THE HILLBILLY SHOW SATURDAY NIGHT

l to r, bruce molsky, charlie edwards, bill dancy

 

The Hillbilly Show happened Saturday night, a comedy and variety show, this year the 21st annual, local people entertaining local people. The Hillbilly Show is a fundraiser for the Alleghany Planning Committee, a branch of the Blue Ridge Opportunity Commission headquartered in Wilkes County. The money raised from admission goes to people in the county having a hard time. They give three $500 scholarships to high school graduates of slim circumstances. They pay electric and heating fuel bills for people at risk of losing their power unable to pay the bill. They give garden seeds to several people a year, seeds of the individual's choice. They arrange house repairs for people who can't afford to pay for the repairs. They buy books for the Head Start daycare center in town. No money is skimmed off for any reason. The money is carefully accounted for. All that is taken in is used for its stated purpose. It appears that more money goes out than comes in from the Hillbilly Show. Donations help too. It is a group of modest people, about a dozen, who believe helping the poor an important aspect of being a member of a community. These are people who answer yes to the question, Am I my brother's keeper? It does not diminish anything for anybody in the group to help somebody having a rough time. I have seen by observation and experience the one word that describes best the natives of Alleghany County is generosity.

 

dr roger arias

 

bruce molsky

 

Dr Roger Arias opened the show playing America on classical guitar.  He later played two classical pieces for guitar. He was good. The man could pick. Flowers were thrown onto the stage while he played. I believe the flowers were part of the show. The audience applauded him as enthusiastically as they applauded the country music and bluegrass. This week's Alleghany News mentioned the Hillbilly Show briefly in an article about different events going on in the county this fall color weekend like high school homecoming, a studio tour of the different craft studios in the county. The article introduced the Hillbilly Show thus, "As sophisticated as the studio art may be, Saturday night's Hillbilly Comedy and Variety Show is anything but." Two seats reserved for the press were empty. It struck me somewhat irresponsible of the editor to dismiss the Hillbilly Show so succinctly. I suppose classical music is not sophisticated either. Maybe he was thinking of Meatloaf for sophisticated.

 

the alleghany golden girls

 

the jubilee line dancers

 

Seems to me a responsible local paper might at least acknowledge an important charity in the county of all local people helping out local people, and raising money by way of an annual laugh for the community. It's about the only thing happening in Sparta not high school sports. I suspect unsophisticated has to do with the Hillbilly Show being working class humor that's not quite sophisticated enough for the middle class. Not near as good as television. The music is more of interest to the working class, the mountain people, country, bluegrass, old-time, than to the exurban middle class. Therefore, hardly worthy of notice to an editor who believes only the middle class is literate. Some of the better musicians in the county play at the Hillbilly Show. This year, Tim Lewis picked his banjo. Tim can pick some bluegrass. Charlie Edwards was picking his rhythm guitar and singing. Bill Dancy picked his banjo. Bill Joines picked guitar. Guest artist Bruce Molsky played fiddle, guitar and sang with the band of respectable local musicians.  

 







dottie dorsett the backstage director in red with gary joines

 

judy rimes and

patrick buchannan

sing sonny & cher

 

My role is to pull the ropes that open and close the curtains. I used to try to help out moving mics around backstage, but it messed me up with the curtains. They take some focus. Dottie, pictured above, signals to me and I have a program she marked with open and close throughout the show. It might be almost ten years I've been with the Planning Committee. It appears to me the Hillbilly Show is better each year. Last year and this year the back stage part was handled the best ever. Onstage flowed seamlessly. I like about my place that I can see what's going on backstage, what's happening on stage, and the audience. Like a good Taoist, I participate by not participating. First couple years with them I learned I don't have it for the stage. The stage is not the place for me. This show had nothing but good music throughout, good dancing, good singing, new sound system and lighting. I felt like it was an excellent show that connected with the audience well. The audience was with what was happening on stage from start to finish. Hillbilly Wes, an MC, kept the spirit lively and the audience laughing at his zany humor.

 

cheri choate's band

 

the house band with bruce molsky

 

 

*

 

 



A GRAIN OF SAND FROM THE BEACH

andy warhol

Yesterday I had lunch with a dozen friends for our monthly BROC meeting. We put on the Hillbilly Show once a year and use ticket sales to help people in the county needing assistance. Every month we pay several electric and fuel bills for people who need a hand to avoid cut-off. None of the money is skimmed off for any reason. We pay for our own lunches. In one way of looking at us, we're people who believe in doing our part to assist people around us who need an assist. It's another form of volunteer Rescue Squad and volunteer firemen. They take care of immediate needs physically, we take care of immediate needs of the mind and spirit, preventing physical need. People living on the edge have to humble themselves way down to go to an office and ask for help. In every case they're grateful for the help that eases worries immensely. Some pass it on later, which seems to be a natural impulse in us humans. 

andy warhol

I had a time so down and out I had to call upon humility to go to the Food Closet and ask for groceries. No questions, sign here. I drove home with enough food for a week, all I needed. Back in motion, a little bit ahead, I gave them a donation to cover the value of the food four times. I had to do it, not even a consideration to question the need. I feel like what we do in our group is further generous behavior by setting it in motion. As one gesture inspires another, and those gestures inspire others, it spreads over time. Maybe very little, maybe a lot, maybe everything in between. It doesn't matter how many, or if one gesture is the end. The gesture itself is what matters. If it inspires others, all to the good. If it does not inspire others, all to the good. I believe it from having seen it so much in self and others that one gesture of generosity creates another. It's the same the other way. Beat down a kid without recourse and the kid will go and, for example, beat down a dog without recourse. Both motivations go on everywhere all the time. I prefer for myself to spread generosity rather than anger. The people in our group are similarly minded without thinking of it in these words, each with his/her own thoughts and motivations. 

andy warhol

I was sitting at the table facing Jack and Linda Joines, two people it warms my heart to think about. The same can be said of everyone at the two tables we occupied at The Pines. Our meetings consist of ordering our meals, having our meeting while the kitchen prepares the food, eating and talking when the meeting is over. While we were eating, I spoke to Jack, asked him if he had yet entered the zone in life where everything is weird. We're the same age. He came to life, animated. It took him home. Lord, yes. He said everything is so weird he doesn't know what to make of it. Linda said a lot of people are talking about how weird things are now. She, too, was seeing it. I ran it by Jack to see if it was something I was feeling or if somebody else had noticed. I felt about Jack that he might feel it. He did. We talked about it a bit, not a whole lot, there isn't much to say. It's so complex and so inter-woven, it would take hours to make a list of the weirdness we see. We make a list, then what? It's so overwhelming that to fix any one item would be the same as picking up a grain of sand from the beach. It doesn't change the beach at all. 

