So Nashville...

I'm still digging up old journals trying to spark my creative writer who is dying to get back out. I enjoyed reading this entry from a few years back. :)
Ron took me to the Grand Ole Opry, the mother church of country music tonight and my brain automatically started fantasizing about how skinny I would look if my five foot four frame got stretched out to six foot two like country diva Terri Clark’s kick butt self. Then when Lorrie Morgan started singing with her mouth open real wide I started wondering if her dentist ever had to remove any big nasty gold fillings and what if she got a gold front tooth with an ‘L’ engraved on it and started rapping with Snoop Dog, kind of like a Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock duo. And then I wondered how many days a week she gets to go to the Hendersonville spa she promotes in the Nashville Scene with only her robe on and how many times she gets a mud wrap and a paraffin facial and a full body salt scrub and falls asleep in Chinese meditation land on comfy three thousand dollar sheets laying inside a leafy garden with a brook running through the middle.
Then I started to think, I really did grow up in this hick filled, goo goo sellin’, honky tonk big small town. Seems like my whole life I have been trying to get out of here and everybody else seems to be moving mountains to arrive. I do love Minnie Pearl though. I know she is dead but man do I love her. How-dee!
Then this little Ricky Shroeder looking dude that looked like a substitute teacher from Topeka, Kansas, came out and sang a few heart wrenching ballads and the crowd went wild. The gal next to me raised her hands and started doing spirit fingers and I started remembering how cute Ricky Shroeder was and how I really hoped I had a little boy that cute and endearing one day and how I won’t let him get involved in boxing.
Then this really old dude named Jim Ed Brown entered stage right and I started to think how this would really remind me of my dad if he was dead, but he’s not dead. There is something about those old Jim Reeves sounding voices that make me think of dad and his guitar and his old Red Sovine records and his storytelling and his hot sauce and how he would fart in the kitchen right at the most opportune moments when one of my friends and I would be playing Mrs. Pac Man in the living room on my Atari 1800.
Rhonda Vincent, the queen of bluegrass, sang a super speed version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and tears started hotting up behind my eyes and I started thinking about my dad and when he took me up to Dolly’s house up on top of a big ole mountain in Townsend, Tennessee because he knew I loved her music as much as the ice cream at Bobbie’s Double Dip on Charlotte Avenue. I listened to that “I Will Always Love You” record with Dolly and her red bandana head and bandana blouse on the floor of our River Plantation condo in Bellevue, right across from the miles of cow and corn fields that now holds a huge shopping center that has now unfortunately contracted the deserted mall disease. At five years old I was swept away into Dolly’s life and soul and escaped to a world of Holly Hobby record player bliss when I didn’t know yet there was something to escape from. Who would have ever known I would live in a cabin so similar to hers twenty four years later trying to find my roots and simple things and a chance get that family feeling and a coat of many colors, not made from rags, but from conversations with my husband and with dreams of what life ought to be like. I have always been a dreamer and an idealist of sorts trying to live in yesterday and in tomorrow. It is just recently I have been learning the art of living in today, in this moment, in today’s skin. At the moment, the Rhonda Vincent band is playing a song as fast as an old Charlie Chaplan movie on speed and I think I’ll go home and write an album full of old country songs that make me think about the Shiloh trip Daddy took me on when all I did was complain when he was just trying to teach me a little history and where we have come from. Songs that remind me of the Jim Reeves statue Daddy took me to go see. He never told me Jim Reeves was his hero, but somehow sitting in that old church downtown makes me know. After all most of the songs Daddy sung for me on my guitar were old Jim Reeves songs and Jim Reeves stories about how he used to record unreleased songs for his wife in place of life insurance, because apparently they didn’t have any. Songs that remind me of the farm where my Daddy took me to see where his parents lived in a tent before building their first house and having their first baby and the tree where Daddy sh-- on his big brother’s head after waiting all day for him to stand underneath the limb without noticing his bare behind squatting like a zoo monkey.
All the rhinestones at the Grand Ole Opry must make Porter Wagner awful proud. Is he dead yet? Seems like most of these artist could be dead or are on their way to being dead. Just sitting in these pews makes me want to go home and make a pan of black skillet Martha White cornbread and a pot of beans with a ham hock in it and enter a 4-H beans and cornbread contest. And Marty Stuart’s rockabilly self makes me want to dance with a beer in one hand and the Bible in the other. I think he invented bed head.
After waiting all night I got to hear my favorite of all acts, The Sweet Harmony Traveling group that consisted of all my musical influences. Emmylou Harris, who I get to stare at when I see her at the Green Hills Wild Oats drinking coffee and driving off in her topless jeep driving in the rain. Patti Griffin, whoo God broke the mold when he installed that voice. Gillian Welch, who reminds me of Popeye’s wife Olive Oil, except she can sing cowgirl songs like nobody’s business. And Buddy Miller, who makes me wonder if my toilet needs plumbing. He sings like an undiscovered plumber, except he is discovered, or rather he discovered himself.