 bc i feel like,, a lot of things were left super vague in my og intro and also a few things have changed per my decision since then so ?? INTRO PART TWO, LEGGO !!

「 MARGOT ROBBIE, FEMALE, THIRTY, BRITNEY SPEARS. 」┈ did you read that latest viral gossip issue on LILY CAINE? she is one of my favorite POP artists. they’ve been releasing music for SIXTEEN YEARS now, but viral gossip has only been talking about them for the last HOWEVER LONG IT’S BEEN AROUND PROBABLY. get this, i think i heard SHE’S BEEN UNDER A CONSERVATORSHIP FOR NEARLY A DECADE. they’re known as the PHOENIX of the music industry, since they have a rep for being RESOLUTE but INHIBITED, but who knows. maybe that will change once they become #1. ( MAY, 18, EST, SHE/HER. )

TRIGGERS: arguable emotional abuse, m a n i p u l a t i o n , death, suicide, unspecified mental illness.

1988 - 2002

lily was born in wisner, la with a population of 926 as of the last census. very small town.

the expy has already jumped out.

she had a super nuclear family. mom and dad, older brother, younger sister.

no middle child syndrome, i just... wanted to put her in the middle.

it wasn’t a harsh upbringing, per se, but it was a questionable one. they weren’t super well-off – her dad ‘ran’ a restaurant with little to no traction that was shut down in 1994, her mom was a job-skipper who was a waitress one day and a nanny the next. her brother started working at a gas station as soon as he was old enough. tried so hard, didn’t get too far.

did they really try that hard tho? i mean homeboy dad knew his restaurant was shit, homegirl mom knew she needed to actually work to hold down a job. only person who actually worked in the family was her brother tbh.

homeboy dad also had a problem with those alcoholic beverages and homegirl mom didn’t do much to help.

so not a TERRIBLE, UNBEARABLE, TAKE THEM AWAY FROM THE HOUSE living situation, but a MAYBE GO MAKE SURE THESE KIDS ARE ALIVE situation

and that’s why lily and her younger sister were both used as meal tickets by her parents. they focused on them way more than they did their jobs, but not in that nice and pampering way?? more in the dance mom -esque way. like, they were CONVINCED one of the two was gonna rise to fame™ and all of their problems would be fixed. they put them in classes and competitions and basically used all of the money they should’ve been using for food and bills to see if one of these two kids could make them millionaires.

sorry brother.

delusional? YES. but did it work? EVENTUALLY.

during one of said competitions, lily was kind of scouted out. she was 15 when she was signed to jive (wow, the expy is just thumpin!) and put out her first single, the anthem we all know, ‘...baby one more time’

2002 - 2010

so homegirl was OBVIOUSLY not used to a city life in la with this HUGE population after growing up... with like 1,000 people in her town (rough rounding of the 2000 census). was she in awe? definitely! was it also super weird and lowkey stressful? totally!

of course, she still visited home – went back to la from la (asdfghjkl) about every two months and spent around two weeks there – but she had stuff to do! people to see!

the label was like “hey ok so we’re gonna train u out of ur normal register and into what we think will make u a hit!!!!!!” and she was like “ok!!!! :D”

released the album ‘...baby one more time’ when she was 15. released ‘oops!... i did it again’ when she was 16. released ‘lily’ when she was 17. released ‘in the zone’ when she was 19.

-banjo noise- THIS IS FOR ALL THEM SOUTHERN BOYS OUT THERE

am i going to steal various accomplishments from her vc? obviously. i’ve already shown that she’s 110% an expy so WHY WOULDN’T I?

collaborated with madonna on ‘me against the music’. did she fuckin star in ‘crossroads’, as written by shona rhimes, when she was 18? obviously. 110% did the snake vma thing when she was 18. 110% did the madonna vma thing when she was 19. got a star on the walk of fame when she was 19. performed live with michael jackson when she was 20. won a grammy for ‘toxic’ when she was 20. ‘blackout’ would later be inducted into the rock ‘n’ roll hall of fame, but we’re not there yet. that’s just one of my favs.

she was totally america’s sweetheart. nice southern girl from a small town. nice manners. fun interviews. cute!!

but that ain’t how hollywood works, is it? catch whiff of a scandal and, yes!, tabloids!

the biggest one before her image completely shattered was when she got married to an old friend in vegas, also at the age of 20. 20 was an interesting age for her.

god, i’m original.

believe it or not, it wasn’t drunken! they were just caught up in everything, then they were like “oh!! that was probably a bad idea!!” a few days later!! especially when her team was like “bitch what the fuck.”

two weeks later, the marriage was annulled. the tabloids were still super excited, and her team was still like “bitch what the fuck.”, so that being said:

people were shutting her doWN.

“bad ifnFLUneCE!!!” “sECX!!??”!” “eXPOasURE!!!” - every parent.

and that was the catalyst!!

so, as we all know by now, i’m really original? like, lily is 110% original with no outside influences whatsoever?

that being said, during a leg of her tour, she met this one guy who worked as a celebrity personal trainer and was immediately enamored with him. very smooth-talking, super good-looking, seemed intelligent, super good-looking, was pretty normal, super good-looking

so she immediately took to him. after only dating people who were essentially the exact opposite of him – very clean, very ‘generous’, etc. – she wanted a change. he provided the change she thought she needed.

so lowkey everyone else totally saw through him. he was very much a druggie, very much a.... womanizer, very much just a douchebag in general? he was very much unfit to actually be in a committed relationship, but lily was totally blinded by how normal and, therefore, different he was.

no matter how long she’d known the person, and no matter how close they were, the second someone was like ‘lily. he sucks.’ she was like ‘we aren’t friends anymore bye.’

what she wanted most out of him was to be domestic, and he was like “ya sure ok.” so only five months after they started dating, they got married.

some of the people she’d shut out had found a perfect opportunity to make her into their own personal cash cow. her mom sold what was meant to be personal information, just between her and her family. her first boyfriend (back before she was #famous) sold a lot of the stuff she left behind or sent him on ebay (i could probably pretend i was being original here, but i’ve gotta embrace the expy, so here’s reg’s expy!!), etc., etc., etc.

i’m telling y’all, it just wasn’t her year!! i mean, she’s actually 21 by now i think, but it still just wasn’t her year!! her dad decided “you know what i’m gonna do... have a heart attack and die.” of course, they were never super close, so it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, but like... WOW. must’ve ignored one of those ‘send this to 10 other people in the next 30 minutes or bad luck for the next two years!’ chain e-mails.

so she compensated for that by having a child, as one does. the same year, ‘blackout’ was put out (because i, of course, am original) and, although it’d later be very much acclaimed, they completely slept on promoting it. of the albums that’d been put out thus far, it’d been her least purchased, despite being arguably the best quality (listen, i’m not talking opinion, i’m talking FACTS. in the zone, blackout, and glory are the most acclaimed in production and content. FACTS.)?? and definitely being the one she was the most involved in.

essentially the only form of promotion they rly did was dropping an album of outtakes, then taking it down the very next day.

we stan all the songs on it. especially the last two.

but!! it was all g!! they named the kid after her dad!! and it was all good!!

up until it was brought to her attention that her husband (whose name was originally jett, but i feel like that needs to be changed now that there’s a jett in the roleplay?? input would be great. gotta be a name that a kid would think sounds cool, but would sound really strange on a grown man.) had had multiple hookups during their months of dating and their marriage. also lowkey admitted he, too, was using lily as a cashcow.

so the bitch was completely torn. he was the first ‘normal’ person who’d entered her life, and essentially the only person left, but everyone else... had been right?

cue ‘why should i be sad’ being added to the album!

ultimately, she filed for divorce.

after inspection, the initial custody ruling was that it’d be joint. there would be one week with brock (the new name has been decided), one week with lily. but, brock wasn’t the one always in the limelight. after the legalities had been, for the most part, settled, he was pretty much a normal guy again. very rare to see him in tabloids. his name was everywhere when lily was in an article, though! because everything was his fault, of course!

due to numerous articles that were very suspicious, reports of erratic behavior around paparazzi and reporters, etc., etc., plus just the general rules of it all, lily got some more visitation from the services who were really keeping a keen eye on her.

there came times that coincidences made it look like the ‘house’ (see: mansion) was an unsafe place for a child. too often, the nanny wasn’t around and it was her word against her new manager’s.

although she was, in no way, romantically or sexually involved with her new manager, he was under the assumption that everything would be far easier if the kid wasn’t around. plenty of sabotage, y’know? (can we guess who he’s an expy of?) the fact that she was involved with a tmz reporter (expy of who?) didn’t help, either.

eventually, they were like “aight binch we’ve had enough” and decided it was in everyone’s best interest that the kid go live with brock, full time.

ok, so now she had: her new manager whom she and the nanny were wary of, that tmz reporter who, if she was being realistic, would probably milk her for all she was worth if they broke up, and the nanny... but not even really her, what considering she didn’t need her anymore.

so, one day, she was like, “bye bye, birdie!”

birdie being her.

but birdie didn’t go bye bye, what a relief. the one good thing her new manager ever did – redemption.

but, i’m original, she was placed under a 5150 hold.

after one other incident, this time not exactly ‘bye bye, birdie-ing’, but close enough, everyone was like “ok wtf bitch.”

i feel like it should be known that the fact that it wasn’t just about a Boy or even her kid was ignored. there were many forms of therapy involved, some controversial. like,, we ain’t playin around,, we ain’t blamin boys,, it ain’t 1940.

in may of 2011, she was placed under a conservatorship.

so, if you’ve stuck with me this far, you’ve probably totally forgotten about her siblings. you know what happened to her dad, you know what happened to her mom, but what about her siblings?

one of them, her sister, almost signed to a label... until she was like “o shit.”

her brother was still a normal guy who wound up being the conservator of both the person and the estate. a good ol’ boy.

they’re dumb. in september of 2010, ‘womanizer’ came out as a single; october, ‘circus’; november, ‘if u seek amy’; december, the full ‘circus’ album. great comeback album, but........ super quick back into the spotlight.

i feel like that makes it seem like i’m going to start describing more events that took place after. nothing super dramatic did. there were a lot of questions, though. there was one (1) documentary in which no question was off limits (huh, wonder what that’s an expy of?), but, after that, B L A C K L I S T.

also, i feel as though i should specify: it’s pretty hard to?? not know when a huge celebrity has been placed under a conservatorship?? like y’all we know amanda bynes was and she wasn’t even a b-lister anymore. so!! that being in the ‘rumor’ section is more because it: 1) covers all the controversial parts without being specific bc we don’t want... anyone perusing the main to be like “wow chill”, 2) would probs have been forgotten by many by now?? so it’d be like a “o ya i forgot she was under a conservatorship!!” type thing.

