Remember "The Foal" ?

Before we start the process of preliminary packing this weekend for our eventual move to Hardwick in late August, I've been sifting through my desk and loft and boxes and cabinets, trying to decide what should be kept and what can be parted with. For instance, there's no need to keep the 1998 edition of "Musician's Guide To Touring & Promotion" on hand anymore. Shelly and I have finally admitted that we can afford to part with some of our books, now that six bookcases can no longer accommodate them all. I have old music books like the "All Music Guide" (now available online), Shelly has scores of horror stories she read when she was in high school. At least if we could free up a few shelves so that we no longer have small piles of horizontal stacks sitting on the shelves starting to block out the vertical stacks. Being an English teacher and Shelly now running her own reading group, there will be many more coming.

Anyway, as I prune away, I keep running across stuff I haven't seen in years. Wiseass poetry I wrote while bored at work, lists of fake album titles for friends. "Marchese Like A Fox." "Short & Sweet- The Ribboncandy Collection." This morning, I had the most delightful bellylaugh reading through "The Foal," which was a playbill Henning, Ari and I devised for a Humbert performance at The Iron Horse in 1998. One needs to actually see a copy to get the full experience but basically we listed the songs we played, giving them plot points such as:

Teen Hotline
Margie and her nauseous pet turtle strike up a conversation with a physician in a queer hat.

Greyhound
Again, the Russian dreams of the candy-coated leper princess surrounded by Swedish mermaids sunbathing listlessly on a satellite dish.

Alone In Your Victorian
In a panic, Dr. Friday confronts the housekeeper.


There is also a section telling about the players and their resumes. For instance, a "brown-eyed bushy-haired habitue of North Andover, MA" named Brian Marchese got his start in "avant-garde vaudeveille and long-form improvisational romantic comedy." The performance of Ari Vais will "send slivers up your shins." "Mr. Ohlenbusch infuses the grisly physician Dr. Friday with a loopy aloofness under a guise of cocky macho respectability."

Perhaps my favorite part is the back page which, natch, lists the benefactors. I distinctly remember the delirious fun we had driving to NYC to play a gig, each of us inventing names. Some were in-jokey (Thane MacGowan), others were wordplay-like (Andrea Durand- the end of her last name runs right into the beginning of her first, Trish Shirt- palindromes, Kate Coburn- the female version of Kurt Cobain) but most of them just cracked us up because they could be real names and one could almost imagine what the folks looked like (Percy Connecticut, Laverne Waxler, Tori Polk, Frank Hanes, Rory Valentine, Russ Lutz). Also, the names were listed according to how much they had contributed- a "Friend" gave $10, a "Donor" $100, a "Patron of The Arts" gave $100,000 etc. But even this we had to have fun with. Those who gave $1000 were given the title of "Sycophant." An in-joke because we had a song called Sycophant but also a funny joke on its own.

My merriment and delight and laughter reading this nonsensical relic earned a few complaints from my daughter, who had a hard time concentrating on her coloring with all the guffaws. Come on! "Gil Fleming? Kim Pacino? Roxanne Bevacqua?" Aren't those funny names?