Pre-Occupied With 1985, Part 4 - The Musician

The decision was made. Music it was going to be. No holds barred. I was most likely one of the most focused, if not completely delusional, sixteen-year-old girls wandering around Mena, Arkansas thinking she was going to be the greatest rock musician in the history of the planet.

Well, I did what I could.

I was already an “Outstanding Girl Musician.” 

I won that title at Junior High Band Camp after the 8th grade. I was destined for greatness.

That was playing the saxophone though. I did choose that because that was the closest thing to a “rock and roll” instrument available. I already knew how to play the piano. I could read music and was pretty good at picking things out by ear. In fact, that was why I quit piano. I played it like I heard it, not like it was written on the page. Sandra Curtis, my piano teacher, was having none of that. This would be a tremendous benefit to me later, though I didn’t know it at the time.

I HAD to play bass. Had to. No ifs, ands, or…but all I had was an old Spaulding tennis racket that I “pretended” to play bass with.

Jumping around my room shouting at the devil and running to the hills. It didn’t quite have the same effect. 

But I did have a PLAN.

Robbie had an old guitar in his closet he never learned to play. No brand name on the headstock. It had three strings on it. I went over to his house one afternoon; door wide open, TV on. Nobody home. Such as it was in Mena, Arkansas in the middle of the summer in the 80s. I took the guitar out of the closet, put it in the car, bought strings at WalMart, and took it home. Figured out by guessing how to string it. I called him that night and said, “I have your guitar.”

His reply: “Oh, great. I’m glad somebody’s gonna learn how to play it.”

I sat down that night with a Mel Bay guitar book that was Liz’s and got to work. The first thing I figured out? The opening bars of Dokken’s “Alone Again.” Well, that was easy! I learned some basic chords, a C scale. Some of other easy exercises in the Mel Bay book, which was Book 2 by the way. Moved on and picked out the opening of Judas Priest’s “Electric Eye” and Dio’s “The Last in Line.”

That’s as far as I got as a lead guitarist. I knew that was never meant to be and I didn’t aspire to that. Everyone wanted to be a stupid guitar god. Or a drummer. Or a lead singer (that would come later). I was going to be different. And be the bass player.

Well, just around the corner from Ye Olde Fabric Shoppe was the only other music store in town, and on display in the window was a bright Red Cort Slammer Bass with MY name on it. If I only got one thing for Christmas, that was going to be it. I didn’t care if I got anything else.

It will be mine. Oh, yes, it will be mine.

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 3 - The Look

Younglings, allow me to back up once again, and explain why the whole year, and not just the summer, of 1985 was pivotal.

Memaw had worked at First National Bank since 1979. Then all the sudden, she and Mamaw Lee up and bought a fabric store.

Oooo…kay. Didn’t see that coming, but that was another big change in everything that year. 

So, I remember her final days at the bank, when I was allowed to drive the car, a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix, by myself! (The photo is not the actual car - just one I found online. Someday I'll show you what it ended up looking like in the summer of 1990.) I must have gone to run an errand or something. Incidentally I remember being in the break room upstairs and there was an advertisement for some KTel (or other compilation LP) that featured part of the video to Scorpions’ “Still Loving You.” I had yet to hear the whole song but that day would come.

Anyway, we had a fabric store. And I “kinda” had a job there, but didn’t really make a salary. I learned to work the cash register and cut fabric and hunt down notions, but I also finished learning how to sew. I earned my keep by making all of my own clothes as store samples. The cool thing about that was that Appolonia (yes, THAT Appolonia) had her own line of patterns through McCall’s. I made about three of them. (Those are in another blog post…Say Goodbye to the Fabric Store. That’s a pretty interesting post so be sure to check that one out! Please forgive the formatting. For some reason they've changed the ability to edit the text for the photos). 

I made some pretty groovy things up until I went to college. I did try to con Memaw into buying zebra striped spandex in every color, but to no avail. I can also remember one Saturday morning we had American Bandstand on at the store and Giuffria was on there performing (lip-synching) songs from their second album “Silk & Steel” and Memaw said, “I don’t want you in a mess like that.”

Giuffria on Bandstand (I was for sure they'd done "I Must Be Dreaming" but...I must have been dreaming.)

I ignored her, obviously. I mean, Giuffria wasn’t exactly musically frightening. Now if Slayer had been on there…

Speaking of Giuffria, sometime earlier that summer I had bought Prince’s “Around the World in a Day,” decided I wasn’t that fond of it, took it back to WalMart and exchanged it for Giuffria’s first self-titled album. Probably a dumb decision, but oh well. I thought they were Journey at first; David Glen Eisley sounds amazingly like Steve Perry.

