Aloha also means Goodbye

March 3, 1979.  Cindy, my bride of less than two years kissed me for good luck as I ventured out into the streets of Gainesville, Florida to tackle my very first marathon.

December 9, 2012.  Cindy, my wife of over 35 years gave me a congratulatory kiss moments after I crossed the finish line in Honolulu, Hawaii as I finished my 200^th marathon.

It’s been a great run, literally and figuratively.  I’ve been fortunate to have run the fabled Boston Marathon twelve times.  I’ve run through the Brandenburg Gate on my way to finishing the Berlin Marathon.  I’ve run my all-time favorite marathon, the Atlanta Marathon (the Thanksgiving Day version; sadly, it no longer exists) 27 times.  I feel blessed to have completed every marathon I’ve ever started.  I ran 10 Shamrock Marathons (Virginia Beach, Virginia), as much a reason to visit my parents as a reason to run a marathon.  I was Master’s Champion at the Vulcan Marathon (Birmingham, Alabama).  Twice.  I’ve lost track of how many inaugural marathons I’ve run (some of them didn’t survive, while others have flourished).  I ran New York City and Chicago when the field was only (only!) 20,000 runners.

I set my sights on the 2012 Honolulu Marathon as my 200^th marathon as early as 2010.  In late 2011 I realized I would have to run an aggressive schedule of marathons in 2012 in order to complete #200 on December 9.  To begin the year I ran 11 marathons in a 13-week window.  I optimistically registered for the Honolulu Marathon early in the year, and was lucky enough to get an early-bird registration of only $40.  The trip to Honolulu was going to be a surprise 35-year wedding anniversary present (which she would find out about on June 18) for Cindy and I.  Virtually everyone I knew was aware of the impending trip; in fact I wrote about it in my running club’s quarterly newsletter, a monthly on-line column I write for a running magazine and on my running club’s Facebook site.  In all instances I would mention ‘it’s a surprise wedding anniversary trip for Cindy so don’t mention it.’  No one did.   

‘But Scott, you said it was going to be a surprise!  What if Cindy read about it and found out?’

I appreciate your concern, but if there’s one thing I’ve come to realize it’s that Cindy doesn’t read much of what I write.  Granted, she did read my first book…two-and-a-half years after it was published.  But I knew there was no way she would read anything I wrote in 2012 in 2012.   I was absolutely right.  When Cindy learned about the trip on our anniversary it came as a complete surprise, although in my circle of friends it had been common knowledge for well over six months. 

You may be wondering why I chose Honolulu for #200?  My dad, an officer in the U.S. Navy was stationed in Pearl Harbor from 1967 – 1970, and in all honesty it was the best assignment my dad—and our family ever had.  I learned to play golf in Hawaii (thank you Navy-Marine Golf Course).  I was in the inaugural class of Moanalua Intermediate School in Hawaii (go Mustangs!).  Our family lived in the greatest military housing in Hawaii (Radford Terrace).  Hawaii 5-0 (the Jack Lord version) and Tora! Tora! Tora! were filmed in Hawaii while we were stationed there.  I learned to walk barefoot—everywhere and eat Li Hing Mui (salty dried plums soaked in salt, sugar and licorice—pretty frightening, huh?) in Hawaii.  I kissed a girl for the very first time in Hawaii.

So over 42 years later I returned to the scene of the best assignment our family ever had.  The Thursday before the race Cindy and I endured a 10-hour flight (thankfully, direct from Atlanta to Honolulu) and upon landing on the island of Oahu Cindy immediately looked for a restroom in the terminal.  I told her to look for a door with ‘wahine’ (‘woman’ in Hawaiian) on it.  Oddly, I hadn’t spoken or even remotely thought of that word in 42 years.

We then rented our Ford Mustang (a red convertible!) and drove in Honolulu rush hour traffic (wow—it wasn’t anything like that 42 years ago!) to our hotel.  The next morning (Friday) we went to the Honolulu Marathon Expo, which was like any other with one major difference: virtually everyone was Japanese.  I was a definite and dare I say distinct minority.  Cindy decided to enter the 10K race walk to be held in conjunction with the marathon.  Her entry fee?  $70!  (So much for the money-saving early-bird marathon registration!)  I figured it was worth it: Cindy would enjoy a walking tour of Waikiki and since both our races shared the same finish line, she would be there to see me as I completed marathon #200.

We went to the pre-race luau that night where—for the ‘bargain’ early-bird fee of $54 each—had a meal eerily reminiscent of the lunches I ate at Moanalua Intermediate many years ago.  The entertainment?  The good news: It was exactly what the audience wanted.  The bad news: The audience was predominately Japanese, and their idea and my idea of entertainment are worlds apart.  (The host?  Remember the ‘lounge lizard’ entertainer Bill Murray portrayed on the old Saturday Night Lives?   His brother.)

