Janice Williams Loves Austin

I’ve been hearing lots of fun stories from my mom and aunts about their childhoods in Grosvenor, Texas (just north of Brownwood) where my grandfather was the superintendent of schools for 10 years or so. When I have a chance this weekend with them, I’m going to ask about what outhouses were like when they were a kid. I have a lot of questions about that. We see them in the old movies and cartoons with the crescent moon on the door and the Sears catalogue, but what were they really like? Knowing my grandmother, theirs was probably scrubbed and cleaned regularly and smelled good. Is it possible for an outhouse to smell okay? And not have flies?

So thinking about their bathroom experiences of childhood made me think of my own. At first thought, my assumption is that bathrooms from all my growing up years are exactly like they are today, nothing has really changed, but then as I examine it, that isn’t the case at all.

Our bathroom in my first home, on King Street in Amarillo, was small and had a bathtub, a sink, and a commode. I don’t remember the tile or the colors, but I do remember the decorative plaster fish on the wall with separate bubbles coming out of his mouth. He was a very friendly, jaunty fish. I don’t think we had a shower in that bathroom. I don’t remember a shower curtain and I know I never took a shower there. There was a window to the outside on the bath wall and sometimes when we were being given a bath I could hear the neighborhood boys still outside hollering and playing. It always made me kind of nervous because I was NAKED and the window was RIGHT THERE!

The sink in that bathroom had no cabinet under it, just a bare drainpipe going into the wall. I remember it so vividly because of a windfall that came from that sink. In those days of loose teeth and a tooth fairy, I was the lucky beneficiary even when Mackie lost a tooth! When she lost a tooth and put it under her pillow, she would get some silver coinage but I would get three shiny pennies. Yes, it was always SHINY pennies, not just three pennies. I looked forward to every loose tooth Mackie had so I could have my three shiny pennies. But at one point, Mackie must have been looking at herself in the bathroom mirror as she wiggled her loose tooth and she lost her tooth down the drain. Horrors! How is the tooth fairy going to know that she even lost a tooth? I’m sure Mom and Dad reassured us somehow that she would know. The next morning, Mackie and I were delighted to get up and find a whole dollar bill hanging over the crook in the drainpipe and up on the sink–three shiny pennies.

Our bathroom in our next house was a completely different story. This house was built in 1902 and we moved it to our farm in the country. Daddy and Uncle Homer did everything to make that house livable, from plumbing and electricity to flooring, painting, new walls, you name it. The bathroom was larger than the bathroom we had had in Amarillo and Daddy installed two sinks in it. I think it probably just came with one, but there was room for two. Dad got lots of the materials to rebuild the house from “the plant,” the place he worked out north of Amarillo. He brought home two sinks and the cabinet that they fit into and installed them. The sinks each had two faucets, one for hot water and one for cold. That was the most inconvenient arrangement when you just wanted to wash your face in warm water, but we made do with that for years. Eventually that bathroom had a better sink and faucets, but that may not have happened until I had moved away. One unique feature bathrooms had back in the 60s and before that they don’t have anymore is a slot in the back of the medicine cabinet. The metal medicine cabinet with the mirror on the front was a standard fixture in all bathrooms and the back had a little slot. That slot, though mostly unused even by my time, was for used razor blades, a safe way to dispose of them. I guess safe until someone needed to open the wall for something and finds years and years worth of rusty blades.

A unique feature that our bathroom had was a window by the bathtub. Not to the outdoors like we had had in Amarillo, but a window that went to another room in the house, the back porch. But this back porch had been enclosed and was an actual room, though it obviously had been the outside of the house at one point because of this window, a window from my bedroom, and another from the kitchen to the porch. I always liked these windows that didn’t go outside. I think more houses should have them. When we were working on the house, all of us kids would go tearing through the house and it was such fun to crawl through that window to make an escape. That bath did have a shower, but I can’t swear when it was installed. Maybe not in those early years.

When we moved to Colorado, we were living on easy street and we had a house with TWO bathrooms. Really uptown now, we not only had two bathrooms, but one of them had a shower stall. Pretty fancy stuff. Three years in Colorado and my only bathroom memory is learning to shave my legs, but I’ll let that story wait.

It seems like bathrooms haven’t really changed in the last 40 years or so, but then I realize that I have a HUGE bathtub in my house like I never could have imagined as a kid and I have a shower stall in the same bathroom. Two sinks with hot and cold running water coming out of the same tap. And a toilet that doesn’t go to a septic system so I never have to worry if it has been raining for too many days (I spared you those stories).  And more mirrors than we ever had in our whole house, much less just that bathroom. And my closets are all in the bathroom now, too, and I hadn’t even thought about that being a big change, but it certainly is different.

As the media continues to cover the death of Michael Jackson, more memories come up.

When I was working in Dallas, I had a co-worker who was dedicated and serious, but sometimes was just a complete dope (and I have many examples). But related to Michael Jackson, something was said about the album Thriller having the most #1 hits of any album ever released. This co-worker spoke up and challenged that assertion. He said, “Well, I had the Best of the Carpenters and, like, every song on there went to #1.” I had to explain to him that the designation doesn’t count if the songs went to #1 before they were gathered together on an album.

