Last Friday when SHmonk and I were listening to great music (that we of course chose on the digital jukebox) at the Arcade bar waiting for Rickie Lee Jones to take the stage, I asked, “With which three people from your past—and with whom you’ve lost all contact—would you most like to re-establish your friendship?”

My answer: 1) John Scroe (perhaps Scrow) – a poor, lost boy in the world of east Texas who entered my school as a foster child and remained there (and remained the best friend I ever had there) for a few weeks. He told me his deepest, darkest secret under the bleachers during gym class, and I told him mine. And then he was moved into another foster home, and I never saw him again.

2) Daisy Collett – a great, fun, intelligent, and creative woman who survived a week of clubbing with the twenty-two-year-old younger version of myself. I miss the dimension she added to my life.

3) Darek Ożga – one of my best friends and certainly one of my all-time favorite people I’ve met abroad. We were great pals at the dormitory where I lived when I lived in Lublin during the winter of 1995-96: he was an English major at the university where I was studying Polish.

By the way, the Rickie Lee Jones concert was amazing. I find it strange that I’ve come around to her music almost every decade since I was eleven. She is perhaps one of the first musical guests I remember performing on Saturday Night Live way back in 1979, and “Chuck E.’s in Love” was one of the first 45 rpm singles my sisters and I owned.

Then in 1989, her album Flying Cowboys came out, and for months my cassette player flipped back and forth from side A to side B as I was deeply rutted in the new folk explosion of the times. “Satellites” is still one of my favorite songs:

So you keep talking in many languages
Telling us the way you feel
Don’t stop confiding in the road you’re on
Don’t quit, you’re walking Satellites

Her latest tour for The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard was a storm that blew through Dallas a week ago. Her voice has such mind-blowing registers: at times she sounded like a drugged-up Courtney Love, at other times she sounded like a Pentecostal preacher; other times her voice was lost in the wall of sound produced by five guitars and two percussionists, emerging only in a whisper, a whale song, a call to prayer by a muezzin. And never once does her voice lose itself in histrionics and hysterics (à la Whitney Houston or any other singer I can’t stand). After soaking in all that that tempest offered, walking back to the car in the pissing rain didn’t matter one bit.

Last Friday when SHmonk and I were listening to great music (that we of course chose on the digital jukebox) at the Arcade bar waiting for Rickie Lee Jones to take the stage, I asked, “With which three people from your past—and with whom you’ve lost all contact—would you most like to re-establish your friendship?”

My answer: 1) John Scroe (perhaps Scrow) – a poor, lost boy in the world of east Texas who entered my school as a foster child and remained there (and remained the best friend I ever had there) for a few weeks. He told me his deepest, darkest secret under the bleachers during gym class, and I told him mine. And then he was moved into another foster home, and I never saw him again.

2) Daisy Collett – a great, fun, intelligent, and creative woman who survived a week of clubbing with the twenty-two-year-old younger version of myself. I miss the dimension she added to my life.

3) Darek Ożga – one of my best friends and certainly one of my all-time favorite people I’ve met abroad. We were great pals at the dormitory where I lived when I lived in Lublin during the winter of 1995-96: he was an English major at the university where I was studying Polish.

By the way, the Rickie Lee Jones concert was amazing. I find it strange that I’ve come around to her music almost every decade since I was eleven. She is perhaps one of the first musical guests I remember performing on Saturday Night Live way back in 1979, and “Chuck E.’s in Love” was one of the first 45 rpm singles my sisters and I owned.

Then in 1989, her album Flying Cowboys came out, and for months my cassette player flipped back and forth from side A to side B as I was deeply rutted in the new folk explosion of the times. “Satellites” is still one of my favorite songs:

So you keep talking in many languages
Telling us the way you feel
Don’t stop confiding in the road you’re on
Don’t quit, you’re walking Satellites

Her latest tour for The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard was a storm that blew through Dallas a week ago. Her voice has such mind-blowing registers: at times she sounded like a drugged-up Courtney Love, at other times she sounded like a Pentecostal preacher; other times her voice was lost in the wall of sound produced by five guitars and two percussionists, emerging only in a whisper, a whale song, a call to prayer by a muezzin. And never once does her voice lose itself in histrionics and hysterics (à la Whitney Houston or any other singer I can’t stand). After soaking in all that that tempest offered, walking back to the car in the pissing rain didn’t matter one bit.