andy warhol

I'm not quite sure what I mean by weird, except what makes sense fails to apply anymore. I see it in an attitude among the people I see. I don't see many, but the ones I see are representative of the ones I don't see, a pie slice. All are tapped into the same source for input. I don't have the fear generated by propaganda through the tv and a headful of misinformation, which I have plenty of, even without getting it directly from tv. I've a feeling the misinformation the CIA has fed us through television at least the last half century has brought us to a place "when everything the American people believe is false." This quote of CIA's stated goal, spoken verbally by then CIA director, Wm Casey, appointed Reaganista, who said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American people believe is false." Thus Fake News and corporate media. My sense of what I feel is weird about this time we're in is we're approaching the completion of the disinformation program, if not already there. Our corporate government is about deceiving us, from Fed to State to County. It has come out this week that Exxon is on record knowing about man-made global warming since 1981, and funded political denial ever since. It's so believable, it feels like I knew it without knowing it. I have to live, without recourse, in the reality corporate government has created by way of deception. I'll stay home and let the Highway Patrol meet their quotas giving tickets to other people. Another grain of sand on the beach.
   

andy warhol himself

*

THE END OF A NEVER-ENDING PROJECT

eula rae cook, mary jane ciraco, linda edwards, the golden girls

My blues over the last two months are fading. The sample dvd of the Hillbilly Show, in October, arrived in the mail today. Next step: email approval back to the people making the dvd. Done. Next, wait for the box to arrive with the dvds in it ready to go. When the box arrives, I'll pick one randomly to put in the dvd player to see if it took. Only then will I be satisfied this never-ending project is over. Two months of frustration to the max. I know the ones who put it onto disc are happy to be done with it, probably happier than I am. They were patient with me. My patience broke at a certain point, but it came back. I pitched a fit over something that was my doing. LOL. Not funny then. My gratitude is heightened by their patience with my ignorance. It started with me taking on a project I believed I could handle. Another one of those learnings of our own limitations. They're good to know. They make boundaries. I know not to cross that line again. The other side of the line was where I took the first step, deciding to make video of the Hillbilly Show. I've made video of so many old-time bands, bluegrass bands, rock bands that I felt like I had enough experience making videos of musicians making music. For what I had in mind to approach the project, I needed somebody to operate a second camera, to take turns with video and making still pictures. I hadn't yet talked with Crystal about helping me out--she's a studio photographer--when I was told by another, "You don't need to get somebody. I'll be with you the whole show. I got a new video camera. It'll be fun to use it." Error number one, not asking Crystal for help anyway. I know I can count on Crystal.  

david nichols guitar and joe irwin

At the beginning of the show, promised helper never turned up. I was stuck with self and two cameras, one for video, one for stills. It's not easy doing both at once. It's even beyond difficult. The pictures here were taken the night before at rehearsal. It took some powerful self-control to put my rage aside so it would affect camera wielding the least for the next three hours. Later, when I saw promised helper, I was told, "I hadta...I hadta...had so much stuff to do." I had to shift mind into hyper-drive, a mind that doesn't even have over-drive anymore. The beginning of a two-month long downhill roller coaster run on a ride of emotion. I talked by phone with one of the people who makes the dvd. We had good, clear conversation of understanding both ways. He suggested emailing the video to their computers. I spent a week attempting to email them at 57 hours a try. The upload jumped track after about 38 hours, every time. I could not use the computer during uploading. When the upload gave out, I set it in motion again. For a week. This step contributed to the blues a very great deal. Another talk on the phone. He suggested I break it up into several short sections and email them by some shrink process I had to write down instructions to follow. Couldn't even do that. Took laptop to Crystal. She figured out the process and set up several packages to send. I brought laptop home and sent them off. They went through, but the place didn't receive good enough quality from the transfer to use. Thanksgiving vacation came and went. I waited a couple weeks. Asked what was up. Oh, it fell through the cracks over Thanksgiving. When they returned they'd forgotten about it, which I took for totally understandable. They operate in big volume. This redneck on the phone that don't know nothin about digital anything was taking up an awful lot of attention and time for something they probably will not even make expenses on. Why wouldn't they forget it?

dr jack cahn, mississippi sawyer

Next, they asked me to send the chips from the cameras. Unconsciously, I sent one, not thinking to send the other. They processed it and sent the sample. It was missing everything on the second chip I'd failed to send. Email again. In my mind, I was blaming them. It turned out I was the one messing things up. Sent the second chip a week ago and the sample arrived in today's mail. The sample disc was the only thing in the mailbox. It was almost a joy to see it, but I reminded self, haven't seen it yet. Carried it into the house in a guarded happy condition. Don't be setting off fireworks yet. I slipped it into the dvd player and ran through the whole show to check out sequences on fast-forward. Stopped it a few times to listen to how the sound took. All the way to the end it looked good. I called Agnes and left a message on her phone the sample is good and I've emailed the go-ahead. Not in time for Thanksgiving, not in time for Christmas, not in time for New Year's, maybe in time for Valentine's Day. Gotta be. Like Agnes reminded me a month ago, everything works out for the best. I walked to the mailbox after the mail carrier's car passed, suspecting the sample might be there today, but without hope. Hope died over a month ago that this never-ending project might someday end. These last weeks I've abandoned hope. Even after I emailed the go-ahead, I still don't feel satisfaction it's done. I've lost concern that it may never end, and lost concern that it might come to completion eventually. I did not want to write about it through the course of the process. Now that it's close to over, if the light at the end of the tunnel is not the light of an oncoming train, I can let it all out, only one future unknowable left. It's almost a joy to see this crazy-making time just a few days from finished. The end in sight is not the end.