I’m thinking about a lot of those co-workers from that job since I broke out the 1988 diary in order to see when I went to Pittsburgh and saw Michael Jackson. I was a busy woman that year and I don’t know where I got the energy (except for the fact that I wasn’t even 30 years old yet). I noted on one Sunday that I went to lunch with my sister and her husband and baby Brandt and her in-laws who were all in town visiting from Holland. We had a lovely lunch at a restaurant and then we all went out to a friend’s house, which was easily 45 minutes from where we lived, and laid out by the pool and swam. Okay, right there that would be a much-too-full day for me now. But I left the pool party at 4 p.m., went home and joined my roommate and we went out to Six Flags to ride rides and see a concert. I was too exhausted to read further, but I suppose the next day I either worked a full day or got on a plane to go somewhere to work.

I’m also amazed to see how much I dated in 1988. I moved to Dallas in 1985 and met Mark in 1992. I think of that period of time as devoid of men in my life. I never dated anyone seriously and, in my mind, I didn’t date at all. But when I go back to the diary, I guess a lot of it depends on how I count something as a “date.” I still had two old boyfriends from Amarillo that I saw upon occasion throughout the year, multiple times, either in Amarillo, Dallas, or their new homes. I had at least two others that I went out with more than once that I apparently liked very much (according to my diary, at least, because that isn’t really the way I remember it now!) and they didn’t care much for me. There were a few blind dates and fix-me-ups in there that I can barely recall. And there were dates on just about every trip I took in those days. I either looked up old friends that lived in the cities I was traveling to, or I had met guys in these towns when they were in Dallas for seminars and I had a date with them when I visited their town. I guess it is a little late in life to change my mindset and think of myself as someone who dated a lot.

I guess it all boils down to the fact that I don’t really think of any of them as dates since I could tell none of them were right for me. We may have done something together or had a meal or went to a show, but it wasn’t a date since I knew there was no future.

That all changed 17 years ago last night when I met Mark at Jonathan’s (a bar) in Denton. My friend Pam took me there to meet him. I won’t say it was love at first sight, but it certainly was a lot of like. He was polite, he was gentlemanly, he was interested in me and my world, and he knew who Lyle Lovett was. No, love didn’t come along until 48 hours later when we had our first date, or maybe a whole week later when I asked him to marry me.  Those stories can wait, but it is a wonderful thing to read about old boyfriends and dates and be so incredibly grateful that I didn’t settle on any of them.

***

I know at least Mom is keeping up with Janice’s Family Project. I have updated it, but somehow can’t find the link or file to put it on the web. I’ll work on that tomorrow.

A lot of people are playing Where Were You When You Heard About Michael Jackson? today. Yesterday I was at my new job. I got an email from a radio-related website with a bulletin that Michael Jackson had been taken to the hospital. That didn’t strike me as alarming or particularly newsworthy, but just about the same time I read it, my boss/friend/co-worker Shalonn across the hall shouts, “Holy shit, Michael Jackson died!” She was looking at the TMZ website, which was the first to break the news. Our crew started buzzing and everyone was checking the more reliable websites to see if we could get confirmation. We aren’t in “radio” so it isn’t like we are going to pass the news along, but since at least Shalonn and I have a radio background, I know we both had that feeling of checking the facts and passing along the news. I sent out four text messages and immediately got back “No, he’s just in the hospital” texts from two. As the news has reported today, the internet slowed to a crawl and it was hard to get info because so many people were searching. Reuters had the confirmation up for a moment and then pulled it off. Then they posted it again, but only quoted TMZ, so that isn’t confirmation. Pretty quickly, though, it was all true. My mother called, my friend Marsha called, I was getting more texts. Once I realized I wasn’t doing ANY work any more, I decided to go home. When I got on the elevator with another guy I wanted to share the news with him and then thought that was silly. Then the door closed and he said, “Did you hear about Michael Jackson?” Yes, it is one of those noteworthy moments in American pop culture.

I’ve heard a lot of people comparing this to their other moments of great importance, so here are some of mine:

ELVIS PRESLEY:  I worked for the Canyon News and was coming home from work in my 1971 Mercury, driving up VFW hill outside of Canyon, listening to KQIZ AM radio. They reported that Elvis was dead. I was floored! Obviously, Elvis had been a part of my whole life and his Girls Girls Girls album was one of the oldest records in my record collection. I got home and went in the house and Mom was fixing dinner at the kitchen counter and I told her. We talked a lot about our cousin Donna who had just been to his concert earlier that year in Amarillo and loved him.

JOHN LENNON:  Now this was the sad one for me. I was on the phone at my little one bedroom house in Amarillo, talking long distance to my boyfriend Scott in Plainview, also a radio person. We were talking and then he was interrupted by his roommate Gary and he said, “Hey, Gary just came in and said that John Lennon was just murdered in New York.” I was speechless. Scott was so blase about it and it affected me so deeply that that was the beginning of the end of our relationship. I hung up from him and my boss from the radio station called to make sure I had heard and to see if I would be able to handle the morning show the next day. After that, I went up to the station to get together with Jamey and others to play John Lennon and Beatles music and have a little memorial on the radio station.