2011 - PRESENT

after all of the Events, it was both in her best interest and in her worst interest to stay out of the spotlight. best interest so everyone would see she’s normal again!; worst interest because... the media was one of the dominoes in the effect??

so, up until 2013, when the next album was released, things were pretty quiet. during promotion in 2013, there’d been arguably enough time to collect everything and go back out and act n o r m a l .

as i said, i wanted to include the fact that ‘blackout’ was inducted into the rock ‘n’ roll hall of fame for its effect on the mainstream (essentially made dark pop mainstream and acceptable). it’s what it DESERVES.

in 2012, after proving herself to not be Bad, she was granted visitation rights. i haven’t mentioned it much because it... wasn’t in my original intro so it... felt weird... but!! she 110% utilizes those.

i’m looking to move some things involving this, her ex-husband, etc., etc., etc. forward eventually, but i feel like i need to get some plots in here that’d help that move forward first, ja feel?? because if i just start writing self-paras out of nowhere about this topic then..... i feel like..... that would make no sense.

by the way, i want everyone to know that she never put out the equivalent of ‘britney jean’. we do not fuck with that album. she put out two songs from it, but we’re saying they were released as singles. WE DON’T FUCK WITH THAT ALBUM.

it has its cute bops but the production isn’t the best, anything where she’s with will.i.am never ends up the best, and... it’s not... all her.

i’m looking for this one tweet that says “britney when her team tells her she has to do more than one take for britney jean” then has the video where the woman says “well let’s just try this again, you bunch of bastards!”

everything else has been effectively released, though. still debating ooh la la. tbh it’s a bop but...............

anyway, is still under the conservatorship of her brother. DEFINITELY has a new manager who was... actually her old manager, same with her team – new team that was... actually her old team.

PERSONALITY

has grown a bit more like she Was by now. she’s still def like,, not 110% there anymore,, nor will she ever be?? still much more reserved and uncomfortable in public than she used to be??

not super bright. not super dull, either. for the most part, she’s very much about the surface. although she often understands the ‘deeper meaning’ of some things, she ain’t gonna act like it’s some profound thing when, really: “the concept for the music video ‘circus’ is basically about, y’know, a circus.”

she’s nice, she’s nice. most of my replies involve her being nice. girlfriend down to bite if she gotta, though, but will she do it first?? she ain’t about that.

asdfghjkl i still dk how common playback use is for her yet. if i’m gonna make her an expy and full-on admit it, she’s gotta have some involved, but......... idk how much........ it would. depend on the performance for sure.

do you beliiiieeeeveeeee in liiiiiifeeee afterrrr looovvvveeee???? she still dks for sure. some of her connections have to do with that (speaking of, i need to update them), and t hose connectio ns are, for the most part, reserved for characters 28+

tbh exceptions could be made for female/nb characters?? idk why but i could?? see that more than for males??

speaking of, she’s bisexual. she’s not super outspoken like “I’M BI!!!!!” about her sexuality, but like?? it’s there?? it exists. ain’t a secret.

tbh she’s been around for a while so i’m trying to think of other things i’ve noticed about her over time but i?? am drawing a blank. n e way, that’s what i got!!

“however long it’s been around probably” aka “we don’t know how long viral gossip’s been around so if it’s been around for fifteen whole years then that’s how long if it’s been around for seven then that’s how long” etc, etc, etc

listen y’all i joined the first day so we were super unclear ok.

tl;dr: almost a carbon copy.

i’m gonna treat this like a normal intro post so:

like this or hmu if u want 2 plot !!

i have a wc page here which’ll probs be updated with more ideas later tonight, but i’m up 2 brainstorm or wha te ver.

also, to old members: if we’ve already plotted: like this for moral support pls.

#viral:intro #take a shot every time i write 'that being said'#or 'expy'#the mona in me jumped out.#compare and contrast the details in this w/ the details in my og intro post it's. incredible.#also for talia's sake i changed jett's name rip.

14 notes · View notes

bcbyies · 6 years ago

Text

damn maggie, back at it again playing these damaged bad boys. hi all! i’m literally so excited to play this lil tol nugget because he’s been born in my heart for like ... a good week or so. anyway i’m maggie, hit me up if you wanna plot because my messages are 100% always open for you.

baby goes by ray because he fuckin hATES his name. so jot that down. if you call him baby you’ll catch these fists.

except like his siblings always call him baby, and they’re the exception.

BABY HAS LIKE...LIVED A LIFE LEMME TELL YOU.

he is the oldest of five children. FIVE. there are three boys, and a lil girl ( aka the princess of his heart ok ) there is a fifteen year old brother kaid, a ten year old brother tai, & five year old twins raylene & sire.

so to understand the present we must travel to the past; baby’s home situation was never ‘normal’. for the majority of baby’s childhood his parents were alcoholics & extremely absent parents who spent majority of their sobriety arguring & fighting. moreso his father, but his mother started to go to the deep end shortly after tai was born. ever since then she’s been in and out of their lives and baby’s been raising his siblings. ( i mean he’s always been taking care of them but now they’re like...legally his. )

BABY hates his father, like...despises him for the fact that he could never man up and take care of their family. he was a selfish, useless, deadbeat and baby was extremely glad to see the guy walk out on his own to turn to his addictions( except just the house, the rat would always come snooping around his mother when she was out of the house...thus how the twins were born. )

so he’s been kind of...forced to grow up real quick, thankfully he had the means to just graduate, but just that. he’s been deemed ‘the rock’ of the family, having to be strong for his baby siblings.

in high school he was known to be a skipper & a ‘rebel’. which would mean he was often hanging out with the ‘wrong’ crowds & never took anything seriously. ( despite this he has a decent iq and knows shit. )

though after his mother finally succumbing to her addictions as well in his senior year baby had to snap out of it and finish high school so he could get a good income to support his siblings.

tbh speaking of knowing shit baby literally knows almost all the dirt in town, mechanics talk a lot of shit on the job lol.

he’s never really had serious, longterm relationships & fails to really seek that out, this may be due to his emotional state in which it’s never really developed outside of his family due to immense trust issues & his obvious daddy issues.

so when baby was 18 he managed to seek help with child & family services, pleading his case to allow him to take his siblings under his wing & the agency agreed to help him with financing an apartment to fit the five siblings.

now that he’s older the cps have less involvement in their lives, though do check up on the family now & then.

baby is like...a closet bi who doesn’t know what to do with that. mostly he avoids it, because he feels he can’t do anything about it.

so basically baby is a 22 year old dad with four kids and life is like...okay now, but he is very emotionally unavailable, distant and exhausted from the hard work he’s had to endure for his siblings’ well-being.

in a nutshell...baby is like this cool, reserved, bad boy family man who is like something out of a motorcycle gang book okay. i love him.

and he’s 100% a self indulgent character, i just wanted to write a 6′4 giant who has a heart of gold who can’t convey feelings properly but MELTS UR HEART when u see him at the store with two TINY children riding his shoulders or holding his hand. be still my heart.

some plots i’d love to have are his ride or die, best friend, casual flings from the past, a crush on the same sex, emotional reliance companion ( aka someone who sees him when he is vulnerable, but just them alone ), some ex-friends from high school who baby had to cut out in order to support his siblings, ex girlfriend who baby didn’t do right by ???

#tallowintro

3 notes · View notes

curious-minx · 4 years ago

Text

Tiffany’s Wastrel

The following short story is based loosely on the above tweet. Enjoy.

Tiffany is acquiring a taste for wastrels.

Especially for the ones with trellises and coiffed, pressed curls.

She pushes past her usual coterie of bleach blonde maniacs and born again divas that once crowded up her equally spacious and collapsing studio upper crust loft.

She envisions herself intentionally choking upon a rice cracker alone and saving herself at the last moment. Delicious!

Would you like a duel? Asks the phlegmy ancient frenchie that is poking through her front door.

“Excuse me?” Tiffany makes sure she stares the fellow down and then quickly looks away depleted from having to sustain so much direct eye contact.

Pip the ancient frenchie takes a swig out of a small ginger tonic he keeps strapped to his chest with a bandolier of tonics, “I repeat: would you like some gruel?! Tiffany you’ve got to catch up or else the entire team is going to march on off without you! How would you like to be cast out into a Tin Pan Alley without even a cockatoo to your name? Sure, you’re somewhat of a real classic Tenner, but let’s not kid yourself your face has too many obvious tells to be truly beautiful. Don’t fret though because everyone is really and truly ugly inside and out.”

Another grotesque elderly lothario, Pip Levant, that frequently sloshes onto the elm shores of bookstore aisles on bad days waiting to go full blown Nabokov on anyone carrying the sweatiest perfumed glimpse of college. Pip had accrued a beggar’s banquet worth of bad habits when it came to Tisch students. Tiffany has started recording these encounters and using the audio of these captured harassments as a soundtrack to her fabulous revelry. Let Tiffany have her revelry you dirty old septic tank of a man. You look less like a man and more like a fox that Bryan Ferry has sought to personally catch and skin intoxicated by velvet clad hand. Tiffany has been preparing a launching off for a TV pilot point for her Elder Abuse-O-Rama daily streaming feed that has gotten over 150,000,000 views mostly by smoking children too tough for to be coaxed onto the factory scene. They have jail broken Fortnite and are capable of thrusting stock markets into disarray, but they are eyeballs and eyeballs click.

Violence is not the answer, but it is the Design. How long has Tiffany started each day emerging from her clamshell bed muttering that stormy relegation? Stretch and and get a feel of today’s wastrel, they are a slender tomboy dressed in leisure wear the color of Haden mangoes and she is amusing herself with a possibly tasteless bit of Tulvan throat singing , worse of all possibly in an attempt to win over Tiffany by her biggest weakness: amusement. Sometimes all you can do with a wastrel like this is give a courtesy curtsey and bid the wastrel adieu. Locked out of her own apartment Tiffany begins to roam the streets of Roman Solitude Retreat Center which has become the size of its own municipality or at least triple the usual sitcom set. Tiffany remembers the last line she had on a Mainstream Cranial Transmission, “Molly Trapped in The Polygon Mall.” Paid in sleek blue cash and she kept it all inside of her fanatical sister’s private banking system where all of her family funds are stashed away in inside the family compound’s intricate false rec room. Tiffany can’t remember this wastrel’s name so she hopes if she ignores them for long enough that they’ll do her a solid and dematerialize. Sometimes she breaks out a full on stoic fetal position wrapped around her blanket sarcophagus that was going to buried underneath her family’s shopping mall, a real brick and cement complex which wasn’t at all like the false duplicate mall her family had on loan in Dubai. How much does a personality cost?

Tiffany is a breath away from answering her own fecund rhetorical when she espies that nearly an entire day has been spent hibernating, oh what a satisfying state, and one that Tiffany prides herself on mastering by constantly tapping into her surrounding ether and stern mental gymnastics. She’s had her fair share of unbelievers. Her train of thought is waylaid by the wrapped in Satanic strawberry gift wrapping prominently displayed on her kitchen vanity. She tears into the gift with a Skipper butterfly knife. Wow, more soap Tiffany wants to say aloud but she is saving her voice for a jump scare, hoping that this will be the present that finally kills me. Tiffany unwraps and palms the cantaloupe-n-Licorice scented goat oat milk soap bar, and of course, there is also another bathing cap. When did all of Tiffany’s dates start insisting that she start wearing a bathing cap for every tryst? Stretching out her hunched wallflower posture into a oblique fortune five hundred pantheress with a vision, always ready to abort any given mission. Looks like all of the freelance work wriggled itself out of the hall of self congratulating mirrors and shriveled up into the sheen of dust it has always been. There’s a problem with having a surplus of disposable income and it’s one of the many in her personal Anti-pride parade stampeding issues that Tiffany is dealing with, better than most. Ho hum.

Another day in the life.