lynn worth, moon over sparta

At last, I feel free of the burden, a lesser version of how the god Prometheus felt when he was unbound from the rock he was chained to for eternity by order of Zeus, his brother. It's not quite that kind of release. The end of a long frustration is more a release like setting a dog free that's been chained for two months. It's like a cluster of helium-filled balloons of different sizes and colors let go at the same time. Cares and troubles sail away to tiny specks in the sky, then nothing. As of today, only one is still a visible pixel. This part almost over, next part starts now. I've been aiming to write an article for Old-Time Herald magazine on the Hillbilly Show, this year its twentieth annual. I've been so out of heart over the project, I'd put writing about it on the shelf of maybe I will / maybe I won't. My mood was so dark over this project, I could not have written an essay from that mental dungeon the project put me in. I feel now like a submarine surfacing. I can breathe. It's all over now Baby Blue. I feel so good around this dvd and the Hillbilly Show experience, now that it's done, the original intent to write about it came up first thing. I will sit with the dvd and watch it all the way through as a memory aid. The one thing I can say to the good of what I see in the video is emphasis on the people involved, very personal emphasis. Some of the video is bad and some is good. Mostly, it wavers in between. I told Agnes when anybody complains about one thing or another being wrong with it, just say, "TJ done it." All that's bad about it is my doing. The people who put it on disc did a beautiful job. 

bobbie and gary parlier, tennessee waltz

*

     

  

ONE OF THEM DAYS

john mccracken

I'm about to take a vacation. Worn out and tired, I had to write an email this morning that wrecked the whole day. Knocked me down to the ground within. At the grocery store I ran into my friend Susan and she asked how I was doing. My spirit was dim, I said the body is fine, but the mind is not working today. I stopped a few places and saw people I knew, mind like a swamp, nothing going on and not hearing much I heard. I think I was in what WH Auden called, "the slough of despond." Earlier, in Farmer's Hardware, I saw Susan from a distance, thought I recognized her, but wasn't sure. I said to Marsha, "Who is that?" She said, "Sue Senter." I knew Sue as Susan Tucker. I knew Susan was born a Senter. I said, "I thought she was a Tucker," and Marsha said, "It's her mother." That threw me all the further. Susan went out the store before me and I ran into her later at Food Lion. Up close, I recognized her. My feeling is she lost weight, was wearing jeans, and had a pony tail I'd never seen her in. Plus, I've noticed recently my vision is going a bit blurry. Talking with Susan I was disoriented. I knew it was Susan, but my mind was stuck in its somebody I don't know who looks like Susan. I felt like I was in a cage in a new environment and couldn't figure out everything around me. I remembered when Jr Maxwell's mind was slipping away, a similar disorientation. I don't think mine was from mind going away, but from mind being shut down. It's like being online, then the modem quits working. I have to unplug to modem for ten seconds and start over. I carried groceries into the house just in time to take some grain to the donkeys as it was getting dark. 

john mccracken

I went to bed without putting up groceries. Couldn't move. Woke a couple hours later feeling no better. Put on a French film that arrived today, Fear & Trembling, by a director whose films I like, Alain Corneau. It was good. It was very good. The moment it was over, I went back to bed, unable to be up another minute. After a few more hours, I woke, unable to sleep, turned on BBC news and listened for awhile about Taliban shooting up a school in Pakistan, over a hundred kids shot down. Turned the radio off. Couldn't sleep for thinking about another atrocity done for God's glory. I got up and here I am, feeling like my head is a block of wood. I've been through one of the very worst ordeals of my life, one that never ends. It started in late October; as of yesterday, I am back to what they call square one, the starting point. Time to start all over. I've not been wanting to write about this ordeal, hoping it would come to an end some time in foreseeable future. As of yesterday, I learned it will never end. I had to write an email this morning saying I regret with all my heart I got involved in this project, am through with frustration and anger, am disheartened unto indifference, though if it takes all of 2015 to get this project completed, I'll bear down and do it, only because I've committed. I volunteered (BIG error) to make the video at the hillbilly show and take care of getting the video transferred to dvd. Was given a catalog of a place that does this promising results in 3 days. It's two months now. Thought I'd save us some money. This time, it's going to cost more than it ever has. Emails, phone calls, trips to town to take snail mail to the post office. 

john mccracken

I spent a whole week attempting to email the video to them by ways I had to consult a friend who knows computers how to do, and even then had to have her do it for me. Downloading time took so long and I had to do several of them three and four times. Two-thirds of the way through one, the connection would go offline. It gets worse. Much worse. It started much, much worse. Much of the problem was my own ignorance. This is a hi-tech place where I have to ask them to explain what they're saying, like doctors, young guys for whom I am a dinosaur, and not Dinosaur Jr. Now, I have to mail something else tomorrow. And it's all my fault. Like it's my fault they lost all the information over Thanksgiving vacation and when they came back, they'd forgotten it and I called a couple weeks later to ask about the delay. Oh, we forgot about it. Gee thanks. For over two months there has been only one thing I want: this project to be over. They sent a sample copy of the dvd. I put it in the player full of hope that this was it. It's over. Until it cut off two-thirds of the way through the show. It's not over. I had to write an email explaining the problem. It's not over. Starting over again. I noted in the email I regret with all my heart that I'd already given them my credit card number. They've been friendly, but I think my email this morning might have squeezed the friendly out of them. I don't care. I have fallen into the zone of indifference. I don't care if it's not over for a year. I don't care if it never gets taken care of it. I don't care if this starting again solves it. I don't care anything about it anymore. I have come into a kind of debilitating slump. There's nothing I want to do and nothing I'm able to do.

john mccracken

Devoid of motivation for anything. Thought I'd force myself to write. Didn't want to watch another movie. Didn't want to read. Only one subject in the front of my mind. Didn't want to write about it, but here it is. I can't get into the progression of the story, all the steps along the way that did not work, over and over, until I get so frustrated it turns to anger. Nothing to take the anger out on, so I swallow it into depression. That's where I've been all day, in the depression of swallowed anger. Every step along the way in this project from the very first moment has been a frustration. First, I was promised help by a fickle twenty-something, which never materialized: I hadta, I hadta.... Otherwise, I'd have got help from a friend I could count on, another twenty-something. No help in a project I needed an assistant. From then on, nothing worked. I realized I had jumped into something out of my league. But it was too late. I had to see it through. Two months ago. It still haunts me every day. I have pressure from two sides and I'm in the middle in stasis. I feel like Luke Skywalker in the Death Star's trash compacter. I've been thinking I'd like to do it next year, and do it right, now that I know what not to do. There is no way I can even consider for a nanosecond jumping into this bottomless pit again. It started as a volunteer effort to save our group that puts on the hillbilly show some money. What I did was screw everything up. It started on an off-note and every step along way was off, a fiddle out of tune played by a beginner. In the morning, I'll do what I have to do to get the next step going, another of the many that have promised to be the last. I've given in to seeing there is no end to it. I'll just continue, one step at a time, on this endless journey to nowhere. 

