Texas Style, Kitten with a Whip meets the Grateful Dead

As mentioned before, one of my best friends, Steve Jaxon, (real name: Stephen Cole Vicario) hosts a live afternoon radio talk show called The Drive (KSRO 1350 AM)...its a talk show that is really Steve's personal canvas and palette...he paints the show with his own guests & music....management is gleefully happy to stay out of Steve's way as the ratings continue to grow....I make small contributions to the show and in exchange get to share the perquisites of Steve's local celebrity status...free passes to many local community events and concerts....the one show alone: Zappa plays Zappa was worth all of my contributions...

This coming Tuesday Steve will have Dan Healy as a guest....Basically Dan is the genius behind the sound of the Grateful Dead...Not many things evoke powerful memories these days....I have had my share of drugs and alcohol...but the mere suggestion of someone connected to the Grateful Dead being on Steves show sent my synapses into overdrive...memories and sensory sensations colliding...images, sounds, people, venues, parking lots....

Growing up in the bay area in the late 60's & early 70's I came to love The Grateful Dead....I dreamed of what it would be like to be backstage....to be friends with the band...to be immersed in the adventure, to be part of the extended Dead Family...it was 1968, I had visited my mathematician uncle in Santa Fe, NM...my uncle put me on a Greyhound bus back to the bay area...I took my seat with a cheap suitcase in tow...on the empty seat next to me was a paperback version of "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest"....the intro still permanently embossed: "One flew east, one flew west and one flew over the cuckoo's nest"....my personal adventure with the extended Grateful Dead family had begun...being 15 I was happy with six degrees of separation...

20 years later my dream about having at least a peripheral association with the Grateful Dead family came true, [caution:name dropping ahead] In fact, I ran into Ken Kesey...literally ran into him...smacked right into his big barrel chest...I was backstage at a Oakland Auditorium New Years Eve show....yeah those degrees of separation had slowly collapsed through time (thank you Clyde Taff)...unfortunately I was drunk and gacked to the gills when I collided with Kesey.....barely able to mumble an apology let alone use the opportunity to say something so cosmically clever that it would make Kesey pause and then demand I join his weekly LSD poker game..."okay we are now playin 3 card bisquick...one eyed pukers are wild...everybody anteup...potato poker chips only..." in fact I probably would have been forcefully removed from backstage if not for the fact that half of the security personnel had been supplied drugs via yours truly and the Medellin cartel..."hey man its going to be a late show...you got any more of that, uh stuff...?...and don't be smackin in to Ken Kesey anymore...thats not cool"

A few years later with at least one trip to rehab in my personal rear view mirror....I was living in Las Vegas....The Dead were going to play for a few days in Sam Boyd stadium...my bridges had not been completely burned and I scored some all access passes...woohoo laminates: "I rock"...I had been hanging out at Ballys Casino a lot because of a hot Texas cocktail waitress...Teresa Duren from Lufkin Texas...Teresa was a small town girl with breasts that reminded me of Dallas & Ft Worth, killer legs too, sugary Texas voice....God I wanted her bad...She was the embodiment of the adolescent lust I felt the first time I looked at a playboy centerfold...mmmmhhh....mesmerized by the big cities I ignored the signs of our cultural disparity and invited Teresa to go with me to the concert...figuring that if an all access pass didnt impress her enough to sleep with me...nothing would. And when I say I was blinded by cultural disparity...I mean blinded with a capital B...Teresa once told me in a syrupy rural Texas drawl that she "liked sushi...but only the cooked kind of sushi"...I listened but didnt really hear her...the big cities were in the way of my auditory nerve...Teresa's comment about sushi should have been a major clue that Teresa and the Grateful Dead were alternate and antithetical universes....but lured by the big cities and the prospect of sleeping with my personal centerfold, I extended the invitation anyway. Teresa cheerfully accepted....I should have seen it coming: Teresa at a Grateful Dead show was a pure Ellie Mae Clampett disaster...epic, surreal and unfixable...

I picked up Teresa at her Las Vegas condo on a blazing hot Las Vegas afternoon, middle of May...there was Teresa in 112% Halloween style Daisy Duke glory...short short cutoff levis, black 5 inch high heels, long white waxed legs...big teased two-toned Texas hair and a half shirt that showed off most of her stomach and the major urban areas of the big cities...I could see all the way from Dallas to Ft Worth and the surrounding areas....hello Weatherford ...it was major cleavage, Dolly Parton shaking her head cleavage...her look was so wrong that there was no fixing it, the girl had no flip flops and Tie dye in her closet...there was no little change I could suggest that would make it better, her look was pure Hee Haw Hooker...Junior Samples drooling and stammering...I decided to make peace with the surreal....looked right at Teresa...well I sorta looked at her mentally imagining the drive from Ft Worth to Dallas, then taking a big right turn toward San Antonio, wondering if I would get stopped by the Federales if I tried to go "south of the border"....I finally looked up and said..."you look perfect, lets go" hoping that Teresa would be oblivious to her own Anne Margaret, country style "Kitten with a Whip" spectacle once we arrived at the show....yes Teresa understood less about the Grateful Dead than she did about Sushi....




There is a lesson here...while I imply that Teresa was clueless about the Grateful Dead...I was obviously clueless as well....Why was I surprised that a Las Vegas cocktail waitress from rural Texas was dressed like a big hair porn star? It seems we all have blind spots....a few years later I got married....I think I was married six months before I realized two things about my wife that were horribly wrong...two thing I missed...completely missed, two glaring red flags, two things I was clueless about....How the hell could I not know my wife was an NRA member and kept loaded guns unlocked in the house? And while that was egregious enough....(egregious on both our parts) perhaps more egregious was that my wife was of the firm opinion that Roger Moore was a better James Bond than Sean Connery...how could I have over looked that...how could I have been so clueless...???? If I had known about her blasphemous James Bond ideas I would have called off the wedding and sent her for de-programming

So a tarted-up Teresa and I arrive at Sam Boyd stadium for the Grateful Dead....even Bill Walton swallowed his tongue...maybe because Bill could see Dallas and Ft. Worth clearly from his vantage point ....[cue the Bill Walton voice: "Un--bee leave ah bil"] It would have been less a sensation if I had been with Madonna and Jenna Jameson...the thing I found fascinating was the stares from the young hippie guys there with their hippie girl friends...I thought the guys would look at Teresa as some sort of cultural freak of nature....Nooooooooo...the guys were staring at Teresa with mouths open and tongues hanging out....hoping desperately their hippie girlfriends wouldnt see their blatant lust....I can only imagine how the discussion would go later...trying to explain to Sunflower why she should suddenly start shaving her legs and wearing heels....I can only wonder how many young hippie girls stormed out of the yurt later that night angered by their boyfriends mental infidelity

Well thats my long strange trip...oh in case you are wondering....I never did have any fun with Dallas and Ft Worth...never made it down south to San Antonio....who knows I might have been clueless once I got there....Of course I might be in good company, I hear a lot of girls complaining that most guys don't know that The Alamo is right in the center of San Antonio...