How to torture a professionally trained musician…

I’m in Grand Junction Colorado.

My Traveling companion and I went to an Applebees for dinner. You know… you only want to eat junk food for just so long before you want a salad and steak.

So in we go and the place is pretty busy, but we get seated pretty fast. As we sit down I’m presented with one of those things that really bugs the crap out of me. 4 or 5 different languages being spoken loudly all within earshot. I don’t know why it just makes me a nut job. I know that part of it is my locking onto the parts of those languages I do understand and then thinking all the other stuff I should understand and well … That’s my problem! You know… one of many!

All this annoyance about the hodgepodge of languages pales as the night entertainment begins to sing.

He calls himself “Wailin Willey” and well, I’ve heard better sounds from a cat whose tail was caught under a rocking chair.

Suddenly I can no longer hear all the languages around me… HELL I can’t even hear my traveling companion across the table.

Speaking of which…

You’d have thought that something foul and diseased had just been delivered as the main course. I thought he was going to get up and strangle the lame assed singer.

I know “Wailin Willey” was seriously sucking but hey what could I do? I mean we’d already ordered! I simply chose to ignore the “music” as if I was in a machine shop where all the air ratchets were vein used at once… (Been there, a preferable experience by the way to hearing Wailin Willey)

As we were discussing in loud voices so that we could hear each other over the Wailin the fact that we could not now leave… a lady at the table behind Jerry asked the waiter for earplugs and some ketchup.

At which point I busted up laughing!

I suggested that perhaps Willey could have a unlikely freak accident involving a slip & fall situation which resulted in the microphone cord being wrapped several times around his neck and the microphone ending up in an unlikely orifice. A subsequent tragic tripping over his untied shoelaces would find poor Willey accidentally strangling himself with his sound system. I think there’s an allusion to one being hoisted by his own petard in there somewhere…

Finally AFTER almost 40 minutes we got our food and less than 20 minutes later I was out the front door of the place.

But I learned something…

If I ever want to torture a classically  trained professional musician, all I have to do is find the shittiest singer I can whose playing in a small venue. Then take my musician friend to the place and buy them watered down well drinks.

I figure after about two hours of that… My musician friend will be compliant to just about any deviant whim.