[Dixielandjazz] Taking the week off...

[Charlie Hooks]

Listmates:

    Am folding up my half-reconstructed house-project, leaving it to the
builders who have as yet only wrecked and not rebuilt doodley--well, I have
one brand new bathroom on my 3rd floor, a new kitchen without a sink on my
second floor, another new kitchen without anything but the floor and wall
board on the 1st floor: no bathrooms on the 2nd, 1st, or basement levels.

    This project began last January.  So frugk it!  We are headed for: North
Dakota!  Where my wife is related to all 217 people in the state, "out where
a friend is a friend, where the longhorn cattle feed/ On the lonely jimson
weed/ And the skies are not cloudy all day."   Well, I seem to have got a
few different songs tangled up here, but you get the idea.  Out of Chicago.
Out of the City.  Out to the great Northwest.

    There are real people out there!  They are like--well, mostly like
outback Australians, I think: totally independent, completely
self-sufficient, raising all their food themselves, fattening and
slaughtering their own meat, hiring no man to work at anything they have
time to do for themselves: "You need brain surgery?  Aw, yeah, I think Joe's
doin' that this week. Y'know how to git over there?"  Much like Texas was
back before the War; before it got overrun with Yankees.

    We've considered moving out to Bismark, No Dak.  State capital.  State
library is there.  Beautiful clean small city.  Computers don't care where
you live.  Bank says my house in Chicago (suburb) is worth $800,000.  I can
buy a much better house in Bismark for just under two grand.  That's right!
So, a no-brainer, right?

    But the music is the Great Problem.  All country-western.  No OKOM.  No
classical players, let alone a symphony.  Forget the Opera.  Umm...

    Some of you people live in odd places, perhaps like North Dakota only
less so; how do you manage?  Am I borrowing trouble?  Let me hear from any
of you who have an angle on this.  There's more common sense on this list
than anyplace else I know.  So I ask you.

    Will be back on Friday, a week after this coming Friday.  A week and a
day.  Anybody yelling at me before then, be patient.  I ain't answering
because I ain't home.  If Gunter and Tommy Loy can get away with it, then so
can I!

love y'all!
Charlie