Tale 14

Into the Orchestra Pit

entering Tyrone Pa. from the south on U.S. Route 220 in 2018

the year which was the Centennial plus one

of Fred and Poley’s forming their first band here

in the small town where they grew up

"I'm tellin' you!" went Bill. The Huron storyteller’s demure little girlish sidekick, his orphan wife comic, had plumb stolen his faculty of speech with her comic little story, there for a minute; but now he had it back, he thought.

Their pathetic interviewer, meanwhile, seemed unsure which universe he was in.

"This is really fun," Bill said, "these stories."

Those six words were the first attempt anyone had made the whole, crazy, endlessly-sun-setting evening to reflect on what in the world they were really trying to accomplish by drinking martinis and telling tales of such a kind.

Betty Ann ignored the stab at higher consciousness, however. She asked Bill: "About the people bein' drunk? the time Leonard walked up to sing 'Valderi, Valdera'? You know how he walked down for his solo? those ‘Old-Timers’? how they'd walk down off–"

"The risers," Bill helped.

She nodded. "And Leonard's plowed? Well, he did really walk down once, and he walked right off the stage."

Bill laughed from head to toe: "Into the orchestra pit, ah hah!"

"Tee hee," managed mj.

"Ah haghh."

"Hee hee," poor mj laughed a little bit again and asked: "And the audience thought it was part of the act?"

"No," Bill said, "I don't think they did that night." He did a worried Fred, looking over the edge of the stage into the black netherworld: "'Leonard! Leonard! Where are you’? Hhaah. Eh, mj! I'll tell you." Another story was waiting in line, chompin’ at the bit and scamperin’ around restlessly in Bill’s active mind.

But the little muse of comedy wasn't ready. "And you know," she said, "that old trick that Fred does?"

Bill laughed through his sinuses this time at his funny little story helper who couldn’t stop, once she had started.

"About havin' the pretty girls help the ‘Old-Timers’ down? They all file down one side and look at the other side, and escort 'em down?"

"He does that as a joke," Bill said, "like they're too old to make it."

Unless somebody holds their arm, as mj understood it.

"Well, yeh, but the reason that all started is because it was," her beautiful upper lip curled, baring more tooth, "a ne-ces-si-ty. And it started with Gordon Goodman, the famous tenor that sang 'On Top of Old Smokey'…."

Mj chuckled at Betty Ann’s biting tone before he realized what the bite was stealing from him.

On.. top.. of.. Old.. Smoooooooh-kee-eeeee...

Bill laughed again. "This is true," he verified soberly for mj’s benefit.

"….when he was so plowed – …. " she managed to get out, turning to look at mj....

"No!" cried the sorry fool of an interviewer, finally realizing what a chunk of his being she had bitten off, and like that he was back in ‘Shock’ and ‘Denial’ again over his protracted trauma, the piecemeal and nightlong gobbling up of his fairy tale, just like the grief therapists always said: a grieving person would swing back and forth between the so-called ‘earlier stages’ and ‘later stages’ of the grief process; the grieving person would repeat the process several times before he or she would finally come to ‘accept’ fully and ‘resolve’ completely the loss they had to grieve, so as to go on with whatever was left of their life at last.

"...that he had to have two people walk him to the mi­crophone," she finished finally.

"Yoh geez!" Poor mj couldn't stand it. There wasn't a sober songster in the whole crazy pack, not a decent or sane citizen in the land any more. Gordon Goodman’s extremely high and ethereally beautiful, soft pining tenor voice singing ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ was a vocal art legend that went on for years. Fred Waring couldn’t finish a concert without it or the audience would give him fits. It truly was spectacularly, heartrendingly lovely, one of the greatest achievements in the decades-long history of Fred’s development of The High Art of Song. The world seemed beautiful no matter what, when you first heard Gordon Goodman singing that famously high, slow, first a cappella line, all by his lonely Appalachian Mountain self without any orchestra or band. Art and religion could not be separate things. They had to be the same, a single thing; you were convinced of it because you had just experienced it.

Yet Gordon Goodman was so alcohol intoxicated every single night when he was supposed to sing that Great Smoky Mountains paean, that he had to be helped physically down from the risers every single night to sing it by not one but two people, so he wouldn’t kill or maim himself or anyone else walking straight off blindly and plummeting head first into the vulnerable audience, just like Leonard and Poley and God knows how many more of Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians had done when they were similarly too sauced to walk anywhere safely on stage unaided. What kind of sense did a picture like this make? What did it mean? It didn’t seem to be a good sign for the country, the USA, mj thought, or for the rest of the world which the USA liked to push around so much. What right did any country which was run by such fools as this have to push any other country around? What right did the fool Republicans have to push the fool Democrats around? Maybe it would be better if all the fools of the world, which seemed to be everybody, just quit trying to act superior and stayed in their own little fool corners and partied and worshiped their Lord in their own way like everybody was doing tonight, the Pennsylvanians, the Blackburns and fool he.

"It's true," she said, apparently aware her good friend mj might wish he could disbelieve it all. "I was there. I saw THAT!!"

All covered with snohhhhhhhw...

And two wobbly ‘old-timers’ in the mirror swooned and toppled into the soft and warm, waiting arms of four dolled up ‘girls’ of the chorus.