Author: elvisgumby

The Odd Guy in the Cafeteria

Post author By elvisgumby
Post date February 5, 2022
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When I was a student at Lambuth College, I regularly ate lunch and dinner in the cafeteria. I’m not much of a breakfast guy and was always waiting until the last minute to make it to that first class of the day. The cafeteria was a gathering place for most of the people on campus. If you wanted to get a message to everyone on campus, making an announcement during the normal mealtimes was your best bet for getting it to the most people. Everyone who stayed on campus was required to participate in the meal plan, but we still had some people from off campus that ate their too. Many of the faculty were regulars for lunch. Then there were some other people that we weren’t sure why they were there. I’m going to focus on someone that I’ll just refer to as The Odd Guy.

Kids True Stories

Voice Message Greetings

Over the years, we’ve had a variety of greetings for our voice mail. When my kids were young, I our greeting was me talking to them. One of these greetings included asking you to leave a message for “Pootie Wheeler”. This one was everyone’s favorite. I’ve always been split on how informational and how entertaining I want to be on these messages. I know that a lot of people use the system greetings where it either tells your number or only says your name with the phone company’s voice doing the rest of the work. That’s too straightforward for me. It also seems to be a long greeting with a lot of information we already know to sit through to just ask someone to give you a call back. My greeting at work is as brief as possible. I tell my name, the name of the company and ask them to leave a message if they wish. It gives them enough information to help them confirm they’ve reached the right number and gives them the option to leave a message, which they will be doing anyway if they are still listening.

Concerts Influences

Steve Martin in Concert

Over the years, I have seen several high-profile comedians in concert. The first of these was Steve Martin. Steve came to my attention with his appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970’s. I memorized his comedy routines from his first album Let’s Get Small and would share them with my friends who were also Steve Martin fans. I was happy when I heard the news of a concert appearance on April 7, 1978 in Memphis at the Ellis Auditorium North Hall.

Christmas

Special Christmas Title

Several years ago, our children were going to start getting Christmas gifts for my wife and me. This was the first Christmas after my son had moved out of the house. The kids planned this change to our Christmas routine as a surprise. They would give us these gifts when we did our normal gift exchange on Christmas Eve. At that time our normal Christmas Eve routine was going to my father’s house and celebrating Christmas with him and my sister’s family, then coming home and exchanging gifts before we settled in to watch Santa Claus Conquers The Martians. My son, James, would stop by our house and ride with us to start the festivities at my dad’s.

True Stories

New Year’s Eve In the Attic

Post author By elvisgumby
Post date January 1, 2022
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My wife and I had gone to some friends’ house for a New Year’s Eve party. Our children didn’t have anything going on that night and were old enough to leave home by themselves. When we got home from the party, our oldest daughter told us that the ice maker on the refrigerator had quit making ice. For some reason, I decided that I needed to look up and see how to troubleshoot this issue at 1 AM on New Year’s Day.

Concerts

Eddie Murphy’s Opening Act

Post author By elvisgumby
Post date December 21, 2021
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In March of 1985, my wife and I had an opportunity to see Eddie Murphy in concert at the Orpheum Theater in Memphis. Most of the material he was performing at this show would end up in the concert film Raw. One difference in the material that I noticed had to do with discussion of marriage. At the concert, he talked about the fact that he was about to get married. In the film, he talked about all of the reasons he didn’t get married. Other than that, the shows were about the same. One of the more memorable moments from the show happened before Eddie Murphy made it to the stage. That moment happened during the opening act.

Concerts Influences

The Michael Franks Concert

Post author By elvisgumby
Post date December 14, 2021
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In 1985, I saw a guitarist named Stanley Jordan on the Tonight Show. I was amazed at his technique and the sounds he was able to get out of the guitar. He used a finger tapping technique similar to what you’ve seen Eddie Van Halen do up on the fretboard of the guitar. But he would play a melody, a bass line, and chords all at the same time. Most bands would have as many as three musicians creating these sounds that he was doing by himself on a guitar. I was an instant fan and I soon picked up his first album, Magic Touch. While there were various genres of music on this album, Stanley Jordan was generally considered a jazz musician.

Concerts Influences

Seeing Historic Concert Performances

Post author By elvisgumby
Post date December 7, 2021
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It’s not that often that you get to be at a noteworthy rock and roll performance. I’ve had the opportunity to see a couple of musicians in concert as they were preparing to record live albums. I saw Jimmy Buffett in Memphis on August 1, 1978. This was exactly a week before he started recording concerts that became the double live album You Had To Be There. I also got to see Bob Dylan on November 10, 1994 in Jackson, Tennessee which was exactly a week before he started filming the concerts that became the MTV Unplugged show and album. While I didn’t get to see the shows that were the ones that became part of these historic recordings, I did get a chance to see these artists while they were prepping for these important shows. I felt they would be prepping to be at the top of their game during these shows and I was fortunate to see them at those special times.

Concerts

Seeing Cheap Trick

I got married in 1985. My wife still had to complete her senior year of college. She was studying communications at the University of Tennessee at Martin. We lived there while she was finishing up school and would occasionally participate in the school activities like the Cheap Trick/John Waite concert. I was not a big fan of Cheap Trick, but I appreciated Rick Nielsen guitar playing and thought they would put on a good show. John Waite had a hit at that time with the song Missing You. I didn’t care for the song and considered John Waite to be a one-hit wonder. Cheap Trick was in a lull in their career. Because Waite had the big hit at the time, he was the headliner with Cheap Trick being the opening act. We decided that we would go to the show and leave after Cheap Trick was done. This turned out to be the wrong thing to do.

Concerts

Seeing Hall and Oates

In fall of 1981, rock group Hall and Oates released their Private Eyes album. I was not a fan of this band. They weren’t bad, but their sound was a little too pop for my tastes at the time. Their music got a lot of play at the college parties that I attended, and we watched a lot of MTV at the time. Their videos were in heavy rotation on that channel. Because of all this, I got to hear a lot of their music. They did a tour supporting this album in September with a stop in Memphis. FM 100 was the radio station sponsoring the show and they were selling tickets for a dollar. I had been dating my now wife Andrea for almost a year at the time. Her mother enjoyed going to concerts and bought tickets for the three of us to go see the show.