So, I had wardrobe options. However, you couldn’t buy ripped-up jeans already ripped-up in those days; you had to create them yourself, and you had to get creative to expedite the process. I had a pair of perfectly boring jeans, and soaked them in water and bleach. Didn’t quite get the results I wanted, so with either that same pair or another one (I preferred Levi’s 501 button-fly at the time), I opted to just pour straight bleach right on them in various spots. Okay, that was cool. The bleach weakened the denim enough to make some rips. I wore them to school one day sometime during my junior year and I sat down in first period journalism…and there went the entire seat of my pants. Luckily I was wearing a shirt I’d made out of some kookoo print that was like a cutaway tuxedo jacket, longer in back than the front, so I was able to make it to the pay phone outside the front of the office to call Memaw to bring me another pair of pants.

Lesson learned. Next…

I wanted to be Nikki Sixx. My hair wasn’t dark enough.

What?

No, it wasn’t black enough. It needed to be blacker.

Memaw, who had been more a beatnik in her college days at Hendrix, was helpful in this sense and introduced me to Clairol semi-permanent hair color. Choose light ash brown, she said, and it will be dark enough. And she was right! This, along with me taking pictures of Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora to the beauty parlors, shag haircuts and body waves in fruitless attempts to achieve BIG ROCKER HAIR, set the stage as it were for the next five or six years. No matter what I did, though, I always ended up looking like Eddie Van Halen. And yes, I had a mullet for a while but that was before 1985. We didn’t call it that, though. It didn’t have a name. 

Well. I had the look. Now I had to learn how to get THE SOUND.

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 2 - The Tunes

Back into the Time Machine…

I left off with my Washington pictures. Several packages of them, 24 exposures per roll. (These were the film days, remember?) And you may wonder what this has to do with becoming a metalhead, but hear me out.

Once I had them developed, the folks wanted to see them all. Well, just before they asked to do that, I was in the process of recording some songs off the radio. (Again, this was how we “stole” music in ancient times.) I had recently discovered 98 Rocks out of Shreveport, which I could pick up on FM radio if it was after 5 p.m. and the weather was good. I’d just put in a fresh, empty 90 minute cassette tape, and had just pushed record and play to capture Bon Jovi’s “She Don’t Know Me” from their first album that had come out the year before. I needed to catch up on all these tunes I’d missed, though I was well aware of Ratt, Twisted Sister, and of course, Quiet Riot. I even had their 45 of “Bang Your Head (Metal Health)” because every one else in the world did. 

I took my photos into the den, we looked at them all, (I wish I still had the one I took of the Washington Monument from the Jefferson Memorial one evening, but I loaned it to someone and never got it back. And like a young dumbass, I tossed the negatives, thinking…I won’t need those.) Anyway…when I got back into my room about 20 or so minutes later, the tape was still recording, and what AWESOME songs I’d collected:

She Don’t Know Me - Bon Jovi

We Don’t Need Another Hero - Tina Turner (Mad Max was a big deal that summer!)

Sentimental Street - Night Ranger

Lay It Down - Ratt

Sleeping in the Fire - WASP (I’d heard of them, not HEARD them. Still LOVE this song. It's on the cassette twice, to fill out the last of the blank tape on the B side. LOL)

I think this is where I came back in, because there’s a break before “Smoking in the Boys’ Room.” I added so much more. (In 2019, I made an Instagram post on my drmacauthor account about this tape: July 5, 2019). It was the ultimate soundtrack for that summer, and the catalyst for what became the “Rock Opus.” More on that in a moment.

Like I mentioned a moment ago, I knew who the “big bands” were, the ones emerging into the mainstream. Def Leppard had been around since 1983. Ozzy Osbourne was infamous. I was aware of Judas Priest (“Another Thing Coming” was played often enough), and I was vaguely familiar with Iron Maiden only by their t-shirts at that time. Maiden would become one of my favorite bands, especially after I bought “Live After Death” later that year. Whitesnake had been mentioned to me in Carolyn Osborne’s typing class that previous spring semester. What kind of name is “Whitesnake?”, I’d balked, only to become one of their biggest fans long before “Still of the Night.” “Love Ain’t No Stranger” is my favorite Whitesnake song. (Saw them live in 2019. They were awesome. Coverdale's still got it! Tommy Aldridge and Reb Beach were also playing that show. What a privilege to see them as well.)

My cassette collection, which could barely fit in a box with 12 slots in the beginning, started to grow. In addition to the bootleg Dokken/Crue tape, 1984, and Theater of Pain, I acquired what I could at Walmart, until those drill weekends in Fort Smith and the occasional jaunt to Dallas, where I always made an immediate beeline to the record stores. My first “metal” compilation purchase, the only one available at Wally World sometime in late May as school was letting out, was “Crazed: An All-Out Metal Assault” in which I discovered Y&T, Queensryche, Zebra, Dio, Armored Saint, bands I’d read about but was just now hearing. 

But I acquired two other albums that really set the tone: Helix’s “Long Way to Heaven” and Scorpions’ “World Wide Live.”

