[Dixielandjazz] Buy your local muso a drink/dinner

[Stephen Barbone]

Norman Vickers kids that I didn't know about the Wild Bill Davison MO
for getting people to buy drinks or dinner. And so I got stuck with a
check at an OKOM festival.

Truth is, I have known it, since the 1950s when he did it to me. And I
was happy to buy. However, at the last Festival I played, The adoring
couple of well dressed fans came up to me gushing with compliments etc
and then THEY INVITED ME to have dinner with them. Where I come from,
the person who does the inviting, is the host.

I was blinded by their good will, insistence that I was the second
coming of Sidney Bechet and Benny Goodman combined, (that should have
been a red flag) and that they wanted to buy me dinner and chat about
music. Naive as I was, I assumed that as OKOM festival fans, husband and
wife, that they were the very model of good, old fashioned breeding and
were hip to the fact that musicians are usually not well heeled. So I
thought they were being generous as well as courteous.

Wrong!!!  A lesson well learned. Now I just say thank you and beg off,
pleading fatigue, unless I know the people, or she is a mysterious
woman, all alone.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone