Two popular pastimes in San Pedro Town are Karaoke and Drinking.
Since bars open early and close late, there is always a lot of drinking going on. Likewise, when karaoke starts and participants pick up a microphone, the singing, good, bad, and ugly, picks up like an afternoon squall.
There is an undercurrent here where what you think you hear is not always what you hear, what you see is not always as you see it, what you assume is often erroneous, what you plan goes astray. Poker cards in the hole are held closely and opportunities to leap without looking are always at hand. There are Spanish gold doubloons in a shipwreck out on the reef and all it takes to get them is a hundred thousand of your money.
Wade, owner of Road Kill Bar, is painting this morning and his orange Karaoke sign advertises fun.
Karaoke is a sign of our times where audience participation is the real star of the show.
Make Believe is definitely more fun than not.
Sunday is FunDay at Crazy Canuck’s.
Three to seven, the Cover Ups hammer out reggae, Santana, Jimmy Buffett and pop songs from last year and yesteryear. As the band powers up, an investment conference concludes with a drum roll and attendees shut notebooks on establishing money havens, protecting capital, and growing nest eggs.
Reggae is a music of choice in the Caribbean.
When the song is over the lead singer reminds me that singing is spiritual and takes him to a different realm and sometimes he goes into a trance. During a band break he chats up a stunning black girl at the end of the bar and he isn’t looking at her with spiritual eyes.
Reggae has its own sound. It takes a while to understand the words, but that will come.
Places move at their own speed, and, San Pedro Town isn’t going to speed up, just for me.
Reggae and waves compliment each other.
You don’t have to understand what they are saying to enjoy their melody.
“She likes details,” Bruce Cooper says of his wife.
Their gallery, in a rented shop on main street in Caye Caulker, presents her art. She paints and he runs the business end of their collaboration.
“We sell original art, prints, and small stocking stuffers, ” Bruce tells me as we talk about New Orleans, the proliferation of guest houses on this island, the fact that his business is for sale due to aggressive web marketing by competing worldwide tourist destinations.
“We are losing 3% of our visitors a year,” he tells me. “I have been working since I was seven years old. I want to retire and go fishing.”
Bruce walks with a swollen foot brought on by diabetes.
I slip my purchase into my cargo pants as he makes a sale to a lady that has already bought two prints earlier in the day.
Selling art in a wood shack in the Caribbean sea, with a breeze rustling simple curtains hung on shuttered windows, seems better than cooking your brains out on a boat in bumpy water with a plastic bag full of stinking cut bait waiting to go on your hooks.
Art and business can co-exist.
It looks to me like Bruce’s work is as close to fishing as he is going to get in this lifetime.
Music is accessible.
You can be wearing a tuxedo and tails, coveralls, golf shorts, uniforms, diapers, or your birthday suit, and it sounds great. You can be wearing a wedding dress, a pearl necklace, spiked heels, a flimsy cocktail party dress, cowboy boots, turquoise earrings or a bikini and it sounds great. You can be white haired, bald, or a long hair and enjoy. You do not need to know how to read or write to get the rhythm right.
This afternoon a little girl stands in front of the Band with her father’s approving look and does an impromptu dance.
She can do worse than hang out with serious musicians wearing suits and swinging with intent.
There is her future ahead.
Possibly she will fall in love with a man who fits her and walk down the aisle with her father holding her arm to be given, with her father’s blessing, to a lucky guy? Possibly she will have happy children and a family? Maybe she will fall into a career that fits her abilities and interests?
This afternoon the band plays and people move into and out of the picture. Some tarry. Some show appreciation. Others barrel through the moment like ordnance in World War 1. Some try to avoid the camera.
Music speaks across place, time, people and ideology – in its own voice.
In the saxophone family you have a number of siblings.