I was up one morning, with MTV on as usual, recording as many rock songs as I could, and they showed Helix’s video for “Deep Cuts the Knife.” Awesome power ballad. I’d heard “Rock You” so this one surprised me, with Brian Vollmer’s bel canto trained vocal versus the screamy thing. But who really caught my attention was guitarist Paul Hackman. Bling! My sixteen-year-old brain was IN LOVE. (I had no idea he was already in his late 30s and married.) He became THE Number One Metal Man. Christine preferred Brent Doerner, the other guitarist. We pitched in the $15 fee (an exorbitant amount at the time) and joined their fan club. 

“Big City Nights”, the live version from Scorpions’ “World Wide Live” album, played constantly on MTV that summer and they were scheduled to show the accompanying documentary one Saturday night after a pre-extremely famous Bon Jovi concert recorded in Japan. It came on pretty late so I couldn’t stay up to watch it in the living room, (my bedroom TV was coax cable only, so I didn’t have the bootlegged VCR connection), but I had learned how to set the VCR to record and then watch everything later, a major skill at the time. Lo and behold, there was a storm and the power blipped, shutting off the VCR right in the middle of the documentary. I was devastated. Practically had a mental breakdown to which my mother was not at all impressed. Why such teenage angst? Because back then a lot of things only aired once, and when it was gone, it was gone. Or if you were lucky, you could buy the official VHS recording, which at that time was probably about $50. (I eventually watched it all on YouTube in 2008, I think. A long time to wait.) 

This chain of events, the 98 Rocks cassette tape and the MTV recordings, eventually led to the Opus, but wait…there was even more leading up to that!

And here's the Spotify Playlist of that cassette, even with the repeat of "Sleeping In the Fire" at the end)

SUMMER 1985 

Pre-Occupied with 1985, Part 1 - The Beginning

And NOW, Younglings.....

It is now June 2025. And what a decade it’s been just since last September. But I'm not here to talk about that, because I think we've had enough of the heavy stuff. So I must reiterate that this year marks an important milestone in the life of your grandmother.

I have been an official rocker chick for forty years. Let me explain, and see if I can get the timeline right. It’s been a minute or two.

The year is 1985. Uncle Danny is only 5 years old. Aunt Tiffany is only 3. Aunt Storm, Aunt Kattie, and Aunt Cassie are barely even idle thoughts. Poppa Don is 24 years old and still in the Marine Corps.

I am 16. (Hence the previous post about the birthday party).

(Contemplate the age differences later, please, before you really start to think about it.) Moving on.

Ronald Reagan is president and the top TV shows are The Cosby Show and Miami Vice. There is no Internet. Mobile phones are the size of canned hams and ridiculously expensive. MTV is playing music videos. ALL DAY LONG. Shocking, yes. Those were the days. 

Now, in the ultra right-wing, conservative burg of Mena, Arkansas, MTV was The Devil. Even though it was part of local cable programming, it wasn't included in the channel lineup available at the McChristian residence on Gary Drive. But...thanks to some insider information provided by one of the high school secretaries, I was able to bootleg it through Dad's early-acquired birthday/Father's Day gift: A VCR purchased at a local video rental store for the whopping amount of approximately $400.

I'm not kidding. It cost that much. It was the size of a small lawn mower and had a remote control with a WIRE. The remote had three buttons: play, fast forward, and stop. It MIGHT have had a rewind button but I don't think so. Or record? I can't remember. You had to change channels by pushing buttons on the front panel of the VCR, numbered 1-20. On the top of VCR, next to the pop-up tape loader, was a panel you could lift up and assigned to each of the 20 channels were these little levers you could switch into 3 positions. On Channel 4, you could move the lever into position 2, then turn this little knob for more accurate tuning, and VOILA!!! MTV!!! For FREE!!!

It stayed on ALL DAY that summer, at least until Mom and Dad got home from work. I saw "Bad is Bad" by Huey Lewis and "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen A LOT. But there was this show that came on? Called "Heavy Metal Mania? Hosted by Dee Snider of Twisted Sister. Or at least the first episode was. The second one, which didn't air until September, was hosted by Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson.

I'm getting ahead of myself though. I bought blank VHS tapes, 3 to a package, and spent the summer days recording videos. Eight hours worth by the end of the summer, and eight more on a new tape in the fall. Again, I'm jumping the gun. I will get back to this particular playlist later.

Here's what was going on prior to June:

We FINALLY had FBLA March of Dimes Variety Show in April, after it had been postponed twice. I had bullied my cronies into putting on our "Herky & the Zerkx" lip-sync act and we were (sort of) a hit. 

During that time I developed a crush on the guy who was our "guitar player", who was a huge Iron Maiden fan and somewhat of a Motley Crue fan. Well, naturally, I needed to become one, too, of course.

I remember getting a ride home from my friend Jay Smith one afternoon and he had a vinyl copy of Dokken's Tooth & Nail in the car. (Why he was carrying around a vinyl LP in the car is anyone's guess but this was long before CDs and streaming so who knows.) Of course, I had to look at it and liked the lyrical content. I asked if he would tape me a copy. (This was old school file-sharing. Someone had an album on whatever medium, vinyl, cassette, or 8-track, and you recorded it onto a blank cassette. We did it ALL THE TIME. And nobody died. Not that I know of, anyway.)

He got it to me a couple of weeks later and I thought it was great. I had grown tired of Top 40 stuff, and needed a "boost." I wasn't fond of Tina Turner's new album (Break Every Rule) and Bryan Adams' Reckless was okay but not heavy enough. The "heaviest" album I owned was a cassette of Van Halen's 1984, because EVERYBODY had a copy of 1984, but I wasn't a huge Van Halen fan at the time. That would come later. (There were complaints about this album, what with the keyboards and all, but I really don't think Van Halen gave a crap).

Rockin' with Dokken, though? Brilliant! Something about George Lynch's guitar tones...It called to me. "Alone Again?" The penultimate power ballad. On the end of this cassette, I had enough room to bootleg a few songs from somebody's copy of Motley Crue's "Shout at the Devil." That might have been from Eric Dodson. He lived across the street from my best friend Christine and I vaguely remember being in his room looking at Circus Magazine while we were copying songs...I could be wrong though but that sounds legit. Those songs included "Shout at the Devil," "Looks That Kill," "Too Young to Fall in Love", and "God Bless the Children of the Beast."

Author's Note: At this writing, I could not locate this cassette but I know I still have it somewhere.

Eventually, I ended up with a REAL copy of Shout At the Devil. And well, the rest is history.

I bought a copy of a "Motley Crue Special Edition" magazine, most likely published by Hit Parader, from Madd-Ox Grocery (used to be Piggly Wiggly and is now James' SuperFoods), and well....the rest is history. I thought Nikki Sixx was the coolest person in the world. He had black hair and green eyes (like me) and he played the bass.

So, that was what I was going to play, too.

I had this epiphany. College was still two years away but I was on the fence about what I wanted to study when I got there because there was no doubt I was going. Drama? Journalism? Music? It had to be something artsy-fartsy, of course. Now that I was up to my ears in "heavy metal" and it was taking over my soul...Music won. My mind was made up. Rock stardom was calling.

I would hoard lunch money to buy Circus Magazine. I think I bought my first one at Walmart. The May 1985 issue with "Rock on Tour" on the cover. I ready EVERY WORD in it, from the full-page ads to the classifieds in the back. I did this every months for another three years - and I still have them all. I cut out pictures of my “Top Ten Metal Men,” glued them to poster board, and tacked them to my bedroom wall as well as the inside of my lockers at school. I still have those, too. They’re priceless, y‘know. Not only did I skip lunch for Circus, but also for Hit Parader, Faces, a couple of copies of Kerrang, and Metal Edge, which was one of my favorites. It had great photos.

When the Star Wars posters came down and the Motley posters went up, so did Mom and Dad's blood pressure.

Allow me to back up once again, though. Every minute of that year was ridiculously important so I don’t want to forget. Keep in mind that “We Are the World” had come out earlier that year and was HUGE. I had just spent the night at Christine’s house over on Cole Street the morning they announced the Live Aid Concert on MTV. I think it was Alan Hunter with Bob Geldof? Anyway, that was a big deal. We watched it together at her Mama Jean's house in Fort Worth, on July 13th that year, Harrison Ford's birthday.

On June 17th through the 22nd of that summer, Christine and I went on a group tour to Washington, DC with a bunch of other kids. My first time in an airplane. My “lil bro” Robbie Sanders was along for the ride, too. I took my somewhat hip 80s, Cyndi Lauper-ish wardrobe, my Radio Shack (or maybe it was RCA) Walkman, my bootleg cassettes, and the Crue’s latest release “Theater of Pain.” (Which I did locate). 

I also took that Crue magazine and Christine and I taped the picture of Nikki wearing nothing but a towel to the back of the hotel room door. I doubt housekeeping ever saw it, but we thought we were being so rebellious. The day we went to the Smithsonian, I wore my unconstructed white jacket with the black random stripes and listening to “Helter Skelter” the whole time. 

I also took that Crue magazine and Christine and I taped the picture of Nikki wearing nothing but a towel to the back of the hotel room door. I doubt housekeeping ever saw it, but we thought we were being so rebellious. The day we went to the Smithsonian, I wore my unconstructed white jacket with the black random stripes and listening to “Helter Skelter” the whole time. 

(How do I know the exact date of that trip? I found a boarding pass among some of the junk we just cleared out of Mom and Dad’s house. Wow. I'll add that photo later also.)

