Heading to Texas

When I was in sixth grade, a couple of my friends and I decided to enter the school's talent contest. Most of the kids came out dancing and singing. I remember one boy with curly hair who strummed his guitar and sang "Mr. Moonlight" in a rough voice patterned after the Beatles. If you told me he grew up to be Brian Setzer of the Stray Cats ("Stray Cat Strut" and "Rock This Town"), it wouldn't surprise me.


As I recall, the genesis of the idea to sign up for the show came when my friend Alan Hale (not the skipper on "Gilligan's Island") came over to my house to play basketball after school and noticed my mom had bought me two striped sweaters that were essentially identical, except that one had orange instead of yellow stripes. We put them on and thought we looked like a singing group...I would guess probably the Lettermen or the Kingston Trio, but we believed we looked like surf music legends Jan and Dean.

Although I took guitar lessons and definitely knew C, F and G7, we decided we would sound a lot better when lipsyncing a song.

We were easily amused, as was my mom who said we should enter the talent show. My mom has always had this optimistic, no-limit faith in me to be able to do anything, and of course she believed everyone would love our "act" as much as she did. Sure, we knew the song, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena" by heart, so mouthing the words wouldn't be a problem, and we managed to parlay our limited dancing ability into something that vaguely resembled a choreographed act, but what would put us over the top?

Although it proved to be one of the seminal moments in entertainment history, I can't remember exactly how the idea of my friend Dean joining the act came to be. Perhaps he came over to play basketball riding his skateboard and the thought hit like a thunderbolt, or maybe my mom suggested it, but somehow we came up with the idea that he should ride out on his skateboard during the song wearing a gray wig and moomoo.

Back in those days, they didn't bother having rehearsals for something as casual as a grade school talent show. On the day of the show, we all just showed up. I don't think we even asked permission to have Dean ride a skateboard into the auditorium, which I'm sure must have been against school rules. We kept our plan very quiet, so that when Alan and I took the stage, no one even knew that Dean was part of the act.

We got up there to dance and lipsync our hearts out, undoubtedly vying to win the heart of Sandy Ligatich, the hottest blonde bombshell in all of Boos School and a babe Dean also had a crush on. Heck, every boy in school had a crush on her....but I digress.

The kids liked the song, of course (Who doesn't like that song?), so they tolerated our sweater-inspired act, but when Dean rode into the auditorium on a skateboard looking like the Little Old Lady herself, the crowd went crazy. The crowd reaction proved to be so jovial and intense, with so much applause and cheering, the judges had no choice but to award us with first prize. Mrs. Kelner, the principal, was so impressed that she had us do a command performance for the PTA. We weren't sure how parents would react to our act, but they proved to be just as impressed as their kids. We probably should have gone on tour and possibly had a showroom built for us in Las Vegas, but this was pre-Celine Dion, and we just didn't think that way.

By the time we got to high school, Alan, Dean and I had all matured into totally different young men. Now, we all had a crush on Anita Crandall, another beautiful blonde, although more bubbly than Sandy. Eventually Alan won and married her, and he apparently never forgave us for conceding victory, because I haven't seen him since. Just kidding. Anita was a great girl, and I'm sure she is a wonderful woman, although she and Alan did divorce.

Dean and I, on the other hand, have managed to remain friends, although we had a few years here and there when we lived in different worlds and didn't talk, during which time he started going by his given name, Mike. When we were in first grade together, there were too many Mikes for our teacher, so she decided to call him by his middle name, Dean, which is what I called him for many years thereafter. I finally decided to start calling him Mike, too, although it was a hard habit to change. During this new millenium, no one could have been a better friend to me. When a great opportunity opened for him in Texas about a year ago, I was sad to see him move, but I knew his job would kill him if he stayed in California. We've gotten together a few times on his return visits to California as well as on a couple of cruises, and I've been threatening to visit him in Texas, but so far I've never gotten around to it.

Since we never got show biz out of our blood, Mike and I both like to sing karaoke, although I have to admit we have sat in more than one karaoke bar on a cruise ship and chickened out. We sang "Margaritaville" together once on Monarch of the Seas, and my mom said we did great, so I don't know what we're so worried about. Anyway, I kept saying we should bring some long costume beards and cowboy hats with us so we could sing a ZZ Top song. I think in the back of my mind I figured that if all went bad, we could take off the beards and no one on the ship would recognize us.


To make a long story longer, Mike called me a couple of weeks ago and said I MUST come to Texas to visit now, because he had tickets for us to see that Little Ol' Band from Texas, ZZ Top. Tomorrow, I'll have California in the rear-view mirror of a United flight to Dallas, and then I'll drive southwest for two hours and ask somebody, "Where in the hell am I?"