You already know about tonight’s Foz the Hook Freakshowcase. It starts at 9:00, it is at Cole’s, which is at 2338 N. Milwaukee Avenue in America, Maria Wojciechowski plays hilarious music, Jason Earl Folks tells great jokes, Mark Rector tells a fantastic ghost story, and You Pals, FtH rock your blocks off funnily.
That’s not what we are talking about right now. You see, I had another dream.
I was preparing to go to a funeral in Springfield, and I had rented a really swell car. Initially I was pretty put-out because it looked like I was going to have to drive a bunch of people I did not know, which would kill the buzz of having a swell car, because, you know, they were all going to a funeral.
It is like when you have to drive to the office picnic, and that weird guy from accounting wants to ride along, even though you were hoping the slutty girl from marketing or the H.R. lady who is always having office affairs would be in your car. And then you can’t even drink, because you are driving.
Yeh, it was like that.
So finally everything is ready and we leave for Springfield. Dad is driving and I am sitting in the passenger seat. No one else is driving with us. Dad drives like a maniac, and since we are driving through Illinois, there are tons of huge mountains with narrow roads and switchback curves. I told Dad that I had made this drive before, and I would be happy to drive. He said he was doing fine. He was doing fine. He was also doing about 95.
Here comes the only “psychological” part of the dream. Even though Dad was driving like a maniac, I felt totally safe, because I was riding with Dad. Thanks Dad!
Anyway, we got to Springfield, which was a small Baptist church in the middle of Kansas with wheat and sunflowers everywhere. When we pulled up and parked in the gravel parking lot, NPR was just finishing a story on the radio, and for transitional music for the next story they played a song called Sound Chaser by the 1970’s prog rock band, Yes. They played the whole 9 minute song. This might have been the most impressive part of my dream: during my dream last night I listened to Sound Chaser all the way through, with all the parts and changes and breakdowns. Nothing weird happened (so to speak). I just sat in the car listening to the song, and really enjoying myself.
Then it was time to go see Granny. Granny wasn’t dead. Someone else was dead. Granny was sitting in the undercroft of the church sipping tea. I asked her how her “outsider art” project was going, and she said she had thrown the whole thing out because it was so Goddamn derivative of 1960’s hippie bullshit, and she was sick of all the hipsters and hangers-on bothering her. She was still confident that she could cough something up before the deadline though.
Now it was time to see the dead guy. We went into the chapel and the coffin was up by the alter, of course. There was reedy organ music, actually a bandoneon, playing in the background.
Here comes the part you have been waiting for, the musical set up of the church.
The bandoneon player lay on his back on an organ bench, playing the squeeze box up in front of his chest. On his chest sat a decorative kind of brace. There was another brace on his legs, and sitting on top of the braces, the coffin. So you would walk up to the coffin (closed) to pay respects, and down below your waist, beneath the decedent’s head, was this old guy playing a squeeze box. You would walk up to the dead guy, and there’s this old dude down by your belt buckle saying “Hi. How ya doin’?” I wanted to ask him about the coffin sitting on his chest. Was it heavy? Did he do this often? Was he the regular bandoneon guy for this church? But you can’t ask those sorts of questions at a funeral.
You have to be respectful.
OK, see you at Cole’s later. Buy me a drink. Bring a psychologist.
Love you, Granny.
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