Nashville Confidential

live your best lunch

A group of five women from work who never have lunch together finally did, and we laughed and laughed. The experience made me miss my book club from home very, very much. That group had a good mix of married and single, mom and not. This group was the same way. We also vowed NOT to discuss work, which raised the enjoyable quotient considerably.

One woman regaled us with her tales from Oprah's "Live Your Best Life" tour. I like Oprah, she is definitely a force to be reckoned with, but her icon-like status does frighten me. I think women like Oprah for a lot of reasons, chief among them the power of the makeover. Everybody loves a good makeover, and we pretty much could all stand one.

If you doubt that everybody loves a good makeover, witness "Trading Spaces" and "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," which I find hilarious. All my lunchmates felt the same. Even worse: We all confessed we have a thing for Ted, the food and wine guy. He has a great look, a great voice, dimples even. He is, it goes without saying, gay. (He's the least mincing of the five.)

One thing we've learned from the show: five homosexual men do a better job of romancing women than one straight guy does.

teambuilding

My team went for dinner tonight, the second week in a row. It's pretty cool. I am by far the oldest and least cool of the four. I don't have cable television, so half the time I need things explained in great detail. Thank goodness news of the "Star Wars" video penetrated my public-radio bubble or I would have been completely out of the conversational loop.

Last week we went to Monell's, a Nashville landmark and definitely not for the Atkins Diet patrol. One of my team is Twiggy reincarnated, and she put more food away than almost anybody else.

I like my work group very much, although the four of us -- yes, we are now up to four! -- are quite different. I recently asked one of them what she would have been if not a corporate drone like me, and she said, "An actress." It was a real insight and a very cool thing to learn. Just when you think you know people, they surprise you. That's what I like best about my team.

do real writers use pen and paper?

I'm irked at the whole computer / technology / Internet thing right now. Whoever developed the Sobig virus needs a good thrashing. Two weeks after the fact, we still haven't quite recovered at work. Who knew we were so enslaved? Between corrupted files and numerous would-be fixes, people are on their last nerve. And, who knows if this is related or not, but some of the security alarms at work have been malfunctioning. (They blast an attention-getting siren and ask us, "May I have your attention, please?" You got it.)

On the way out of the building tonight I saw a sign in the lobby warning that weapons would be confiscated and would become the property of the company. I am not kidding! I expect to have to submit to a breathalyzer in the parking garage tomorrow.

General weirdness has ensued. I blame computers. Then again, I think about my little log. It launched 365 days ago. I've always thought that a true journal is your pen-and-paper journal, but I've actually been more faithful in writing on line than in all my beautiful books. When I look at the log, many times I think of all the things I haven't written, either due to time or subject matter. But I'm glad I've kept it going, however sporadically, for this past year.

Thanks to the five or so of you who read once in a while. I do appreciate it, even though I haven't been mentioned in the New York Times yet! Don't hold your breath for the weight-loss blog.

so very brave

Another small world story: many months ago I found someone's weight-loss blog and it was really, really good. One of the links led to another weight-loss blog, which was even better, and I tracked back to that writer's personal blog. I read it for many months before realizing it was a woman I worked with at the newspaper many years ago. I read her personal blog more than the weight-loss blog, and she is a very enjoyable writer.

But due to her excellent weight-loss blog, Erin has had, in her words, her "15 minutes" this week due to coverage in the New York Times (password required for the link unless you go through the Aug. 25 link on her site) and on "Good Morning America" today! I am really proud of her. She recently completed a triathalon and wore a long-ago-purchased dress. (I have one, the "I Have a Dream" skirt, but it has not yet seen the light of day. Hope springs eternal.)

They showed before and after pics. It's courageous enough for her to put them up on the 'Net, let alone having them shown on national TV. She is a freelance writer, which they unfortunately didn't mention in any of these media outlets. But I will mention it here in hopes that someone will send some business her way.

never quite anonymous

I still miss drummer Stan Lynch, but you can never go wrong with live Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. DMJ and I had dinner and compared notes from our Hell Week at Work (that computer virus kicked our butts) and promptly forgot it all once we heard the first, wonderful, jangly chords of "American Girl."

This has been my second weekend of back-to-back concerts. Last weekend I saw John Hiatt/Robert Cray on Friday and Charlie Robison on Saturday; this weekend I went to see the reunited Bis-Quits on Friday and then Petty last night. Will Kimbrough and Tommy Womack and Mike Grimes, good solo guys all, used to be Bis-Quits, so I figured they had to be great. They were fun, but they were at the soon-to-close SlowBar, one of my least desirable places to see a show, due to all the strategizing it involves. (I will spell out my solo concertgoing strategy in another post at a later date.) It is impossible to be inconspicuous there, and I generally feel like a jerk until the show starts.

