That started from a cheap hotel In Jackson, Mississip'.
The birthday boy was 37 and just wanted some booze
Eight passengers crammed in a van for an alcoholic cruise....
An alcoholic cruise
But the bar they wanted was closed that day, much to their chagrin
And everywhere they wandered, no-one would let them in...
No-one would let them in!
The van arrived at the doors of a Sonny's Barbecue....
With Birthday boy, the sound gal too
All the cast, and the tech
The SM bitch...
Saw the salad and the meat,
But no serious BOOZE
So this is the tale of the celebrants,
Trapped down in Dixie.
Stuck in an empty rest'rant
Trapped down in Dixie.
Stuck in an empty rest'rant
Off of I-20
The sound gal, cast and tech, it's said,
Tried to party through the hell,
But the SM bitch just moaned and whined,
Cuz she couldn't be on her cell
No scotch, no vodka no bourbon,
And no whiskey too,
Nothing but Bud and Heinekin,
And some mysterious microbrew.
So the birthday boy has one message,
To relate to thee,
There's no greater shithole,
Than Jackson, Mississippi!
Yes, gentle readers, that's the story of my birthday celebration in Jackson, MS last night. Flo had found a place which was described as having the best food in Mississippi, and they had a fully stocked bar, so we decided to go there. Unfortunately, what none of the info said was that it was closed on Mondays. So there we are, in Jackson MS, trying to drive around blind and find somewhere to eat and have at least a halfway decent drink to celebrate my birthday. What we discovered was that in much the same spirit as Portsmouth, NH, Jackson closes everything at 8 p.m. that isn't a fast food restaurant. So yes, we ended up at a Sonny's Barbecue, because it was open, and we were there. And I believe if we didn't stop, Levitt would have eaten us all. Levitt is always hungry. I mean like two hours after lunch she wants to stop the van to get more food, hungry. I'm convinced she has a tapeworm. (Actually, I'm far more convinced that she IS a tapeworm who is presently between hosts...) And since she had been STARVING at 6:30, waiting until we left at 8 to get to the restaurant had her RAVENOUS. And because we waited so long to go to dinner, she didn't get a chance to talk to her husband beforehand I guess, so he called while she was at the table and instead of getting up and taking the call like any norma person would, she said she couldn't talk because she was out and at dinner and if he wasn't free later, she'd have to talk to him tomorrow, which upset him, which upset her, so she hung up on him, then stormed off out of the restaurant five seconds later to respond to a text from him and, I suppose talk to to him, as she could have if she had just gotten up before. And so, when she returned, she was a glowing little ball of sunshine. And by glowing little ball of sunshine, I mean huge sucking black hole of despair and pain. And of course, the place didn't have any drinks, save for the ones mentioned in the song, so I got myself a Heinekin (I have no idea of that's spelled right) consoled myself with the fact that at least the place had an all you can eat salad bar, and did my best to have a good time even though my soul was being sucked out of me by little Miss sulky in the corner, who, I might add, did NOT offer to make sure I didn't pay for anything like she did when we celebrated Carol's birthday. Just saying.
That having been said, I am happy to say that despite all of the insanity that ensued from this attempt to celebrate me getting one step closer to a birthday containing a theme having something to do with being on the other side of a rise in the topography, I DID have a good time, because the people I tour with are a lot of fun. And after a certain amount of things go wrong, you just have to laugh the whole thing off and regroup. Plans are now that I will at least get bought one drink this weekend when we get into PA from Dallas. If not, I'm buying myself a drink and screw you people... I also discovered that Jackson, Mississippi is another southern city which does not believe in people being able to drink coffee within the city limits. I hate the South.... trying to find a place to get a late night cup of coffee down here is like the Bataan Death March. You just keep going forward, convinced that sooner or later, you HAVE to find something, even if it is just an all-night diner, and yet, you DON'T! I ended up drinking coffee in the lobby bar of a Marriott hotel. I can tell you this, gentle readers, birthdays suck as you get older.
Today was possibly the worst show we had. The load in at the Mississippi State University was nowhere near as bad as we had been led to believe, since the dock had an elevator on it which lifted everything up to stage level, so even with the temp crew, we loaded in pretty fast. The problem was the space was small, cramped (All of stage left was taken up with fly rails, so in order to make room for the scenery to hide behind the masking, I had to place the prop and costume table
BEHIND the free-standing pulley systems, which, since there were no outlets back there to plug a clip light into, made running back for costume changes quite interesting.) and hot as a welldigger's witch. Add to that the fact that the audience was made up of Stepford children that had apparently been bred not to say shit if they had a mouthful, ANd the fact that a third of the audience showed up after Tell Tale and that ANOTHER third of the audience showed up right before the LAST story, and you can imagine the incredibly low-energy, disappointing experience we all had. These kids were so averse to making noise of any kind they opted out halfway through the curtain call. One of them tried a half-hearted "whoo" when Ted bowed as the frog, and that seemingly tired the whole audience out, because the applause stopped as Carol took her bow. I then tried to skip my bow and go to the company bow, but no-one read my mind (slackers!) and then we kind of all wandered offstage in a daze, feeling like we'd been beaten, kicked in the groin and socked in the gut simultaneously. All in all, NOT a good way to go.
Now we are in Shreveport, LA, where it is raining. But the hotel is already better than the pit we stayed at in Jackson. That hotel was so bad... (How bad was it?) It was so bad that the lady at the front desk had to walk around the desk to the lobby area to make her wireless internet work. WHat did that mean for me? It meant I had to come down to the lobby from my perch out in the western back 40 of the hotel (for some reason my room is always as far away from everyone else's as humanly possible. And Levitt makes the assignments...go figure.) and go into the lobby. Because otherwise the network kept disappearing on me. And the free coffee was great--if you liked motor oil. But the Shreveport hotel is completely different, in that it isn't a run-down, crumbling, mouldering rat-trap in a sinkhole of a city that as far as I can see has never in any way deserved to be sung about with the fervor used by Johnny and June Carter Cash. The Man in Black lied to me, and when I meet him in Heaven (on a visitor's pass, obviously) I will take him back to Jackson, and shoot him there, just to watch him die. Why? Because that's all there is to DO in Jackson!
Pond in 2012--Willing to kick Johnny Cash's dead ass for Freedom
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