I
TENNESSEE, USA!: 28 Years Later
by Charles Gavan O'Lanahan
After a 15-year hiatus, Cumberland County Playhouse in Crossville, Tennessee has brought back the musical production of TENNESSEE, USA!, a stageplay written by the Playhouse's founder, Paul Crabtree, that made its first debut when the Playhouse opened on July 15, 1965.
Yesterday was the 45th Anniversary Performance, which I am proud to say that I attended. (EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was begun July 16, 2010.)
I saw this play for the first time back in 1982. The program (which, after digging through a drawer for about 45 minutes, I was finally able to recover) says July 1st-September 5th, and, since I remember the weather being quite pleasant that day, which is pretty well unheard of in the summertime, here in East Tennessee, I must've attended one of the last performances that year, if not the last.
I went with my grandparents. I was not yet ten years old, but certain things about the performance really stuck in my mind, and I remembered them, even years after I made the foolish mistake of getting rid of the soundtrack which I bought in the lobby that day.
The scene involving James K. Polk, and the musical number that followed, always stayed with me. And I remembered the Henry Willoby character getting beaten up by pro-Confederate Tennesseans after saying: "The South can't win!". I remembered the Willoby family, after returning to their own time, hearing Johnny Timberlake singing "Plinketty Plank" on the radio, and then going to see him perform with Big Rip at the Grand Ole Opry. But that was really about it.
Aside from that, I remembered the basic characters: Henry, Evelyn, Jody, and Buster Willoby, the money-grubbing yuppie family sent back in time to find their true souls, Johnny Timberlake, God's representative on Earth, dressed in pioneer garb and a coonskin cap, (who, that year, anyway, had a bushy brown beard) who tried to lead the family in the right direction, and Big Rip, the "representative from the Bargain Basement" who did his devil-damnedest to lead them astray.
Like I say, I had bought the soundtrack, and, initially, anyway, I certainly didn't regret doing it. But, as time went on, and my own soul became more and more corrupt, I found myself less and less able to relate to it and its message.
The last time I played it, it was just one song, "Johnny's Creation", and I played it in the summer of 1985, as prelude to a program of songs glorifying nothing but sexual lust. I played it as a sort of animistic conjuration, attempting to summon every element, every inanimate physical object to serve as the backdrop for the sordid little orgy I was creating in my mind. Now, driven by nothing but my own pubescent libido, I was actually worshipping the creation instead of the Creator. I had sunk to the lowest level possible, truly becoming nothing but a two-legged dog.
After that, I simply didn't care anymore. I was on a highway to Hell, running at breakneck speed, and bound and determined to bust the place wide open when I got there. I gave the record to my grandma. Six years later, I sold it at a flea market.
After my grandmother died, in November 2008, there was one thought in my mind, and one only: TENNESSEE, USA!. I simply had to retrieve the soundtrack. In my mind, it was akin to reclaiming my soul. It had been a long road that had brought me back to this point, but, in the wake of the Obamanation's seizure of power, I was determined to re-evaluate my life, and try to reconnect with that reality, that person that I had been.
Unfortunately, while I had remembered giving the record to my grandma, I had forgotten about selling it at the flea market, back in 1991, so I just naturally assumed that it would still be up at her house, among her other records. But, when me and my parents went up there to look, we couldn't find it, and, slowly, but surely, it began to dawn on me that it had been sold.
I guess it was mid-2009 before I remembered the Green Acres Flea Market in Alcoa, and how my grandpa had tried to dissuade me from selling the record, but I did it anyway. The dumb shit flea market guy had no idea what it even was. Had never heard of TENNESSEE, USA!. He just took a quick look at it and asked, "That's country, ain't it?" And, since I was eager to get rid of the thing, I said: "Yeah." He didn't want to buy any of my rock records. He said they didn't sell well with the flea market crowd.
You see, I simply couldn't wait to get rid of it, even though, honestly, up until that time, I had simply forgotten all about it. The fact of the matter is, since I had attended the performance with my grandparents, the record was a reminder of that, and, therefore, had sentimental value to my grandpa. It would hurt him to have to part with it. So I insisted on it. I hated the little bastard, then and now, and, if I could've done so and gotten away with it, would've plunged a spear into his worthless heart and watched the life drain out of him. I would've enjoyed it, too.