The shortest boys, who sing the highest, are the C Melody and Soprano saxes. Then you move to Alto and Tenor Saxes who are the most common kids on jazz bandstands. At the back of the parade you have Baritone Sax. The lowest voiced saxophone, and biggest of all – the Contra-bass saxophone- seldom gets out of its case because it is an elephant at the tea party.
This afternoon Sax Therapy performs in Old Town during the annual Albuquerque balloon festival.
Dressed for this performance in suits, the quys move through their songbook with style.
A few listeners take photos, engage the musicians in conversation, and dance, especially when the ensemble launches into a spirited version of ” When the Saints Come Marching in. ”
The guys play like a family, and, on this song, a happy family.
Everyone knows their part and they play well together.
Sax Therapy is therapy everyone can use.
Once the sun drops below the Albuquerque city limits, street lights switch on, programmed by computers.
The man made lights aren’t strong enough to make everything visible so, at night, you move from one pocket of light to another and guess what is down that alley, or behind that fence, or on that roof.
Tonight, brother Neal and I run into downtown’s neon’s, flashing signs, street lights cycling from green to yellow to red to green. Car headlights appear like gigantic bug eyes as gawker’s cruise. Earlier, street food vendors were parked in the middle of closed fourth and sixth streets selling their specialties but most of them have since closed up and driven home.
At Sadie’s, Neal and I have our right hands stamped with a black owl that lets us re-enter the bar if we decide to leave and want to return. My jazz teacher, Chadd, plays with a Latin band playing tonight and we came down to hear him play.. The opening act Cuban band is just setting up on stage and we realize quickly we will have a wait before Chadd’s group finally gets on stage.
Compensating, we take our black owls outside to fly old Route 66, admire the beautiful renovated Kimo Theater and grab a burger at Lindy’s, a downtown eatery dating back to the 1940’s. This Downtown area has been trying to rehabilitate itself in the last decade and has made some progress though families and sane people don’t often come down here after dark.
When Chadd’s band, Barrutanga, finally marches on stage in a crazy Latin band homage to New Orleans, it is after eleven.
Neal tells his wife, later, that it was an experience.
Experience, I have been told, is what happens when you make the same mistake twice.
The only mistake we made was arriving at nine instead of eleven.
On Sundays, during warmer months in Albuquerque, an old train barn opens its huge metal doors to the public. Vendors set up inside to sell their produce, art, clothes, soaps and lotions, health food, get signatures for green projects and alternative lifestyles, listen to music and enjoy the scene.
This Sunday, we come down to hear Chadd’s saxophone quartet – Sax Therapy.
It is quaint inside the train barn, good to see an old dilapidated unused piece of functional architecture used for better than a roosting place for pigeons.
Running across, and embedded in the concrete floor of this large open area, are rails that used to bring trains inside to be repaired, outfitted, cleaned, and re-conditioned. Now, the only Albuquerque train is Amtrak that has ticket sales in what remains of the original Alvarado Hotel. The real Alvarado Harvey House was demolished in the 60’s to make room for buildings that never followed, part of the 1960’s short sighted urban renewal dreams of government elected officials.
Seated at the south end of the train barn, Ruby and I watch dancers twirl to forties style big band music. A college singer croons Rosemary Clooney. Following them is Sax Therapy featuring two alto saxes, one tenor sax and one baritone sax. They do a Monk tune, a twenties style ragtime classic, and a Texas blues wail to start, then move to a show tune and Be-Bop.
Chadd negotiates his bari with ease, his eyebrows going up when he moves into the upper register and eyes looking to the ground when he goes real real low.
I’m not sure but think I hear a train whistle moving towards us in straight four four time.
When you get four saxes playing together you can almost feel your teeth vibrating on the crescendos.
Drive In movies, in the fifties, were a popular family outing and also a place where teens, borrowing the family car, could get away and explore birds and bees in the back seat of station wagons.