PRINCESS DIANA:  Like all girls, it seemed, I had a great admiration for Princess Diana. I had been in Dallas visiting my sister when she married Prince Charles and Mackie and I (both single) got up at about 3 a.m. so we could watch her wedding and we cried all the way through it. The night she was killed, Mark had a gig and I was home just watching TV and cleaning house. They broke in with the news about the car crash. Strangely, my mother and I called back and forth that night and discussed how serious it was and then were on the phone when the news broke that she died and we were both so sad. Why we didn’t call my sister that night I have no idea. I don’t know if we assumed she knew, or was busy, or had little boys to tend to, or what, but she did not know this was going on. She didn’t know until her husband brought the paper in on Sunday morning and she saw the headline and I’ve always felt bad about that. That was the kind of news that needed to be shared to make it more bearable. When Mark got home from his gig, I expected to be the first to tell him, but he said the news had spread throught the club he was playing at. I lived in Dallas by this time and on the morning of her funeral I got up early and went to Mackie’s house again and we watched it at 4 in the morning and cried some more.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY:  Okay, I can’t say I remember the moment, but Mother tells me we were at the grocery store and a woman came in and said that the President had been killed. The manager called someone and confirmed it. I do distinctly remember much of the TV coverage in the following days and the funeral cortage.

and other big events:

WHEN REAGAN WAS SHOT:  I worked mornings in those days and I was driving home from the radio station when I heard the news on one of our competing stations (I hope my station was announcing it, too, but I was not listening to them). When I got home I did call the station to make sure we were covering it and then I settled down to watch CNN all afternoon. Mother and I, again, were on the phone back and forth. In that need to share big news, I remember the postman coming to my door to mail in the box and me leaning out to make sure that he had heard the news. He had, from another neighbor.

THE SPACE SHUTTLE:  I had only been in Dallas a few months and was working in a loud cassette-making business, a part of Zig Ziglar’s company. We always had the radio on with KVIL in the background. That day we were busy and the machines were clacking, but I had the thought in the back of my head that they sure were talking a lot on the radio for a music station. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I just knew it wasn’t music. About that time, my sister called from her office and let us know that the space shuttle had blown up. My department had about the only TV in the building so we went and saw a bit of the news and then had to go back to work with the radio keeping us updated.

AND 9/11:  Of course, no day in my life has been as pivotal as 9/11. I was mostly unemployed at the time, just working part-time for KVET, recording their all-night shows in advance and doing some weekend shifts. We had had our kitty Nathan Jr. for just a few months and he was absolutely the most fun thing I had going in my life at that time. That morning Mark and I slept incredibly late. When we did wake up we were playing with Nathan and admiring him and weren’t eager to get up and get the day started. When we did get up, Mark headed into the living room and office and I heard him hit the answering machine button and heard my sister’s voice. Message after message she is screaming into the phone for us to wake up, the country is under attack, etc. etc. I expect it was horribly frightening for her to not be able to get us to comprehend that this horrible tragedy was going on. Obviously I called her back before we heard all 10 of her messages and we had the TV on by now and all of the plane crashes had happened by that time (but of course we didn’t know what was next or that it was over). We stayed glued to the screen all day long. Later in the evening I realized that my voice-tracks for KVET that would be airing at midnight would be hugely inappropriate in light of the day’s events. I got in the car and headed toward the station and then turned on the radio and KVET was carrying ABC news coverage uninterrupted. At that point I pulled over and called the station. Another weekender was on the air monitoring things and running the board and he said that the station was running ABC until further notice so my show would not air. That was a huge relief and I went home. I was grateful that I was NOT on the air as that occurred. Some radio people love the challenge of managing a crisis on the air like that, but not me. I’d rather experience it out here with the real world, I think.

Man, what a difference a day makes! I certainly had no idea that I would be thinking and writing about Michael Jackson today. I would like to scan some photos and put them here, as well, but that may take longer. The talk of the world is Michael Jackson’s death yesterday.

Was I a fan? No, I’ve never considered myself a fan of Michael Jackson and I don’t find myself sad about his death except in the sense that I am sad about the life he led and how exploited he was from childhood and how they turned him into such a strange person. But, I did have a long interesting “relationship” with Michael Jackson in my professional life and his death and all the stories about him bring up those memories in abundance.

It surprises me when these “old” newsmen on television talk about growing up hearing Michael Jackson music. That just doesn’t seem to make sense except that they are MY age (like Brian Williams on NBC) or even younger and of course we grew up with Michael Jackson. I’ve known who he was since I was 6 or 7 years old. The Jackson 5 was regularly in our 16 and Tiger Beat magazines. When we lived in Colorado, my friend Jane was a big Jackson 5 fan and had some of their little records. Though I always enjoyed them on the radio and when they were on the Ed Sullivan Show and other TV shows, I never bought any of their music.

If you were also of that era, you know the Jackson 5 sort of faded in the mid-70s. I just got out my Billboard book of Top 40 hits to check my accuracy of memory and I was right. The Jackson 5 had Never Can Say Goodbye in 1971 (#2), Sugar Daddy in 1972 (#10 and I don’t even remember it), Dancing Machine was #2 in 1974 and Enjoy Yourself at #6 in 1977 (my senior year and I don’t remember it either)… The songs weren’t climbing as high and the hits weren’t coming as fast as their 4 number 1 songs in 1970. So the Jacksons were out of the mainstream music picture through my teenage years.

Then Michael Jackson came out with the solo album Off the Wall and the#1 song Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough in September of 1979. I had just started at KPUR in Amarillo, the Top 40 station that was THE disco station of the era. We were maybe the only station in town playing his music. Our biggest competitor, Z-93, was also Top 40, but they saw themselves more as a rock station and shied away from most of the disco hits from Donna Summer and Tavares and Earth, Wind, and Fire. But we played Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough and Rock With You and She’s Out of My Life. At the time, I thought it was just an interesting thing that “little” Michael Jackson had grown up, he was 20 now, and was going solo. The Jacksons had a hit that year, too, with Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground), but it was primarily on the heels of Michael’s hit, I think.

—  I just took at least an hour break to find my old diaries and check some facts.  Too bad my diary was sketchy… “Jackson concert was good” doesn’t quite tell me all I needed to know.—

But the Thriller album made 1983 and 1984 the years of Michael Jackson. We were still the only station in town that trumpeted the fact that we played Michael Jackson. I think Z-93 was playing his songs by then, but still trying to position themselves as “cooler” than that.