He's nothing but a dirty little beady-eyed, monkey-faced mamzer RAPIST as far as I'm concerned. No better than a 100% savage Injun beast of the field who rapes a pure-blooded White woman (Which is what my now-deceased maternal grandmother was, as far as I or anyone else knows. At any rate, there's no dysfunction or criminality on her side of the family tree, which would seem to bear it out.) All of his half-brothers and sisters and their spawn or nothing but criminals, drunkards, and neer-do-wells. Not one decent, responsible, semi-White man or woman in the bunch. That pretty much tells me what God thinks of their worthless family.
And, like a typical little Jewdayo-"Christian" whigger, he thinks he's so righteous, just because he doesn't drink, never cheated on his wife, and, "got saved" when he was 14 years old. (Basically, he knew he was gonna be going off to war in a couple of years and wanted a little "fire insurance", just in case he didn't make it back. Typical whigger behavior, huh? )
The unfortunate fact of the matter is, he did come back from WWII, and he's been a typical little brainwashed ZOGling flaggot ever since then. And, why, you may ask? Simply because the little mamzer bastard doesn't have anything else to be proud of, being what he is. People who wrap themselves in the ZOG shitrag are usually people of very little quality, who have nothing to legitmately be proud of besides simply being "Americans, bah Gawd!"
You see, the fact of the matter is that my maternal grandpa is not only a mamzer, but, also, at the very least, a product of statutory rape. His very existence is only due to the fact that nobody even cared enough about his worthless little inbred SKANK of a mother enough to avenge her rape, or, at the very least, force her semi-rapist to marry her.
She actually maintains, to this very day, that his sister and her sister talked her into fucking the guy. That's about as likely a story as that a UFO landed and ol' Yakub hisself got out of it and told her to fuck him. The plain fact of the matter is that either, A, She was a little, probably drunken slut, who gave it up to the first male to come sniffing around her little coochie, or, B, She was raped, at the age of sixteen, by a grown-ass man, and yet none of her male relatives thought enough of her to defend her honor. Those are the only possiblities.
But, anyway, like I say, the worthless little bastard wraps himself in the ZOG shitrag, declaring to the high heavens how he's willing to fight and die for "America", even at the age of eighty-four, (He'll be 85 this September.) knowing that the local inbreds here eat that kind of shit up with a spoon, and, therefore, will never question his personal racial pedigree. So, in his own way, the dirty little fucker is as sneaky as a Jew, as "dumb" as he claims to be. He's not dumb when it comes to taking advantage of a situation, that's for sure.
So, for that reason, I hate his fucking guts, and have ever since it became clear to me, around the age of fourteen, that he thought he was a combination of General Patton and Billy Graham, as unlikely a combination as that may seem.
And, when I was going through my hippie phase, I just loved rubbing his little flaggot face in that. Relished every minute of it. (As it was, I decided to become a hippie after ol' Limp George The Chomo said the New World Army was marching into Iraq, back in April of 1990, and continued to be a very flamboyant hippie and antiwar activist throughout the first Gulf War and for several months afterwards, until the last of the big flaggot parades, around September 1991. But, when the inbreds lost their enthusiasm for flaggotry, I lost a lot of mine for hippiedom. Even though I kept my long hair and beard for another six years, [the hair in solidarity with David Koresh and Kurt Cobain, the beard just because I've always thought I looked like shit without one, and still maintain that opinion] since the age of fourteen, I had been defined not so much by what I was as what I wasn't, and not so much by what I loved as by what I hated.
And, since the flaggots had stopped their little game of tug-of-war, I needed someone new to hate. For a couple of months, I toyed with the idea of "becoming an Injun" like my idiotic Mom had done, around the time I was seven years old. [She's about 1/8 Cherokee Injun, but wants the whole world to thing she's full-blooded, so she starting laying out in the sun and dyed her hair black, and now the crazy little bitch looks like an Injun. Some family, huh?] I had picked up cassette tapes of XIT [a "native American" Injun rock band from back in the 70's] and Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman at the Cherokee Fall Festival up in Cherokee, NC, the weekend of my birthday, and I was trying my damndest to convince myself that I was an Injun and hated "the White Man"--- ALL White people---, but I just couldn't seem to do it. Too many brain cells getting in the way, I guess. The experiment probably would've required a little bit of peyote, at the very least, even then.
A little voice in my head kept saying: "Look, dipshit, all your heroes are White!" "Jim Morrison was White." "Roger Waters is White." "Elvis Costello is White." "Tom Petty." "John Cougar Mellencamp." "The Who." [Actually, Pete Townshend's a little half-breed mischling Jew, at the very least, but I didn't know that at the time.] "U2." "REM." "The freakin' Everly Brothers." "And I could go on." "So how in the bloody hell are you gonna be an 'Injun' when all the people you practically worship are White?" "Doesn't make any sense, dude." And I couldn't argue with its logic. I had to admit, then and there, that I was *NOT* an Injun and was never gonna be one.
Once I had decided to reject my Injun heritage, I chose to embrace my Irish heritage instead. I had already had my Mom sew a homemade Irish flag onto the back of the white imitation-wool jacket I had gotten two years before. Starting in December of 1991, I started getting into Irish music, and the defiance and desperation of a lot of those "rebel songs" really appealed to me, and fit my political bent at the time.
You see, after I realized that, like it or not, I was a White man, at least as I defined the term "White" at the time, I knew I couldn't hate all White people, so I decided to narrow it down, and start looking at ideology. Who was to blame for all my misery? At that point, I wouldn't have thought to blame God, as I did in more recent years, [along with my race-traitorous and miscegenated relatives, of course] since I maintained at that time that either, A, God didn't even exist, or, B, He was an impersonal, dispassionate Deity, who didn't involve Himself in the affairs of men, so it had to be some human being, or group of human beings.
I thought about it a little while, and came to the conclusion that is was that child-molesting faggot, George Herbert Walker Bush, and all the idiotic vermin who had voted for him that were to blame. So I determined to strike a blow against them.
So, as I stated, many paragraphs earlier, while I didn't cut off my hair or beard until October 1997, [I ended up letting the beard grow back, even after that. I only cut it off in the first place because I thought a wasper had gotten stuck in it, and one had, in fact, flown through it.] I began to grow disillusioned with hippiedom around late September 1991.)
But, anyway, like I said, after my grandmother died, and I had realized that I'd sold my original copy of TENNESSEE, USA!, I became damn near obsessed with finding another one.
Being the procrastinator extraordinaire that I am, however, it was around the summer of 2009 before I actually got around to doing a Google search. What I found depressed the living shit out of me, though. Apparently, the search words, "TENNESSEE, USA!" were just too generic. Even though I added the words "soundtrack for sale" at the end, Google just kept turning up things ending with the address, "Tennessee, USA".
Finally, in October, I turned up a Playhouse webpage referencing the actual play. It had the phone numbers and e-mail address for the Playhouse listed, so I went ahead and sent an e-mail about it, but four months went by and nobody ever replied.
In early January, I called Lost & Found and asked them if they'd ever had one come through their store, and if they could locate a copy for me. They didn't have a clue.
So, finally, in desperation, I called one of the Playhouse phone numbers. I had been hesitant to do so before, since I had no idea who to direct my question to. There were several different departments, each with their own phone number, and I didn't know who to call. So I just called the Main Office, explained to them that I was looking to purchase a soundtrack album, if they had any left, and told them to direct my call to the proper person.
Eventually, they put me through to the Assistant Director, and I left a message on her answering machine. A couple of weeks passed, though, and I never heard anything back from her. So I called the Main Office again and explained the situation. This time, they put me through to the Producing Director, Jim Crabtree, and I left a message on his machine. He called me back a couple of hours later.
I explained to him that I had bought a vinyl soundtrack back in 1982, when my grandparents had taken me to see the play, at the age of not-yet-ten, and that that original copy had been sold. I had gotten a Crosley CD Recorder for Christmas that past year, and wanted to purchase a vinyl soundtrack album, so I could put it on CD. He told me he would check the inventory and see if they had any left.