john mccracken himself

*

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE SOUTH

gary parlier and bobbie parlier

the hillbilly show

Just now had a rush of emotion from out of the blue over how much I love the Southern people, the people of the American South, the people I've lived among all my adult life by choice. Knowing what I know about the South, and who I've known in the South, I could not live outside the South. Looking back to early influences, I don't know where my interest in the South came from. In third grade I read a child's biography of Robert E Lee, not so much because I wanted to know about him, but I wanted to know about the South. This would have been about 1950 when the South was known for magnolias, moonlight and Spanish moss.  I had not seen any tv before then, we didn't get ours until 1950. I had seen several movies with my grandmother. She liked Betty Grable movies. I was enchanted by Susan Hayward, which probably had to do with mommy, and later, Claudette Colbert. More than likely saw some Southern images in those late 40s pop sentimental movies I saw with grandmother, going downtown on the bus to a movie theater. Big deal when you're four. Perhaps was carried away by a Southern romance scene with big dresses and Confederate uniforms, the moss hanging from the live oak trees. From a working class neighborhood in Kansas City, it was otherworldly, someplace else, a kind of Shangri La for a city kid with no experience. My feeling is the Robert E Lee book might have been the spark that deepened whatever interest I already had from post-war Forties movies. Betty Grable of the million dollar legs. The South had a mystique for me all the time growing up. The mystique associated with Gone With The Wind and the Solid South, the Dixiecrats. I knew nothing they were about except they didn't like authority, either. The closest to a goal I had was to get to the South, feel it from the inside, live deep inside Dixie. First time I drove across Mississippi, I felt like it was a foreign country. Mississippi had no billboards then. I don't know about now, but it was unforgettable to drive through a state with none. If I had not gone to South Carolina, I'd have probably gone to Mississippi.

hillbilly wes

the hillbilly show

It's not the Gone With The Wind South I fell in love with. I don't care about the mansions and the plantations. I love the Southern people, the people you see at a George Thorogood concert, the people you see in the crowd at a Nascar race, the people hanging out at the river around a campfire, pickups parked nearby with doors open and all radios on the heavy metal station. The South is a culture of poverty, in Depression for a century after the war that I still have issues with Jefferson Davis over, for letting go ahead. Going into the war, the South did not have a chance, not even an imaginary chance. Possibly, too, I had a sympathy from mother's milk for the underdog. Maybe I felt sorry for the poor Old South the Yankees beat down. In fifth grade, a civil war cap was something every boy in school had to have, like a Davy Crockett hat a few years before. All the guys had Yankee hats, but I had a Rebel hat. This was Kansas, just a few miles north of Jesse James and Cole Younger country, and not long after. I loved my Rebel hat. I was disappointed there weren't others with Rebel hats, but wouldn't put a Yankee hat on my head, not even to see how it fit. In 1952, age 10, Yankees were already my enemy. I lost my Rebel hat one night when daddy took me to see Battle At Apache Pass, starring Jeff Chandler as Cochise. I loved the Apaches then, Cochise and Geronimo my heroes. The crowd was packed so tight with some coming out and some going in, my hat was knocked off my head by somebody's shoulder, it fell to the floor and was trampled to death. I couldn't pick it up and it was gone later. I loved about the Apaches that they stood up to the white man to the very last, like the Lakotas of the Plains region. Cochise spoke Confucian truth such as, White man speak with forked tongue. It's fairly obvious I had a problem with authority young. I was a defiant child on the inside. Didn't dare express it on the outside. All authorities said no.   

jackie maines

the hillbilly show

It was the Hillbilly Show Saturday night in Sparta that set off a welling up in the heart, adoration of the South I've been feeling today. From outside the South, it's seen intolerant, racist, mean-spirited and largely stupid. All these apply, but no more in the South than in the North and West. Neither Michelle Bachmann nor Ted Cruz is from the South. Cruz is from intelligent Canada. Both are racist as you get, mean-spirited, intolerant and best known for stupid; they're not from the South. Neither is John Boner. Stupid is universal. So is racism. In all my time in the South, I've had friends who are not racists, white friends who marched in demonstrations for black civil rights. A good percentage of Southerners do not fit the cliche mold as seen from the outside. When I'm outside the South, I find the people tend not to like Southerners for all the South's negative cliche associations. I'm reminded of a prank video I saw on facebook. A man with a sandwich board on front and back on a busy sidewalk in New York. It said, Fuck the Poor. Everybody that passed had something to say to him, either aggressive or passive aggressive. Sometimes it was threatening. Next scene, he's standing in the same place and his board reads, Help the Poor. Not one person looked at him. All went around him like he was a post in the middle of the sidewalk. Not one even cast a glance. All were preoccupied. I see the outsiders pointing the finger at the South over racism and slavery, what you white Southerners done to them poor black people, aggressive tones of voice. When it comes to helping the poor people of the South, black or white, the dregs of a century-long Depression, everybody looks the other way. Switch the channel. Of course I know racist people in the South. I know even more people who are not racist. Sure, there are some ignorant Southerners going around. I don't know but a few. It's just people being people, people with a common culture I happen to love. 

lynn worth

the hillbilly show

I saw a wonderful sense of community at the Hillbilly Show in the people on the stage and the people in the audience. The people on the stage were the same people as in the audience. Home town people, people who still have the old ways in their soul. In Alleghany County, as in Charleston, you can be who you are, do what you do, just don't make a spectacle of yourself, whatever your agenda. Keep your agenda, whatever it is, to yourself and we all get along good. Everybody knows what your agenda is, anyway. No need to bore the people around you repeating it. Whatever it is, it's ok, it's yours. There is little like walking into a hardware store and being called Honey by a man who is not gay. He's just talking the old way that some people still carry. In my life in the South, there is no other place on earth I'd rather be. In the South I live with a very personal warmth between people. All emotions are stronger, it seems, in the South. You fall into hate with somebody in the South and it's on. Falling into love is equally powerful. It is a warmth in the heart I find characteristic of Southerners, an open, receptive warmth. Mama is the goddess of the South. Paula Deen is a good model of the Southern middle-class, upper-class wannabe, white woman. She's not objectionable. She has a Southern charm that can sweet-talk her man into buying her anything she wants. My kind of people is really every kind of Southern people. Southern culture has a warm heart. It goes back to mama calling her chubby little boy Butterbean. And maybe it's that old Nineteenth Century belief in the sanctity of the individual that continues to live in the rural South. A Nineteenth Century religion possibly has something to do with it too. It's possibly the Nineteenth Century remains in today's South that drew me to the South subconsciously. I've never really trusted Twentieth Century Progress. Now the Twenty-first Century is dismantling the Twientieth Century back to the Nineteenth, and I don't trust that either. Oh well. I set out to write about the Hillbilly Show. I think what I wrote is why I love the Hillbilly Show. 