I wasn’t hooked up to the Walkman the entire time; I did enjoy the trip and appreciated all that I got to see. I took a lot of pictures with Dad’s 35 mm Minolta, and got them developed fairly quickly after it was over. This brings me to the next phase of that summer.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Pre-occupied with 1985 - Prologue

1985. Not the song by Bowling for Soup, but the real year - 1985. Particularly the month of June. I was there. I was 16 years old. We finally had a VCR. I learned to bootleg MTV. But most importantly, I discovered...

HEAVY METAL.

The genre that has way too many sub-genres now but back then? Very different.

Let me give you some background information first. I’m gonna back up to my birthday that year. I even have pictures.

For some reason of unknown origin, I was in the dumps about people not remembering by birthday. (Sixteen Candles, anyone?) I was being a typical sulky teenager. So my mom said, “Let’s order a pizza and you can go with me to pick it up.” (Mena’s Pizza Hut did not offer delivery then.) 

We go. I sit in the car, a 1984 Pontiac Phoenix (a car that deserves a blog of its own), while she goes in to retrieve it and the box is about the size of a two-car garage. She had to put it in the back. I’m surprised we didn’t need to put the back seat down.

Naturally I ask what was with the huge box and she said it was all they had.

Huh. Okay.

When we return to the house, I see movement through the back sliding glass door, which should be somewhat alarming because Dad was at drill (as always on my birthday weekend) and that was way too big to be a cat (even though Squeaker, our calico at the time, weighed about 20 pounds). I recognized the movement because only Robby Sanders could flit around like that.

So I walk in and like a jerk, say, “Okay! I know what’s going on!!”

Surprise party, LJ. Duh.

In attendance were my bestie Christine Cooper, Alena Lintag, Darrick Wilson, Shonna Lowe, Janna Liles, Wes Sunderman, and my “Lil Bro,” Rob Sanders. At least that’s who are in the pictures. If someone else was there, well, I’m sorry. Most likely the weather was bad (typical early February) or folks were out of town for the weekend. But it was a good time anyway. If you look closely, it’s quite obvious I was very much in preppy mode, with my button-down oxford and the argyle sweater vest. I don’t know whose haircut I was trying to emulate as this was the pre-Joan Jett shag years. I’m sure it was some actress/musician/popular girl at MHS. Simon Le Bon, maybe? I was not wearing makeup.

Anyway, this was the magic age of course, for any teenager. So I was learning to drive, albeit not well, and I was still listening to a lot of Tina Turner, Prince, Stevie Nicks...the only “rock” album I owned at the time was Van Halen’s 1984. Because everybody else did.

I was also in the middle of devising our act, Herky and the Xerkz, for the March of Dimes Variety Show. It was quite the lip-syncing extravaganza: Kicking off with Van Halen’s 1984, then the opening speech from “Let’s Go Crazy,” and after some heated deliberation, the main song chosen was “Wild Boys” from Duran Duran, which is suddenly interrupted by the guitar solo from “Firehouse”, (thank you, Eric Dodson), and ending with...sirens. (I still have this cassette mix, although the first part was eventually covered with something else at a later date. I don’t know if that was by accident or not.)

We had costumes, choreography, borrowed instruments that wouldn’t be plugged in, and even rehearsals. This was a fine example of how bossy I used to me, conning my friends and fellow youth group members into doing something completely ridiculous, because Rick Davis’ Goony and the Goonheads would not be on the bill that year, and we would be the most talked-about act of that Spring! There were several of us: Me (as the “Lead”), Rob (as Herky the alien, wearing Dad’s old flight suit), Tara Osborne as the girl looking for Biff, (Eric Dodson), who was abducted by the Xerkz and turned into a rock star. (Yes, that was the premise. We were nerds before nerds were cool and WE DID NOT CARE.) The other cast of characters were Suzanne Drager (unplugged guitar), Sherri Bates (unplugged bass), and Missy Langley (un-beaten drums). Back up singers were my always-present companion Christine and Shonna Lowe. Darrick Wilson was the stray goof-ball alien carrying a broom pretending to be the singer, or guitarist, or...whatever. It was geek mayhem. And it actually took a lot of work. And I, along with Rob, didn’t just instigate this ordeal, I also volunteered to appear as “Tina Turner” between acts for the daily shows for the middle and high schools. I used to do a pretty good impression. Still can.

The date for the show kept getting pushed back due to weather and was moved to some time in April. More time to prepare, but also more time to maneuver some big personal changes in my life. The first being the shift in my next big “this isn’t going to go anywhere” crush, and the second, the more important one, being my continuing disinterest in Top 40 Music.

The shift in “crushes” was really the catalyst for the shift in musical tastes, because the latest “crush” was a metal head. And as summer approached, a lot of changes were about to occur...

Stay tuned for…the REST of the Story….