The next week, the Assistant Director got back to me, telling me that they did in fact, have a few albums left, and that it would cost me $25, which, in fact, was a lot less than the $100 I had offered to pay them for it in one of the messages. Good thing they didn't hold me to that figure. Of course, if they had, I would've gladly paid it. This was a piece of my soul, after all, that I was retrieving. That's the way it felt to me, anyway.
I quickly had a money order made out and mailed to them. They initially mailed it back to me, though, as I hadn't signed it. Hell, I never sign any of the money orders I send out. That's always been my policy. And they were the first people I'd ever dealt with that seemed to have a problem with it. Must've been some kind of administrative thing, I guess. Probably had to know for tax purposes. Anyhow, I signed it, re-mailed it to them, and, about a week later, (it was late February by this time) I received my new copy, signed, as it turned out by Bob Gunton, the actor who had played the role of Johnny Timberlake in the original production. (He made his movie debut in a movie called ROLLOVER, opposite Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda, back in 1981. Not really sure if he made any movies after that or not, though.) Not bad for $25.
Anyway, I made the CD, but I had some problems making it. Certain tracks didn't do right the first time around, so I had to redo them to get an acceptable version. Since, as far as I know, there's no such thing as a CD-RW, you can't delete individual tracks. You're just stuck with the ones that don't work out. I had thought that my friend, Tim, knew how to scan a CD into an MP3 file and then delete individual tracks from that file and burn a new CD from that file, minus the deleted tracks, but apparently, he doesn't, since what he sent me back still contained the unwanted track. Also, copying it via computer made it sound like SHIT WARMED OVER. (I guess due to the fact that the original was done on the Crosley unit instead of a computer disk drive.)
So, since they didn't have any professionally-made soundtrack CDs for sale at the Playhouse, I guess I'm gonna have to re-tape all the songs from my original CD, after first putting them in chronological order, and make a new CD from that. Then I guess I'll give my original CD to Andi. It'll be a pain in the ass to do, but there's just no getting around it.
TENNESSEE, USA!: 28 Years Later
by Charles Gavan O'Lanahan
After a 15-year hiatus, Cumberland County Playhouse in Crossville, Tennessee has brought back the musical production of TENNESSEE, USA!, a stageplay written by the Playhouse's founder, Paul Crabtree, that made its first debut when the Playhouse opened on July 15, 1965.
Yesterday was the 45th Anniversary Performance, which I am proud to say that I attended. (EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was begun July 16, 2010.)
I saw this play for the first time back in 1982. The program (which, after digging through a drawer for about 45 minutes, I was finally able to recover) says July 1st-September 5th, and, since I remember the weather being quite pleasant that day, which is pretty well unheard of in the summertime, here in East Tennessee, I must've attended one of the last performances that year, if not the last.
I went with my grandparents. I was not yet ten years old, but certain things about the performance really stuck in my mind, and I remembered them, even years after I made the foolish mistake of getting rid of the soundtrack which I bought in the lobby that day.
The scene involving James K. Polk, and the musical number that followed, always stayed with me. And I remembered the Henry Willoby character getting beaten up by pro-Confederate Tennesseans after saying: "The South can't win!". I remembered the Willoby family, after returning to their own time, hearing Johnny Timberlake singing "Plinketty Plank" on the radio, and then going to see him perform with Big Rip at the Grand Ole Opry. But that was really about it.
Aside from that, I remembered the basic characters: Henry, Evelyn, Jody, and Buster Willoby, the money-grubbing yuppie family sent back in time to find their true souls, Johnny Timberlake, God's representative on Earth, dressed in pioneer garb and a coonskin cap, (who, that year, anyway, had a bushy brown beard) who tried to lead the family in the right direction, and Big Rip, the "representative from the Bargain Basement" who did his devil-damnedest to lead them astray.
Like I say, I had bought the soundtrack, and, initially, anyway, I certainly didn't regret doing it. But, as time went on, and my own soul became more and more corrupt, I found myself less and less able to relate to it and its message.
