Nothing is worn, it all works perfectly—and KEEP YER HANDS OFF IT!!

I’m reading a very funny murder mystery called Highland Laddie Gone, by Sharyn McCrumb, who’s a writer educated as an anthropologist, living in central Virginia.  The murder takes place at a Highland Games in Virginia, and BOY has she got it down about all the posturing and guff that goes on at one of those affairs!  I can remember going to Games in Texas when I was a teenager, and at time it was a little Brigadoonish—a bunch of Yanks dressed up in their kilts and Balmorals, trying to behave as though nothing had changed since before the ’45.

And as for whatcha wear underneath those kilts—don’t get me started!!  While I was in college, a guy I knew, Patrick Regan, dragooned me into playing bass drum in his pipe band (ancestor to the Silver Thistle Pipes & Drums), because I was big enough to carry the damn thing, and because he knew I’d been a drummer in high school.  Around here, all the pipe bands in town wind up playing various hotels, restaurants, and bars (mostly bars) on Saint Patrick’s (why do Scottish pipes and drums play on an Irish holiday?  Because the Yanks are too drunk or too stupid to tell the difference, or more often both).  Austin is, of course, a college town with an Enormous State University (the University of Texas at Austin, or as I sometimes call it, the Universally Excess), and it was (then) accepted behavior among members of social fraternities and sororities to go out en masse and get ridiculously drunk on beer colored a nasty shade of green with food coloring.  (In those days, the Texas drinking age was still 18.)

The year I’m thinking of, about 1983, we were playing at Birraporretti’s, an Italian restaurant-cum-Irish Bar on Barton Springs Road.  (Don’t ask me why Italian and Irish. I don’t know either.)  We were supposed to do a fifteen-minute set every ninety minutes or so—march in to “Scotland’s Depraved,” form a concert circle so Patrick could cue us and count off the tunes, and do a medley of “The Fairy Dance,” “Paddy’s Leather Britches,” and something else I don’t remember any more.  Next we’d stop while Patrick gave a quick and humorous couple of minutes, mostly stolen from Anna Russell, on What Is a Bagpipe and How Do You Play It.  A couple of minutes is about how long our audience could manage to pay attention by that time, and the jokes helped to keep them listening.  Then we cranked back up for the Other Concert Medley (we had two—This One and The Other One), and then march back out with “Scotland’s Depraved” again.

By the time the third set began it was close to midnight (the party had started getting lively about 7:30, and closing time wasn’t until 2:00 AM), the crowd was so thick in the room you couldn’t stir ’em with a stick, and all the Greeks were thoroughly sotted on their green Budweiser.  And I swear there are few cruder groups than a bunch of sorority girls drunk off their arses on cheap beer!  That was where the trouble started.  They got to egging one another on, and as we marched out, they decided it would be funny to flip up our kilts and see what was there.  Now I was already hot, tired, chafed raw about the thighs from sweating all afternoon and evening under the hot, heavy wool, and completely out of temper—I’ve got little use for rowdy drunks of any sex, age, or what-have-you, and I’d had to put up with far too many that night—so I just flat blew my stack.  When they tried it on me, I waded right into the bunch swingin’ my drum first to one side and then the other, and lashing about with my drumsticks (camouflaged as fancy stickwork; I wasn’t an utter fool, even then).  I can tell you from experience that getting clipped by a bass drum, which weighs about twenty pounds and is covered with knobbly hardware, is very painful.  The combination of swinging drum and flailing sticks cleared me a path right fast; fortunately, the crowd weren’t so drunk that they couldn’t get out of my way, or I might have spent a night in jail for assault and battery—and I split for the greenroom, or what passed for one there.  It’s a good thing that was the last set of that night, because I couldn’t have stood another.

Robert the Bruce commandeered a xylophone for the invention of the horse collar  Fnord.