Wait a sec, Tiffany realizes that she fell for one of the many FALSE STARTS that have been rampaging her apartment building. FALSE STARTS of days spent as an ode to lovemaking; days dedicated to laundry folding; waking up pregnant with someone else’s paranoia; burning down your house and the rest of the complex being a rare but sought after FALSE START, but other FALSE STARTS are convinced that the other one is openly putting a Welsh mobster hit out on the other. Is it possible to take a hit out on a photo wonders Tiffany? Specifically, the one she keeps in her walk way inside an empty bombed out hospital in Malta. Other such snapshots of daily life were also tormenting the rest of Tiffany’s entire building, surely you can sage that sort of thing away? Tiffany’s FALSE START looks like a pinwheel sprouting out of the rusty smoldering eternally damp spot on her apartment’s bedroom ceiling. Tiffany braces herself, lunge stretches, swaddles a Ninja tailored hijab across her head that suctions itself to her skull. Air circulates into the lungs, but the exhalations are filtered out and even cleaner than before. She has gotten a job as a weather presenter for a fetish enthusiast video game streamer who always has extraneous content for the fans. The unironic straight faced weather reporter portrayed by a youthful female that looks slightly unreal. Tiffany massages her smile dimples and manages to tilt her eyes in every conceivable expression; the main pre-show exercise she has been doing for a good decade now.

////

Back on the set of one of her first jobs as a substitute “Older Sister” or throwaway Kooky Aunt for FACSIMILE FAMILIES INC. Her fictional father, Kale a method actor Pacific Island Man with incredibly bright fiery orange hair and glow in the dark freckles that made him constantly functioning at low-grade irritability. Whenever the real families were asleep Kale would creep into Tiffany’s attic room wearing a flowing night gown and a cigarette stained fuzzy robe. He would mutter all sorts of things never actually going inside of her room but just suspended in air on the ladder leading into the attic. One such muttering exchange sticks out in Tiffany’s imaginings:

A decade spent in this town and even the most alpha Fool gets thrown out for a newer model. Thankfully that won’t happen to you.

“Why not? “ Tiffany asks fully knowing the answer.

Tiffany you’re too much risky business. Something is always fussing around you. You’re gonna be fine, especially when you’re not.

Back on set living the life of a fictional family member Tiffany cradled a special hated in her heart for whenever Kale was being cute, and she was readying to go and take notes of the other crew members smoking and getting union benefits. Then Kale made his average frame appear more layered and enlarged by holding his breath only in certain parts of his body. Complete control is but a mere fragment of the whole this Entertainment Business requires. Spanking the imaginary neighbor too hard on a playdate is the only scenario Kale ever really got to act in and Tiffany never bothered to stay in touch, but the Fake Dad was right, there is something fussing around me. Tiffany flashes a tight knit smile and she grabs a magic eight ball and swinging winged bat, a cold transfused powder steel baby blue and jostles open one of the house’s many front facing windows. Without even looking Tiffany reaches into the umbrella stand pale containing a rough and splintered baseball bat. With one crack of that bat she cleanly smashes a drone out of the sky, the machine putters and sputters lamely crashing down into a private nude beach. .Another one of her secret garden variety admirers keeping an ever watchful eye? There are only so many drones you can cause crashing down out of the sky before you’ve got to pay back an obnoxious fees and fines. Community service is even enforced with classes to drone building classes sprouting up all over the country. The real family grew tired of Tiffany attracting so much attention of making their family feel too mythopoetic. Tiffany could handle getting fired from all sorts of jobs and she was maybe most thankful for being terminated for this one. She was starting to grow too fond of portraying Laurel Tallow daughter of Kale and Whisper Tallow. You have to always be able to find yourself.

////

A sickly fresh out of college bird man, a Gentleman Finch, is greasing up his feathers with Tokyo milk and sebum outside of Tiffany’s apartment building, checking his reflection in the empty koi pond. The Gentleman Finch Using the abandoned walker as a prop to imagine getting old with Tiffany, but then smashing it up and fluttering away with merciful glee. He must have been circling the block for at least half an hour but he hid his agitation well when he greets Tiffany.

Oh, great, not another wastrel. Tiffany lifts the bird boy up by his scruffy lapel and shoves him towards the community bathing center that has been closed since Tiffany moved in for constant reupholstering and fumigation. There is even an over eager exhibitionist elderly nudist. He is reciting the history of the Roman Empire by memory and coaxes the bird man child into the pool who falls in first flustered, and then he wheezes his bony little chest into a doggy paddle. He doesn’t even seem to care that his tweed suit is irreparably damaged.

Tiffany is acquiring a taste for privacy. She no longer traps her thoughts and misabelq them in jars. She is taking this time for herself. She is going to finally learn how to play the saxophone and be her own musical support on her own talk show. Sure, there are too many talk shows right now and it is a dying form of disposable industry, but you have your dreams and leave Tiffany with hers. Tiffany draws up a frothy absurdist escapist bath that is overflowing the entire apartment building. All of the FALSE STARTS are splashing about and pretending to be water nymphs in a manner eerily similar to when Tiffany tripped on acid at the Washington Yearning Yeti festival. Tiffany calls out to one her many readjustable neighbors: Hazel the Terrible, Lorne and Sade the lovers that always setting off alarms of their own agony and ecstasy, Father Pennyweather the convicted child molesting Catholic Priest with an expansive TinTin collection and was weaving a TinTin a Day tapestry in the building’s lobby, and even entire dozen of rude Yuzu family children were nowhere to be seen and no one bothers answering any of her calling out.

Pip is on an island of other people’s belongings and debris, stroking Hazel the Terrible’s dirty snow colored Pomeranian who is upsettingly sedate in Pip’s hairy arms. The Gentleman Finch offers a wing to Tiffany, he is out of breath despite flapping because his life depending on it. Tiffany shrugs him away and hops onto the back the Last Great American Whale, she is smoking a pipe, and she is exactly the kind of life model a woman could hope to find in these canceled times. The Last Great American Whale sings

I’ve watched my best brothers and sisters become bulimic because of arrogant Jonahs

Festoon your sharpest harpoons with my blubber because I’m going splashing

There’s a washed up Actor finding her way in the world and I am not her taxi

Nor am I her Mustang Sally, but nonetheless she shall Ride these waves with me

How about the Palisades?

Tiffany attempts to warble, “Suits me just fine,” but the Last American Whale sighs and gives Tiffany the silent treatment for the rest of the ride. Tiffany is deposited off on a cliff where she is free to dangle her feet over brackish crashing water. Down below idling in the Hudson is the same tomboy wastrel from earlier operating a steel sail boat. The ship’s sail is designed with a print of Tiffany’s shadowed eyes and Tiffany has no choice but to be kind of impress. The tomboy aims a cannon and fires out a parachute at Tiffany with fairly clunky but legible instructions and descends onto her craft.

I was hoping that you’d be wearing your new bathing cap.

“I bet you would. Listen, you’re perfectly cute in a droopy eyed Shelley Duvall kind of way but I’m not really that interested in having a relationship right now.”

Fine by me. Just so you know this ship is not meant to travel far and I can only get you back onto the New York side. Is that where you want to go?

“I do think of you as a mighty great acquaintance…” Tiffany holds waiting for the tomboy’s name to occur to her, but the tomboy simply stares at her, smiles and nods. “New York is the last place in the world I want to go, but it is where I must. The planet has been divided and conquered by the anointed media conglomerates and they want me back there….I want to say…Rikki.”

Glad you finally remembered.

“Whew so your name is Rikki? It’s certainly...spunky.”

No, but I’ll take it. I’ll wait and see how long it takes for you to guess my name right. The longer you take the bigger your prize. I’m going to port in Vermont, maybe Montreal if this old tin bitch can handle it.

“Canada. You know, I’ve always loved Canada. Joni Mitchell, Destroyer, Mark McKinney, what a country.”

They’ll probably deport you, but you can stay with me as long as you like or I can at least help get you sit up with a new place.

And with that the two women with no chemistry and a flaky friendship pointed and directed wind machines into the masts of Rikki(?)’s sail boat, which despite being weighed down by ostentatious steel was beginning a glide up the Hudson. Tiffany kicks herself when she realizes that she has agreed to this nautical voyage without having packed anything other than what she is wearing, but then The Gentleman Finch comes back up over the horizon lugging up one of Tiffany’s antiquate trunk suitcases big enough to fit at least one coastal traveling magician’s circuit worth of belongings, the trunk lands with a gentle thud onto the ship nearly causing the entire vessel to sink. Tiffany has to quickly go through her belongings and sacrifice a flank of wardrobe and two forty pound sacks of floral loose tea leaves that make one’s complexion clear and the glow of living in the present, she still had three more but it still did not diminish the weight of the sacrifice the Hudson is in a state of shock with the weight of so much style and sophistication.

A sea mammal somewhere between a manatee and a bipedal seal with flippers with thumb like protrusions catches flipperfulls of garments, and on a slippery jutting rock begins trying on some of Tiffany’s more scandalous Hudson offerings and is stuffing the rest of the clothes inside of a repurposed fisherman’s net. A gal can always afford to be thrifty. Rikki(?)’s sail boat regains momentum with the assistance of the loud and careening wind machines that Rikki silently with the same expression somewhere between a hesitant grimace and surgeon’s gleeful bad diagnosis. Tiffany reminds herself that this is all temporary. Even newer Jerseys and future minted Yorks will colonize and fetishize even taller metropolises, or better yet retrograde back into a state of complete wilderness. Suits Tiffany mighty fine because she’ll just be using the timber of said wilderness to fashion herself her own Desk. The tinier, aerodynamic and all-encompassing the better. The swaying undercarriage of the steely ship rocks Tiffany into a glimpse of a doze, trying to keep one eye open, trying to not get taken advantage, trying to not appear to be trying.

The Canadian Border approaches. Nevermind, that’s just the Catskills.

#short story #based off a tweet #birds #humor #short fiction

0 notes

nashvillesingersblog · 7 years ago

Photo

Ken Hatton shares his insight about performing with the Bluegrass Student Union, the Louisville Thoroughbreds, his experience as a director, solo performer, and arranger, and his very candid opinions about the evolution of the music industry and the Barbershop Harmony Society.

Top photo: Ken Hatton

Bottom photo: Bluegrass Student Union 1978 International Quartet Champion of the SPEBSQSA (DBA Barbershop Harmony Society) (L to R) Ken Hatton, Allen Hatton, Dan Burgess, Rick Staab

Todd Wilson had a chance to interview Ken Hatton for our email newsletter. Todd is one of our founders and serves the Nashville Singers as Executive Director and Artistic Director.

You can subscribe to our newsletter by texting the word SINGERS to 42828

DISCLAIMER: Some of our readers may find Ken’s responses to a few of Todd’s questions a bit edgy. Due to the length of this interview, only a small portion was published in the Nashville Singers newsletter. Hatton’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of the Nashville Singers organization.

TW: When did you know you wanted to be a singer?

KH: It’s impossible to remember not being a singer. Granddaddy and Dad were both “song-leaders” in the Church of Christ (“Minister of Music” was considered too “uppity”), and Dad joined the Louisville #1 Chapter of SPEBSQSA, Inc. as a tenor with his high school gospel quartet, in 1951. Mom was a fair pianist and could hold a tune pretty well too. Brother Allen was born in 1954, and I came along in 1955.

The Church of Christ held that instrumental accompaniment was a sin when making a “joyful noise,” so all the worshippers sang in 4-part harmony, you know, just like that original quartet, “Matthew-Mark-Luke-and-John.” It was all we knew as toddlers, so I can’t really recall when I learned to sing harmony. It just always was. Dad taught us to use our “musical ear” to find the harmony, using the shape-notes in the hymnal. His advice was, “When the note moves up, sing higher, and when the note moves down, sing lower, until it sounds good with the melody-note.” That was how we learned to woodshed; it was a spiritual thing.