In hopes of snagging a corner seat, I arrived at 8:30 p.m. for the advertised 9:30 p.m. show. I walked in and found the band during soundcheck while the wives looked on. Apparently the paper had the time off by an hour. So, after assuring them I am not a groupie, I walked to a new restaurant and read for a couple hours. At one point I thought, "Isn't it great that I live in a town where I can pull a bonehead move like that, but no one's the wiser, and I can sit here not knowing a soul?" About 20 minutes later the volunteer coordinator of the Frist came in and said hello.

Eventually I made my way back to the club. Not a seat to be found, and nowhere to stand. So I jostled with all the beautiful people and wondered where Harry Potter got that invisibility cloak and how I might get one. I saw a couple with an extra chair at their table, and they seemed nice, so I asked, "Do you mind if I sit here?" They did not, and a good time was had by all (I guess - we didn't really talk to one another).

The next night, it was the opposite concert setting: an outdoor shed with many pavilion seats and a big lawn. Guess who I saw a couple rows ahead of DMJ and me? That couple!! I went up to them and said, "Do you mind if I sit here?" and we all marveled at how great minds think alike. We compared musical notes for a while and eventually introduced ourselves. Turned out I "know" them - we have corresponded on the Jason and the Scorchers list lo these many years! Can you believe it?

Not only do great minds think alike, but it's a small world. [Add your own cliche here.]

real real gone

During my year in Connecticut, I saw two concerts. One was John Hiatt opening for Robert Cray at a hall in Hartford. The other was B.B. King at the Rose City Festival in Norwich.

One whole year.
Two concerts.
No wonder my time there was so unhappy.

I remember counting the days for that Cray show. I listened to only a few albums that whole year -- "In My Tribe" by 10,000 Maniacs, "Moondance" by Van Morrison and "My Aim is True" by Elvis Costello chief among them. I played Cray's "Strong Persuader" now and then, but it made me too melancholy for my college road trips to University of Illinois and my faraway friends. I LOVED that album and I couldn't wait to see Cray.

I went with a colleague from work and his wife. His last name was Woodcock and yes, he used it in his byline. Brave man. He knew a lot about music and was very funny. He insisted that I listen to XTC's latest album, "Oranges and Lemons," which I eventually did (about 18 months later) and became a huge fan. Anyway, Mr. Woodcock was going to see Hiatt, I was going to see Cray.

But once the lights went down, I never wanted Hiatt's set to end. He stormed the place, was loose and funny and absolutely potent when he sang. Soon his "Bring the Family" album became No. 1 With a Bullet on my Connecticut album rotation. (One song from the album, "Thing Called Love," eventually became Bonnie Raitt's comeback hit and I'm sure put the Hiatt children through college. The whole album is stellar.)

I don't remember anything about Robert Cray's set, to tell you the truth. Hiatt had dazed me and won me over completely. I've seen each of them a time or two in the intervening years -- Cray in Peoria, and I actually got to interview him; and Hiatt at Mabel's in Champaign with CHM, and that was one of the best shows ever -- and again I was counting down the days to their live performance.

This time it was at the Ryman and Cray opened for hometown hero Hiatt, and the Robert Cray Band was incredible. I never wanted THAT set to end. He has an amazing piano player and they did a version of "Our Last Time" that had my jaw on the floor.

John Hiatt and the Goners (featuring Sonny Landreth) were just as amazing and I don't know how a guy so goofy on stage can be so cool! I could wax rhapsodic about it for at least seven more paragraphs but take my word for it, that was a great show. It made me very nostalgic about a number of people from my past, including A. Woodcock - who knows where he is now? - and WDR, who called yesterday afternoon to tell me about developments in his life both happy and sad. I told him about my Cray / Hiatt outing, and he said, "Man, I saw John Hiatt at Mabel's in the early 90s ..." He was at that killer show that CHM and I attended. Then he announced he's going to see Springsteen in Chicago on Wednesday. That one-upped me.

ex libris

I think it was the gold embossed "C" on the red cover that made me choose the book from all the others on the fiction shelves of the McClure Branch Library. It was "The Stories of John Cheever" and I was old enough to care about and actively work toward a suntan, because I remember laying out behind my parents' garage and devouring it. I read every one of the nearly 700 pages. His stories were so worldly: they hinted at cocktail parties and Italy and adultery and upper crust East Coast ennui, a whole universe very far from my parents' garage.

More than that, I loved the way he put words together. He could write sentences that were powerfully musical and others that I still don't fully understand. I read some stories over and over again, especially "The Enormous Radio" and "O Youth and Beauty" and "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill."