When Andy Senior reminded his writers we had an earlier deadline due to February’s being shy two or three days, there was a bit of a scramble. Hal Smith and I ripped through our Ain’tcha Got Music in “record” time—any misspellings or typos fall squarely on my shoulders as I do the final edit—and I was faced with what to write for this month’s My Inspirations column. With virtually no time this weekend—Anne and I left Jekyll Island, GA yesterday (Feb 10) after a wrap-up with our most recent batch of Road Scholars, made a five-hour drive to the Tampa area, performed a gig today as the Sweet&Hot Quartet for the Clearwater Jazz Society (with legendary reedsman Terry Myers and drummer/vocalist Dick “Spanky” Maley) and now are getting ready for “Bowl” Sunday (not the Super Bowl: the Puppy Bowl, an annual event on Animal Planet, real sports with no steroids: so there!), I had to feverishly flip through my files of as-yet-unpublished folderol. And BOY did I find a doozy! The following snippets involve incidents either eye or ear-witnessed.
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The film “Titanic” came out to great fanfare and of course most of us went out to see it. The late Bob Ault, a ragtime musician from Michigan who was proficient on 27 different instruments, once told me he attended the film with another seminal ragtime performer, the late pianist/historian Trebor Tiche