I do remember at the age of five, when I learned my first popular song. Allen was in the first grade, and I would wait for his school bus every day on the front steps. I really missed my playmate! Each afternoon, he would teach me all the things he had learned that day in school. On one of those afternoons, he sang me a song that some of his fellow first graders had heard on the radio. Within a few minutes, we were singing it in unison, and with some occasional improvised harmony. “When I was a little bitty baby, my mama would rock me in my cradle, in them ol’ cotton fields back home.” I’m not sure that’s when I knew I wanted to be a singer, but that’s when I realized that I was one.

TW: What can you tell us about growing up in the Hatton family?

KH: We were encouraged to participate in music-programs in school by our parents, and we enjoyed those activities. Perhaps talent at a given discipline affects one’s motivation (For some reason, I did not really dig long division or algebra). Allen learned to play the trumpet, and both of us took piano-lessons as youngsters. Later, our younger sisters displayed similar talents for singing, and the oldest of the three, Jo Anne, played piano. Dad was one of the original Thoroughbreds, when the chorus was formed out of the old Louisville Chapter, and Mom sang with the Kentuckiana Chapter of Sweet Adelines, Inc. (later, Sweet Adelines International). Both parents dabbled in quartet-singing from time to time, and their ensembles always sounded musical, but never seemed to stay together long enough to earn rank in competition.

Dad took Allen and me to an occasional chorus show, where we would be seated in the audience and admonished not to move. Then, we would watch the chorus rehearse for their performance, and would enjoy the show. I can recall getting an unexplainable lump in my throat whenever that chorus of men would sing with reckless abandon. The highlights of those shows were the several chapter-quartets, including the Derbytowners and (later) the Citations, both of whom were really good competing quartets. We didn’t realize that the goose-bumps and throat-lumps were being caused by the ringing of chords. The big thrill for us, as kids, was to experience the Club House Four. They were a pretty good singing District Champ quartet, but those guys really worked at entertaining. Their jokes and routines were not as “edgy” as the Brian Lynches of the world might prefer, but old folks and kids alike just couldn’t stop laughing whenever the “Club House” was on stage.

The Thoroughbreds’ Musical Director was a guy named Bill Benner, who had moved to Louisville for work, after having directed the Lake Washington Skippers to a second place finish in international competition in 1957. Over a four year period, he took the brand new Thoroughbred Chorus to 8th, 6th, 2nd and 1st place finishes, winning their first chorus championship in 1962. Soon after that competition, Bill resigned as director, though he still conducted the Sweet Ads for a while. It seems he had been so focused on barbershop that he had ignored his wife and his job, and they both sort of fired him. He needed to get paid for directing the chorus, and the 1962 T-breds didn’t like that very much. So, our family took him, in, and Dad provided him with a job at his real estate company.

The saddest part was that Bill was being considered for the Society’s Music Services Director position. The Thoroughbreds’ 42 singers had finished second in 1961 to the 160 voice Chorus of the Chesapeake, under the direction of Bob Johnson. It was revealed later that year that a certain judge was a member of the winning chorus, and he had over-scored the winners and underscored the ‘Breds. The judge was kicked out of the judging program, and the Thoroughbreds received a secret apology, which was delivered in person by the new Music Services Director – Bob Johnson! It probably was a good thing, as Bill’s tunnel vision personality might not have been a good match for that position.

Bill proved not to be much of an agent, but he sure was fun to have around the house! While he was thinking about what he was going to do with the rest of his life, and eating Mom’s home-cooked meals every night, Bill would teach us tags. The guy was a savant, carrying all four parts in his head, and could teach the whole song by rote – eight bars at a time, with no “spots (That’s what we called sheet music back then).” In fact, that’s the way Bill had had taught most of the charts to the Thoroughbreds for four years – by rote.

So, Allen and I had one of the Society’s premiere musical smart-guys in the bedroom next to ours, and we got quite an education during his year and a half long visit. It turned out that we were pretty quick studies, which was a good match for a bipolar type, like Bill. There were five us in the house at that time who could hold our parts, and it was fairly easy to sing one of Bill’s tags after very little teaching time. The first one we learned was “I Found in My Mother’s Eyes.”

Bill moved to Chicago, and none of us ever heard from him again. Jim Miller and Joe Wise had been appointed co-directors, and with the help of coach/arranger Ed Gentry, ushered in a new era of barbershop chorus singing through the Thoroughbreds. Meanwhile, Mom took Bill’s place as Musical Director of the Kentuckiana Chapter of Sweet Adelines, Inc., later directing Falls of the Ohio Chapter, Derby City Chorus and Song of Atlanta. She served as a judge in SAI contests, and sang a pretty mean baritone.

Most choruses had a rule back then that excluded men under the age of 16. The exception was that one could join at 15, if your dad was an active member. The thinking was that the members looked forward to their night out with the men (not with the women or the children). They didn’t watch their language, and if they felt like having a beer or a smoke, they didn’t have to worry about being a role-model for just that one night each week. Boy, I miss those days!

Allen and I both joined at 15, and sang in our first Chorus Contest in Atlanta, in 1972, in which the chorus placed third. We were disappointed, as the Thoroughbreds had won the championship without our help in 1962, 1966 and 1969, and were tied with Pekin, IL for the most international wins. Allen headed off to Morehead State, and back home, Rick Staab, Danny Burgess and I got our feet wet, singing with an “old” Thoroughbred named Paul Morris on tenor. Paul was 28. We sang together for about six months. Rick went away to attend Georgetown University, breaking up the group, and Allen came home to attend University of Louisville. Then, Rick surprised everybody, and came home to attend U of L as well. That’s when the final combination of the Bluegrass Student Union was formed, with Allen on tenor. Now, we had four guys about the same age, with similar skills and education.

Mom (Mary Jo Hatton) was our first coach, and refused to let us work on craft, focusing instead on singing with the right muscles. She knew we wouldn’t go back and do that grunt-work after we had earned the “cheap” points. Mom was concerned about us damaging our young voices, so she demanded that we master vocal production first – a smart move.

TW: What got you interested in barbershop harmony?

KH: One could say, “See Question #2,” and just stop there, but there is a twist. As a young teenager during the hippie-years, barbershop was associated with the establishment, and we young people had our own subculture. We were told not to trust anyone over 30, and pop music was progressing in a different direction from Tin Pan Alley and the Great American Songbook. I perceived barbershop in those days as a fun hobby for older fellows, but the quartets and choruses I had heard didn’t seem like a good fit for the musical trends I was following as a baby-boomer.

Allen and I attended our first International Convention on our parents’ coattails in 1964. Later, we attended our second one in 1968 (I was twelve), and discovered that barbershoppers had lots of pretty daughters in the “Barberteens” room, but didn’t appear to have very many sons. That turned out to be handy for us. We enjoyed attending those conventions, and sang some tags, but didn’t really pay much attention to the musical goings-on – too many distractions.

Fortunately, Mom and Dad had a library of recordings of the Society’s Top Ten quartets, as well as recordings of live shows and Long Play (LP) record-albums produced by top quartets like the Renegades, Roaring Twenties, Boston Common, Dealers Choice, Regents, Gentlemen’s Agreement, Sundowners, Sidewinders, etc.. We listened to them all, and enjoyed some more than once. But far and away, the quartet whose records I fell in love with were produced by the Sun Tones (later the “Suntones”). My headphones and I spent hundreds of hours poring over their fantastic renditions of popular songs set to barbershop, and that music convinced me that this particular a cappella style could actually be “cool.” Later, I would wait by the mailbox for each new Suntones-record, as it was released. I listened until I had accidentally memorized all four parts to all of the several “Sunspots” records that we had. That was the final piece of the puzzle. I then joined the chorus, because I simply had to.

TW: You were a member of the Thoroughbreds, considered one of the most successful barbershop choruses in history. Can you share a few of your own experiences with the T-breds?

KH: Like you guys, I could write a book. Most of my experiences would be similar to those of other long time barbershoppers, and if I started telling about funny things that happened, we would never be able to list them all. I will mention one general happening that helped create my personal mission and philosophy.

Our 120 man chorus showed its best face during competitions, but after winning each trophy, about half of the guys would take a “break” for a couple of years. We would be left with 60-70 active singers, who did the business of the chorus, week in and week out. That core of “lifers” sold the tickets and program-ads, built the scenery, commissioned and tweaked the arrangements, rehearsed the show-tunes and performed the package-shows. The rest of the guys came back only to compete.

To our director, Jim Miller, it didn’t matter how small the audience was, or whether it was a prestigious event. He spent the same energy in preparation and performance, whether we were singing for a banquet of 75 people or a stadium of 10,000. I can recall many tough shows for small audiences who were not expecting the entertainment to be some barbershop group. Jim would plan the show carefully, knowing that we would have to work hard and smart, in order to please the “tough” crowd. Then, he would rehearse us for a couple of hours before the performance, to see which key people were missing, and would change his plan accordingly, moving certain singers to different voice parts to achieve balance, and substituting some second string MCs, soloists and quartet-singers.

After a complete run-through, the chorus would hit the stage, and Jim would let the audience know with his body language and apparent effort that we wanted to please them. He would work up a sweat, and motivate us to dig in, so as to deliver the most emotional and exciting performance we could muster. We always exceeded the expectations of those tougher (smaller) audiences, and each performance made the event seem more important to them and to us than it really was.

BSU followed Jim’s example in that regard, and, with few exceptions, we exceeded the expectations too. For three decades, our quartet did a complete run-through before every performance. We found that our percentage of remembered lyrics and accurate intervals went up, while our number of seconds of dead time went down.

Music Educators generally teach singers to perform without showing any apparent effort, but that was exactly the opposite of our approach. We always wanted the audience to sense how hard we were working for them, so we made sure that all of our effort was apparent. That made our audiences feel special, which is supposed to be “the job,” isn’t it? Jim’s and our approach was one of the things that set our chorus and quartet apart from most others, who tried to hide their effort during performances, for some unknown “sophisticated” reason.

One exception? We sang for a United Nations General Assembly dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in the early 1980s, and we gave ‘em our best stuff, performing with reckless abandon. We never got more than a white gloved golf-clap from those diplomats. Our host explained that they had all been taught to be very reserved, when in the presence of each other. But our job was to make them forget their emotional training, so we failed that day. There were no whistles, shouting, hats in the air, money or room-keys on the stage, and no tears or laughter from anybody. It was miserable. Later, at the reception, the audience-members were quick with the compliments flattery, but I just wanted to crawl under a rock.

The rest of the 33 years of shows pretty much run together in my mind, because they were the same in this regard: We gave everything we had in preparation and performance, and fell across the goal line each time, totally spent and exhausted… victorious! Looking back, our experience was a lot more fulfilling than if we had taken some drugs, skipped across the stage, and tried to hide our efforts from the crowd. Thanks, Jim!

TW: What were the names of some of the quartets and quartet-singers you sang with before the Bluegrass Student Union? Compared to those quartets, what was different about the BSU?

