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Howdy, y’all:
Excuse the informality and folksiness of
the greeting. It’s hard not to get a wee bit down-home and countrified when
reviewing my notes (yes, I make them—IOU’s have two sides, you know) for this
long-overdue account of a recent journey. Upon hearing that Our Old Friend Mr.
Cousins was heading down to Nashville last month for the annual conference and hoedown of the
American Society for Theatre Research, we-all (note the folksy hyphen) piled
into the Funmobile and high-tailed it for Music City. The purpose of our trip
was threefold: 1) the standard search for adventure; 2) the opportunity to slip
whatever samples of home distillates we obtained into The Cousins Family’s
checked luggage for their flight home, thus avoiding the watchful and
censorious gaze of what were once locally termed the “revenooers”; and 3) as
Sparky is aptly wont to put it, to throw a barrel of monkey wrenches into the
lives of all we encountered.
Sparky got an early jump on Phase 3 of
this master plan during the trip down. You haven’t really lived until you’ve
tried to keep a car out of the ditch while a back-seat passenger sings the theme to “Tennessee Tuxedo” non-stop across five state lines and an
international border (crossed twice due to an unforeseen detour occasioned by
the distraction of this endless serenade). As I said, you haven’t lived, but
you can probably get through life just fine without it. The inevitable
variations to the lyrics that crept in through the course of constant
repetition didn’t help much, either. “A small pen-guin/ who tries but can’t
succeed-o” is scarcely improved when modified to “A small pen-guin/ who likes
to wear a Speedo”. The resulting mental picture is also much, much harder to
shake.
Sparky’s singing went over rather better
at the conference. By then, he’d changed his repertoire to something more
appropriate to a gathering of theatre scholars, sung to the theme of the old
“Davy Crockett” TV show.
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The similarity between this and something
Mr. Cousins broadcast live during the Belle Epoque Before Y2K is evidence that
Sparky has: A) finally conquered the combination lock on Mr. Cousins’ personal
archive; and B) learned to operate a cassette player without turning a tape
into an unravelled mass of acetate spaghetti. I’ll link you to the original version, and leave it to you to decide which is easier on the nerves.
(Apologies in advance for the sound quality of the pre-digital-technology air check
recording.)
Well, time is pressing, as they say in the
dry cleaning business, so I’ll sum up the rest of our sojourn among the
Nashvillians and Nashe villains (evil characters from the works of an
Elizabethan dramatist, that is) directly from my notes:
-In spite of local residents’ near-constant
invocations of their bucolic heritage, the extensive preparations for Christmas
which were already underway by Halloween did not extend to even the tiniest of
ornaments featuring the likeness of Rudolph the Redneck Reindeer. (Yes, such a
critter exists—and the internet is ready, willing, and able to prove it at the
click of a mouse.)
-Although it wasn’t baseball season when
we went, the Nashville Sounds still have one of the most eminently collectible
mascot-style logos in the minor leagues. Here he is, under the watchful eye of
his batting coach:
-For reasons best known to herself, Milady
M’Dear (plucking the mandolin in the illustration that leads off this post) got
a kick out of telling total strangers that she was in town to film the new TV
series Nashville. She’d say that
she was playing Shelley Duvall’s character, going on to explain that she’d let
herself go a bit over the years. The fact that the series is in no way based on
Robert Altman’s 1975 movie of the same name (which features the willowy Ms. Duvall) may
have some bearing on your assessment of whether this qualifies even as dry wit.
-Speaking of wit (?), the name “Cousins”,
when used south of the Mason-Dixon Line to make restaurant reservations, is
guaranteed to spark off quips-a-plenty among bartenders and other wait staff.
Depending on the nature of the remarks and how long they persist, this may or
may not result in tips-a-plenty.
-On the subject of restaurants (isn’t it
amazing how these random thoughts somehow segue into each other, folks?), you
wouldn’t expect one of the best fondue restaurants you could ever hope for to
be located in Nashville, but there you have it. You also wouldn’t expect it to
be part of a continent-wide chain of fondue restaurants, but there you have it
as well. (The very idea of a continent-wide chain of fondue restaurants is
probably not something you’d expect, either…nor should it be.) One thing you would
expect is to see Sparky in said fondue restaurant, wielding his fondue fork
like a harpoon and hectoring hunks of wounded bread foundering in a sea of
melted cheese with shouts of “ahoy there, Moby—taste the revenge of Ahab!”
-Another hidden Nashville gem is Historic
Fort Nashborough, located right downtown on the banks of the Cumberland River. Austere
but authentic, this recreation of the city’s original site is…oh, let’s be
honest—it’s a palisade of sharpened logs surrounding a patch of dirt. In spite of
the more salient defects of sticks and soil as a tourist attraction, there is
one very clear attraction for tourists. You can walk in whenever you like,
stroll around at your leisure, and get your fill of early Americana,
unsupervised, unsanitized, and free of charge.
If one of your party of tourists happens
to include Sparky, however, all this freedom comes with a price. The fort’s proximity
to the stadium where the NFL’s Tennessee Titans play their home games, combined
with the presence of throngs of supporters of the Chicago Bears, who were in
town to play the Titans, gave Sparky too good an excuse to test out the range
of his slingshot as a frontier defense weapon. He didn’t help matters by once
again invoking Davy Crockett as the inspiration for his behaviour. Historical
precedent or not, I wasn’t keen to see how well Sparky’s justification that Mr.
Crockett had shot a bear when he was only three was likely to wash with the
authorities. Fortunately, the Cumberland isn’t as unpleasant to take an early
November swim in as you might think.
All
in all, our idyll in The Land of Opry left us neither Flatt nor Haggard. In
fact, our Parton of the ways with this great Urban centre found us full of
Pride (especially at our ability to make low-grade puns based on the names of
country music stars past and present). As
for Cousins (non-country variety), he has a continuing reminder of his place in
the world of theatre history studies, thanks to an impressive new collection of
Tennessee Williams…or, as they’re known down home, back home, and in any other
home you can think of—Bills.
And, as I like to tell the bill collectors who drop by my home (in the notes I leave for them, that is)...Y’all come back now, y’hear?
Uncle Fun
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