The last time I played it, it was just one song, "Johnny's Creation", and I played it in the summer of 1985, as prelude to a program of songs glorifying nothing but sexual lust. I played it as a sort of animistic conjuration, attempting to summon every element, every inanimate physical object to serve as the backdrop for the sordid little orgy I was creating in my mind. Now, driven by nothing but my own pubescent libido, I was actually worshipping the creation instead of the Creator. I had sunk to the lowest level possible, truly becoming nothing but a two-legged dog.
After that, I simply didn't care anymore. I was on a highway to Hell, running at breakneck speed, and bound and determined to bust the place wide open when I got there. I gave the record to my grandma. Six years later, I sold it at a flea market.
After my grandmother died, in November 2008, there was one thought in my mind, and one only: TENNESSEE, USA!. I simply had to retrieve the soundtrack. In my mind, it was akin to reclaiming my soul. It had been a long road that had brought me back to this point, but, in the wake of the Obamanation's seizure of power, I was determined to re-evaluate my life, and try to reconnect with that reality, that person that I had been.
Unfortunately, while I had remembered giving the record to my grandma, I had forgotten about selling it at the flea market, back in 1991, so I just naturally assumed that it would still be up at her house, among her other records. But, when me and my parents went up there to look, we couldn't find it, and, slowly, but surely, it began to dawn on me that it had been sold.
I guess it was mid-2009 before I remembered the Green Acres Flea Market in Alcoa, and how my grandpa had tried to dissuade me from selling the record, but I did it anyway. The dumb shit flea market guy had no idea what it even was. Had never heard of TENNESSEE, USA!. He just took a quick look at it and asked, "That's country, ain't it?" And, since I was eager to get rid of the thing, I said: "Yeah." He didn't want to buy any of my rock records. He said they didn't sell well with the flea market crowd.
You see, I simply couldn't wait to get rid of it, even though, honestly, up until that time, I had simply forgotten all about it. The fact of the matter is, since I had attended the performance with my grandparents, the record was a reminder of that, and, therefore, had sentimental value to my grandpa. It would hurt him to have to part with it. So I insisted on it. I hated the little bastard, then and now, and, if I could've done so and gotten away with it, would've plunged a spear into his worthless heart and watched the life drain out of him. I would've enjoyed it, too.
He's nothing but a dirty little beady-eyed, monkey-faced mamzer RAPIST as far as I'm concerned. No better than a 100% savage Injun beast of the field who rapes a pure-blooded White woman (Which is what my now-deceased maternal grandmother was, as far as I or anyone else knows. At any rate, there's no dysfunction or criminality on her side of the family tree, which would seem to bear it out.) All of his half-brothers and sisters and their spawn or nothing but criminals, drunkards, and neer-do-wells. Not one decent, responsible, semi-White man or woman in the bunch. That pretty much tells me what God thinks of their worthless family.
And, like a typical little Jewdayo-"Christian" whigger, he thinks he's so righteous, just because he doesn't drink, never cheated on his wife, and, "got saved" when he was 14 years old. (Basically, he knew he was gonna be going off to war in a couple of years and wanted a little "fire insurance", just in case he didn't make it back. Typical whigger behavior, huh? )
The unfortunate fact of the matter is, he did come back from WWII, and he's been a typical little brainwashed ZOGling flaggot ever since then. And, why, you may ask? Simply because the little mamzer bastard doesn't have anything else to be proud of, being what he is. People who wrap themselves in the ZOG shitrag are usually people of very little quality, who have nothing to legitmately be proud of besides simply being "Americans, bah Gawd!"
You see, the fact of the matter is that my maternal grandpa is not only a mamzer, but, also, at the very least, a product of statutory rape. His very existence is only due to the fact that nobody even cared enough about his worthless little inbred SKANK of a mother enough to avenge her rape, or, at the very least, force her semi-rapist to marry her.
She actually maintains, to this very day, that his sister and her sister talked her into fucking the guy. That's about as likely a story as that a UFO landed and ol' Yakub hisself got out of it and told her to fuck him. The plain fact of the matter is that either, A, She was a little, probably drunken slut, who gave it up to the first male to come sniffing around her little coochie, or, B, She was raped, at the age of sixteen, by a grown-ass man, and yet none of her male relatives thought enough of her to defend her honor. Those are the only possiblities.