KH: BSU was the first organized quartet of which I was a member. Years later, I sang in several other quartets; Kids at Heart, The Sensations, The Exchange, Four for the Price, Bold Venture and The Daddy-Ohs! One difference with BSU was trust. Since I knew that the other parts would always be where they were supposed to be, I was free to think about the message of the song and our emotional connection with the audience, instead of being preoccupied with a few synchronization errors, out of tune chords or horizontal tuning (song going sharp). The other main difference was the fact that BSU was all business. When the last man arrived at rehearsal or at the studio, we started singing, and we didn’t quit until the first guy had to leave. On the road, we didn’t sight-see or attend a lot of parties. We discussed future plans on the plane or in the car, had our carb-dinner together, rehearsed at the hotel, went to the venue early, set up our recordings in the lobby, dressed and made up, did our complete run-through, and gave our performance. Then, we repeated the process before the afterglow. We often listened to the show tape on the way home, and discussed improvements for the next show. Every action was designed to maximize the quality of performance. In some of those other quartets, we spent a little time more enjoying ourselves, and that was fun, too, but in a different way.

TW: What can you tell us about a few of your most memorable BSU performances?

KH: There was a sameness about our performances over the years that makes them all kind of a blur. The common denominator was the audience-reaction. We started with a short, fast, high pitched opener, designed to get the audience’s attention away from whatever had preceded us on the show. We followed with self-deprecating humor, to make them like us personally. Then, we sang a swing-tune to charm, and followed with a sincere love-ballad, for the “kill.” After that, we could sing our novelty songs, to demonstrate virtuosity, and repeat the process ad infinitum. We were never really a one-song standing ovation kind of quartet. Our approach was a selling process, designed to earn the audience’s respect and love over the course of the performance. Typically, the long or standing ovation would come at the end, as designed, and only then would we agree to perform an encore. Incidentally, you never saw BSU take cups or bottles of water on the stage. What’s up with that? Do beta-blockers dry you out?

Of course, we saw our share of far-away places and prestigious venues, but prestige and exoticness were not what made a performance memorable. Again, it was the audience. One that stands out was in Viborg, South Dakota. This community had one hotel, made of unpainted concrete blocks. There was no phone in the room, and a black and white TV was advertised at 50 cents extra per day. The venue was a high school gymnasium, and our expectations were low. Nevertheless, we prepared according to our training, and when we hit the stage, we realized there was standing room only in the place; people were hanging from the light fixtures to get a chance to see this show. We didn’t know that South Dakotans rarely got to see any kind of live entertainment. People had driven to Viborg from several hundred miles around. It was such an appreciative crowd, and we were able to deliver a solid performance because we had not taken them for granted. Carnegie Hall was nice, but this crowd was deafening!

We were invited to sing on the Saturday evening show at the Buckeye Invitational, in Columbus, Ohio, 30 years after our first performance. It was to be our second appearance at the Buckeye, which was rare, so we were excited about the opportunity, late in our long career.

We decided to dress and make up in our hotel rooms, and arrived during intermission, knowing that there would be a feature quartet before our spot as the headliner, which was traditionally the final act. The stage manager excitedly welcomed us into a dressing room, expressing surprise that we were so late, and advising that we were scheduled to open the second half of the show. I apologized, and asked, “Who is headlining?” “Max Q,” he replied (who at that time was a silver medalist).

Barbershop-etiquette calls for the International Champion to headline the show, which should have been us. It was (and is) a slap in the face for any champion to play second fiddle to a second place quartet. Of course, it was possible that the show producers were neophyte barbershoppers who didn’t know any better. However, there is no way that Max Q would not have known that tradition. They should have declined immediately, when asked to headline, but evidently, they had decided it was appropriate for them to be the stars of the show, for some reason that was more important than good manners.

We decided that the only thing to do was to remain quiet about their offense, and to simply do our “talking” with our performance, as we had been trained to do. We spent a few minutes in the dressing room, rearranged our song-order and palaver for maximum effect, and went through the curtain with big ol’ grins, about half pissed off. We opened with “Back in Business,” and the crowd went wild. We just banged every song, and there was nothing left for Max Q, but a pile of juice. In the lobby after the show, our recording table was mobbed, and theirs had four lonely guys in tuxedos holding pens, with a couple of crickets chirping, and no autographs to sign. Second again!

As we were packing up, Jeff Oxley ambled over, and said sheepishly, “I guess you guys probably should have headlined this show.” Ya think? Yeah, that one was memorable. We never told anybody about it, until this writing.

In the 80s, we did some research by surveying the various chapters. There were over 800, and about 600 of them held an annual show, with a guest quartet. If you took out the holiday weekends, on a given Saturday night, there were 15 annual chapter-shows going on in the country. All of the show-chairmen wanted a champion, a past-champion or a top ten quartet as their headliner. As one of the most popular show-quartets, we had our choice, so we conducted a survey, and began to be selective about which bids we would accept. Our goal was to maximize fun and profit. We started to perform only where the chapter had a larger crowd (good for recording sales) and a reputation of hospitality where other guest quartets were concerned (good for the fun).

We pitched in with the Citations, the Harrington Brothers and eventually the Suntones, to organize three special weekends. We approached chapters about sponsoring special shows that would feature BSU and each one of those other quartets, with only quartet-singing – no choruses. The idea went viral, and the three weekends were spectacular - so much fun! The last one was in 1991, with the Suntones. We performed on a Friday night, two shows on Saturday and one on Sunday afternoon in the southern Michigan and northern Ohio areas. What a kick to ride around for the weekend with our idols, and get to know them personally! We included a set as an octet, since we knew all of their tunes, and we traded two of our guys for two of their guys at the afterglows. It was a dream come true, and BONUS – we all became good friends.

TW: What BSU CD recording project generated the biggest sense of pride, and what about that project was different?

KH: We were proud of all of our recordings, because we took great care in the production of each one. From a young age, we knew that our quartet was finite, and hoped that people would listen to our recordings, long after we were gone. That thought was on our minds with the planning and execution of each project. Bobby Ernspiker was our recording engineer, and he was also the son of a Thoroughbred.

On the first two albums, “After Class” and “The Older the Better,” we had a largely technical approach, caring more about the accuracy of the notes, the ringing of the chords and the intelligibility of the lyrics than about the art. We were making pretty good bucks on the road, so we decided to give Bob unlimited control over the duration of sessions. Bob was our fifth set of ears, and was instrumental in capturing the best performances we could muster. Unlike other quartets, we spent six months to a year in weekly recording sessions, to do our best work. It was our perception that those albums were not perfect, but they were better than most others. We made money, although our sales were not yet commensurate with the expense and effort we had invested.

Having met Walter Latzko, we decided to do our first theme album, which would be the first one created by any barbershop quartet. We chose Meredith Willson’s “The Music Man” as the theme, and set to work on Walter’s fantastic arrangements. We spent more time listening to Bobby’s guidance in the studio about emotional performance. It took a year to take the tunes from the paper to the stage, and another year to record them. This time, we spared no expense on the studio time, the costuming, choreography, graphic art and photography, in an attempt to create the best show-package and recording in the history of the Society. The result was an artistic success, but again, the sales were no better than those of any ol’ past champion.

In spite of the apparent unwillingness of the buying public to notice any difference, we were pleased with the product, and decided to look for another theme. We eventually settled on the songs of the 40s, and the idea for our “Jukebox Saturday Night” album was born. Latzko and Waesche, our two faves, collaborated on the charts, and we applied the same attention to detail (and spent the same moneys), to create the best product possible. We accelerated our attention to capturing the right mood for each song. When that recording hit the streets, the sales went through the roof. It was puzzling; perhaps the barbershoppers were tired of the Music Man theme, but excited about hearing tunes adapted to barbershop that they had not heard before. For whatever reason, this particular theme appealed to them, and Jukebox catapulted us to a new level of acclaim that left the other past champs behind. The perception was that we were progressing, improving and pushing the edge of the envelope musically, just as our great examples, the Suntones and the Buffalo Bills, had done twenty and thirty years before.

We continued that approach with a collection of tunes written by George Gershwin, whose chords and progressions had earned his songs taboo-status in previous Society competitions. But we liked them, and so did Walter (Latzko) and Ed (Waesche). The result was our album, “Here to Stay,” the first one we did not release as an LP record, but only as a CD and a cassette. The songs were more sophisticated, the arrangements were arguably better, and the performances were emotional. The singing demonstrated greater savvy, while our technical execution was just a hair less precise than that of the previous two recordings. The perception was that this was a lateral move, kind of an extension of Jukebox, and the sales were just as strong as those of the previous album.

In 1998, we introduced “LEGACY,” a 25 year collection of audio recordings in a 3-CD box set, including all five studio-albums, several previously unreleased tracks and a recording of a live show, complete with declamatory stuff between songs. In 2006, we created our final recording product, called “COMMENCEMENT,” a 2-disc set (1 CD and 1 DVD). The audio disc includes a few tracks that we were messing around with when we decided to retire for good. The video disc includes the best performance of each song that we could find on video tapes we had collected over the years.

Fans of “Here to Stay” and “Jukebox” have since gone back and checked out “Music Man,” and found it to have been under appreciated by past generations. We understand that our video of the Music Man show-package has been used by teachers at Harmony University for decades, to demonstrate showmanship, the way to put a show together, avoidance of dead time and the use of costumes, props, lighting, effective pauses and voice-over-music, to enhance a quartet’s performance. That pleases us very much. All of our tracks are available perpetually and digitally through iTunes, CDbaby.com and Pandora. We have discontinued production of all hard copy CDs, etc.

We are certainly proud of all of the products, since those five (original) releases each represented our best work at a certain stage in our development. By design, many of the songs in the second half our career had a timeless appeal that continues to pay dividends. Thanks to some good taste in song selection, great arrangers, hard work, outside-the-box engineering and professional artwork, our collections of recordings are still being purchased and listened to today. We anticipate that people will enjoy our music a century or two after we start keeping each other company at the ol’ marble orchard.

TW: The Nashville Singers had a chance to sing your arrangement of “Manly Men” a few years ago, and the audience loved it! When did you complete your first vocal arrangement? Do you remember the name of the song?

KH: Glad you liked that one, but sorry, I really don’t remember the first one. When BSU started, I was not adequately educated to sight-read. That skill was developed slowly, and by necessity, over the years. BSU was a hybrid quartet – that is to say, we were products of the woodshedding generations of the 40s, 50s and 60s, but were also affected by the work of genius-arrangers of the 70s and 80s. As a result, we did not trust some aspects of the written arrangement, and always reserved the right to woodshed our own changes. Sometimes, they were necessary, to facilitate breath-points and “covers” of pickups. Other times, they were swipes that we heard and felt, as we learned the chart. Helping to create the tune was a big part of the fun that we simply refused to give up.

Most arrangers think it is presumptuous of others to change anything about their work. That attitude is hypocritical and presumptuous in itself, since an arrangement, by definition, is composed of changes from the songwriter’s original work, who is the real (and legal) artist in question, anyway. As we experienced different arrangers, we figured out which ones had a problem with our changes, and we quietly declined any and all opportunities to sing their charts. Ed Waesche was the first to exhibit an appreciation for what he called our “musical sensibilities,” and endorsed our changes, unless we committed a form-error, which he would help us to correct. Later, Walter Latzko encouraged those same sensibilities, so we had two of the smartest geniuses in our corner, which was more than anybody else had. Those who wanted to dictate every aspect of the way we sang a song could go find their own quartet. This one was ours!

