Hoodoo Highway

Discovery in Tallahassee

So, there I sit in my hotel room (scratch that - junior suite) in Tallahassee, Fl. Junior suite means "hotel room with a full kitchen". I am here doing training. Last night I was studying the instructor manual for a section of training that another trainer was to have completed but did not. I have the tv on for background noise. That being said, the reality is that it often distracts me and I, willingly, let it. I was not all that interested in what constituted an "undue hardship defense", to be honest. I surfed around and stopped on this channel that had this "old" lady talking to her hip, young and fashionably pop punkish grand daughter. I stopped because something about the "old" lady was familiar. The old lady was, obviously, not as old as the part she was playing. She had a terrible wig. Why is it that when they want a younger actress to portray an old lady, they put them in a bad wig? I am talking lifeless, shapeless, ugly wig. Her character was not a bag lady but a middle class, small town grandmother - with bad hair. Add to that the horrible make up job that did not leave her with "wrinkles" but rather areas on her face that looked like healed burns. Hell, when I did makeup for community theater I could create far better wrinkles with two makeup pencils in brown and white. This was B A D. I got interested in the show though.

The premise is that the grand daughter is wanting to leave town for a bigger, brighter future of more exciting things than little "Three Rivers" could ever offer her, she wanted to leave with a not so savory boyfriend "Richie" (aren't they always called Richie?" and she wanted grandma to give her money to do so. In fact, she promised Richie she would get the money. Instead, grandma forced her to listen to her life story before giving her the money. The life story was what we saw - interspersed with bad makeup. bad hair grandma. It hit me that bad hair, bad makeup grandma was Cheryl Ladd!! We see grandma as a young girl who had lost her mother and was attending college away from tiny old boring Three Rivers. She returns home at the end of the semester to stay with dad, the town doctor. She dresses fancy, drives a car around, wears a lot of lipstick, has a neighbor next door that pines away for her and she does not notice him, meets the new "Reverend" and kills time waiting to leave Three Rivers. However, she falls in love with the new Reverend, rejects a marriage proposal from "Will" - the pining neighbor, becomes involved in teaching Sunday School and decides Three Rivers is the place for her after all. The Reverend goes away to the war and she promises to wait for him and to marry him when he returns. In the meantime, dad dies leaving her penniless and the bank takes the house. Will takes her in and gives her a job at his insurance office. She waits for Ben to come home. A soldier shows up and tells her he was killed in action. She ends up falling in love with Will and marrying Will. She is happy as can be when a letter arrives from Ben. He was not killed - he was merely a prisoner of war. He is coming home to get her. She meets him and tells him she loves him but that she married Will and loves Will and is happy. He promises to "always" be there for her. Will and she have a son. Son gets a gal pregnant and they have a little girl. Son and girlfriend get killed in a car wreck and bad hair/makeup grandma begins to question her faith and raises the kid. Meanwhile, Will gets alzheimers and starts to forget her and, eventually, dies. I stayed with this story until the end ya'll... I must really have been wanting to avoid studying. At one point in the story, she questions why God keeps taking from her everyone that she loves? She wondered what she had done to deserve that and, I have to be honest, I wondered as well.

In the end, her grand daughter sees the error of her ways in wanting to leave Three Rivers with Richie and only gets as far as Chicago before Richie gets on her nerves and she heads back to Three Rivers. Ben shows back up and dances with bad hair grandma at a dinner honoring her for 50 years of service to the church. Why did they make this person look like a bag lady? Go figure. Of course, Ben has waited for her all these years. Some 50 years he waited for this lady and he gets bag lady grandma. He tells her that she is still as beautiful as she always was. Well ok, if you have cataracts and low vision Reverend...maybe.

So that ends and I guess I am not so interested in studying so I cruise the channels some more and all of a sudden hit a channel with a guy singing. I stopped. I was fascinated with this. The man was blonde but not particularly attractive. Maybe it was more the way he did Joe Cocker looking faces. He sounded like Ray Charles, Joe Cocker and John Hiatt rolled into one. The music was awesome and his song was amazing. It was something about "Drops of Praise" or something like that. It did not take me long to realize it was christian music but it was "different". I am not all that drawn to a lot of christian music but this just stopped me. It was sultry, rhythmic and reminiscent of some Al Green kind of thing. I even stuck around after the singing was over and the cheesy organ music played in the background and he did that whole "smiley face, i-am-your-caring-friend-trust-in-jesus voice". Long enough to see who it was. His name is Phil Driscoll and this is him to the right--> I would buy this song. It was just that good. Can you imagine him squinching up his face like he is in pain? That is what reminded me of Joe Cocker. I googled him and found out he used to perform with Joe Cocker, among many others. Until he got saved and just in time, apparently, because several days later his house was raided and he was arrested for manufacture and distribution of cocaine. The article I read said he was acquitted. Anyway, my point is that sometimes boredom and an attempt to avoid doing something you should be doing sometimes leads to a cool discovery.

posted by Deb @ 6:17 PM