AND HERE'S THE PICS!

Oh I Am My Mother! - The Final Edition (?) 2025

 And here we are again, in 2024.

I don't have much to update, except that we've made it through another year as mothers, grandmothers, etc.

Cheers to all. Enjoy!

In honor of Mother's Day, I'm posting the article I wrote that appeared in HER magazine, May 2009 (back story - it has been edited):

Good day, Younglings. Mother's Day is Sunday, May 14. And that's why this blog gets re-posted somewhere on social media EVERY YEAR since its original publication.

Read on, Padawans, and enlightened you will be:

OH! I AM MY MOTHER!

Oh, yes! I definitely am! And that’s perfectly okay with me.

People have always considered me a “chip off the ol’ block.” Some women would have flames bursting from their eyes if anyone told them this, but not me. My mom is funny, beautiful, and doesn’t take a lot of crap from anybody. I for sure got the funny part, because if I can make people laugh, I’ve done my good deed for the day. I’m still working on the beautiful part. That always took some work, because my mother couldn’t get me to wear a dress or makeup without great gnashing of teeth. She’s been accused of dressing up to clean house. I’m accused of having too many dresses and not wearing any of them.

When I got married, I instantly became the mother of four. Then there was a fifth, but that's another story for another time. I helped raised two of them on an everyday basis: girls, age six and nine at the time. I skipped colic, diapers, and potty training and went straight to slumber parties and tubes of lipstick left in the pocket of a pair of pants that got put into the dryer.

After a month went by, I called my mother and said, “I apologize for everything I’ve ever done.” I was in my late twenties, so that covered a lot of ground.

All five of these children are grown now; four have children of their own. This made me a grandmother at 31. (I could insert one of those shock emojis here, but I’ll refrain.) It wasn’t until I started hanging with the grandkids that I really noticed how much I was saying things like, “Scat, Tom!” when someone sneezed. I haven’t started calling everyone “shug” yet, but that might be a future endeavor.

I was standing in line at the local discount shopping mecca noticing the covers of women’s magazines, and thought, “Gee! I knew that in the fifth grade!” How? Because my mother told me. She knows everything, like the names of obscure actors all the way back to the 1930s. My children now ask me, “Who’s that?” when old black and white films turn up on services that stream old movies, like Tubi and Freevee. Nine times out of ten, I know exactly who they are, thanks to excellent maternal guidance.

My mom and I definitely have different musical tastes, although she did think some of Poison’s tunes were kinda catchy. (I was a teenager in the 80s, so...) Without her, I wouldn’t have Frankie Laine and Andy Williams on my Spotify "liked" songs list, right alongside Black Sabbath and Metallica. “The Theme for Rawhide” coming on right after “Iron Man” upsets the passengers in my car somewhat, but you know what? I really don’t care. “Rollin’, rollin’, rollin…”

My mother loves to read, and I remember frequent trips to the library as a child. She introduced me to Stephen King, and we both had extreme fears of Plymouth automobiles for a while. (Remember Christine?) I don’t know if that explains my sister’s avid interest in the film version of Cujo, but oh, well. If I had time, I’d follow Mom’s lead and join a book club, but I don’t think “Building Online Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom” is on Oprah’s reading list.

Mother-daughter relationships are complicated. Every woman knows this. Especially if they survived their teenage years and still have both arms and legs. Several films have captured the dynamic: Terms of Endearment, Postcards from the Edge, Steel Magnolias, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. (Hmm…three of those starred Shirley MacLaine. Wonder what that means?) Some women strive to be like their mothers, others…not so much. Who knows how the Kardashian's offspring will turn out. We won’t even mention Joan Crawford or the Octo-Mom. Maybe Shirley MacLaine could step in and line up everybody’s chakras.

I learned an entirely new facet of motherhood in 2021 when I lost one of my daughters, my youngest. There are no words to describe the devastation and the eventual emptiness the loss of a child can leave behind. I've known mothers who have lived this experience and now I fully understand. It's not a club one wants to belong to, nor is it a club that seeks new members. We'd rather you didn't join. Even though I wasn't there at the very beginning of her journey, I was there to prepare her for her final journey, that she was radiant, that she would "always be young, always be beautiful." That daughter was also a mother, and now as I watch her sons grow up without her, and remember my last moments with her, I realize that I, too, inspired her to say, "Oh, I am my mother!" 

And now, my mother is gone. On March 12, 2025, my mother went on to be with her Lord whom she served faithfully for all of her life. Her whole being was synonymous with the church, and I know she was welcomed with open arms by her mother, and her sister, and my father when she arrived. The end didn't go the way my sister and I had expected, but it was almost as if after my father passed last October, she felt like it was time to go, and then she was gone. This is the first Mother's Day where I won't go to visit, I won't make that phone call, and I will just have her memory, feel her spirit, see those "signs": a note she wrote I found among the things we moved from the house I grew up in, a piece of her jewelry, the many things she created and painted, a scarf she wore. What she was reading on her Kindle. The songs, the funny phrases, the ongoing inside jokes. I'm still trying to process it all; I'm in that other club, too, now. My mother isn't here for me to tell her the new things. But I have all the things that I've mentioned previously, the things that will stay with me always. 