After the luau we stayed on the beach to watch the Pearl Harbor Memorial Parade (it happened to be December 7, which I haven’t mentioned yet).  The highlight of the parade was seeing the Pearl Harbor survivors—all of them heroes and all of them beaming with pride.  The lowlight?  A Japanese woman in her 40’s asking me what the parade was for.  Me: To honor Pearl Harbor.  Her: What happened at Pearl Harbor.  Me: It was attacked on this day 71 years ago.  Her:  Attacked?  By whom? (At least her grammar was good.)  Me: The Japanese!  (I couldn’t help it; I stayed PC as long as I could.)

Saturday we took a drive to the north shore and encountered considerable traffic on the two-lane as there was a surfing competition going on at the infamous Banzai Pipeline.  We had a great lunch at the artsy-hippie village of Haleiwa, vowing to return later during our vacation when we had more time (translation: when I didn’t have to get back to the hotel to rest up for the marathon).  Once we got back to the room, I laid out my running gear and noticed the screen of my chronograph was blank; the battery had apparently died.  Cindy and I made a quick trip to a drug store at the Ala Moana Mall where I bought a battery and borrowed a watch tool (from the counter clerk) and a pair of reading glasses (right off the rack) and replaced the battery.  The chronograph was as good as new, and after setting a 3:00 a.m. wake-up call (the race would start at 5:00 a.m. the next morning), I was fast asleep by 9:00 p.m.  Cindy wasn’t far behind.

Race morning I walked to the starting line (a mere 1/3 mile from our hotel) where I lined up in the middle of the ‘three-to-four hour’ corral.  A fantastic fireworks display began minutes before the start of the race; in fact the fireworks were still lighting up the sky (and waking up the locals and any tourists who weren’t in town to run, which fortunately for the local Tourism Board couldn’t have been very many) when the marathon began.  As I was watched the fireworks I felt a lump in my throat: partially because I knew how much Cindy enjoyed fireworks (and they really were amazing) and she was missing them as her race walk didn’t start until 5:25 and partially because I knew it was signaling the start of my very last marathon.  Yes, #200 was going to be my finale.  My swan song.  My farewell.  Sayonora (for my Japanese readers).  Aloha.

I started my chronograph as I crossed the starting line and spent the next hour or so dodging other runners, and by ‘other runners’ I mean a good many of the Japanese runners who were stopping here, there and literally everywhere to take photographs of the Christmas lights of Waikiki Beach, the historic landmarks of Honolulu and last but not least of each other.  The aid stations posed another problem: in the dark the white paper cups discarded on the road looked a lot like the white traffic reflectors, so I made every humanly effort I could muster to avoid stepping on anything white.  All I wanted from this marathon was to finish: time was irrelevant.  I couldn’t afford to twist an ankle, trip and fall or entangle myself with another runner—anything that would jeopardize me finding that pot of gold at the end of my final 26.2-mile long rainbow.

Once daylight arrived (two hours into the race) I found the course much easier to navigate.  I could see the reflectors in the road.  The crowd had thinned out.  The temperature had only risen seven or eight degrees (keep in mind, however that the temperature at the start of the race was 70 degrees so by now things were getting pretty toasty).  With every nine (Ten?  Eleven?) minutes another mile could be checked off. 

Then the unthinkable happened.  I saw a life-size Scooby-Doo (who happens to star in my grandson Krischan’s FAVORITE cartoon) and I knew I just had to have a photo of the two of us.   So on the only out-and-back section of the entire course I cut through the crowd running in the opposite direction (Ruh Roh), took my cell phone out of my waistband (I would later use it to call Cindy when I had one mile left in the marathon) and asked an obliging elderly Japanese gentleman if he would take a photo of my pal Scooby and I (if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em).  This two-minute drama made me realize two things: (1) I am no longer in any way, shape or form the serious marathoner I used to be and (2) I am now more a grandfather than I am a runner.  Not that there’s anything wrong with either or those revelations.

Almost four-and-a-half hours after the firework display signaling the start of the marathon, I had one mile left and called Cindy.  She would be on the right side of the road just before the finish line…which is exactly where I later found her as I was duking it out with a Japanese man dressed in a white swan costume, complete with a two-foot long neck with a tiny swan head on top.

As I approached the finish line I wondered why I wasn’t getting a lump in my throat…or sensing that special feeling of pride and accomplishment I normally have when I’m about to finish a marathon.  The only thing I felt was anxious; anxious to get it over with.

After completing lifetime marathon #200 (the time is totally irrelevant; better to focus on the 100% marathon completion rate!) I met up with Cindy who gave me a congratulatory hug and kiss and asked me how it felt to finish my final marathon.  I told her two things: I was relieved to be at the end of my 34-year journey, and embarrassed I had been duking it out with a guy dressed as a swan for the final eight miles of it.  Cindy said I would be more embarrassed if I had seen some of the other runners who finished in front of me.

Sometimes fate has a funny way of telling you when your time is up.

Less than 30 minutes after finishing the Honolulu Marathon, the face on my chronograph was blank once again.

Like I said, sometimes fate has a funny way of telling you when your time is up.