But, anyway, like I say, the worthless little bastard wraps himself in the ZOG shitrag, declaring to the high heavens how he's willing to fight and die for "America", even at the age of eighty-four, (He'll be 85 this September.) knowing that the local inbreds here eat that kind of shit up with a spoon, and, therefore, will never question his personal racial pedigree. So, in his own way, the dirty little fucker is as sneaky as a Jew, as "dumb" as he claims to be. He's not dumb when it comes to taking advantage of a situation, that's for sure.
So, for that reason, I hate his fucking guts, and have ever since it became clear to me, around the age of fourteen, that he thought he was a combination of General Patton and Billy Graham, as unlikely a combination as that may seem.
And, when I was going through my hippie phase, I just loved rubbing his little flaggot face in that. Relished every minute of it. (As it was, I decided to become a hippie after ol' Limp George The Chomo said the New World Army was marching into Iraq, back in April of 1990, and continued to be a very flamboyant hippie and antiwar activist throughout the first Gulf War and for several months afterwards, until the last of the big flaggot parades, around September 1991. But, when the inbreds lost their enthusiasm for flaggotry, I lost a lot of mine for hippiedom. Even though I kept my long hair and beard for another six years, [the hair in solidarity with David Koresh and Kurt Cobain, the beard just because I've always thought I looked like shit without one, and still maintain that opinion] since the age of fourteen, I had been defined not so much by what I was as what I wasn't, and not so much by what I loved as by what I hated.
And, since the flaggots had stopped their little game of tug-of-war, I needed someone new to hate. For a couple of months, I toyed with the idea of "becoming an Injun" like my idiotic Mom had done, around the time I was seven years old. [She's about 1/8 Cherokee Injun, but wants the whole world to thing she's full-blooded, so she starting laying out in the sun and dyed her hair black, and now the crazy little bitch looks like an Injun. Some family, huh?] I had picked up cassette tapes of XIT [a "native American" Injun rock band from back in the 70's] and Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman at the Cherokee Fall Festival up in Cherokee, NC, the weekend of my birthday, and I was trying my damndest to convince myself that I was an Injun and hated "the White Man"--- ALL White people---, but I just couldn't seem to do it. Too many brain cells getting in the way, I guess. The experiment probably would've required a little bit of peyote, at the very least, even then.
A little voice in my head kept saying: "Look, dipshit, all your heroes are White!" "Jim Morrison was White." "Roger Waters is White." "Elvis Costello is White." "Tom Petty." "John Cougar Mellencamp." "The Who." [Actually, Pete Townshend's a little half-breed mischling Jew, at the very least, but I didn't know that at the time.] "U2." "REM." "The freakin' Everly Brothers." "And I could go on." "So how in the bloody hell are you gonna be an 'Injun' when all the people you practically worship are White?" "Doesn't make any sense, dude." And I couldn't argue with its logic. I had to admit, then and there, that I was *NOT* an Injun and was never gonna be one.
Once I had decided to reject my Injun heritage, I chose to embrace my Irish heritage instead. I had already had my Mom sew a homemade Irish flag onto the back of the white imitation-wool jacket I had gotten two years before. Starting in December of 1991, I started getting into Irish music, and the defiance and desperation of a lot of those "rebel songs" really appealed to me, and fit my political bent at the time.
You see, after I realized that, like it or not, I was a White man, at least as I defined the term "White" at the time, I knew I couldn't hate all White people, so I decided to narrow it down, and start looking at ideology. Who was to blame for all my misery? At that point, I wouldn't have thought to blame God, as I did in more recent years, [along with my race-traitorous and miscegenated relatives, of course] since I maintained at that time that either, A, God didn't even exist, or, B, He was an impersonal, dispassionate Deity, who didn't involve Himself in the affairs of men, so it had to be some human being, or group of human beings.
I thought about it a little while, and came to the conclusion that is was that child-molesting faggot, George Herbert Walker Bush, and all the idiotic vermin who had voted for him that were to blame. So I determined to strike a blow against them.