The woodshedding accelerated my learning process, and over the years, I learned to spell some of the chords, identify intervals, tell a major key from a relative minor key, make up simple key-changes, etc. Before long, I could sight-read all four parts, and would know them cold before we had our first rehearsal on a given song.

It wasn’t until 2002 that I bought my first Finale software. Friend Walter, had suffered a stroke several years prior, but was still writing arrangements daily, using his left hand to operate the mouse of a computer. The Finale system would enable me to be of assistance to him.

In his salad days, Walter could write an arrangement with his lead pencil and some blank staff-paper while on an airline flight that lasted a couple of hours. He could see the notes on the page in his head, could hear the tune being sung (also in his head), and he could write it down as fast as you or I could write a letter to Mom. That was his genius, and it explains why only a handful of our Society members were respected arrangers in those days. In no case did it take Walter longer than a few hours to hand write an arrangement of a single song.

However, the stroke had robbed him of the use of his strong writing hand and of some of his energy. On the computer, it then took Walter about twelve hours to write an arrangement. It became a two day job, so he would sometimes tire of the piece before he finished, and would send it to me for ideas from my old “musical sensibilities.” We collaborated on a lot of charts during the last years of his life, and he taught me a lot about arranging.

Lacking formal musical education, I am certainly no match for the geniuses who have that special (in their head) kind of talent. However, with the aid of the Finale program, I found that I was competent to write a chart that included some original ideas. With the computer, I could listen to my work through speakers, instead of “in my head,” and, with effort, could tweak the chart until it met my own standards as a top quartet singer.

It was a labor of love, and I was mentored by a guy whom I loved. I found that, even as my performing ability began to slow down, my strong imagination produced the same endorphin-rush, while writing, that I had enjoyed as a performer. Over the past 14 years, I have compiled a modest library of 60 or 70 charts. However, I was not the only one who discovered that Finale can take the place of those certain genius-skills. There are now more competent arrangers than there used to be, all competing for the attention of the top ten quartets and choruses. Of course, there only ten of them, right? So, my catalogue has been placed with friend Jay Giallombardo and his wife Helen, in the hope that some hot shot quartets might notice them. Some of those charts are listed on Jay’s web site, but I am not writing much these days.

Some favorite arrangements that I wrote include a medley of songs from “Paint Your Wagon,” a millennial song popularized by “Five for Fighting” called “100 Years,” and a five part solo (with barbershop chorus background) called “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.” My favorite collaboration with Walter is a contest-chart of a song written by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells, called “County Fair” for an obscure Disney film called “So Dear to My Heart.” We finished that one shortly before my old friend passed away. All of those tunes have matching learning tracks, which should be available from Jay. You can hear full mixes of several of them on my album, “Walter and Me,” available on iTunes and CDbaby.com. Thanks for the commercial.

TW: From 2004 to 2011, you released four recordings as a soloist. What/who inspired you down that path? How would folks purchase some of those products?

KH: In January of 2002, the phone rang, interrupting a BSU rehearsal on a Sunday evening at Thoroughbred Hall. A tiny voice said, “You don’t know me, but my name is Chilton Price, and I’ve written a song to honor the fallen firefighters from the 911 disaster. We would like for the Thoroughbreds to sing it.”

Usually, such a phone call resulted in an embarrassing experience, because I would have to tell the person that they had written a bad song. This time, such was not the case. Ms. Price faxed me her song, and on Monday, I sent it to Walter, who wrote a chart that same day. That evening, I passed it out to the chorus, and we learned in the same night. Two weeks later, we performed it for a thousand attendees of a convention of the National Association of Retired Military Officers and their bejeweled significant others, at the Grand Ballroom of the Galt House Hotel, in downtown Louisville. The place came apart.

I visited Ms. Price the following Tuesday evening, to present her with a recording of that performance, and to thank her for thinking of us. She said,” Ken, I didn’t tell you who I really was, because I wanted you to judge my song by its own merits. I have several gold records hanging on the wall in my hallway. I wrote ‘You Belong to Me’ and other hits from the 1950s. They stopped recording my music when Elvis came along, because I refused to change my writing style. But I have continued to write new songs that sound just like the Great American Songbook tunes for the last 50 years. No one with talent has ever heard them before. Would you be willing to listen to some?”

Chilton played, and I sang. I felt as if I had won the lottery. The first song made me cry, and each one was better than the last one. This was the start of a beautiful friendship that lasted 400 Tuesday nights over an eight year period, until her death at the age of 96. We catalogued her music, and wrote verses and extra lyrics together. We collaborated on new original songs. And we talked about every aspect of our lives, keeping no secrets. You guys should know by now that when you make music together, it is one of the most intimate things you can do with another person. When writing together, we had to communicate the same feeling to the listener, so we had to compare our feelings and life-experiences, in order to tell the same story. It really was one of the thrills of my life, to become friends with an accomplished songwriter, and Chilton, in particular, was a genuine person, with great wisdom and class. She taught me how to write songs.

Along the way, Chilton expressed her desire to have other artists sample her work. We were already familiar with the freshly budding careers of Michael Bublé and Josh Groban, so she was inspired to hire a pianist and record a demo-CD of original songs, with me doing the singing. We called it “Pure Price.” The project turned out well, but we were advised that new songs presented by a new singer was a tough sell. So, we went back to the studio, and recorded a CD with half original songs and half familiar songs, called “The Best Is Yet to Come.” Then, we were advised that, while piano-vocal was charming, the tunes really deserved more accompaniment. So, we went back a third time, and recorded yet another CD of half familiar and half original songs, but this time with a full 17 piece big band and a dozen string-players. The original band-charts were written by our favorite pianist, Jay Flippin, who also put together the best musicians in Louisville for the project. Man, this was a dream come true! To be the Sinatra-guy, with a studio full of hot players and the actual songwriter, smiling behind the glass. It really was heaven. We got to meet with Michael Feinstein for an afternoon, but so far, none of Chilton’s and my unpublished works have been recorded by anyone famous.

By that time, BSU had slowed down, and in December of 2006, we called it quits for good. Another singer who was working at the studio had a steady gig, fronting a big band on the Cunard cruise-ship “Queen Elizabeth II,” and needed some relief, so he could spend more time with his family. So, he got me set up to take his place on several trips for 35 days at a time over the next two years (2007-2008). That was a real learning experience. I was surprised to learn that those musicians do not rehearse. They don’t need the practice, because they can sight-read it the first time, and make it sound like some guy on the radio. The only question was, could I keep up with them?

We had several thousand passengers on the ship, and several hundred of them came on board strictly for the ballroom dancing in the ship’s famous Queen’s Room, which was designed and furnished in the style of the Titanic, from the original White Star Line. It was a classy joint, full of rich folks from several continents, who were very sensitive to the tempo required for each different kind of dance. We performed two one hour sets each evening, seven days a week, and we were not to repeat a song during any certain cruise, some of which lasted for more than two weeks. I had the opportunity to perform several hundred different songs, and I had a whole four measures to figure out the key, tempo, meter and rhythm of each one, before coming in on time and in tune.

The international montage of musicians was mostly fresh out of college, using their talents to work their way around the world, before settling down with a job and family. These guys were all pretty jaded, and showed it with their playing. Everybody was in business for himself, and not enjoying the room, the crowd or even each other. It became apparent that they had been taught by their university professors to look down their noses at the listeners and at other musicians who could not play as well. We had a trombone player who was a great sight-reader, but who was not an experienced improviser. They would “throw him the ball,” and then laugh hysterically (in full view of the audience) at his feeble attempts to play a trombone-solo.

I dressed them down pretty good during the next break. I let them know that this was unprofessional behavior, and I expected them to get a haircut, be sober, stop showing up with spotted ties and wrinkled clothes, and to act like pros, instead of amateurs. They could set me off the boat in Tahiti, and I could fly home – no problem, and they could explain the absence of the singer for the rest of the month. Then, I began to recognize horn players from the stage whenever one would distinguish himself with a solo. I gave them nicknames, like “Mr. Incredible (Ukrainian)” and “Lady-Killer (Canadian).” Before long, those guys were smiling at each other, calling out the measure-numbers and enjoying playing as an ensemble. We didn’t feature the trombone player anymore.

It was a little nerve-wracking at the start, but after three or four days, I was comfortable enough to look up from the music-stand and perform. After another few days, the music-director in charge of all the acts asked me to handle the speaking between songs. At the end of our first 17 day cruise, the passenger-evaluations gave us a score of 85 out of 100, which turned out to be the highest score ever awarded to that particular room. The musicians and the bosses were pretty doggone happy, and the band-director got a raise. All that resulted from a barbershopper – an amateur with a professional attitude – being thrown in with a bunch of professional musicians with bush-league attitudes. I found out from the band-cats that singing in tune on that ship made me an anomaly, which helped.

We made some good noise, and I learned a lot. The favorite tunes we played turned out to be a samba called Quando Quando Quando, with lyrics by Pat Boone, and a waltz-rendition of “If You Were the Only Girl in the World.” The young cats had never heard of the latter, but played it well, and told me, “Dude, you sang that tune like you wrote it!” It was fun! I was able to stick and jab – to back phrase – whenever I felt like it; much different from singing homophony with a quartet. No rehearsal was necessary.

After each performance, we had a midnight buffet, and then I would stay up all night in my cabin, writing band-charts. What was cool about that? The band would play the chart the next night, and would then give me pointers about my writing. It was a great experience, but after two years, I had enjoyed a lot of songs, and had learned everything the ship could teach me. I came home, and fronted for the Don Krekel Orchestra, a big band in Louisville, for a couple years, before retiring from solo-singing. It was a kick, but in the music biz, “you is either famous, or you is pore!” My last gig was a party for some rich folks at the Galt House on New Year’s Eve of 2015. I looked marvelous, but filled the room with mediocrity. Time to move on.

By that time, I had collaborated with Walter on some great charts, and I had written some myself that I liked, so I produced an a cappella recording, singing all four parts. I called it “Walter and Me, and it appears with my three solo recordings on iTunes and CDbaby.com, under the artist-name Kenny Ray Hatton.

TW: Can you talk about some of the choruses you have had a chance to lead over the years? What advice could you give to aspiring choral-directors?

KH: It was always a dream to someday be front-line director of the Thoroughbreds. At the same time, I had watched as the guys who followed John Wooden at UCLA and Adolph Rupp at University of Kentucky do well, but fail to come close to the records of the great ones. I did not relish the thought of following Jim Miller with the ‘Breds.

Brother Allen got his shot when Jim resigned in 1985, as co-director with Ken Buckner. Then, when Bunk left town to work for the Society in Kenosha, Allen was the man! He did well, and if you listen to the recordings, the chorus did some of its best singing ever, under his direction. But certain other choruses were getting better exponentially, and even though the T-Breds tied for first in 1990, the proverbial “coin-toss” went to Dr. Greg Lyne and his Masters of Harmony. Egos, trends and politics divided our chapter after that. Choruses have a way of assigning all the credit for a chorus’s success and all the blame for its failures to the director, neither of which is true. But directors and chorus-members know that going in, so I suppose it’s fair.

When Allen resigned in December of 1992, I was not active in the chorus, but the BOD sent guys to talk to me. I had recently started my own business, and was not prepared to discuss the matter until August of 1993. They had appointed a guy as “interim director,” while they conducted a “search.” The Board asked me to keep quiet about their approach, so they could make that guy think he was getting the job permanently, while they waited six months for me. I refused to make that promise, but I did not go out of my way to let him know. I regret that.

That’s the thing about chorus-directing that I detested – the politics. The official BOD of our beloved Thoroughbreds deceived that poor fellow, an action which was, in their minds, “in the best interests of the chapter.” I never understood how lying to a guy could ever be in the best interest of any chapter. But that’s what you get, when you put humans in charge.

A seasoned judge once wrote, “You get good marks, and win a scholarship. You finish pre-law, and get into a great law-school, where you graduate with honors, and land a job as a clerk for a Federal judge. You get on with a prestigious firm, and after several years, they make you a partner. Then, you run for circuit-judge, and win the election. Your first trial is almost over, and who makes the decision? Two retired guys, three housewives, a file clerk, a bricklayer, a schoolteacher and ditch-digger!” That’s kind of the way a barbershop chorus works. The Board of Directors searches to find the most skilled and knowledgeable person they can to be the Music Director. Then, knowing they are less qualified, they complicate your efforts with frequent attempts to micromanage. Unless you can earn enough implied authority with the troops, it is a built-in recipe for failure.

Regardless, I showed up to accept the directorate in August, and we went to the Cardinal District prelims a few weeks later. We won handily, with a group of about 70 men, and began to prepare for our annual Christmas Show, as well as the 1994 International Chorus Contest in Pittsburgh, with 92 guys on stage.

International competition was a different story. Our ranks had been decimated during the prior year by the formation of the Louisville Times Chorus by David Harrington and Mark Hale, along with a couple of dozen of our better singers. The new group had a tough audition for admission, and didn’t invite any of our “average” singers to participate. Wonder where that idea came from?

That loss of so many good singers gave us a tougher row to hoe, but we started in earnest on the fundamentals. We tackled a new Ed Waesche medley of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Billy-A-Dick” and Jule Styne’s Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat,” along with a new chart of “Till We Meet Again.” We had Sally Whitledge, of International SAI Champion “4th Edition” fame as our choreographer, and her husband, Bob, of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” was our bass section leader and one of our associate directors.

We worked hard, but the resulting performance was scored in the mid-80s; not up to the chorus’s reputation, nor to my standards. I was privately embarrassed by the singing, even before the scoresheets revealed a 6th place finish. Another year and two new contest songs later, our 1995 contest performance in Miami was equally embarrassing (to me), and the rank was identical (a gift, in my opinion). In the meantime, we had done a lot of exciting B-level singing on shows, and held on to most of our local following.

When Ken Buckner announced that he was moving back to Louisville, I was sure that he could lead the chorus to greater heights than I. As it turned out, the performance we gave in the 1995 fall contest was the best singing the chorus had ever given under my direction. I had my letter of resignation in my pocket, and handed it to the Chapter President immediately after we came off stage, and before the call-off. I was finally proud of a contest-performance, even before I learned that we had won, and we had beaten the second place chorus, the Louisville Times, by 20 points. I handed the baton to Bunk, and wished him well.

Three years later, in February of 1998, the chorus was struggling even harder, and I was approached by the president and one of the associate directors to again serve as front line director. When I showed up at the Board meeting to respond, both of those guys denied in my presence that they had approached me. Once again, they didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the guy who was in charge at the time. More politics – more lying.

I then announced to the Board that this idea must have come to me in a dream during the night. I would be out in the parking lot long enough to have a smoke – about four minutes, and then my offer would be withdrawn. They came out and got me to serve as director three minutes later, but explained that they had to complete their “search,” so it would be a couple of months before I would start my term. That wasted time led to a slim defeat in the fall contest at the hands of our rivals, the Louisville Times – more embarrassment. We weren’t even the best barbershop chorus in town! Still, we received a “wild card” bid to participate in the International Chorus Contest, where they finished eighth, and we finished fifth.

This time, I quickly got Brother Allen on Board, appointing him as co-director for the duration. The group improved exponentially in preparation for the 1999 chorus contest in Anaheim. We commissioned a new Waesche arrangement of the Irving Berlin tune, “Pack up Your Sins, and Go to the Devil,” and dusted off Ed’s old chart of “Over the Rainbow.” The Anaheim contest saw the Thoroughbreds return to the medals, although it was a bronze, awarded for a 5TH place finish. In the old days, it would have been disappointing, but our guys jumped for joy, as they had failed to even qualify for the dance the previous year (for the first time ever).

We seemed to have a tiger by the tail, but that’s when the wheels started to come off. Allen and I agreed to implement individual performance-accountability, and divided the chorus into two groups – one performing group and the other remedial. This was our way of competing against the “hand-picked” choruses – by focusing our teaching efforts on smaller groups and individuals where they were needed most. We had not predicted that the remedial group would be embarrassed to the extent that they would vote as a political block. The following year, we competed with fewer singers, and dropped out of the top ten choruses, and in 2001, in Nashville, finished 14th. That was it! Allen and I were pretty much out on our ear.

We left the chapter with about 30 guys, and formed the New Horizon Chorus, leaving the ‘Breds in even worse shape. We had allowed ourselves to be affected by the individual performance accountability standards which were running rampant around the Society, but our Thoroughbreds were not willing to accept them. In retrospect, we would have been smarter to have continued the path of John Henry against the steam drill. We still would not have won the championship, but we would have gone down swinging! Instead, we joined the plethora of chapters who had divided themselves in the interest of the elitist-singer. We had become what we had previously scorned. We ended up with three “also-ran” choruses, in lieu of the mighty International Champion Thoroughbreds.

In 2013, I moved to Alabama for work, and also accepted the job of Music Director of Voices of the South, in Birmingham, Alabama. We started with sores of 68%, and (several times) raised those scores to the middle 70s. We finished second in our first spring chorus contest, and three years later. We tied for second, one point out of first, in my final contest performance as a director. We sang some good shows during our three years, and the guys were kind enough to sing some of my arrangements, along with some written by my late pals, Walter and Ed, as well as two original songs written by my dear departed friend, Chilton Price and me. I retired in 2016, because some physical ailments made it difficult to perform the athletic tasks associated with conducting. Also, I had not been able to figure out how to grow the chorus. We started with 22 active, and we ended with 22 active. I thought perhaps a younger guy could do better.

What did I learn that I can share with aspiring chorus directors? I was not smart enough to figure that out. All hail Jim Miller! He used to say, “I hate when you guys whine, ‘I don’t know what to do, Jimmy.’ Maybe I’ll smack you in the balls, and then you’ll sure know what to do. You’ll say, ouch!” I wrote an e-book about Jim’s life called, “If Not for Jim,” available on Amazon and iBooks, which was released in 2012, a few months after his passing, at the age of 87. Read the book, and maybe you can get some advice from Jim. My advice is, if you don’t know what to do, stick to quartet-singing, or you might get smacked in the balls.

TW: You’ve had a chance to work with so many amazing coaches over the years. What is some of the best advice you have been given by a coach?

KH: Well… not so many. In the 70s, Jim was too busy directing and singing in the Citations to coach us as a quartet. Ed Gentry was already coaching the Citations, the Thoroughbreds and the Cardinals quartet. My mother was our first coach, as previously mentioned. Her lessons had to do with breath support and using the right muscles, which held us back at first, but raised the level at which we would perform later. We failed to qualify for International in our first two attempts, in 1974 and 1975. However, we had won the Cardinal District Championship, in the fall of 1974, a year after our formation. Back then, there just weren’t many good singing young quartets. Most good ensembles were in their thirties, forties and fifties. The hot-shots of our youth had been the Sundowners and the Grandmas Boys, who were six to ten years older than we.

The Johnny Appleseed District had scouted us at our convention, and invited us to an all-expense paid trip to the JAD spring convention, in 1975. There, we sang for the quartet contest audience, while the scores were being tallied. Let’s just say, we were having a good day. We sang almost everything we knew, and there were money and panties thrown on the stage. We got to our dressing rooms, and already had our jackets off, when the MC came to get us, and said, “They won’t stop clapping until you guys come back out here. They don’t care who won the quartet contest.”

So, we went back out, and sang the only other song we knew; the Suntones’ “Lollipops and Roses,” being sure to apologize in advance for the fact that it wasn’t suitable for the contest stage. In the judges’ pit that night was a man named Don Clause. When we left Dayton on Sunday, he was our new coach. Don was one of the writers of the category description of the new “Sound” category, and was getting ready to be C&J Chairman, which we didn’t care about. He was also the coach of the 1973 and 1974 International Champions, the Dealers Choice and the Regents. We recognized him from his picture on the back of the DC’s first album, which we did care about.

Within a year, Don had introduced us to several original Ed Waesche contest-arrangements, had us as his guests on Long Island for a weekend coaching session, had interpreted all four of our new contest songs (which we recorded), and had challenged us to master our craft, using the Society’s “green book,” a craft-manual patterned after the one Ed Gentry had written for the Thoroughbreds.

We didn’t always sing every phrase the way Don had instructed, but he never noticed that. What Don did for us was to convince us that we could master our craft, and provide a tie-breaker to keep us from arguing about how to sing each phrase. We did all of our homework within six months, having applied our new craft to the four Waesche charts, including “Midnight Rose,” and “I’ve Found My Sweetheart, Sally.” In the spring of 1976, at the ages of 20 and 21, BSU won the Cardinal prelims, and in San Francisco, in our first International Quartet Contest, we were awarded a 4th place medal. That was the biggest thrill in my quartet career, to this day. It was so unexpected by so many people, including us!

Don’s impact was the greatest, but not the only one from great coaches. He put each of us in touch with our weaknesses. Mine was pushing down low, instead of trusting my fellow singers to help create my note. Ricky’s was forgetting the dynamic plan. Danny’s challenge was to be firmer with his diction. Allen’s was to keep his falsetto tenor balanced (softer).

Our visual presentation coach was the great Ron Riegler, from the Roaring Twenties, who came in fifth to our fourth, at the San Francisco Convention. Ron taught us to move to the outside when singing louder, and move to the inside when singing softer. He taught us to do a preparatory move in the opposite direction from which we intended to move, like Jackie Gleason before he would say, “And away we go!” Sadly, Ron became gravely ill in early 1977, and passed away after the 1977 convention. We recruited my high school drama teacher, Gene Stickler, to choreograph four new tunes for the 1977 and 1978 contests. You would have sworn that Gene was Ron’s brother; they were so much alike!

The third coach was a more modest fellow, also from Cincinnati, Ed Weber. Ed was a stage presence judge, who specialized in facial expression, focal point and the fundamentals of stage presence. He taught us that it mattered where we looked in the audience during each phrase, and that our facial expression should be planned to mirror the emotion suggested by the changing message of the song. Ed taught us never to raise our hands above the waist, unless there was a planned reason for them to be up there. And don’t ever close your eyes. They are the windows to the emotions.

Our makeup guy was Joe Bruno, who taught us which stage makeup to buy, and how to apply it modestly, so that we looked normal and handsome on stage, rather than like a bunch of clowns. The makeup was a part of our ritual of preparation, which helped us to feel an aura of invincibility before we took the stage. The longhairs coming out of the universities to save us all from ourselves have since convinced our lazier members that such efforts are unnecessary. Consequently, their faces wash out in the stage lights, and we can see their expressions only by watching the big screen – when there is a big screen, that is. We miss you, Joe.