We worked out promotions with Pepsi and Delta to send winners to Dallas for the Jackson concert with Michael Jackson and we gave away jackets and maybe gloves and lots of Pepsi and other prizes. We had a Michael Jackson look-a-like contest. We had a contest where I would show up, unannounced, at a Toot ‘n’ Totum, call the station and give my location and the first person to come up and say “I want to Beat It to Dallas to see Michael Jackson with Pepsi and 14KPUR” would win tickets. That was an interesting time because people would wait at the station and follow me and I’d have to lose them with maneuvers before I got to the right Toot ‘n’ Totum. And when I would call in, I would SEE heads in cars turn and look when I said that I was at the Toot ‘n’ Totum that they realized they were right beside. That year, EVERYONE was listening to KPUR, it seemed. That year, we were the #1 station in town for the first time in a long while and the last time ever. The competitors would blow it off as being lots of teens (since we were number one from age 12 and on up) but being #1 was being #1 and we were very happy about it.

I remember that CDs and CD players came along about that time. I went to a stereo store one day just to see if the quality was that good. The clerk gave me a choice of several CDs that I could listen to– obviously I needed to hear something I was familiar with to see what it sounded like on CD. I chose Thriller and it sounded incredible through headphones on a CD.

I went to that Jacksons’ concert in Dallas in 1984. My diary did include the fact that Eddie Van Halen came onstage and played Beat It with Michael Jackson. He played it on the recording and happened to be in Dallas for the weekend with Van Halen and made a surprise performance.

I suppose it was also sometime later that year that Michael Jackson had the accident where his hair was on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. I was taking a nap, I remember, and woke up to hear that news on the radio station. In those days I was the station program director so I was always thinking “promotions!” and I called up the station and had the jock on the air immediately announce that we were creating a giant get well card for Michael Jackson to sign. I don’t remember now if we had people come to the station to sign it or if we had remotes or what, but we tied into that tragedy, too. If it involved Michael Jackson that year, we were part of it.
I left KPUR in 1985 and was out of radio for a long while and then in country radio so his later albums didn’t have much of an impact on me and I barely knew the songs that came from them except what I would see when he sang on the Superbowl or other specials.

But along about 1988 —  exactly Sept 18, 1988, I just found the diary page — I made a trip to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At that time I was traveling and speaking to public groups for the Zig Ziglar Corporation. I also did seminars in Dallas where people came from all over the country. In August, probably, a girl had been in our Dallas seminar from Pittsburgh. I told her I would be coming that way in September and she said to call her and we’d get together. I did that a lot with our clients. When I got to Pittsburgh, I called her and she said, “Hey, would you be interested in going to a Michael Jackson concert tonight? I have an extra ticket.” Well, sure. I might not have gone through the hassle of buying a tickets, etc., but to have it just given to me that way, transportation provided, too, you bet. So she and a friend of hers and I went to the big arena in Pittsburgh (I think it is where the Pittsburgh Penguins played, at least then) and we had tickets on the 22nd row! Unbelievably good seats. It was really one of the best shows I’ve ever seen in my life. Michael Jackson was a showman and it was part circus, part concert, part stage play. I big extravaganza with lots of dancers and singers. What I remember most vividly was something like him getting in a big cage and the cage being lifted and was suspended up over the stage and then *POOF* a tiger was in the cage and Michael Jackson was down here on the other side of the stage. I wrote in my diary that I couldn’t believe that he and I were the same age, the way he moved and danced and was so athletic…. almost the same thing I wrote about Bruce Springsteen when I saw his show in April (except he’s ten years older than me and I can’t do those things).

Another Michael Jackson memory– like I said, I’m surprised myself at how many there are– was Halloween in 1984. I have a picture somewhere of me and my roommates dressed up in front of our house. Diane was a bumblebee, Beth was a bunch of grapes, and I was Michael Jackson. It was a last minute, thrown together costume, but it got the idea across. I had a shiny jacket, a glove that I sprinkled with glitter, a cap, shades, and, politically incorrectly, I blacked my face. My cousin Donna always had a big Halloween get-together for the family and I went to her party. My little cousin Trent was an adorable 4-year-old. When they told him I was Michael Jackson his eyes got big and all night long he was showing me things, “Here, Michael Jackson, look at this,” or taking me to see things, “Come see this, Michael Jackson.” When I left that night, he was waving and saying, “Bye, Michael Jackson, bye!” and his mother said, “Trent, you know that’s Janice, right?” Trent suddenly looked embarrassed and abashed and it was easy to see a dream had been crushed. I wish we had just let him think that Michael Jackson had been at his party that night.

Newscasters and commentators have said, “Who doesn’t have a favorite Michael Jackson song or a special memory that a Michael Jackson song brings back to you?” and I really can’t say that I do. Like so many songs I played on the radio, they remind me of that era, but not specific memories because I played them so many times. I certainly did like Billie Jean, but that is probably the only song I really liked of the grown-up Michael Jackson. But I guess they all bring back 1984 and that great year at the radio station.

One of my Canyon High School classmates, Marcella, posted a link on her Facebook to these beautiful pictures of Palo Duro Canyon. It all brings back so many memories of Palo Duro Canyon.

When people find out I’m from Canyon they always ask if I spent a lot of time in the Canyon itself. I feel like I didn’t. I never camped and wasn’t a hiker or outdoorswoman, and there were probably whole years that went by without a single trip into the Canyon, but, compared to most of the world, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Canyon.