The latest Hollywood movies were projected onto huge screens and patrons watched from their cars with sound provided by little speakers that hung on a partially rolled down car window. If you got hungry you walked down gravel, between cars, and bought Cokes and popcorn at a cinder block concession stand that had restrooms, tables to sit and eat, promos that told about coming attractions.
At night it was cool and pleasant and if you didn’t like the movie you could watch shooting stars or look for aliens on their way to Washington D.C.. The movie screen was enormous and much better than the little black and white television in your living room.
The 60th anniversary of the Sandell has arrived and the featured movie this Saturday, August 29th, is ” Love Me Tender ” with Elvis.
Deep in Jesus country, Elvis still gets air time. He is remembered as a rock and roll legend, a womanizer, a great entertainer who died middle aged and alone with a drug problem. He sang great gospel, served in the military as a regular enlisted man, and never lost his Southern roots.
Finding an operating drive in movie these days,that still shows movies, is almost as impossible as finding a roll of Kodak film, or a camera that even uses film. Technology is zipping past us more quickly than we can process its need or ethics. Humans being ruled by artificial intelligence is no longer the crazy science fiction we used to think it was. Drones are almost to our front doors delivering packages.
Clarendon is a small Texas town where my father, and his sisters, were raised and went to school. They used to ride a horse to class during the Great Depression.
When Elvis burst on the scene he must have looked, to them, like a madman.
He was a harbinger of things to come.
Music is a tougher taskmaster than writing, but not by much.
Laid on the bed is a 1940’s Conn ” Naked Lady ” Alto Saxophone.
Her sound is sweet, her lacquer finish is imperfect and worn, her response is excellent.
This horn was bought at Baum’s Music Store in Albuquerque and cost two thousand dollars. You read about famous violins that are hundreds of years old but are still coveted. This model was used by Charlie Parker and it is hard to question ” Bird’s” musical talent and taste even if his personal life still raises eyebrows.
Autumn will be here soon and leaves will fall from swaying branches. The leaves will tumble in space and then, before they hit the ground, will be sent back upwards by gusts of wind.
Playing a good chorus of ” Autumn Leaves “, with no music, out of your own head, is worth working for.
Music comes from places of dreams.
Popsicle’s have been with us as long as I have been on this planet.
Back when my shoes were size five, we neighborhood kids would hear music marching down our street and see a big white ice cream truck with black speakers mounted on its roof. It was playing happy music on a dreadfully hot summer afternoon.
The truck stopped in front of our house as we stood out front with coins in our little fingers. It wasn’t a glamorous job for the drivers, but, then, people worked to pay their bills.
Grown men with two day beards were paid one to two bucks an hour to drive the truck and sell us treats. They smoked Marlboros or Lucky Strikes and had anchors tattooed on their right forearms. They took our money with a smile and always gave us back the correct change. A radio hanging from the truck’s rear view mirror played Patsy Cline or Hank Williams.Some of the men had fought on the battlefields in Europe and the Pacific.Others were just drifters.
The Popsicle’s were all flavors. You could get cherry, lime, orange, banana, pineapple, and half a dozen more tastes..The ice cream in the freezers was vanilla, chocolate, chocolate chip plus lime or orange sherbet for those who didn’t like ice cream. There were also ice cream concoctions covered with chocolate that were popular – Eskimo Pies, Dilly Bars, Ice Cream Sandwiches.
When you finished your Popsicle you were left with a stick and a joke.
” What is the most musical part of a turkey? (The Drumsticks)
” What did the horse say to the angry cow? (What’s your beef?)
” What is the mouse’s least favorite weather? ( When it rains cats and dogs)
” What do you call a girl in the middle of a tennis court? ( Annette)
Popsicle’s are still sticking around though I never see the trucks in neighborhoods anymore.
What is touching is the generation of kids that bought them from a white truck in front of their home during summer vacation now have gray hair, walk with a cane, or need oxygen to keep them going.
The popsicle jokes are still funny to me even if my gray hair isn’t.
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