What Do I Know? The Staff

A guy gets lonely on the road-but not with these guys. Our crew is like one big family, and you know how annoying that can be. But, what the heck, we put on a show, we have a few laughs (not on the show, unfortunately) we get whisked off to a few local attractions (when it's climbing the local mountain my foot -- the right one -- is always hurting me. It does!) we have a few pale ales. It's kind of like being in the army (or so I would imagine) -- you can depend on everybody to be themselves. For example, Rick, one of our crack engineers (and the guy who claimed to travel with the Allman Brothers, I guess when they were calling Beloit home) can be depended upon to shake his head over a salad, and pick at a meal like it is some dead thing he's eating (it is, I know, but most of us forget that, except Tom, who's a vegetarian and has been dragged blanching through every rib joint in Kansas City). It is always Rick who says, when some of us dash for a plane seat, "you're just going to sit around that much longer." It is Rick who, when you spring up after landing, says "You're not going to get out any quicker." It is John, however, who, if he sits behind you, shakes your seat violently and, when on a drinking streak, puts away enough miniatures to make a really big bottle. While we're on the plane, it's Jeff who gets an attractive woman seated next to him, and who genuinely seems to be impressing her (to everybody's consternation) with his non-stop patter from O'Hare to Portland (and you wondered why we don't let him talk). It is also Jeff you don't want to be behind boarding the plane as he attempts to get a free seat for his bass, and Jeff you don't want to be ordering after in a restaurant as he inquires as to the origin and quality of each ingredient in a dish he then declines to order, and inevitably asks the waitress to throw in a little of this or substitute a little of that on the side.

If anything free passes by Jim Packard he looks like his whole life has passed in front of him. It doesn't matter what it is-a tape, a refrigerator magnet, a chiclet. We have intimidated Jim into buying rounds of drinks over the years, but they go down hard. John, on the other hand, will buy rounds for complete strangers after beer number four, but after beer number six, some flailing may occur (fortunately, as in St. Louis, he only hit Rick). Steve Colon, another of the engineering pack, can always be counted on to have a little too much trouble with his English (he grew up in New York) and will always take the bait if you yell "Lucy, I'm home!" even though he is Puerto Rican and not Cuban. Once Steven put a white towel over his arm and seated us at a very nice table in a restaurant in Chicago, and I've been impressed with him ever since. Speaking of which, Clyde (the Funky Drummer) Stubblefield, who likes to complain of being treated "like a black step child," is forever saying that, as soon as he sees him, the maitre d' is going to seat us in a back room. I have to tell you we have been seated in a lot of back rooms but it could be because there's twelve of us. Clyde has a "salt jones," an unusual habit of salting his food much like he assaults his drums, with a shaker in either hand, thusly, in a perididdle. He says its doctor's orders, because he sweats so much when he plays. You don't ever want to eat off Clyde's plate, but his leftovers last forever!

Chris ("Garrison Keillor hired me") Bannon, whom we've humored with the title, "Producer," mostly looks worried the whole time. We've stopped asking why. Well, he's got a lot of details to arrange besides being the den mother of this whole entourage. I don't mess with him ever since I saw him argue with someone taking the door at a nightclub who had (apparently) pocketed all the money John had given her to let anybody who came after him in free. He got the money back. He does tend to favor trendy restaurants the rest of us can ill afford (OK, I can afford, but don't ask me about the $1200 check I got stuck for in Birmingham); thanks to him I've learned what polenta is and that I don't like it. Lyle likes to amuse himself and no one else by reading signs aloud as we travel, particularly those with funny names in them. By default, he is my driver on the road, and I must tell you the little old man in Pasadena is no speed demon. Lyle's the best tourist of any of us, actually walking into old buildings that reveal why it was necessary to tear the rest of them down. I don't know who he sends the postcards to -- are you on the mailing list? Debbie is our saving grace; always smiling, always nice, and always indulgent of men who, if not behaving badly, are behaving as men.