ernest and agnes joines

the hillbilly show

*

GRUMPY OLD BASTARD LIKES THE POPE

I put off going to town today until after 4. Necessary to go to grocery store for catfood, carrots for donkeys, and may as well pick up items for self, granola bars, bananas, apples, paper towels, Bounty, the only kind I'll buy because they work, peanuts, a cranberry-grape sugar drink with "no sugar added," ice cream Klondike bars with a polar bear logo, something to nibble on while writing, reminding me that polar bears are on their way to extinction but for zoos. African elephants may be extinct soon but in zoos. The gorilla is on its way to extinction. So curious. And what can we do? Nothing. I once knew a woman for a short time who worked in Rwandan refugee camps and other African refugee camps, mostly burying bodies with a shovel. Several years of it made her gaunt and took the light from her eyes. She was serious, wanted to do something to help, wanted to help the suffering. She couldn't change it, but she could do her best to assist survivors of international horrors. It broke her spirit. She entered a short-lived, disastrous marriage hoping to rehabilitate herself living rurally in America, the Appalachians, with a guy who lived simply, grew his own vegetables and hunted his own meat. Except he was crazier than she was. She jumped out like the frog dropped into boiling water. I hated to see her go, but was glad for her she cut and ran instead of sticking around being miserable. She was already miserable. She wanted to rest from it. She comes to mind when I feel impulses to want to do something about the vast horror show of extinctions going on and genocides and people hating each other for mere existence. It is possible that too many parasites can kill their host. After how many thousand years of religion as an ongoing part of civilization and pre-civilization does it take for humanity to get it?

People calling themselves Christian spew hate predictably like Old Faithful blowing steam. They're the most hard-hearted people around and they point the finger at the rest of us (three fingers pointing back at themselves). When I meet somebody with a hard-hearted attitude, I know right away its a Christian. Not a Catholic, not an Episcopalian, not a Lutheran, not a Methodist, not a Presbyterian, but a Christian. This is behind my Woody Allen quotation in the column to the right. Jesus really would not ever stop throwing up if he were to come back and look at what was being done in his name. For once, the Catholics have a pope who expresses compassion and caring for down and out people, maybe first one since the beginning, one who wants to dress simply and know people, wants to be in among the people around him, to feel their lives, their living spirit. His eyes glow with love as do his sayings. Strange to see the top dog bureaucrat in the original bureaucracy is of a sincere heart. He sets himself up for assassination going against the Sicilian mafia and says, What have I to lose? So I leave the body. I will be free. My jaw drops to witness such a man in the papacy. Some say he speaks truth, but does he live it? He gives the appearance that he does. He won't wear red shoes. He wears the simplest garment allowed a pope, wants a simple room for himself. He has been elevated by his character to a place where he can make a difference to the poor by appealing on their behalf as infallible authority to a rather large population. He may yet be offed for so much emphasis on the poor, the billions of people having a rough go of it all day every day, hungry and no help coming from anywhere;. The poor have been his lifetime concern like some people are concerned for pandas and ecology. I continue to be in awe that such a man would even be considered for pope. He's pissing off the rich Catholics and alienating important (translates: self-important) people everywhere in the world. He's a rebel.

Pope Francis came to mind as someone who has a position he can use to make a difference appealing to the higher self of the people who look to him and to many who do not look to him. He's the only pope of my lifetime I'd like to meet. But then, why? If I admire what he does, I can find in myself a way to "make a difference," whatever that means. I don't have money to give to the poor. Hell fire, I'm one of the poor. That's by American standard, not by the Zimbabwean standard or the Somalian. I don't know what I can do to help the poor people in my world. When I come face to face with somebody who is poor, I don't turn away. I regard the poorest people I know with even higher respect than the well off people I know. In fact, the poor people I know get a great deal of my respect. They have hard lives that I can't change. I work with the Hillbilly Show in Sparta to raise money to help some people of the county in need. We can't take care of everybody, but we can help some. We're a dozen devout believers, each in our own way, who come together in agreement that we can do something toward giving an assist to people who need help. Sometimes I give money to somebody asking for it and sometimes I don't. An individual's worth, to me, is in who the person is, character. The wealth factor is just a way of life. I prefer the company of working people, the working poor. I came to the mountains wondering what it was about the poor that God loved so much. Some years of living in the world of the working poor and having known about as many truly poor people as I've known very well off, I find the well off are better educated, experienced in the social graces, dressed up pretty with every hair in place, and every suit showing its price tag. The poor are every bit as obsessed with money as the rich. And the poor are stuck wherever they're living, unable to afford to move someplace else, like the rich live near the source of their income. The poor have nothing to fall back on but God, while the rich have money. They're God liberated.  

I've never known where I stood in the matter of being a benefit to the poor. I see so much going on around the world that is creating human misery, animal misery, misery to all life, poisoning the worms in our lawns, poisoning the ants with lethal food that kills the whole colony. Roundup spray for weeds is the first thought now, like Raid for bugs. All this happening at such an alarming rate, it's looking like the momentum is going in an obvious direction, everybody sees it. We're like watching it on tv. Even the news on television is fantasy. What can I do to stop the Japanese from killing whales? How can I turn the rising temperature of the ocean? Our politicians are on the take. That's the long and the short of it. They're no good to us. They're a large part of the problem. The part that floors me is that everybody in the congress and senate and supreme court is college educated. They don't sell a college education any better than Michele Bachmann sells Jesus. A large number of them have law degrees. I look at them and listen to them and think: What? An educated man who speaks like a fool. So many of them. What is it about our educational system that doesn't educate stupid out of people? It seems like transcending stupid would be a matter of education, but these people are educated and, as we say in these hills, dumber'n shit. It is surely the end of the American Empire when our representatives only represent our ignorance by acting it out publicly. I know there are intelligent people in this world, a lot of them, but they're staying out of sight in this time. This is the age of ignorance in the driver's seat, the Reagan Revolution 34 years into its purpose, ignorance its trump card. Ignorance has taken over our government from local to state because intelligent people are staying out of it. It takes low intelligence to want to be a politician in this time, and a very real inner cheapness. Our "leaders" are not respectable in this time, except in fake ways. My answer for myself on where I want to aim my respect is never for wealth or the show of wealth, but for individuals with compassion in their attitudes.  