On the pictures on that slide show there are many photos of a flood we experienced in May of 1978. I did not see the Canyon during that time (that would have been foolish) and I experienced enough of the flood up on higher ground.

We had many family trips to the Palo Duro Canyon, usually when there was company in town. That was the place to go to “do” something. My cousins Bobby and Marshall would come up and camp and I remember when they were once “caught behind a water crossing” in their camper for a few days. That was always the worry if you went to the Canyon where there was a possibility or rain upriver–that the Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River would rise and you’d get trapped in the Canyon. You could still be on relatively high ground, but just not be able to get out for a while.

I loved the watercrossings in the Park. Of course, our family, always conscious of the weather, would comment on the depth of the water and whether there had been any rain or whether it was a good or a bad year. There were always people wading along the water crossings as we drove across. We stopped and waded many times ourselves. The sand there was softer and squishier than any beach sand I’ve ever encountered. It was like liquid satin between your toes.

I never was caught by a flooded watercrossing, but I think there were times that we couldn’t go past the first watercrossing because it was flooded, so we were trapped out instead of in. Big logs of trees would go flying past and the river rolled. The same river that on the previous visit was barely over the concrete of the road (or not at all).

Many visits to see the play “TEXAS,” which is still going on and is still worth a trip if you haven’t seen it. We even saw “Sounds of the Thundering West” (I think that was the name) in the very first season of a play in the Canyon. We went with our friends Bob and Marge Mathias, who were visiting from Oklahoma. I was about 6 or 7 and there was a little girl about that age dancing in the show, too. Marge kept pointing her out to me, I suppose because she thought I would be more interested if I could relate to a character on stage.

We went, at least once, for the sunrise Easter service in Palo Duro. Believe me, that is getting up early to make it all the way down for that. I remember being curled up in the COLD backseat of the car, nibbling on a chocolate bunny in the dark. I used to think that the amphitheater faced the wrong way since you were facing away from the sunrise for the service, but now that I look back and know how the Canyon looks at different times of the day, that is probably perfect…. the sun coming up behind you makes the colors on the Canyon wall on the opposite side, in front of you, come alive. I don’t really remember the message that Sunday morning, but I remember the COLD. That is still wintertime in the Panhandle.

When I turned 17, my friends and I went to Palo Duro Canyon to celebrate my birthday. My birthday (March 15) always fell during Spring Break, so I was lucky to have friends even around on my birthday. Cassi, Bryan, Carol, Brenda, Raymond, and I went to the Canyon in Cassi’s station wagon. Trouble was, it was freezing cold. Like I said, March and April are still winter months in the Panhandle. I can’t remember if we attempted a fire and hot dogs or not. I know they had a bakery cake with a shamrock on it for my birthday and we all squished into the back of the station wagon to eat it and then hurried home to warm up.

Since we’ve been married (and just before), Mark and I have gone to the Canyon several times, never for a good lengthy visit, though. I have a great picture on my bulletin board right here by my desk with him in the Canyon from 1992 or maybe 1993. I love that picture. When we went home for my 20th high school reunion, I made him go to the Canyon to see “TEXAS,” too, just so he would know what I was talking about.

When my cousin Judy died in 2007, we left her funeral late that afternoon and made a quick stop in the Canyon on our way back to Austin. We got there just before the sun started down, so there was only time for a few quick shots, but Mark, my personal photographer, got some great pictures. In fact, this is one of my favorite photos of me:

Here are just the beautiful colors of the eastern rim as the sun set…

And this was the highlight of the drive. We were almost alone in the Canyon. It was minutes before the park was going to close and it is a few days before Christmas on a weekday, so not many visitors at that time of year. Mark looked up and saw this:

Mark’s first reaction was “Is that real?” and then the realization that, yes, we are out in nature and he is real! We stopped beside the road and he was just above us and quite undisturbed. Another truck pulled up behind us and marvelled, too, at a buck of this size just being out in the open where we could see him. It was beatuful.

Many happy memories of Palo Duro Canyon. I am going back to the Panhandle next week for Independence Day, which is my aunt Dorothy’s birthday, but I don’t expect a trip to the Canyon. Holiday weekend crowds and the heat don’t make for a good trip down. It is a marvel of the government programs under FDR and I’m glad it was created.

I have lots of thoughts about topics, but they are all long and involved, so let me just rant a moment about computer designers. I am tired of the words “user friendly” or “intuitive.” I don’t believe there is such a thing. It is just something computer people make up because they “get it” and don’t know why the rest of us don’t.

For instance, just now on my Yahoo website page, where I go to change my main website or to access this blog for updates. It had a link that said “Why not make your Easy Upload more accessible? Just click here” or something like that. The Easy Upload is a function I need to change the main website and add pictures anywhere and I do need it to be more accessible, so I thought I would click that link. Does it take me to what it SAYS it will have? No, it takes me to the general help page with a million topics and a search box, etc. From there I have no idea what to click or search for.

My Mac computer has been the same way. I got it last year because everyone told me that I would be able to do my website easier and more quickly from a Mac than from my PC. Everyone raved about how intuitive the Mac is. That is a bold faced lie! If someone has never used a computer, maybe it would be easier to learn with a Mac and things might come easier. I don’t know. I have been using computers for 20+ years (both PC and Mac). I never did find the Mac to be intuitive or easy to use when I “knew” what I was doing. I still don’t quite know how to save things or find things and my biggest gripe is how it “yells” at me when I unplug something. On my PC if I plug in a camera or a hard drive or a flash drive and unplug them, they are just unplugged and I’m done, but the Mac warns against corrupted data and insists I need to disconnect them digitally before I do it physically or something.

