Sunny and Red

The book (see yesterday’s “post”) did inform me that Nelson Eddy had a bodyguard named Red Boyles, which I found hilarious for reasons requiring, I believe, no explanation. Furthermore, Jeanette MacDonald, later in life, enjoyed the company of a regular “escort” named Sunny Griffin, which is not a significantly funny name. But Sunny Griffin’s day job? Makeup man at a mortuary! I guess it is, if not funny, something... for a mortuary makeup man to go by a cheerful moniker like Sunny. But maybe I don’t know enough about mortuaries. One time Dr. Theresa and I were in a bar in Decatur, Georgia, I think, and a guy there was like... wait, his girlfriend was writing a big old grimoire by hand at another table. And this guy was like, “Did you know you can just walk in and get a job in a mortuary with no qualifications? That’s what I did!” And he was really happy about it. Now, we don’t have to take his word for everything. Then, as I recall, he said some weird stuff about remembering a photo he had seen on someone’s refrigerator of Dr. Theresa in the gloves she wore at our wedding, and something else weird about what she had done with her hair that day, which I think may have been his job? Fixing up hair at a mortuary? Or maybe I got that from an X-FILES episode. Then he said something funny about his hometown, or he said it in a funny way, which, though I can’t or won’t explain it right now, became the basis of a long-running inside joke between Dr. Theresa and myself. I hasten to add that the joke was not at the fellow’s expense, as you may be forgiven for thinking after he had made startling personal remarks about a photo of Dr. Theresa he had seen once and never forgotten, like he was Dana Andrews in LAURA, while his girlfriend scrawled evil runes in a big, black book (the latter being a detail I drew on, if loosely, for my 2016 story collection MOVIE STARS) but no, it had to do with the musical intonation he struck while saying the name of his hometown, that’s all, a very innocent bit of japery indeed. This little walk down memory lane has reminded me of a song by Bill Taft’s current band. I’ve gone to the trouble of making it the number one selection on the following very manageable 10-song playlist (for you to experience as you read this “post” over and over again) of bands featuring Bill and the cellist Brian Halloran, though another of their bands, Hubcap City, seems to have been scrubbed from the music streaming service entirely, just like Jerry Clower before it. (Hey, just to bring it full circle, which I don’t think I’m actually doing, Bill and Brian were both in our wedding! Brian played his cello as Dr. Theresa, before she was a Dr., came wafting down the aisle on the wings of love, one assumes.)