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EVERYDAY LIFE AS SPIRITUAL PATH

michael heizer

My friend Carole and I were talking on the phone this morning, as we do every morning, and, as usual, we talked freely in a free-flowing way, whatever comes up. We have nothing to hide from one another, no hesitations about trust, and where our belief systems are concerned, she is the only one I know with mine, and I'm the only one she knows with hers. I believe I can say I know her higher self and she knows mine. I use higher self because it is even hard to find in oneself, let alone somebody else. Our spiritual interior lives are both educated from the East, India in particular. Yet India is only the present location of ancient wisdom that goes all the way back to Neolithic times. I point out that our higher selves look to the East, noting there is nothing in the West to look to for anything having to do with one's interior life, like wisdom. I once told a zealous fundamentalist baptist that I looked to the wisdom of the East, even had a guru. It was all over the place next day that I'm a devil worshipper. That's no big deal. Anybody who knows me, knows it's not so, and people that don't know me, I don't care. Just another anonymous name to gloat in self-righteousness over. I knew that would be next, and said it just to see. He was not somebody I have ever spoken to with anything near the word trust, a preacher's husband, and my respect for this guy is an empty bag. I do things like that to amuse myself when a moment arises. When my buddy Justin was in high school running with a rowdy bunch, more like a crowd, he told everybody to stay away from that old man at Air Bellows, "He'll shoot your ass! He don't care!" Justin didn't tell me what he'd done until a decade later. His dad and I were friends, and Justin had been my friend since he was his baby's age. He said he told them this to keep them from doing shit to me. He said, "I knew the shit they got into, I wanted to keep them away from you." I thanked him, sincerely. I knew the kind of shit they got into, too, though not from the inside like he did.

 

michael heizer

 

Carole and I agree daily that we like not having much future in this world. We tend away from the news and more toward the spiritual, meaning the spirit in everyday life, living in relation to the spirit, the flow of the spirit. Neither of us meditates or goes to workshops or anything to do with "spirituality" and certainly have no involvement with religion. She watches no tv and listens to NPR radio seldom, same as I do. She reads historical novels, mostly, from the library. Every couple weeks she takes home a stack of books. And she reads books having to do with Meher Baba, as do I. My reading is all over the place. I've been interested in contemporary fiction and art films from mainland China over the last decade or more, and the history of China. I like reading American, French and Chinese poetry, as well as American and world fiction. Poetry is the only source I've found in the West that concerns one's interior life, the life we really live. That started changing with the New Age period of the 1980s. I worked in bookstores from 1965 to 1975. Very little spiritual kinds of books were available. What was available was largely out of print and hard to find. Since 1975, spirituality has become a whole new genre of American writing. Some of it is nonsensical and some of it has very practical relevance. It's good to have the whole spectrum to pick from. At the time I fell in with Meher Baba, I was most interested in American poetry, the Twentieth Century, and for the first time realized poetry had been my source for spirituality through the time of the life I rejected all that. Brought up in the belief system of Kansas fundamentalism, which makes Southern fundamentalism look logical, I see the bozo Westboro preacher that died recently from Topeka is a good example of the fundamentalism I came up in. I left that mind like an arrow pulled all the way back as far as it can go and let go. I feel like my life in that time amounted to an arrow being held at full tension until the string almost broke with frustration, anger, confusion, depression, suppression. The arrow took off like a rocket and sent me as far away from that mind inside myself as the full strength of the bow could push it, full speed.  

 

michael heizer

 

The problem I had that I did not know I had in that time of brow-beating religion was not understanding yet that God and religion are about as equal as a flame and a rock. I was rejecting false religion believing it the nature of God. It was fifteen years of peeling away the onion layers of bullshit I'd been fed in the name of God. Getting down to the core of that kind of thinking, it comes from ego, not God. I had to wash my mind of about everything I'd been taught by way of religion, threw the baby out with the bath water. It all had to go. I needed to get myself down to neutral. About the time I had convinced myself to my own satisfaction "God is dead," I learned it is not God that's dead, but religion. Meher Baba taught me that in a very short time, a couple days. God is alive and well and very much active in our everyday lives. That's where God lives, in our everyday lives. Our everyday lives is what all the gospels are about, not wearing a tie to church. God takes a human voice and explains the real thing is in our hearts, our attitudes toward life, extending ourselves to the benefit of others. Not because it's God's commandment. It's simply sound counsel. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is as much a natural law as gravity. What we put out into the world comes back. Donkeys are the first example to come to mind. They return what they get right now, like cats and children. It is automatic behavior in all living beings to return what we receive immediately. You might say it's the nature of life. I feel like Jesus was saying, use this principle to make your life better, use it for a path to inner peace. Be conscious of words and behavior, mindful. Like Melvin told a friend who is on his way to prison, First one that disrespects you in any way, knock him on his ass. That tells everybody you'll fight and they'll leave you alone. In other words, you give back what you receive right now. It works the other way too. Regard others with inner peace, no hidden agendas, respect, and everything that comes back is of the same nature. If you want to be respected, respect the people around you in every interaction. Soon you'll live in a world full of respect and wonder what happened that changed everybody.

 

michael heizer

  

 I'm thinking about  friend I've not seen in a lot of years. She'd been hanging with an odd bunch of people that kept her on the verge of bonkers all the time. Something changed in her. She came to some new understandings of her relationship to the world around her. Friends started dropping away, so fast and so many she became a little bit hysterical. She was telling me about this on the phone, and I felt I had insight into what was happening, because I'd noticed in myself that when I change within, the people around me change, some fall away and new ones come in. I suggested she wait and see what happens. I said those old friends have to go with your old way of thinking; they're interwoven. With patience, you'll see new people coming in and new circumstances. It was the biggest change of her life. Right away, circumstances started changing for her and more reliable people came into her life. At the time, I wasn't sure that what worked for me would work for her too, but it was all I had to offer. I find in myself, I have cycles too. From one cycle to the next, a rather remarkable change occurs in that some people fall away and others come in. My cycles tend to seven years. In one cycle, I did the radio show at the local AM station of mountain music for seven years. In that time, about all my life had to do with the music in the area. Next cycle I started making videos at regional music venues for YouTube and writing articles about the music of the region for an old-time music magazine. Had the inspiration for the next one today. It won't be until October, giving plenty of time to consider how I want to approach it. I want to write about the Hillbilly Show, an annual event in Sparta for the last 20 years, this the 20th. Theme this year will be music of the county.  I will be the one making video of the whole show to put on dvd for sale to the people that want them. The one we've used in the past to make video of the show puts the equivalent of a cell phone on a tripod and lets it run. I will be doing some hand-held and tripod some, move around, different angles, lively images. Use the zoom. This cycle has about two more years. I went into this cycle curious to see if I'd make it through it. Made it this far.  