Anyway, that is all just spewing and ranting and fomenting. My ankle/foot/knee/body is getting better while it gets bluer. I’m limping but I’ll live. Thanks for asking.

I have two topics tonight:  The new family project I started yesterday and the PAIN I am suffering from.

I’ll start with the pain. Last night Mark had a gig downtown at the Amsterdam Cafe. There was a time I rode with Mark to a lot of his gigs. I would hang out and kill time while he set up his drums, I would watch the whole show, kill more time while he packed up the drums and loaded out, and then ride home with him. Somewhere along the way I wised up and I go separately to a gig if I go at all. Mark told me from the beginning that it wasn’t a requirement and he is working and it doesn’t matter if I am there or not (though he does love to have me there, he assures me). So I decided yesterday that since he was playing with Jackie Bristow, who is very talented and I like her, along with Chip Dolan, a friend of mine, too, that I should go see them play. Also, it was an early start, a short show, and just around the corner from my office, where I wanted to pick up a large framed photo I bought on Friday.

He began to set up and I drove his truck to my parking garage and killed some time on the internet and then, about showtime, I got my photo and went out to the parking garage to put it in the truck before I went to the gig. With hands full, slippy shoes, no free hand to hold the handrail, my foot slipped on the bottom step and I went down, twisting my ankle and banging it and twisting my knee and every other joint in my body and ended up on my bottom on the garage floor. Ow. Good thing:  The framed/glassed photo did NOT break.

I sat a long time debating calling 9-1-1 or information for the security guard number of the building. I didn’t want to call Mark because he should have just been starting the gig. Eventually, I tested everything and didn’t think anything was broken and I got up and hobbled back to the security desk. The very sweet guard got me a chair and an ice pack and bandaged the ice pack to my ankle. We talked a long while and then I did some flexing and testing and decided I was able (if only barely) to go to the gig.

I have a lot more sympathy now for people that cross the crosswalk ever so slowly (unless they are on their cell phone). I waited until traffic was nonexistent to cross at the crosswalk and I slowly made it across. With nothing to lean on, that was probably the most difficult part of the walk. I clung to the Norwood Tower wall the next block. I’m sure diners in Perry’s Steakhouse wondered why this drunk woman was grasping at their windows with a pained look on her face. I rounded the corner at the gig and Jackie and Chip were outside. They had not started yet. That was good in that I could tell Mark why I was walking this way. He got me a good seat and I propped my foot up high and enjoyed the music until he could get packed up and get me out of there.

A night of rest did wonders and I’m much better today. I’m still not making any land speed records and I am avoiding walking to the other end of the house if I can. But, yes, this has made me KEENLY aware that we are among the nation’s uninsured. We don’t want to be, but Blue Cross is taking their sweet time deciding if we (well, really Mark) is healthy enough to insure. Anyone who doesn’t think the insurance industry needs reform or our government shouldn’t get involved and help people find insurance, not just affordable insurance, hasn’t been laid off and lost their insurance. Oh, wait, I was going to stick to two topics tonight, wasn’t I?
Now, on to the family project that I told you about yesterday and is on the web here.  What I hoped would happen happened fast. Just by starting the project, I got enthusiastic. Yesterday I wrote about Pitt Williams, my great-great-grandfather. My intention was (and really, still is) to just write down everything I know off the top of my head and then go back and do the details later. I’ve learned that when I start putting in details and parents names and brothers and sisters and on and on, I get bogged down. Or, when I try to cite my sources in detail, I realized I don’t HAVE sources so I go in search of the information again to cite the source. So yesterday I just wrote about Pitt Williams and then today I wrote about his wife Nancy. But immediately I got back into my genealogy programs and started filling in the details and adding more bits of information and some pictures. I don’t want anyone to have to read it over and over and see the differences, so maybe you’ll just want to come back and read it when it is all done. But my plan/hope is to write what I know in my head about one person a day. I’ll start with 16 great-great-grandparents, then do 16 pairs of great-great-great-grandparents (because there’s only a few I know much about the wives) and then come back to the 8 great-grandparents and eventually get to the grandparents and more. So by the end of summer, I should have a lot of sketchy information and I hope I will have gone back and filled in more of the details as I go, too.

Okay, I didn’t literally marry my father, but sometimes I am amazed at the similarities between Daddy and Mark. And I know Daddy used to groan and not particularly want to be compared to Mark, just like Mark did today when I said, “I married my father!!”

I have been attempting to do some voice work for my dear friend Steve who I’ve worked with at Mix 102.9 in Dallas, ABC Radio in Dallas, and StarSystem here in Austin. Now he owns a radio station in Gainesville and I’ve done a couple of commercials for him, but I still haven’t gotten my “studio” tweaked the way I want it to be to sound right when I record for him. Upon his advice, I bought a good piece of equipment to process the signal and make my voice sound warmer and fuller. Mark brought me a great microphone (well, he’s brought me a couple actually). But the sound still didn’t sound right. Steve’s advice was that I needed a microphone filter.

Everyone has heard someone POP their P’s when they’ve been on a microphone. It’s something that disc jockies learn to control and radio station equipment is also designed to eliminate that burst of air from making a sound through the mic. Steve sent a link to one he recommended, but I hadn’t wanted to invest yet.