Our costume-designers included Louise Cecil, a professional, who made the brightly colored thrift-store knickerbockers that we wore during our three contest years for $143.75 – for all four them! Another was clothier and barbershopper Mike Mazucca, who designed our unique kelly green tuxedos and our rose colored (pink) tuxedos for the other two contest sets. Our last costume-designer was Dan’s wife, Cyndy Burgess, who had a degree in Home Economics from the University of Kentucky. She designed and built our Music Man costumes – the ones that appeared in the photograph, with the plumed hats and reversible jackets. We wore them on stage for many years.

TW: What are your thoughts on the evolution of the music-industry and songwriting over the course of your lifetime? Are you happy with this evolution?

KH: Well first, let me say that Irving Scrooge Berlin was a greedy SOB. Besides refusing to allow barbershop arrangements of his songs because our genre was not “legitimate,” thanks to that stuck up, crusty old curmudgeon, who never learned to read a note of music, and played piano only by ear in the key of F sharp, and thanks to his lawyers, the term of a song-copyright was extended from 50 years after the copyright started to 90 years after the death of the longest surviving collaborator. I don’t like that very much.

I am glad to see the money-people, whose only talent is to recognize and take advantage of the potential of others, finally being left out of the mix, thanks to technology. With the advent of cell-phones, video and social media, any artist can reach the public directly with his or her songs, voice and instrument, from the safety and obscurity of his bathroom or basement. He or she no longer needs cow-tow to the David Fosters and Phil Specters of the world, in order to be “discovered.” If his or her talent is special, it will now be noticed by the real judges. In the words of the late George Gershwin, “It is not the few knowing ones whose opinions make any work of art great; it is the judgment of the great mass that finally decides.”

Of course, I detest licensing agencies BMI, ASCAP, SESAC, and abhor publishers Hal Leonard and Alfred Publishing for what they have done to the undiscovered songwriter and hobby-singer/player of music, and I am embarrassed and angry that our Society is playing ball with them. By the way, BHS is both a licensing agency and a publisher. The former group of pariahs caters only to the writers of songs featured in blockbuster movies, the top 100 grossing concerts annually and of protected works that get radio, TV and internet airplay. The latter group is squeezing the rest of us out of mere participation by the high cost of permission to arrange, perform, record and promote, and our Society is helping them do it by agreeing to their terms.

Our better option is to join together to boycott all protected works, and resort to Public Domain songs and original songs copyrighted by our own members, and to make sure not to allow any of those publishers or licensing agencies (or our Society) to participate in even partial ownership of our protected works. This happened once before, you know, when ASCAP got too big for its britches in the late 1940s, and took all of its catalogue off the radio airwaves. That’s what gave birth to the country music industry and caused BMI to be formed. Perhaps such a boycott now, would birth another industry called a cappella. There are thousands of public domain songs that are very fine vehicles, and we are perfectly capable of writing our own songs that fit the style.

Meanwhile, if you want to adapt any protected work to the barbershop style represented by one of these licensing agencies or publishers, just so your quartet or chorus can sing it in a show or a contest for which you might earn no moneys in exchange, please be prepared to pay several hundred dollars to the copyright owner, just in exchange for permission. Of course, another way is to woodshed your own arrangement of a protected work, which constitutes “fair use,” under the law, as long as it is not written down. We used to all know how to do that!

TW: What personal accomplishment are you most proud of outside the world of barbershop harmony?

KH: Many people like to say they are proud of their families. I cannot take the credit for the successes of my children, and I will not take the blame for their failures. We lead the horses to the water, but it is up to them to make the choice to drink. I feel good about having done my job. They did not ask to be brought into the world. Their mother and I made that decision, and all three arrived kicking and screaming mad about it. We owed them good food, clothing, shelter, education and love. We paid our debt and provided additional things like cars and money after they were grown. Since then, it has been up to them. To their credit, they are all paying taxes, and none are drug-addicts or criminals. I am glad for their varying degrees of success, even while meeting different levels of hardship, because I love and want only good things for them. But to be “proud” would claim responsibility for their success, which I cannot do. There are people close to me who have had adult children who made wrong choices that resulted in incarceration and even death. Those children enjoyed the same benefits that mine did. If I claim credit for my own children’s success, I would be blaming other parents for the failures of their kids, which would be over-the-top inappropriate. That’s why I cringe when I see parents bragging about “pride” in their adult children’s successes, and it’s why you won’t see claims of pride in my kids’ accomplishments on my Facebook page.

That being clarified, I suppose I am proud of the fact that I work hard every day, and that I am not a burden on my family or on society. I am proud of the kind of work I do, and that makes it necessary for this answer to overlap the answers to your good question numbers 15 and 16.

TW: Barbershoppers probably know you best as the energetic performer and lead singer of the Bluegrass Student Union, the 1978 quartet champs of the SPEBSQSA, now known as the Barbershop Harmony Society. What are a few things that folks may NOT know about you?

KH: I can juggle. I discovered as a teenager that I could isolate overtones with my voice, and play tunes with the overtones while holding the same note, simply by changing my mouth opening and tongue position. I speak fluent Spanish. I have not been able to walk farther than a block and a half without resting for ten minutes since 2003. That will likely never change. I didn’t like Irving Berlin when he was alive, and now that he is dead, I still do. Oh yeah, we covered that.

I have worked as a loading dock equipment and industrial doors application-expert on and off since 1986. When I entered the industry, I was sent to a school held by our main factory, which was called KELLEY, inventor and manufacturer of the hinged lip dock leveler, a bridge between the loading dock and the trailer bed. The fellows who taught that school were the same ones who had been around since the invention of the device, in 1953. They had been the first generation of sales persons, who introduced the product to American industry, and they imparted to me their noble mission. Their product had revolutionized the safety and comfort of the loading dock worker, and, along with a later invention by a competitor (the trailer restraint), had saved the lives and limbs of countless people around the world, none of whom realized that they would have died or been maimed without it.

Most businesses provide goods and services that help people in some way. We don’t all get to be astronauts or Supreme Court Justices. Most of us make our contributions to humankind in smaller, less famous ways. On our tombstones, it won’t say, “He laid a lot of brick,” or “She counseled a lot of crazy people.” On mine, it won’t say, “He sold a lot of levelers, restraints and overhead doors, and made sure they were properly installed.” But that is exactly the thing of which I am most proud. Funny how one can attain something akin to immortality by doing a little singing, but the day in and day out saving of lives by most of us who do it goes unnoticed.

When I was a kid, I didn’t imagine growing up to be a dock leveler salesman. The job sort of found me, instead of the other way around. But I developed a keen interest in the product and in applying and installing it correctly. I found that once I embraced the noble motivation, my clients could sense that sincerity. When I get the job, lives are saved, the work area is more comfortable, the customer’s management enjoys the savings that comes with increased productivity, and my commissions take care of themselves. It’s a great business, because my degree of personal fulfillment just happens to be commensurate with the financial rewards. What a great country! I have to believe that unless you are a criminal, or you work in the liquor- or tobacco-industry, your job probably offers similar fulfillment. We are all here to serve each other, and most jobs allow you to do that. I can only hope that it brings you similar rewards.

TW: What’s the next item on your bucket list?

KH: That’s a tough question, because I have had such a great life! I had two marriages that lasted a total of 36 years, and 29 of them were pretty darned good. I loved me some women. I am now divorced and single, and life is really stress-free these days. My three kids are healthy and standing on their own six feet. I have a special relationship with my son, Mike. I always treated him as an equal; not as a child. As a result, he is now my friend, in addition to being my son, which pleases me very much. I enjoy my work, and will never retire, as long as I can walk and think. I have lived many of my dreams, helping the Thoroughbreds to earn four gold medals and some other colors too, winning quartet contests with my three “brothers,” Allen, Danny and Rick, and then going on to join the Suntones-Buffalo Bills-Boston Common-club. I got to direct the Thoroughbreds in competition on several occasions, although it didn’t turn out as well as I had envisioned. I traveled around the world a few times, and got to visit 47 states, most of them multiple times. I directed a chorus across mainland China for four 2-week trips, and coached my way across New Zealand and Australia. I learned how to arrange music, with no formal education, and I sang professionally in jazz clubs with a great accompanist. I became friends and wrote songs with a real award-winning Great American Songbook writer. I met idols, heroes, presidents and other famous people along the way, who all turned out to be regular guys, just like me. My quartet recorded some of the best-selling barbershop-recordings of all time. I recorded a big band album with 33 top musicians that sounds like it belongs on the Sirius Sinatra channel. I wrote a biography about the life of my mentor, Jim Miller. I made a barbershop recording dedicated to my other mentor, Walter Latzko. I made three recordings that honored yet another mentor, Ms. Chilton Price. I wrote original songs and arrangements, and heard them sung by others. On occasion, I even got to perform on the ‘lectric television. Hoo-wee!

I promise you that I have done everything that I wanted to do, and more. I have a few regrets, but owe no amends. There is no bucket-list, but I discovered something else that I enjoy, just this past year. You see, I moved to Alabama five years ago, for my work, and I have no “old friends” here. New friends are nice, but there is nothing like the friends with whom you share some history. I see Allen, Rick and Dan once a year, at a reunion at Allen’s lake house. I hate to think that I might see those guys only a handful (or two) more times before one of us takes a header.

I have other friends around the country, with whom I stay in touch. Still, there are others who I care about deeply, but don’t get to see anymore. Last June, I visited Marjorie Latzko at her home in Lewes Delaware, where she lives, with her daughter, Melanie and her husband and two boys. Marjorie is one of the tenors of the Chordettes, of Mr. Sandman fame, besides being Walter’s devoted wife for over 50 years and one of my dearest friends. After a great three day visit, I took the ferry across Delaware Bay, to Cape May, New Jersey, and drove to Brigantine, where I met with old friend Carol Plum. We took her parents, Ellen and Neal, out to dinner, and enjoyed reminiscing about his quartet, Sound Revival, back in the 70s and 80s.

The next morning, I met pal Jack Pinto, of Old School quartet, for breakfast, and we traveled to New York City, where we had dinner with genius arranger, judge and quartet-man Steve Delehanty and his wife, Connie, along with medalist lead singer Scott Brannon, of the Cincinnati Kids. I enjoyed spending time with these many good friends, and made a new friend, Keith Harris, the barbershopper and professional opera-singer. It took some effort and expense on my part, but this was more fun and fulfilling than going around the world. I did that already, and got paid for it – twice! It couldn’t be as much fun the third time, especially if I’m paying. But this trip was a gas, because I got to see those lovely people one more time.

So, I don’t have a bucket-list of things I want to do and experience. I just want to see my old friends one more time. So, I have already planned my trip for 2018. In February, I will see Todd and Jennifer Wilson, in Nashville, and then hop on a plane to see Holly and Brian Beck in Colorado Springs. With any luck, Bobby Gray and Terri will be available for dinner, and maybe I can sneak in a luncheon with George Davidson, Terry Heltne and Kurt Hutchison in Denver, before visiting old quartet-buddy, Vince Winans and his wife in Salt Lake City. After a couple of days, I will head for Palm Springs, California, to visit former Thoroughbred Jonathan Friedman and his wife, Annabelle, where they will introduce me to their new baby girl, who is to be born next month. Then, it’s on to Oakland, where I will spend a few days watching some of my grandkids play soccer and volleyball.

I might try to visit old pal Greg Lyne, while I am there. He always tries to tell me that the Thoroughbreds should have won that contest in 1990. I like that about him.

3 notes · View notes