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Bandmates? He don’t need no stinkin’ bandmates! All this guy needs is a tennis racket and a typewriter! Massimo Tortella aka Porcapizza does more with a Pringle’s can and a butter knife than most musicians will ever do on an electric guitar.

If you play it they will grow.  45 years ago Mort Garson recorded Plantasia, an album for plants and plant lovers.  Sunday afternoon my old bandmate, Danny Firestone made a post about it on Facebook.  I listened to Symphony for a Spider Plant, and I couldn’t stop smiling.  See if you can say that three times fast!  When hard times come my way I’ve got a plan now: put on a pair of headphones and let these electronic sounds from the 70′s work their way into me like a Calgon bubble bath.

It’s a humbling experience. There’s only so much a guy can do during his waking hours with two eyes and one brain, but if I can’t dig it up, someone else can.  That’s what I realized when I read a few posts from friends and strangers last week on Facebook. Those discoveries include:
- an album made for houseplants
- a Jimi Hendrix song played on a tennis racket and a typewriter
- an elderly robot
I will go into more detail as I shine a light and brush the soil off of each one.

The diner in my hand is also the diner in my mind.  It’s actually a magnet from the refrigerator.  If I stare at it long enough and deliberately shrink myself down to size, I could walk right through that steel alloy door and sit at the counter.  You’re probably thinking “how could you do that in a two dimensional object, Dave?  You need three dimensions to walk inside a handheld diner!  As soon as you open that door to the diner, you’ll bump your head into your own refrigerator!”  It’s ok, I’ve already thought about that and I have a team of engineers working on it.

Yep. These girls are doing an 80′s version of the hokey pokey. I found this pic among a treasure trove of images on polaroiddecade, an Instagram page that is ripped right out of my teenage past. It’s a flame and I’m a moth.

Barney Miller was the first cop show in a drab setting that I remember on TV.  Back in the 1970′s Barney, Wojo, Fish and the gang always looked tired– but they still showed up for work every night.  Abe Vigoda NEVER smiled except for publicity shots like the one above.  It’s cool to watch this show again on YouTube when I’m done working and I feel a little tired myself.  Here’s a list of episodes.

Clay’s girlfriend, Angela, posted this memory on Facebook from February 2019. It’s actually a still image from a video she recorded. Clay, Chris, and I were practicing to play as Motel Mancini. Chris was singing in French. Angela wrote: 

Yesterday was Barb’s birthday. Barb is our neighbor and we are blessed to have her live next door to us. We have the key to each others’ house. We take care of each others’ pets. When Jenny asked me to make a card for her, I put her in the same league as the coolest neighbors I’ve seen on TV: Kramer from Seinfeld, Rhoda from the Mary Tyler Moore show, and of course Mr. Rogers. Last year for a friend’s birthday she wore a ceremonial dress, sang, and did an interpretive dance around a bonfire. Barb’s the coolest.

They take me back, and they move me forward. I’m being rocked. Jenny and I watched more videos from Choir!Choir!Choir! yesterday. As I watched each one I remembered what it was like to sing in school choirs and church choirs, how I learned my tenor part or my bass part, and how three or four part harmonies created pleasant vibrations in my head. In the Choir!Choir!Choir! videos, choir members made eye contact with each other as they were singing. I didn’t know what they were thinking, but I could tell that it was a shared experience. We could all use a good shared experience right now. I’m looking forward to the time when our social distance is less than 6 feet and we can stand next to someone without a mask and learn a song together. When I see all these people, I see a unity of purpose. I see people of different origins coming together for a common goal. I see people celebrating what it means to be a community alive. Thank you Daveed and Nobu.

One of my Facebook friends who goes by Dave Dirt posted this. It’s a cool spin on an old 80′s tune, Overkill. At first it just looks and sounds like an acoustic song that was recorded in a small nightclub a few years ago– but when the crowd starts singing as a choir something happens. It magically becomes something waaay cooler.