I asked Mark about his thoughts on a filter for the mic and where I should go to get one and asked if he already had one (that’s a great thing about Mark, most things I ask for in the way of wires, cables, audio equipment, etc., he already has it!). Mark said, “Here’s what you need to do. Get you one of those round things that you do needlepoint or whatever in.” An embroidery hoop? “Yeah, that. Get one of those and pull some pantyhose across it and you’ve got yourself a filter.” No way! “Sure, that’s all they are.” Right. Am I going to believe that?

So today he needed to go to Guitar Center and I tagged along. Then I thought about needing a microphone filter and figured they would have them. They did:  At $20, $30, $50, and $70. So I asked what was the difference between the lower priced models and the higher priced models. The clerk was knowledgeable and said, basically, these two cheaper ones, they are like, just a hoop, with, like, nylon hose pulled across them. Incredible! Exactly what Mark had said. So, did I rush home and get my embroidery hoop and pantyhose and save $20? No, of course not. I still wanted the cool looking filter that attaches to the mic stand and looks impressive. I paid the $20. No, I let Mark pay the $20. Thank you dear.

Now why is that like my Dad? I’m sure I have other examples of Daddy saying the most ludicrous statements and thinking he was either losing his mind or just was simply mistaken, my favorite happened only 15 years ago or so. I say that so you’ll know I wasn’t just a rebellious teenager that refused to listen to my parents. I said something to the folks about not having any tomatoes on my big tomato plants despite a lot of blooms. Daddy said, “Here’s what you need to do. Get your broom and go out there and just wail the tar out of those bushes.” I thought he had to be out of his mind. He didn’t offer any explanation. Would the tomatoes cower in fear and say, “Okay, we give, here’s your stinking tomatoes”? I think I did do it and I don’t really remember if tomatoes immediately popped up, but one day I was listening to a garden show on the radio and someone had the same problem. The host offered the solution of going out and shaking or striking the tomato plants in order to shake up the blooms and the pollen and get things going. Unbelievable, Daddy knew exactly what he was talking about.

Obviously, I immediately began believing everything my father advised from then on out (NOT!) and I’m sure I will do the same with Mark.

—-

I have just begun a new family history project. If you want to follow along on the progress, you certainly can. Right now it is just off-the-cuff, writing from memory, and I will fill in more details as I go. We will call it Janice’s Big Family Project and you can find it here.

I thought I could post a couple of stories tonight, but it has taken so maddeningly LONG just to get pictures open and saved and uploaded, etc., now I am tired and running short on time.

My screensaver on the computer is a circulating slideshow of the pictures I have in my computer so I come in to see lots of gravestones in the mornings. But earlier today I saw my one and only picture of my great-great-grandparents Williams. I was thinking about something I wanted to do with that picture so I went looking for it tonight and it is nowhere to be found. Of course, in this digital world I no longer have all my photos in a shoebox (just all pictures pre-2002 or so). But now I have a digital shoebox. Every so often I open the shoebox, flip through all the pictures one by one, stick them back in the box without writing on a one or putting them in any order, I shut the box up and put it back on the virtual shelf.

So no Rufus Pitt and Nancy Clard Adkins Williams to share tonight, but this picture reminded me of a discussion we had at dinner last night at the Shady Grove.

I was talking with my dinner companions, our sound crew from Music Lab (Nordyke, who is about my age, Jennifer, who is just over 10 years younger, and Dave, who is probably 10 more years younger). I was asking them all some of those “benchmark” questions… Like there are virtually NO kids growing up anymore without a television and a computer in their homes. So I was measuring the benchmarks. I asked how many channels they had as kids. We discussed how Dave had a cable box where you had to physically press a button down on the box to change to each of the only 13 channels. I think Jennifer said they ONLY had basic cable so they also had a limited number of channels. So, of course, I had to go into my hard luck childhood of only THREE black and white channels until I was 10 and we moved to Colorado and we got PBS, too! I whole new world opened up when I got to see Sesame Street for the first time. I was too old for it, but I thought it was very clever.

The TV we had pre-Colorado was ancient, too. It was missing knobs and had all sorts of “issues.” To turn it on, you picked up the screwdriver we kept on top of the TV for such a purpose and you sort of ran it around inside of a metal box on the front of the TV (that normally would have been behind a plastic panel, but we were missing that panel now) and sparks would fly and the TV would come on. I don’t remember how we turned it off. Can you imagine allowing your 8 or 9 year old stick a screwdriver into electricity? Don’t worry, Daddy did tell us to ALWAYS hold onto the plastic handle and never touch the metal. We survived.
When we moved back from Colorado in 1971 we got our first color television and that was quite an upgrade (but we were back to 3 channels). I also shared with them the horror of not having channels that played past midnight or 1 a.m. When I was at my 7 to midnight job at KPUR in Amarillo I would come home from work and the only channel still on had Tom Snyder so I would watch Tom Snyder sometimes and they would read the poem about the face of God and play the National Anthem and then the station was off the air until morning. At that point, kids, I usually turned on the radio or played records because I tended to stay up just as late then as I do now. I miss all night radio with real disc jockies. Once I won the album The Knack from an AM radio station in Los Angeles I was listening to late late in the night.

I bought my own TV in about 1983. Before that I either got by with a roommate’s TV or a small portable borrowed from Mom and Dad or someone (black and white, too). My big new beautiful TV was color and I got cable along in there. I remember when my friend Jack had a brother that worked for a cable company in San Antonio. He had a “borrowed” cable box. We hooked it up to my TV and we saw MTV for the first time. It wasn’t a part of regular programming for a long time.

