Run, Harriet, Run! Part Two By Jackdaw

Read Part One

The band had a night off between the Allentown and New York shows; I think they went into the city to see the sights and to visit friends. Anne, Azariah, and Donny went to New York, but Ron and I had decided to skip the traffic and expense of the Big Apple and head on to Massachusetts, so I could show Ron the town I lived in during the mid-70's. We wanted to skirt the city entirely, but I screwed up as navigator because I didn't realize that the toll road we wanted was called the Garden State Parkway and not the New Jersey Turnpike; somehow, we ended up crossing the George Washington Bridge at the peak of rush hour on Manhattan, the precise situation we had hoped to avoid!

Several hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic and brief 80mph. sprints later, we finally got clear of concentrated humanity and sped through the darkened wilds of Connecticut, trying to make up some of our lost time. We got to Webster at 11 PM, too late to drop in on old friends who weren't expecting me; the local motel had gone out of business, too, and when we finally found a room for the night, we collapsed into exhausted lumps.

We spent the next day-and-a-half sightseeing, visiting my old friends, taking pictures, and buying souvenirs of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. That's an old Nipmuc Indian name that means, "You fish on your side, I fish on my side, and nobody fishes in the middle." (The headliner of the Big Red Van now carries a Lake C bumpersticker!) Then we headed for Boston to hook up with other old friends before the Saturday night show in Cambridge.

After a few miles, the Mass Pike turned into an as-far-as-you-could-see traffic jam; we detoured to US 20 and ended up circling through unmarked side streets at sundown, looking for Gordon & Amy's place. We stopped at a gas station so I could call Gordon, but the attendant, in a foreign accent, told me "No phone!" while I was staring at the phone on the wall. I started asking the half-dozen customers at the gas station for directions; they were local folks and knew that the street sounded familiar, but none of them could tell us how to find it. The attendant finally let me use the phone, probably because there didn't seem to be any other way of getting rid of me, and Gordon drove down the hill and led us to his house. Thoroughly frazzled by the Boston traffic, we decided to leave Harriet at the house and ride with G&A to the show.

The Saturday night show at T.T. the Bear's wasn't supposed to start until 11 PM; by the time we arrived, the medium-small club was packed full of RE fans, local Russians, and other creatures of the night. Walking through the door was like walking into a sauna, wall-to-wall people at about 105 degrees Fahrenheit. I stashed our camera bag in the green room, then swam through the crowd and handed out Red Elvises pencils to anyone who looked like a potential RedHead.

I'll never know how the guys had the stamina to put on their usual great show in that incredible heat; I remember quite a bit of shirtlessness, and Oleg told me later that at one point, he thought he was going to faint. I hung around on the fringes of the packed dance floor, fanning myself, when I wasn't ducking outside for a breath of air. On a trip back through the crowd to get more pencils, I found a young woman in the green room, lying down from near-collapse. Besides the totally inadequate ventilation, the bar had some sort of mascot, a guy in a big papier-mache head, who hogged the stage during "I Wanna See You Bellydance," which was pretty annoying. It was all worth it for me, though, when the guys played a rare performance of "My Love Is Killing Me."

Phelan wanted to do some video-taping at the show, so he enlisted Ron to sell CD's and T-shirts for him. Five people who had driven from Michigan to drop their mother off in Webster had seen Harriet parked in front of Mary's house, and then heard a radio ad for the RE show in Cambridge; for lack of any other plans, they came to check it out. Of course, they became instant fans, and they told Ron this story while they were buying CD's. He told them Harriet was ours, and everyone marvelled at the series of coincidences that had brought folks from Michigan to a Red Elvises show in Cambridge because a car from Ohio just happened to stop in Webster, MA. It's a Red World, after all!

Gordon and Amy got to see the whole show, my friend Leigh and her friend Lissa, who go to school in Boston, arrived halfway through and had time to dance and take pictures; it's thanks to Leigh that I have photos from T.T.'s. Mary, Chuck, and Mike drove in late from Webster, but, because the bar closed at 1:00, they only caught the last two songs; they said it was okay, though, because I'd been playing RE at them all during my visit, and they already knew all the words. Everyone got CD's, and the guys, as usual, were great about signing autographs for the "virgins," despite being sweaty and exhausted. I tried to be helpful by cooling them off with my "I'm just a fan" routine. (see photos)

The bar was trying to get everyone out the door, but since we were "with the band," we stuck around as they tore down and loaded the van, with Ron helping with some of the grunt work. My friends took off for their various homes, and we spent the night at G&A's. The RE headed for a hotel outside of town, so they could get a head start toward the gig in Geneva, N.Y. the next day, where we planned to catch up with them.........stay tuned for Part 3. Run, Harriet, run!