The Gathering
We are moving house across the country in less than a month from now. The actual moving van event is more like two months away, but we are leaving with the dog in tow to drive to California in twenty-three days. Driving to California sounds so Beverly Hillbillies or National Lampoon Vacation. We aren’t piling up the truck with a rocking chair. There is no planned visit to Wallyworld and not likely to be any Christy Brinkley encounters along the way. And I certainly hope I won’t ever feel the need to loop Cecil’s leash around our back bumper after spending the night in a smelly $12 camp tent. And there is only a small “see-ment pond” at the end of the road (my boulder-bounded hot tub). But we are packing the car and the dog and driving to Knoxville, Oklahoma City, Santa Fe (for dinner with my high school pal, Tom) and then Casa Moonstruck on our little hilltop overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
One of the things Kim did in anticipation of moving was to plan a final New York cabaret show with her cabaret husband, Lennie Watts. These shows don’t just happen. They began rehearsals with musical director, Steven Ray Watkins, back in the late Spring once they had conceived of their theme of Home Town Heroes. The idea was to celebrate the music that sprang from their respective home states of Indiana and Missouri, with a bit of good old New York City thrown in to commemorate their collective adopted home town for thirty plus years. They did their first show in late September and have planned three more in November. The good reception for the show has meant that they plan to do one more in early February in New York City (mostly for the cabaret community and the MAC awards) and then take it on the road to home towns in Wabash and St. Louis. They may even decide to go so far as to play it in San Diego and Los Angeles (and possibly Camarillo).
Kim is very connected to the cabaret community. She is on the board of Manhattan Association of Clubs and Cabarets (MAC) and on the board of Syngnasium, both with her pal Lennie. Many of her cabaret friends have already come to her show and few would miss a performance by the great Lennie Watts. This show is the best of cabaret in my opinion as they do songs from Hoagy Carmichael, Burt Bacharach, Cole Porter, Michael McDonald and even John Kander. From Kim singing ROCK in the U.S.A. to Lennie belting out Chuck Berry’s Too Pooped to Pop to their grand finale of a mash-up of New York, New York and Nowadays, the show is engaging and uplifting, speaking to the past and the future all at once.
We have also built up a long list of my and our friends who get the mailings about her shows and attend quite faithfully. I am fond of saying that if we fill the house for all shows we stand a damn good chance of breaking even. But the real reason for the shows is because Kim loves to sing and perform. Over the last twenty-five years, our motorcycle club, called American Flyers Motorcycle Club (AFMC) has enjoyed an expanding roster of riding friends. They all love and admire Kim as she is so very easy to love and admire. At times I think they tolerate me to be able to spend time with Kim. The best evidence of this is that when they received word of this Home Town Heroes show, many of them planned visits to New York City to attend. Being her “last” show and being planned for the start of the holiday season (the favorite time to visit New York City), the attendee list expanded. We had one couple come in from Arizona last week. This week the roster includes several from Vermont, four from Utah, several from Florida and a few from California. It’s quite impressive as a testament for the groups’ love of Kim and its pleasure in gathering.
I have often said that this is a very special group to me. I have one tattoo and that is dedicated to my love of motorcycling and my AFMC. It was designed twenty-five years ago by my daughter and I had it installed on my upper left arm by the same artist that gave my oldest son his tattoos. These friends and I ride together perhaps twice a year at this point, but they are somehow among my dearest friends. I feel that if any were to call on me for help, I would always be there and vice versa. When we gather, we always update one another on the advances in our lives (new grandchildren, house moves, new ailments, etc.), but then we tell tall tales of rides past and rides planned. Even members that have stopped riding for one reason or another (usually some physical limitation), still like gathering with the group to reminisce and stay connected. Perhaps others have similar groups that revolve around activities different than motorcycling, but few activities I have encountered have the bonding capacity of riding together. We are alone, but we need each other because there is something both solitary and dependent about being a man or woman alone straddled on a machine with a great deal of power. We rarely have to be going where we ride, but we have to ride where we are going, which is to say that the ride seems to be an imperative for some deep-seated reason. It’s a bit hackneyed to say it, but the ride is all.
Our motto as a group has always been “High Mileage, Low Expectations”, but we all joke that time has reversed the order of that banner. The longer we ride, the less the length of the ride matters and the simple act of gathering to ride or stand and talk of riding is the core of the group. There is a Progressive motorcycle commercial that has a Motaur which is half human, half motorcycle. On one such commercial, the Motaur suggests that it sometimes wishes it had legs but was still a Motaur. The absurdity of a Motaur with a human bottom and motorcycle top is very consistent with the notion of a motorcycle club that rides less and talks, drinks and eats more. Progressive obviously knows its audience.
Among motorcycle enthusiasts I am less of a gearhead than others. I like the riding part much more than the tinkering part. In my youth I could and did field-strip a small Ducati and Gilera and a big twin Triumph, but those were the days of simple internal combustion machines with minimal electronics and no computers. I always liked the story of the Harley burning by the side of the road that we helped to douse, only to see the owner take off the charred seat and use lamp cord to rewire his electronics and be off on his way again. That is the sort of mechanic I would tend to be. But nonetheless, when, on the way home from the show, one of our members asked if I wanted to go to the motorcycle show at the Javits Center in a few weeks, I readily accepted. If he had asked me to go to any other show I may not have gone, but there is something about any gathering that uses motorcycling as its pretext that attracts my attention.
I have planned a twenty-fifth anniversary ride this May to our favorite western lodge in southern Utah. We have near full attendance confirmed. In the old era of The Clan of the Cave Bear, tribes gathered semi-annually just to reassure themselves that they still existed. The AFMC still gathers for the same reason. Maybe our new motto should be Colligentes Ego Cogito Ergo Sum or “I Gather Therefore I Am”.