 

michael heizer

 

 

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SEVEN YEARS WITH MOUNTAIN MUSIC

      jr maxwell by tj worthington

Tonight I'm going to Scott Freeman and Edwin Lacy's cd release party at the Fiddle & Plow show in Woodlawn. The album is 2 CHAIRS NO WAITING. It will be a knock-out show. Steve Lewis will be there with guitar and banjo. Butch Robins will be there with banjo. Willard's rhythm guitar will be there. Probably Mike Gayheart playing bass, or Sandy, or both. I'm hoping Dori will be there. It's going to be some music in the real sense of the word as music. Yesterday I saw Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale dance a waltz in THE LEOPARD. It was a dance, not just moving their feet the way I "dance." This is the difference between music and music the way these guys make it. Their music itself is a dance. They pluck the strings with the same grace of Lancaster and Cardinale swirling over the floor. Their music flows. I'm not saying this makes them better than any others. Only that this is what draws me to be there every Friday night I can make it.

First time I listened to this project, I felt a wringing and twisting inside longing to play it on the Saturday morning radio show that went away when the station was sold out of the community. This is an album I know my listeners would love, and I would love playing it for them. It brings to mind the time I found a cd from a mid Sixties lp of a Galax bluegrass band, Larry Richardson And the Blue Ridge Boys. Buddy Pendleton plays fiddle. He is one of the great fiddlers of the region. Worked at the Floyd post office for 40 years. First time I heard the album was just a few weeks after the radio station shut down. My longing to play it for my listeners was so strong it hurt. I'd have played the whole album straight through. When I play it now it still pains me that I never had a chance to play it for the listeners. Those seven years of the radio show, The Backwoods Beat Music Hour, were part of a seven year cycle that were happy years, which doesn't mean without sorrow. In childhood I was afraid of sorrow, but have come to embrace sorrow the same as joy, a legitimate human emotion that has a hidden joy in it, like joy has a hidden sorrow in it, like light has darkness hidden in it and darkness has light hidden in it. On a scale where joy is at one end and sorrow at the other, I like to think I waver somewhere toward the middle, sometimes wavering all the way over to one side or the other. When I'm in joy I know it's short lived. In sorrow I know it's short lived too.

I have no way of guessing even close to accurately how many people listened to the show. Over the seven years about twenty people spoke to me in the grocery store, here and there, saying they listen. They were the faces I played the music to in my mind's eye. I didn't know if it was two hundred or twenty. It didn't matter. I think of times in the Regular Baptist church meetings when it was only two or three people, Millard Pruitt would quote a verse from the pulpit, when two or three of you are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst thereof. He preached the same as if the house were full and people standing. That made a lot of sense to me. It's not about bigness. It's about the thing itself. I've adopted that thinking for everything I do. In the beginning of this "blog" were three or four views a day. I was ok with that. I wasn't going to advertise. It wasn't about how many. It was about doing it. I wanted to make myself write something every day worth reading. If 3 people find it worth reading, I'm fully satisfied. After three years it's up to over 200 views per day. I am no more satisfied with 200 than with 2. Yet, I felt a mild sense of thrill when it passed 100, then again when it passed 200. It's a thrill because it was unexpected --- a hundred times 2. I don't know who they are except for a few who have contacted me. Now I love my readers like I loved my listeners to the radio show.

The first year with BROC and involved in the Hillbilly Show, Agnes wanted me to be a comic hillbilly mc. I did it one more time, but it was too unsettling having 800 people looking at me. I was not born for the stage. But I had a very strong feeling that all the people looking at me knew me and I only knew a few of them. It told me that perhaps most of the people in the audience have heard the show at least a few times. That's what unsettled me most. I was not prepared for an auditorium full of my listeners. Had no idea that many people listened, at least sometimes. The people in the audience listened when I spoke and I was not ready for that. Yet, it gave me a measure of my listeners and gave them faces. In the beginning, the black mic I spoke into at the radio station seemed as far as my voice went. I was talking to and playing music for the mic. Beyond that I had no clue. Then I stand in front of an auditorium of people and they know me. It blew my mind to smithereens and I did not know how to handle it. Practice night in front of empty seats was comfortable. When the seats had faces, that was another deal. I tend to see people as oceans of consciousness that are really complex from one individual to another. I get 800 oceans of consciousness looking at me like they know me and I'm too overwhelmed to be able to function. After two shows of being freaked out, I asked Agnes to let me pull the curtain ropes, involvement less the freakout.

In this seven year cycle I've been making videos of the music at the Fiddle & Plow to put on youtube, painting mountain musicians and writing here. These are my art forms in this cycle. Yes, I regarded the radio show an art form. I wasn't much at talking, so I kept it brief. Emphasis was totally on the music itself. There is no talking I could do that would be better to listen to than anything recorded in these hills. I'd rather my listeners groove to Gaither Carlton's banjo or fiddle than to put them through anything I'd say other than identifying musician and title, and to mention he was Doc Watson's father in law. I couldn't even do that playing the Carter Family. I love them so much that just mentioning their names choked me up. None of their songs need an introduction of title or anything. I'd play one after the other with tears of joy running down my face, knowing that everyone listening loved what they were hearing at least as much as I did. Carter Family songs have been played and recorded countless times, though I've never heard a version of one of their songs that reaches all the way into my heart like Sara, AP and Maybelle do. Sara's and AP's singing was entirely without emotive expression, like old time church singing, yet the emotion is so powerful that even screaming rockers can't get there. After hearing the Carter Family's Wildwood Flower, there is no other Wildwood Flower. And then there is Ralph and Carter Stanley. Legends of the Clinch Mountains.

