I Don’t Love A Parade..OR…A Sad Day For Dorothy Lamour I’ve just noticed that the titles to these tales from beyond are now looking like the ending to a Rocky & Bullwinkle episode with the teaser for the next coming show. That’s ok, I still love Moose & Squirrel. Bullwinkle playing the ukulele was as good as it gets! And now, as the late Paul Harvey used to say..for the rest of the story… This morning was a quiet Sunday morning here in Shanghai. It was 7 in the morning and I was cutting more “Z’s” than Zorro on his best day. It couldn’t be better. My head was resting on Dorothy Lamour’s (ca. 1938) lap and she was peeling crawfish and feeding them to me. We were in a small dugout canoe that Dorothy herself had carved out of a tree in anticipation of this evening. Andy Iona and his boys were softly playing island music and in the distance were the faint sounds of island drums. I was just getting ready to serenade Dorothy with a couple of choruses of “Moonlight Bay” with Andy and his boys giving me the perfect backing. However, something seemed a bit off. I looked up at Dorothy and asked, “Say Dorothy, do those drums sound a bit louder than before?” She looked at me and with a sweet smile said, “No my darling. That is simply the beat of my heart beating faster in anticipation of your singing “Moonlight Bay” to me! Will you be repeating the last two bars slowly for the ending? If so I will join you in close harmony.” But of course! What else could it possibly be? What a girl! Dorothy and I share the same birthday and she believes that this is a sign from above, and that’s fine by me. Who am I to argue back? Indeed, we do have so much in common, I lived in New Orleans for 10 years and she was born there. In fact she won the title of “Miss New Orleans” back in 1931! She had a quite lovely singing voice, and I…ummm..sing too. She was a beautiful woman and sure enough, I love beautiful women!! Yes, it was fate who decided that this was to be. The only real difference between us was that she married a banjo player while quite young. But being the kind soul as everyone knows I am, I overlooked this horrific deed and forgave her. We all make mistakes. Hell, I even invented the “Wine Float” years ago that made several of my pals so ill that they would have taken my life, had they been able to get to their feet. Dorothy was still gazing down at me with love in her eyes, and I asked her to peel me a few more mudbugs as the song went on without me. As I waited for Andy and his boys to play the verse again before my inevitable crooning coming up, I had noticed that the drums were very loud now, and very close by! Was it a call to war perhaps? No…because what came next was something that neither Dorothy nor I had ever heard before from island drums…a roll-off. Sudden fear entered her lovely eyes and she cried, “Oh oh! I knew it! Hedy (not Hedly!) Lamarr warned me this might happen!” “NO! DOROTHYYY! DON’T GO! IT’S NOTHING!” I wailed. But it was too late. The drum roll-off had ended, Dorothy was back with Bing, and a Chinese marching band had announced to me that they were standing under my window giving their all. On what, I have no clue. Now please understand that I have made friends with quite a few Chinese musicians, and they are excellent players! Good rhythm, fine tone and with nice ideas are how I would describe them for the most part. Of course as with any society, you’ll have people who just plain suck, no matter how long they have been playing or how much time they have spent practicing on their chosen weapon. They have always and will always just..suck. And it appeared to me that everyone in the latter category had chosen to form a marching band and were making their debut under my window. The pitch was so far away from anything I could recognize that the horns of the protesting taxicabs who were trying to edge around them were a very welcome sound! I now knew exactly how Oliver Hardy felt like in “Saps At Sea”, where he had a nervous breakdown while working in a horn factory. At the sound of any horn, he would start screaming “HORNS! HORNS!” then he would beat his chest and then beat anyone close to him into a rather messy pulp. I threw open the drapes and got smacked in the puss by the 7am sunlight, which as we all know can be quite lethal to most jazzmen. I then opened the window, which was another staggering blow as it was below freezing out. Trying to figure out who was responsible for this unprovoked attack, a thought came to me that seemed to make sense. SANTA!!! He had brought these people instruments on Christmas and told them they should form a marching band at once and practice at a certain location as soon as possible. Bastard! This made sense to me, as he had probably read what I had discovered about him and reported here on Facebook earlier, and he was going to make me pay in a big way. I Leaned out the window to see if he was lurking there in the sax section. And I was armed with a coffee cup to bean him with when I saw him. But there wasn’t a Santa within throwing distance and so I sadly put the cup away. Keep in mind this took place at 7 o’clock in the morning. It is now 1:30 in the afternoon and they are still out there! As for the sound, well the brass section peaked around 7:10am so than an occasional sound that sounds like some bodily function, they are a bit on the quiet side. The reed section have proven themselves to be a hardy lot that can still chase the birds away for a three block radius. But the drum section must be made up by many Energizer Bunnies who are still pounding away like demented construction workers. After realizing that this was not going to end any time soon, I just staggered back to my bed after digging out my industrial strength earplugs from my suitcase. I put them in so deep that they met in the middle. As I climbed back into bed I noticed something that just stunned me! For there in my bed were..empty crawfish shells! Could it be that it wasn’t really a dream and Dorothy Lamour had really been peeling them and feeding them to me? Or perhaps it was because I fell asleep while watching a Jack Benny movie with a sack of crawfish laying next to me? Ok, FINE! You believe what you want to and I’ll do the same! Sorry if I peed on your parade! HEY!!! That gives me an idea…! J.P. Sousa
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 09:10:32 +0000
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