I bought my first VCR in 1984. My friend Jamey had the first VCR I ever saw (he always has been cutting edge when it comes to technology).  His had HUGE tapes (maybe even Beta?) and he was a collector immediately. His player was huge, too, but he was a hit when he’d have videos on this TV during a party. Having a VCR made life so much better for me. By that time I was doing mornings and truly HAD to go to bed early sometimes. So I then started taping shows and watching them later and finally could keep up with things. When I worked nights in the pre-VCR days I missed whole seasons of Happy Days and M*A*S*H and many more classic shows.

I was talking with another friend, Ellen, who is moving back to her home state of Virginia next month, about childhood. She is close to my age and she said when she was a kid she was always out in the woods or the neighborhood or somewhere. I chalked some of her outdoorsyness to living where there were other kids. Living out in the country, there weren’t other kids to play with so I wasn’t as inclined to go exploring and getting into mischief. But the picture above is testament to the fact that I DID get outside occasionally and, no, this definitely wasn’t work. This was my early pyromania stage and I was raking up hay (see the haystack behind me) to burn. I took great joy in burning anything and everything at that point. I would have burned the whole haystack if I thought I could have gotten away with it.

I don’t know why I was wearing a dress. That, by the way, is a homemade dress that Mother made for me. Mackie had a red one and mine was blue. I don’t believe I lived in an era where I normally wore dresses while outside playing, though I definitely wore more dresses to school that girls do today. I distinctly remember wearing pants one day when I went out to play. I was about 6 and it was a cold, wintry day and I had two badly skinned knees, but I begged Mom to let me go outside and play. She didn’t want me to because she knew the odds were good I would fall and skin those knees all over again. So she put on long double-knit blue pants on me to protect my legs and told me to be very careful. I walked out the back door and tripped over my shadow, ripped the knees out of the pants and tore both scabs off within minutes. My clutziness and pyromania both go WAY back.

I remember going to play outside (I guess I played outside more than am admitting to) after we had had a good rain. We had a “sand box” that was a huge hole in the ground (it seemed) by our swingsets. It had filled up with water and formed a lake with the rain. Mother told me I could go outside and play but to NOT get near that sandbox and the water. Immediately I went over to investigate. There was a piece of lumber floating on the water with one end sort of hung up on the shore. I decided it wouldn’t hurt anything to just push that piece of wood out into the lake and watch it float and imagine it being a boat. I pushed it with my toe and my foot, ankle, knee, and complete leg followed it right into the water. I knew better than to hide it, I took my wet leg and pants right into the house and confessed.

I confessed a lot because I never ever got in trouble.

My mother and her sisters have been emailing a lot of stories about their childhoods in Grosvenor, Texas, in the 1930s. No, no TV, and no radio either. I love their stories and I can see that mine have just as quickly become old-fashioned to anyone that was born after 1970. Unlike my mother, we did have indoor plumbing (well, most of the time), a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, electricity, running water, a hot water heater and bathtub, and a phone (except for the first year in the country). It is incredible how quickly the changes come and the advances are made and what was a luxury for only the rich quickly becomes a necessity. I once told my nephew Brandt that I didn’t have a phone for a year when I was a little girl. He said, “How did you go online?” He was a smart kid and was being funny, but now when I think abou thim saying that 10 years or so ago, we all were still using a dial-up connection and you did have to be wired. Now, he’s got his iPhone and his wi-fi computer and most of the time he doesn’t even need a wire. Times move fast. I’m writing as fast as I can.

I’m on a roll posting tonight so I’ll keep going…

Last night we went to see Doyle and Debbie at the Long Center. I wrote in January and about our Delbert McClinton Blues Cruise and our discovery of Doyle and Debbie. Since then, we’ve been waiting for this Austin performance. They played six shows here in four days, but we were only able to go to the finale last night. They will be back for 12 shows in July and I hope we get to see them again (even if it is the same performance each time– we make discoveries of things we didn’t see before).

The duo sing the best country songs and for people like me that know their country music, their accuracy on the music style and the word choices and the seriousness of it all are hilarious, especially since they words in their songs would not be heard on a country station, although the meaning might be the same (i.e. “When you’re screwing other women, think of me.”)

We met my friends Denise and Penel and they shared our up front table for the show. And I was most surprised to look over and see my cousins Dan and Christy Foster at the very next table. The curtain was about to go up, but I told Mark “punch that guy for me.” Mark said his first thought was “but he’s a lot bigger than me!” He followed my orders and Dan was so sweet, he jumped up and came over to hug me despite the rising curtain. We had a good chance to visit during the intermission. They are distant cousins–we have the same great-great-grandparents–and they are Cunninghams, too. I don’t know when I began to be acquainted with them at the family reunion, but they have always been favorites because we’re the same age and have the same interests. They are musicians and music aficianados. Dan hosted KUT’s Folkways for 20 years, too, so we have that disc jockey experience in common, too.

If you haven’t seen or heard Debbie and Doyle yet, check them out on YouTube… I’ve been watching this one again tonigh:  Blue Stretch Pants. It makes me laugh. I like the line, “So I married that girl, we have a couple a kids, and I’d have to say these past few years I’ve been mostly glad I did.” Now that’s true love.

On the cruise we never saw “Doyle and Debbie” and “Buddy” (their band) in their finery where we could get a picture. We did get to know them a little bit in their civilian clothes. So last night, we took the opportunity to get a picture with the trio and we also picked up our new bumper stickers that say “Whine Whine Twang Twang” (one of their songs).

Here we are. Mark really wanted a picture of just him and Debbie, but we figured we could crop this one so he would have that wish fulfilled.