Today's theme - Coonskin Caps
To any of you who are tempted to singlehandedly bring the coonskin cap back into fashion allow me to just say this - don't, seriously don't.
You would think that if anybody could rock a coonskin cap it would be Frank Freaking Sinatra right? I mean, who looks greater in a hat than Frank Freaking Sinatra?
It's sometime in the mid -50s and of course I'm with Ava (Gardner) and Davy Crockett is all the rage - everywhere you go it's Davy Crockett this and Davy Crockett that.
By the time the mid -50s arrived I had so little hair left that I used to use a washcloth to comb it thus the tendency to go nowhere without the ever-present fedora perched upon my head.
So for reasons so obscure that not even I can remember why I did what I did I suddenly decide that I'm going to trade in the trademarked fedora for a coonskin cap.
So I pop that topper right on my melon, walk into our bedroom, Ava takes one look and bursts into laughter and it's not the kind of charming "girlish" laughter that you would expect but this huge wide-mouthed super-loud horselaugh that is so insulting that I felt my eyes start to water because I felt like crying. Now... I'm Frank Freaking Sinatra, right? Right.... and so I can't start crying like a little girl in front of Ava Freaking Gardner and so I rip the coonskin cap off my head and fling it right out the 10th story of the Sands Hotel in Vegas - where it winds up I haven't the vaguest idea nor do I care to find out.
So you would think that should be the end of the story but every time Ava and I start fighting like Apaches (which is pretty much all we do at this point in our relationship) she starts to take cheap shots at me whenever I'm getting the best of her in our "debates" which is pretty much always. Ava starts in with "The Cap" - "Where's your cap, Frank?" - "Put on your cap, Frank" - "You really rocked that cap, Frank" and so on and so on until I finally decide that I would sooner divorce her than to ever hear anything about "The Cap" and so I do...
And no sooner do I divorce her I spend the next two freaking decades cranking out nothing but an endless parade of hit songs "for only the lonely" and "Where Are You?" and all of that other BS which is completely laughable because at this point I'm dating so many Vegas showgirls and aspiring starlets that sometimes I had one on each arm and a third one carrying my coat.
And so I lost Ava Freaking Gardner, a really nice coonskin cap that I kind of liked, and had so spend the rest of my life consoling myself with nothing but an endless supply of Vegas showgirls and aspiring starlets... oh, and Jack Daniels and Dino and Sammy.... and money... don't forget the money which contrary to what you might think actually does have the capability to buy happiness and indeed bought me plenty.
There's a moral here somewhere but you'll have to find it yourself as quite frankly I'm too lazy... quite "frankly"... get it?I crack myself up...
This was John Sebastian's last famous song. You can ask yourself, why is that? It's a bit like when musicians start labels for others and then cease being able to be good composers themselves. Perhaps, too much of a business mind is a bad thing for a composer.