Last time I was at Heathrow . . .

The last time I flew to England was in January, 1975. I was 24, full of myself, and I was playing baritone in the Stan Kenton Orchestra. It was so long ago that we flew on Pan American out of JFK. The morning was frigid, we played a gig the night before, and I discovered Stan's way of dealing with the stress of transatlantic airplane travel: Get drunk and stay drunk. He'd been drinking all night and we needed to fetch a wheelchair when the bus pulled up to the curb at the airport.

That being said, I had my own windmills to tilt at, because we were traveling on January 29--my 24th birthday. Stan and the road manager, Jack, settled into first class and as we sat down in the crowded Economy cabin, the first round was bought for the celebration of my birth by my bandmates. It would not be the last.

By the time we got to Heathrow, we'd escalated from beer to bloody marys. Eventually I was unable to move. Looking back, I can hardly believe that it was me that needed a wheelchair when we got there. We met Jack, our Cockney bus driver, and Tony, the laughing though menacing when crossed Jamaican who would be our road manager, and headed off into the night to our rooms at the Mayfair Hotel.

Stan's band did 4 weeks in Britain. I never drank another drop until I got off that band.

In Memorium

One of my dearest friends died yesterday. Marjorie Baer, who I knew so long that she was Margie when we met, passed peacefully in her apartment in Berkeley surrounded by her friends. The cause of her death was a brain tumor. The cause of her life was editing and helping hapless friends like me.

We were the spitball crew in Cosimo Corsano's Italian class at UCSC in 1972. When she became an editor at Macworld magazine, she gave me the chance to write reviews about music notation software, something which I knew next to nothing about when I started. I'd been a copyist though, and I learned fast at her urging. For 8 years I was a stringer, publishing occasional pieces for the magazine, building bylines. She used my spouse Jan to write an extensive review of accounting packages for the Mac. When she moved to Peachpit Press she hired me to write a book on Claris Home Page, which was pulled off the marketplace the day the book was published, but still sold every printed copy.

She was a most positive person with a genuinely twisted sense of humor. She never used a sentence to end a preposition.

Her grieving friends include her former roommate Ginger, who now lives in Houston. She broke the news to me gently over the phone.

We're all stunned. We had no idea she was ill.

Speaking for myself, my world is a much smaller place without her.

(I am aware that she'd never have let that last sentence stand.)

A Little Personal History

I started working on ships in an odd way. In 1979, I moved from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles. One of my friends was Tom Hill from Oroville, a superb bass player and quite a cut-up. We did several rehearsal bands at the union building, which is what you do in Los Angeles. 

One day, Tom mentioned that someone was putting together a band for a new ship that would be going out of LA Harbor called the Azure Seas. Tom already had the gig and suggested me for the saxophone chair. I auditioned, but I really didn't get on with the music director, so I wasn't offered the job.

After a couple years the job fell to a saxophone player from Santa Cruz named Ray. Sometime just after my son was born in 1983 the phone rang. It was Tom. Ray's dad was in bad shape and he wondered if I could fill in for him for a couple 3- and 4-night cruises to Ensenada. Ah, Ensendada! Half a day's ride from my house by car, 4 days round trip by ship. 

I took the gig, on an open-ended basis, because Ray had now idea if his dad would get better. You can't believe what the deal was back then: The ship would clear the harbor and haul ass out to the 20-mile limit and the casino would open, much to the relief of the passengers. Back then, there were two places on land in the states where you could gamble: Las Vegas and Atlantic City. So we had some gambling fools on the Azure Seas. 

The food was great, the band cabins smaller than any I've ever lived in, and the band pretty good. My cabin-mate was the stepbrother of a guy I went to UCSC with, a slightly demented piano player who killed himself a couple years later by self immolation when he was trying to convince a dancer that he loved her. Some of the acts were less than bad, most pretty good. Gary Mule Deer worked the Azure Seas. On the other hand, so did Judy Kolba. The cruise director was a putz, a gay fellow who had a cabin with the Assistant CD dominated by a huge bed.

I ended up doing several turns on the Azure Seas, the last of which my then-wife and always-son (who was 6 months old) made the trip. Somewhere I have a great picture of Tom Hill mugging with Brendan nose-to-nose.

Tom married a blackjack dealer from the ship, who was from England. They have a family, and Tom has a career as a voice-over artist and actor in England.

My next cruise ship gig was in 2005, on the Dawn Princess.

Travel Details Revealed

I leave next Friday, October 12, from Austin Bergstrom Airport at 5:12 pm, fly to Chicago, arriving at 7:46 pm. Then I get off the little Embraer aircraft and get on a 777 at 9:29 for the overnight flight to Heathrow, arriving 11:15 Saturday morning. Can I find some Ambien? Maybe my dr. will give me some. I'm thinking about it because there is some crazy business that takes place on the first day on the ship (in this case I have a day to recoup from the flight). I've been known to stare blindly all night through an aircraft's portholes, looking for the contour of a known coastline. If that happens again I'm in trouble. 

Let me try to explain what it's like to join a ship. You're confused, tired, you don't know where anything is. Your supervisor meets you at the gangway. Hopefully, your baggage arrived with you. If it didn't, you won't have a suit to wear tonight, when you play your first gig. You are shown your quarters, you meet your roommate, and you can sleep for a half hour if you choose to forego your unpacking. Maybe you take a shower. You've been given a list of inductions, important but sleep-inducing meetings for new crew members describing crowd dynamics and safety aboard the ship.

After your first induction (there will be four more on the following days) you're hungry, but of course everybody from the music cabins is off enjoying the port. You don't know where to eat, so you dig through the stack of papers you've been given for the rules and locations for eating. You're lucky if you just arrived because you haven't made yourself known on the ship, so yo can stretch the rules a little in that golden moment when the servers think you're a passenger, for whom there are no rules.

I'd like to say that this pattern won't repeat itself on QE2, but my experience tells me otherwise.

2 weeks to go

There's a winter parka on the back of a chair in our living room, despite the fact that the high will today be 90 degrees. I bought it yesterday at Cabela's in nearby Buda, Texas. I'd been looking for an excuse ever since they opened a couple years ago to drop in. I was not disappointed, except for the fact that kids (of all ages) were menacing each other with pop guns. Here everyone hunts and fishes, which is news to me. 

While not my exact perfect fit for the job, this parka was cheap ($29!) and it's mighty warm. There's a hood, enough roominess to wear a sweater underneath it, and did I happen to mention it was cheap?

The purpose of the parka is to get me through the winter on the QE2. We have a couple Atlantic crossings, not to mention a little jaunt to Oslo and Hamburg in December. I may send it back home before we head for South America.

I've got the beginnings of a repository of non-blog stuff on my .MAC site:

Click here.

You don't have to have a Mac, but as an Apple shareholder I'd appreciate it if you'd just go out and buy one. Thanks in advance.