AS HUCK WAILED TO HIS CONSCIENCE,
"EASE UP ON ME, WILL YA!"

It's all La Mancha, all the time

Having veered into my mad little memory excursion, as described in the previous post, I had well and truly answered my "What ever happened to....?" question about Paul Myrvold to my complete satisfaction. (And had enjoyed the spin-off excursions into "Whatever happened to Bob Lowry and Tim Monich?", the other two Hargadine St. musketeers (with Ron Lagomarsino) in a memorable Shakespearean troika during that long ago pre-professional summer, one we shared with a talented unknown college-boy named Powers Boothe (the e-e-e-v-i-l-l-l one -- a man, if ever there was one, born to wear a black hat.)

Heady days, my friends.

Okay, so I'm minding my own business strolling down memory lane. A critique here, an interview there, and I'm quite prepared to accept that, having played him six (seven? nine?) times since he was a callow youth, Paul Myrvold simply is the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, the ur-Quixote, scourge of windmills everywhere (even Cape Cod?), and I wish him well of it.

So can I have my brain-pan back now? Can I reclaim my own cranium, wherein songs I haven't really thought about for 30 years are now ricocheting all over the place, every waking minute of my day? Can I hang up my Golden Helmet? Can I stop only thinking of HIM?

I didn't realize how well I knew these songs, though I've always posited that the number of show-tunes burnt into my gray matter accounts for the chronic shortage of memory cells to tell me why I made a trip upstairs and marched into my office to fetch......what?

Now the songs are re-emerging in torrents, albeit with gaps, slamming into bulkheads and boulders when some line or verse escapes me and I start singing around in circles.

This all came to a head yesterday, when I dove into the vinyl archives, where I SWEAR I had the album in the Broadway Musical section that spans a good eight inches of shelf space. Nada. Nothing for it but to head out and do an emergency music store run. Off to the nearest HMV -- I'm S.O.L. Then Sunrise Records -- not today, dear. Then Best Buy -- bupkus. The closest thing I turned up was the film soundtrack with Sophia Loren and Peter O'Toole (NOT doing the singing, I'm guessin'). Uh, I think not.

Sometimes the suburbs completely suck.

All plans for a rousing session of car Karaoke, and a window-shaking kitchen concert, all foiled, foiled! My only comfort is that tomorrow I depart for a week in San Diego, and shall no doubt be able to walk into the nearest Borders and find exactly what I need.

I need this album. 'Cause, man!, inside my head it's all La Mancha, all the time.

Curse you Paul Myrvold! And not just for lookin' good.