This music, mountain music, makes me glad I am where I am every time I hear any of it. The more funky old-timey it is, the more I love it. Tommy Jarrell with his fretless banjo and his fiddle. Fred Cockerham with banjo and fiddle. One of the great albums of all time is Tommy and Fred picking banjo together. It's called Tommy and Fred. It was out of print for a long time. But I'd think by now it would be back in print. It's too good not to be available. And that was the motivation for opening the music store, an outlet for mountain music in the area. Floyd, Virginia, was the closest place. It was a great adventure. I met a lot of wonderful people. Met some new friends. Took up painting mountain musicians. Discovered Old-Time Herald magazine. Discovered a lot of incredible music. Sometimes I get called an expert, but I always remark that I am not an expert, just someone that loves the music. I've learned so much from mountain music and musicians that I can't imagine myself before the learning started. One of the great joys of my life has been playing mountain music to mountain people on an AM station in the mountains, the next county over from WPAQ, the ideal.

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THE HILLBILLY SHOW SATURDAY NIGHT

stage / backstage

 

 

 

Saturday night the Hillbilly Show happened in Sparta, the 19th annual. Large, responsive audience and the show was indeed entertaining. The picture above is my view of the Hillbilly Show. I pull the rope that opens and closes the curtain. I see stage and backstage at the same time. I can't participate in moving mics around and setting up props, because I have to be alert for Dotty to signal open or close the curtain. I take a moment to make a photograph of somebody backstage or onstage and before I can get the camera out of my hand I'm told to close the curtains, so I have to hold the camera strap with my teeth while I pull the rope. That happened several times. Not being a master camera operator, I made video of Agnes Joines singing on stage. The camera picked up the beginning when she first spoke on stage, then skipped to her turning and leaving the stage. Frustrating.

 

The show was fun like always. This time Gary and Bobbi Parlier danced a Beauty and the Beast costume waltz. They put together props and outfits that are quite a production. Gary made a "castle" out of some cardboard and painted it like made of stone. The castle had a fog machine. Gary put on a mask-wig that was the beast face. I couldn't tell if Bobbi made it or if they found it somewhere. It was the same with her dress, 19th Century deep South Suthun. Beautiful. I wondered if she'd made it or found it somewhere. They are a couple who likes to dance. They dance well together. Before Gary went out as the Beast, he huddled behind the castle walls filling his black cape with smoke from the fog blower. When he stepped out onto the stage, the fog billowed and seeped from his cape and followed him when he walked away from the castle. Every year they perform a dance of some sort and dress up for it. They spent the entire skit dancing. No telling a story in words. The dance itself told the story. He throws off the wig-mask and it's Prince Charming in a silver crown. And they lived happily everafter. In Cocteau's film, they ascended to the clouds.

 

Henry Thorne was dressed up in a suit and looked alert, no more hobbling. Agnes was dolled up in a red belly-dancer's dress with beads all over it that shimmied when she moved. Hillbilly Wes, who works at the middle booth in the post office, makes a good MC for the show. He engages the audience directly and personally. If you're in the audience, you feel like he's talking personally to you. He's good at slapstick and spontaneous comedy. His personality is inclusive of all around him. He takes you in and includes you in his attention, that's with everyone around him. He is not shy of other people. He told me a few years ago that since his divorce with his first wife, who he said with the humor of exaggeration was related to half the people in the county, in the post office he figures half the people he sees in the course of a day hate his guts. It's like the time I was told once by someone I didn't know, "Everybody loves you!" That was middle-class approve-of-me exaggeration, but it sets off alarm buzzers. I said, "No they don't. I can make you a list of exceptions, a long list. You just don't know the right people. The right people despise me." Wes is what we call in the mountains a catbird, somebody who is fun, cuts up, pulls pranks, makes funny remarks. He doesn't know it, but he's an asset to the county. Agnes Joines, too, is a catbird, and an asset to the county.

 

Cheri Choate sang two Dotty West songs quite beautifully. To my personal ear, I preferred the Emmy Lou Harris song she sang Friday night. But only by a little bit. She told the story of Dotty West's life and death in brief and sang the songs. I took an empty seat in the first row to make video of her performance. I did that video poorly too. The first song took good all the way through. The second song quit making video after about half a minute and finished it out with about 50 still pictures. It was not the camera. It was me. I haven't used it in several weeks. It was just as well for the second song, because in the middle of it a wire in the sound system did its thing. David Nichols said it burned out a wire. A shrill, loud screech went on for several seconds, went away and came back for several more seconds. George Sheets, sound man, got it under control. If I'd been backstage where I was the night before I'd have heard the singing better. It probably would have been a better place to make video from. The two guitars and bass made some good music.

 

George Sheets sang his tear-jerker song about the farmer in the Depression. It's a song with a powerful story of a man who works all his life for something and ends up with nothing. That's becoming more and more the American story. His second song was another good American story, Okie From Muskogee. It's a place where they get high drinking liquor instead of smoking pot, and the boys don't have long hair and this and that and the other. It was a country hit in the time when boys with long hair were from the city and boys in the country still got haircuts. A few years later, country boys were growing long hair and smoking pot. Now they're doing crystal meth and crack. The Okie from Muskogee story didn't last long. It took about as long as it took country girls to quit wearing pointed toe spike heels several years after city women quit wearing them. Ten years after city boys were smoking pot, having long hair and listening to metal rock, country boys had long hair, smoked pot and listened to REO Speedwagon, Ted Nugent and such. City boys eventually started having shorter hair; the country boys were the only ones with long hair for about ten years. By now in both city and country, hair length on a guy is individually optional. Tattoos are not optional in city or country. They're mandatory of a certain age group.

 

Maybe ten minutes before the show was to start, I was talking with Agnes. She expressed her fear with a long, sorrowful face of the whole show being a flop. "I'm afraid it's not going to work." I said,

"It's going to work. It always works." She gets wound up into a state of anxiety as the director who orchestrates the whole show. Every year she falls into a state of fear that it is going to flop, everybody will walk out and demand their money back. It never works out that way. At the end of every show she is ecstatic that it worked, as high in spirit at the end as she was low in spirit at the beginning. Ernest, he just laughs, everything's going to be all right. And it was. At the end everybody involved, stage and backstage, were required to go out on the stage and bow to the audience. Nobody threw tomatoes or rotten eggs at us. No boos. Just a big roar of clapping. It worked.

 

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