Love Is Real

All those horrible Sheryl Crow commercials, where she rapes “Not Fade Away” and turns it into a song about fucking hair color not fading away, has made me think of good old Jerry.

First of all, Sheryl Crow and Revlon are the devils. “Not Fade Away” is one of the most covered songs of all time, written by Buddy Holly and beloved by Grateful Dead fans as one of the Dead’s most played songs. It is at home on many a wonderful Dead bootleg.

Look, if Sheryl Crow recorded herself burping and put some acoustic guitar behind it, it would be better than all her bland shitty songs combined. I’m sorry she had to go through breast cancer, and okay – she has done some good environmental and social activism, but aside from that I have no love for this woman.

I’ll take my angry hippie rants elsewhere in a minute.

Back to Jerry Garcia, the most loveable dead man in the world (sorry Martin Luther King, you’re second). I hope heaven is one big Jerry Garcia concert.
If you want to listen to some classic Jerry, here it is on the web. This was one of my favorite bootleg tapes and I’m now searching for a good quality copy online or on cd.

By the way, I am an asshole for having Jessica Simpson’s “Private Affair” follow Jerry Garcia on my iTunes. I hate myself.

No More Secrets

I am working on a story right now about the play I was in during my freshmen year of college. I thought I was all actor-y, so I auditioned for this frigging play, and it ended up being an educational musical for children about molestation called “No More Secrets”. Seriously.

This kind of burned me on theater.

Yes, later that year I played a stoner Rosencrantz in an outdoor version of Hamlet and of course, I was in the Vagina Monologues during my senior year, but my dreams were pretty much shattered after I played the mother of a girl molested by her male babysitter named Sparky. SPARKY.

A few people who read this blog actually had the pleasure of watching this trainwreck. They even got me to see sing a song as “Mom”, which was a lengthy blues number about not being able to find my keys. This song kind of became an anthem in my dorm (Smith South, holler back!), and my JA (Junior Advisor) Chuck once sang it to me as I puked up the six-pack of LaBatt Blue he had bought me earlier one night.

(Who drinks LaBatt Blue?!)

On the day of our final performance, a Sunday afternoon, my high school boyfriend drove up from Boston to watch the show. He then took me out to lunch were he dumped me after I had one bite of my turkey sandwich. I got so angry that I ran out of the restaurant with my cup of chai, ran down to the river nearby and threw the chai in the air to accentuate my anger. The whole thing dumped all over my hair.

My (ex)boyfriend – who is a super nice guy – was clearly doing the right thing. I was a loopy. Maybe it was all the Camel Lights I smoked that year…mixed with Canadian beer.

Actually, the most hilarious part of him dumping me was that he had already gotten into and was going to my same college the next year. This of course, tormented me, but I never thought what a chunk of hell that must have been for him. Everyone is all excited to head off to college and the poor guy was probably filled with dread thinking of the crazy chai-thrower awaiting him in Maine.

We even ended up in the same dorm his freshmen year, but I’m happy to report that we made it through college without incident and as pals.