Geezerville

“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

So said Arthur Carlson when his radio station WKRP dropped live turkeys from a helicopter in a Thanksgiving publicity stunt that went terribly wrong.  The hapless birds, according to newsman Les Nesman, hit the ground "...like bags of wet cement."  The TV sitcom was based on the Turkey Trot Festival in Yellville, Arkansas, which ran for more than 40 years and included tossing live turkeys out of a low-flying airplane until animal rights activists put a stop to it in 1989.

Turkeys may have (delicious) wings, but they really can’t fly.  At least, not domestic turkeys.  They belong to the order of galliformes -- ground-dwelling birds such as pheasants, quail and partridges.  Wild turkeys are capable of short flights – more fluttering hops than anything else.  But domestic turkeys can scarcley trot.  

 Betsy, she's singin' just like Patsy Cline                                       

Sendin’ shivers chasin' each other up and down my spine...

Roy Forbes is banging that battered old Gurian guitar and almost dancing as he taps his feet to the music.  He’s crowding 60, but the kid can still rock.

    The smoke haze is risin', the liquor goes down                                  The feet start tappin’,  let's order a round

I wasn't surprised when we were arrested for picketing The Skillet Cafe. It's what we hoped would happen. It was the sixties, after all. Vietnam. Ban the Bomb. Protests and pickets were the order of the day. 

This picketing wasn't planned at all. Half a dozen of us had been lounging around a horseshoe banquette with a window looking out onto Granville Street. We’d been there for most of the afternoon, smoking cigarettes, nursing cold coffees and arguing about how to fix the world. They asked us to leave and, having nothing better to do, we asked why. After some hemming and hawing, the manager said it was because were were unshaven. That was true of some of us. But being 16, I could barely raise peach fuzz, and said so. The owner said never mind, he didn't like my beard-like attitude.

Of course we picketed the place. Eventually some of us were arrested and hauled off in a Black Maria to 312 Main where we were relieved of our valuables, fingerprinted, photographed and jailed. They even took our belts and shoelaces, so we wouldn't hang ourselves in despair.  

I was going to write a piece about my love affair with the ukulele.  What prompted me was word that the Vancouver Folk Music Festival is asking ukulele players to write a song about the festival.  The winner of the contest will be invited to perform their song on the main stage Sunday night.

With that in mind, I planned to write about the ukulele zeitgeist, about the fact that all over the world people are playing ukuleles in alarmingly large numbers.  Just Google ukulele and you will get 38 million results in .07 seconds flat.  There are ukulele circles from Nanaimo to New York.  There are on-line tuners, tutorials, tablature tables and shops devoted entirely to the instrument, such as Ukulele Movement in Singapore. 

I would have also drawn your attention to music by people like Nellie McKay, Rani Arbo, Black Gardenia, Ralph Shaw and James Hill.  I’d have pointed out that the uke is ubiquitous these days, and that the two most common TV advertising tropes are golden retrievers and soundtracks with boppy ukuleles playing happy summery music.