In closing, regardless of whatever may have happened between birth and the day we looked at a stray digital photo and said, “Oh, wait! That’s a picture of ME! I thought it was my mom!,” one thing is certain: We are all shaped into who we are as women because of our mothers, no matter what the relationship may be. Some of us have spent every day of our lives with our mothers. Others were adopted, or separated from their mothers due to divorce or death or other circumstances. Be proud of those traits you’ve picked up, either consciously or unconsciously, and remember those special women on their day this month. Without them, you wouldn’t be reading (or listening to) this column, and I wouldn’t be writing it!

THANKS TO ALL THOSE MOTHERS OUT THERE!! YOU ARE LOVED!!

One More Time

The Leader of the band is tired

And his eyes are growing old

But his blood runs through my instrument

And his song is in my soul

My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man

I'm just a living legacy to the Leader of the Band

    - Dan Fogelberg

That's when we lost it. I know I did. 

Sorry, y'all. This took me a few days to process.

There are stories. Many, many, many stories about how Paul Gray had an impact on my life. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

In the beginning, I knew him from church. He was the choir director. He was my sister's band director. Then he was MY band director. There wasn't a time when he wasn't connected to my family. His wife Billie was a dear friend of my mother's and she was at our house quite often. His oldest son Paul (Sonny) was Liz's classmate. I remember when his younger son Michael was born. When he was around 5 or 6 was one of my first babysitting jobs: New Year's...1983? The year "Every Breath You Take" was the Number 1 song of the year, because I stayed up to listen to the countdown while in the Gray's den. The Grays were a big part of our lives: church, school, home.

We went to band concerts and football games and marching contests and parades before I was even in band myself. My sister and I grew up with "Gray Standard Time." It was already a way of life. I joined the middle school band in the 6th grade, under the direction of Randy Been, but I couldn't wait to be part of the "Big band" with Mr. Gray. I knew that would be epic.

And it was.

The summer before I was a freshman, Mr. Gray asked me to join the High School band for a clinic at the Arlington in Hot Springs, conducted by the incomparable Dr. Francis McBeth, no less. I was just this little kid, riding on the bus that day with all these high-schoolers. I was tucked back in the lower end of the saxophone section. But what an opportunity. Then two-a-day marching band practice started at the end of July.

Yikes. 

But I did that, for four years. Worked my way up to first chair, held that position through my senior year, when I was drum major. Was a "band aid", copying parts and helping put together band folders for both marching, Christmas, and concert season. Lived in fear of being the first band to get less than a First Division AND Sweepstakes at ANY contest. (We never were that band - we ALWAYS won Sweepstakes.) Heavy duty pressure there. There were 100 of us when I joined as a freshman, and that's a hefty number for a school Mena's size. It was a pretty big deal.

Paul Gray was a formidable man, but if you KNEW him, he wasn't so scary. He liked to play golf. Richard Wagner was his favorite composer, which is probably why I like Wagner also. (We didn't play Elsa's Procession when I was in band, but Liz's group did. So hearing at the service, the recording by the 1980 band, was a propos. I analyzed the band transcription for a homework assignment in Tom Chase's Form and Analysis class, Spring 1990.) Six-to-five military marching style, with glaring white tennis shoes, was so ingrained in me that I considered corps-style marching an abomination when I was dragged into it kicking and screaming when I went to Henderson. (I learned to enjoy it though, because if Mr. Gray thought I was giving Wendall Evanson trouble, my ass was grass. And he would have told me so.)

Paul Gray was tough but had a great sense of humor. He let us do cool things like the end of show "scatter" and the great Senior Walk-Out (I can still see Suzanne Redman popping up out of the French Horn section and basically telling him off, in jest of course. We sophomores thought we would all surely die...). He was the first person to show me the World's Smallest Violin Player playing "My Heart Bleeds for You." We could tell him about our senior high weekend escapades and he never judged us, never blew our cover. When we played against Paris and they played their alma mater, to the tune of "O, Tannenbaum," he turned to us and mumbled, "Don't laugh!!" (We did anyway.) He was like a crazy uncle you could share a six-pack with.

One story I always remember was after a LONG bus ride home after an away game in Alma. Another girl (can't remember her name but she played clarinet) and I were the last ones to be picked up but we assured Mr. Gray that we had rides coming, so he left. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited, tried to get to the payphone over by the cafeteria...until finally my parents realized no one had gone to get me. (This was WAY before cell phones, y'all). We both made it home, but since then PG opted to stay until EVERYONE went home. He gave me a set of plastic "baby" keys at Band Banquet that year. I kept them for a long time. I'm sure they're in a box somewhere because I keep EVERYTHING.

