CHAPTER 30

Billy Ray Barnwell here, I didn’t mean to go on about wedding music like I did but it’s one of the few subjects I know anything about, you already know I’m not good at sports, I can’t play baseball although I love to watch it, I never wanted to participate in football or basketball or soccer or wrestling or what they call track and field, a person could get hurt with all that bodily contact plus you sweat a lot, golf and tennis are both for the rich which I am not, stock car racing is for everybody else but it’s the absolute worst, it’s the pits, ha ha ha, how people can go stand in the hot sun and drink beer and inhale all those exhaust fumes just to watch cars go round and round the track is beyond me, you can’t even hear yourself think in the infield, I really don’t have any hobbies to speak of, fishing bores me to death, I tried a little bird watching, excuse me Mr. Morris, I mean I tried bird watching a little, you know what, you have to be real careful about misplaced modifiers because you can end up saying something you didn’t mean to, like one time I went into a department store and told the clerk I wanted to buy a black man’s umbrella and I suddenly realized I meant to say a man’s black umbrella but it didn’t seem to matter to the clerk, I still have my binoculars but I don’t know where my Audubon book is, I guess I misplaced it too, my Dad collected stamps and coins when he wasn’t yelling at Mama or me, he could sit at the kitchen table for hours examining his treasures with his little magnifying glass, he enjoyed finding out whether a stamp had ten perforations or twelve and he loved licking those little translucent hinges, he collected plate blocks and some of them were old and quite beautiful, it was a way to learn about history he said, and he lived in hopes of someday finding a 1909S-VDB Lincoln penny or one of those really rare 1913 nickels, he was going to leave his collections to me but my stepmother had to sell them to help pay for his hospital bills, when I went back home for his funeral she did give me a couple of his ties even though they were very narrow and the style had changed to wide by that time, she also gave me his eyeglasses and she offered me his false teeth but I respectfully declined, my youngest stepbrother got his hunting rifles and his handguns but I wouldn’t have been interested in those anyway, so while everybody else is going bananas over Super Bowls and Final Fours and American Idols and NASCAR, NASCAR, NASCAR, I really don’t get the fascination, I like to read a book or play the piano or go to a movie if it’s decent, I guess I’m one of those wonderful people out there in the dark that Gloria Swanson was talking about in Sunset Boulevard, but as time goes by, I threw that in for you Casablanca fans, even the movies have less and less appeal to me, I identify more and more with Mr. J. Alfred Prufrock who was created by Mr. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, shall I part my hair behind? do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach, I shall hear the mermaids singing each to each, I do not think that they will sing to me,” or something like that, I’m quoting from memory. Prufrock also said “in the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo,” well I saw a Michelangelo once in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City, I even made it to Europe once but I didn’t see a Michelangelo there because I was in Stockholm Sweden, another place I never made it to was the Interlochen Music Camp in Michigan like Miss Sally Pierce my band director and clarinet instructor suggested but I did make it to Eastman School of Music in Rochester New York, not as a student but as the parent of a student and after touring the campus and the big theater we drove north for a while until we came to a park at the edge of the water and as we stood there looking out over this great expanse I thought about the people who lived in Rochester and out of the blue a line of poetry popped into my head, “in the room the women come and go talking of Lake Ontario,” I had to smile at the combination of cleverness and audacity my brain had just come up with, I guess we get our jollies in different ways, to each his own is what I say, whatever floats your boat is all right with me as long as it is legal and doesn’t hurt anybody and you keep it to yourself, of course I’m not the one you have to answer to, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing, oh P.S. I also wrote a song parody once a long time ago, it was back in the days before organ transplants were common, they were still experimenting and it was announced on the television that a baboon’s heart had been transplanted into a little girl’s body, the media referred to her only as Baby Fae to protect her family’s privacy, the little girl’s family I mean, not the baboon’s, well my mind being what it is I immediately thought about the old song “Baby Face” which you may or may not know, and wrote a little song in about thirty seconds, sometimes inspiration works like that but most of the time it takes blood, sweat, and tears to coin a phrase, so anyways here’s a song you can sing to the tune of “Baby Face,” it helps if you try to picture a line of chorus girls singing it and move your hands back and forth like they would do in show biz.


Baby Fae

Baby Fae,
You’ve got that certain somethin’,
Baby Fae,
Keep that new heart a-pumpin’,
One day real soon
You’ll be a baboon,
Gee, the doctors love ya,
They made a monkey of ya,
Baby Fae,
If you like strained bananas
Sue the A.M.A.,
With missing links they toyed
And now you’re anthropoid,
Our little ape-girl, Baby Fae!



and now for the reprise and the big finish:


Baby Fae,
If you like strained bananas
Sue the A.M.A.,
With missing links they toyed
(dunt dunt dunt DUNT dunt dunt)
And now you’re anthropoid,
(dunt dunt dunt DUNT dunt dunt)
Our little ape-girl baby,
Little ape-girl baby,
Little ape- (kick) girl (kick),
Bay- (kick) bee (kick) Faaaaaaaae!


and exit, stage left to wild applause. I wish I had thought to send it in to Saturday Night Live or somewheres but I didn’t, and this is Billy Ray Barnwell signing off for real this time.