So, as I stated, many paragraphs earlier, while I didn't cut off my hair or beard until October 1997, [I ended up letting the beard grow back, even after that. I only cut it off in the first place because I thought a wasper had gotten stuck in it, and one had, in fact, flown through it.] I began to grow disillusioned with hippiedom around late September 1991.)
But, anyway, like I said, after my grandmother died, and I had realized that I'd sold my original copy of TENNESSEE, USA!, I became damn near obsessed with finding another one.
Being the procrastinator extraordinaire that I am, however, it was around the summer of 2009 before I actually got around to doing a Google search. What I found depressed the living shit out of me, though. Apparently, the search words, "TENNESSEE, USA!" were just too generic. Even though I added the words "soundtrack for sale" at the end, Google just kept turning up things ending with the address, "Tennessee, USA".
Finally, in October, I turned up a Playhouse webpage referencing the actual play. It had the phone numbers and e-mail address for the Playhouse listed, so I went ahead and sent an e-mail about it, but four months went by and nobody ever replied.
In early January, I called Lost & Found and asked them if they'd ever had one come through their store, and if they could locate a copy for me. They didn't have a clue.
So, finally, in desperation, I called one of the Playhouse phone numbers. I had been hesitant to do so before, since I had no idea who to direct my question to. There were several different departments, each with their own phone number, and I didn't know who to call. So I just called the Main Office, explained to them that I was looking to purchase a soundtrack album, if they had any left, and told them to direct my call to the proper person.
Eventually, they put me through to the Assistant Director, and I left a message on her answering machine. A couple of weeks passed, though, and I never heard anything back from her. So I called the Main Office again and explained the situation. This time, they put me through to the Producing Director, Jim Crabtree, and I left a message on his machine. He called me back a couple of hours later.
I explained to him that I had bought a vinyl soundtrack back in 1982, when my grandparents had taken me to see the play, at the age of not-yet-ten, and that that original copy had been sold. I had gotten a Crosley CD Recorder for Christmas that past year, and wanted to purchase a vinyl soundtrack album, so I could put it on CD. He told me he would check the inventory and see if they had any left.
The next week, the Assistant Director got back to me, telling me that they did in fact, have a few albums left, and that it would cost me $25, which, in fact, was a lot less than the $100 I had offered to pay them for it in one of the messages. Good thing they didn't hold me to that figure. Of course, if they had, I would've gladly paid it. This was a piece of my soul, after all, that I was retrieving. That's the way it felt to me, anyway.
I quickly had a money order made out and mailed to them. They initially mailed it back to me, though, as I hadn't signed it. Hell, I never sign any of the money orders I send out. That's always been my policy. And they were the first people I'd ever dealt with that seemed to have a problem with it. Must've been some kind of administrative thing, I guess. Probably had to know for tax purposes. Anyhow, I signed it, re-mailed it to them, and, about a week later, (it was late February by this time) I received my new copy, signed, as it turned out by Bob Gunton, the actor who had played the role of Johnny Timberlake in the original production. (He made his movie debut in a movie called ROLLOVER, opposite Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda, back in 1981. Not really sure if he made any movies after that or not, though.) Not bad for $25.
Anyway, I made the CD, but I had some problems making it. Certain tracks didn't do right the first time around, so I had to redo them to get an acceptable version. Since, as far as I know, there's no such thing as a CD-RW, you can't delete individual tracks. You're just stuck with the ones that don't work out. I had thought that my friend, Tim, knew how to scan a CD into an MP3 file and then delete individual tracks from that file and burn a new CD from that file, minus the deleted tracks, but apparently, he doesn't, since what he sent me back still contained the unwanted track. Also, copying it via computer made it sound like SHIT WARMED OVER. (I guess due to the fact that the original was done on the Crosley unit instead of a computer disk drive.)
So, since they didn't have any professionally-made soundtrack CDs for sale at the Playhouse, I guess I'm gonna have to re-tape all the songs from my original CD, after first putting them in chronological order, and make a new CD from that. Then I guess I'll give my original CD to Andi. It'll be a pain in the ass to do, but there's just no getting around it.
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