My partner in crime Christine Cooper and I both sang in the church choir under his direction. We probably got in trouble a few times for giggling. He was much more mellow for church choir rehearsal, with the older folks. Those of us that knew him during the day though were still relatively terrified.

I was drum major my senior year. He DIDN'T chew on me too bad when one afternoon during rehearsal out on the football field I turned on the wrong yardline, thus causing chaos in each rank and file that followed. Maybe because he MIGHT have asked me at some point to do that on purpose to see if everyone else was paying attention. I apparently beat him to that...so of course we had to do it "One more time!" Then one more time after that. And another after that. And so on, and so on, and so on... 

Geese, he called us. Others were goats. We were geese. And dummies. But those Sousa marches, y'all.

He was one of the first to trust me to be "in charge" when we did pep rallies and basketball band. I'm pretty sure you'll see his style in my conducting, if I ever get the chance to do that again. I was his second-in-command and that was a big role. I never wanted to let him down.

He taught me music theory and the old church modes. Basic composition. I remember the album he played in Music Appreciation (a class I didn't really need but took it anyway) of what Beethoven's 5th would have sounded like with the "deleted scenes." I wish I could find a copy because I thought that was so cool. He prepared me for being a music major better than anyone else on the planet. You REALLY need to love music, and because HE did, I was able to carry my love of it forward.

Speaking of walk-outs, however...

One day we were getting reamed up and down, in and out, during spring contest season. I don't even remember what we were playing. I'm sitting there, first chair saxophone, thinking, What the crap? I'm over here working my butt off and everyone else is slacking off...so in my just-turned-18-years-old mind, and with all the other senior drama at the time, I'm taking it personally. So I got up and just left the band hall. Something I WOULD NEVER DO. Naturally, I was called in for a "talk." His tirade of course had nothing to do with me. It didn't have to do with anybody, really. He just wanted us to be our best, as always. Uphold our reputation as one of the best high school bands in the state of Arkansas, maybe even the country. He knew I was doing my part; he expected nothing less. I needed to cool my jets and keep up the good work, get over myself. I aired my frustrations, he listened, and I was all the better for it. 

We talked for quite a while that day. One of the first of many conversations I had with various mentors over the years about the need to have a thicker skin to maneuver one's self through the world in order to survive, especially when you were in danger of choosing a path less trodden by women. Professional musician, huh? Brace yourself, young Padawan. You're in for a bumpy ride. Here's what it's gonna take. And that wasn't just a discussion about the music world, that was about the world in general, which I really knew nothing about at that point. I would have the same discussion with Rick Dimond, Earl Hesse, Wes Branstine, Jim Buckner, David Rollins, Lydia Evanson, The Remarkable Ryes, Kay McAfee...But Paul Gray was there in the beginning. He gave me, and everyone under his baton, that foundation.

His influence got me through 5 years of college. Everything I was learning about teaching instrumental music always brought me back to what he taught me first and it built the foundation for everything I would do for years to come. I only band directed for two years, but those kids in that little school in Sanford, Colorado got to experience Paul Gray whether they knew it or not. I may have made a junior high trumpet player cry (a boy no less - that kid had got on my last nerve!), but they earned a 1st Division the first time they'd ever gone to concert contest. They marched on the football field for the first time in several years. They marched in a Christmas parade. Went to a clinic sponsored by the Monte Vista band director. Went to solo and ensembles at Adams State in Alamosa. We did some things, and some stuff, too. Because Paul Gray showed me how.

One thing I was reminded of when I read Mr. Gray's obituary was that he was preceded in death by his son, Roger, age nine. I vaguely remember this event; even though I was only four at the time. Since my mother and Miss Billie were very close, I remember snippets of conversations they'd had about it; other mentions by Liz and Sonny and their friends. Now that I know this type of grief, losing a child, I regret that I didn't have the opportunity to talk about this type of life-changing event with Mr. Gray (I can't call him Paul; it seems so disrespectful). I'm sure there were days when he didn't want to give everything he had to band directing; but we never saw that. Maybe his "goats" and his "geese" provided solace for that. I had a role model for a future experience and I didn't even realize it. Thank you, sir. Because that helped me more than anything.

A legend is gone, but what Paul Gray has left behind will live on through the lives of all of us who sat in those band rooms, on the stage at the old Middle School Auditorium, the grounds of Boyd and Bearcat Stadium, the parades routes down Mena Street, the First United Methodist Church Sanctuary, and other venues across the state of Arkansas and beyond. And for those of us who also got to hang out with him outside the confines of music, we will miss his laughter, his candor, and his friendship greatly. And someday, we'll see him again.

One more time.