Pere Ubu, "Waiting for Mary"

I'll give you "Si Se Puede!" Number 17 in a long list of the ways Hal Wilner subtly influenced my life. During the years I knew him through Vicki I never heard that he had been music coordinator for "Michelob Presents, Night Music" so I never got to tell him how the show kept me sane (or, at least, focused) during a weird unhappy 9 months waiting tables in a Bennigan's down by the highway in the great steaming zoning accident that is Macon, GA. Not that we had a TV, but the show came on at 3:00 AM after the last bars closed. By this point we had tired of setting off the fire alarms down at the Mariott in the hopes we could see Baptist Youth Conventioneers in their pajamas. I think I wanted David Sanborn's job. Anyhow I needed to get out so I put a Bauhaus sticker on the bumper of the Chevette and set out for Cambridge and, eventually, New York.
A few years on Hal and Vicki joined us for a picnic in Prospect Park and then a small dinner party on the tiny terrace of an old lesbian couple Burnley knew who were celebrating their fortieth anniversary. Hal's voice was shot and he spoke in a whisper anyhow so I had to lean all the way in to his 'fro to hear him. He had a tape recorder where he had recorded Warner Brothers cartoons off the TV. Later this became the Carl Stalling project. He kept saying "listen to the music" which was funny because a) it was cartoons and b) he and Vicki had passed out on the grass and slept through the whole opera. Of course the above is impossible - no way I could have been in Georgia in '88 - but that's the way I remember it. Anyhow, here's your Christmas wish: That you might do one thing in the next year with the fearless intensity Dave Thomas brought to singing over the credits of a syndicated late-night show twenty years ago...