Nine days until my plane leaves for Orlando. I need to think about packing. I like to travel light--carry-on luggage only. This always requires difficult decisions. Camera, yes, ukulele, no.
With the memory of melted shoes still etched in my mind from the 2010 San Antonio reunion, I'm wondering about late June in Orlando. San Antonio, at least was dry; today's humidity in Orlando is 85%. "It's not the heat, it's the humidity," is a sadly true assessment, as is known by anyone who's been forced to run with the Marines through the golf course at NAB Little Creek in July.
I've only been to Orlando once, and that was in the fall. The temperature was fine. Everything else was a disaster:
In the early 1970s, I worked with an improvisational comedy group in New York. There was no such thing as Saturday Night Live, and ensemble comedy was a new thing.
We'd been kicking around the city going broke for a while when we got an offer of a gig in Orlando at a college. Young, hip crowds were what we were looking for. Money was also what we were looking for. This gig payed a thousand bucks. We needed it, real bad. The gas shortage had driven up the price of gas, which would eat into our profits, but we were hungry.
We got in the van, the driver turned the key, two out of six cylinders fired and things went downhill from there. We spend the afternoon in a service station in Queens, getting the van fixed enough to head south. Before we crossed the state line into New Jersey we were running late. The van limped down the East Coast at the speed of a hippopotamus grazing on the savanna. Somewhere in the Carolinas we pulled into the Bates Motel at 3 a.m, and copped a few hours rest while waiting for the knife to fall and the violins to screech. The next day we got to the gig site in Orlando with seconds to spare before the performance.
After the show, while some of us packed up the gear, the driver took the van for a checkup at a Jiffy Quick-type service station we'd passed. An hour later he wasn't back. Three hours later he wasn't back. We stood outside the auditorium with our gear into the dark hours. The driver finally showed up. He'd seen signs for Orlando, and realized this might be his only opportunity to see Disney World. He'd spent the evening with Goofy and Cinderella.
Fistfights. Psychodrama. Character Assassination. The trip home was a hellish journey of cheap motels and flat tires and death threats. When we got home, we cashed the check and gathered around the table to split the thousand bucks. There were seven of us. We'd spent three nights in motels. Gas prices had equaled that of Jack Daniels on a gallon for gallon basis. The mechanical repairs had cost an arm, a leg and most of the torso. We'd eaten road food up and down the east coast.
Final net profit was $32 bucks each. Within weeks I was engaged in a budding relationship with a Navy recruiter.
This trip will definitely be better.
Frank Mullen's very unofficial source of poop, skinny and bitching for present and former U.S. Navy Musicians.
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