So about 1979 or ’80 Spencer (now of Coffee Sergeants fame) called me up and told me we had a gig playing for some woman at a festival. I can’t remember now if it was the Oatmeal Oatmeal Festival, the Lorena Strawberry Festival, the Cedar Park Cedar Chopper Festival, the Taylor Rattlesnake Festival, the Florence Fat Legs Festival or what. But it was one of those or something just like one of those. I would link to the ‘blog post, but we lost those archives when old hudge caught fire in ’92.
The thing I do remember about it is that I expected we were going to be accompanying someone I didn’t know, but it turned out that we were just playing with plain, old Deanna. Nothing wrong with Deanna, but it wasn’t what I expected. Somehow I never did figure out what caused my misapprehension, or what happened to Spencer’s mysterious woman.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago when our new next door neighbor moves in. Finally a winner in the neighbor lottery, we got Mike Murphy (A.K.A. Michele, A.K.A. Crazy Michele) and she’s pretty hip. She’s one of the Pleasant Valley “Boys” and she owns her own music school. The hook to this music school is that they get kids together and put them in bands, kind of like School of Rock with Mike playing Jack Black. Only, I suspect, zanier.
So anyway Mike flags me down at the mailbox a few days ago and tells me that my old buddy Spencer contacted her and was asking her if she remembered getting him a gig back three decades ago, and mentioned me and she said “hey, I think that’s my neighbor!” So anyway, Miss Mike (as we call her) was the mysterious woman and we were never going to accompany her; she was the organizer. And Spencer and I were among the first kid bands to play a kid band show in, perhaps, the original School of Rock.