Marathons are no longer fun.  I can no longer run marathons without pain.  Sure, in the old days I didn’t mind some good old-fashioned self-inflicted pain—the kind of pain you can only get from pushing yourself to your anaerobic threshold.  But the kind of pain I had been experiencing in marathons wasn’t that kind of pain.   It was the kind of pain that was telling me I shouldn’t be running 26.2 miles any more.  Truth be known I knew it over a year ago, but I’ve always been good at lying to myself as well as being a ‘numbers guy’ and I found 200 to be a nice round number.  And from what I can tell, my body and (believe it or not) my mind had been telling me that 200 would signal the end of the (marathon) road.  And I’m good with that.

For the rest of the week we enjoyed the sights and sounds of Oahu.  Pearl Harbor.  Punchbowl Cemetery.  Diamondhead.  We celebrated my 58^th birthday the day after the marathon.  We returned to Haleiwa (we had more time to spend this time) and the Banzai Pipeline (when there was no surfing competition).  We drove to the northeast side of the island and watched the windsurfers at Kane’ohe Bay.  We took a trip to the Navy-Marine Golf Course, Moanalua Intermediate and Radford Terrace—for old times’ sake.  We took a dolphin-watching/snorkeling cruise along the southwestern shores of Oahu.  We ate Li Hing Mui seeds (yes, we).   We celebrated 35 years of marriage.  We also celebrated the end of my 34-year marathon career.

March 3, 1979.  Cindy, my bride of less than two years kissed me for good luck as I ventured out into the streets of Gainesville, Florida to tackle my very first marathon.

December 9, 2012.  Cindy, my wife of over 35 years gave me a congratulatory kiss moments after I crossed the finish line in Honolulu, Hawaii as I finished my 200^th marathon.

It was only fitting that Cindy—who has been with me every step of the way, was there for the first and last steps of my marathon career.

Sometimes fate has just the right way of telling you when your time is up.

No Country for Old Men

For the past eight years Cindy and I have become ‘regulars’ on the music trivia scene.  We were originally recruited by the ‘Rockin’ B’s’ and played under that name until the woman who owned the Rockin’ B, a local antique store stopped playing with us.  We played with the team name ‘Chicago’ for a few weeks, the result of a Chicago Greatest Hits CD that wouldn’t eject or stop playing on the CD player in my car.  I was to the point that hearing 25 or 6 to 4 caused involuntarily convulsions; flip side is I rarely get any of Chicago’s songs wrong anymore.  Then we tried the name ‘That’s What She Said’ for a while because we got a kick out of hearing the music trivia host say it when she read out each team’s score following every round of songs.  One week we used the name ‘In First Place’ because it was hilarious watching the confusion on the faces of everyone else when the scores were announced:  ‘In third place, the Usual Suspects.  In second place, In First Place.  In first place, the Mufftones.’   I crack myself up sometimes.

The game is pretty simple.  A song is played, and teams have to come up with the title of the song, the artist and the year it was released (plus or minus one year).  Over the years I have religiously studied the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, ‘80’s and ‘90’s stations on satellite radio, as all three (title, artist, year) are displayed on the radio screen as the song is playing.  On long drives—to Gainesville, Florida for a Gator football game, for example, I can get in quite a bit of ‘studying’ done along the way. 

The team name we’ve been using the past five years is ‘Fried Mushrooms.’   I wasn’t there the night this particular name was selected, but it stuck.  I don’t particularly care for the name so I never took the time to ask where it came from.  Besides, I abbreviate our team name on the answer sheet to ‘FM,’ which sounds a whole lot cooler than ‘Fried Mushrooms,’ although the music trivia host insists on calling us by our full (albeit dumb and inappropriate, for that matter since none of us has ever ordered any fried mushrooms in the eight years we’ve been playing) name.

Our team has quite a few members.  The most we ever had were 23, although the usual number hovers around 10 or 11.  We’ve also played with as few as three.  Regardless of how many are playing on any given night, the prizes are always the same: A $30 gift card to the host restaurant for the first place team, $20 for second place and $10 for third.  So on the night we had 23 players, our first place award equated to approximately $1.30 each, not even enough to cover our gratuities for the evening.  So what we do is accumulate our winnings until we have a sum large enough to pay for the entire team’s meal for a predetermined night that all of the regulars will be playing.  It’s worked out quite well over the years, and if I had to guess I’d say right now we have almost $250 in gift cards that we’ve won in the past few months.

I’d like to introduce you to some of the regulars of the Fried Mushrooms:

·      Ginger, one of the original Rockin’ B’s.  Her specialty is novelty songs, late ‘70’s and assorted pop music she has on her iPod that she listens to during her workouts.  Standout moment: Puttin’ on the Ritz was the song being played.  We knew the title and the year but none of us could come up with the artist.  Ginger went to the restroom while the song was playing so she could think.  Two minutes later she came barreling out of the restroom running towards our table and it was all she could do to refrain from shouting out ‘Taco’ before she leaned over and whispered it to all of us.  From that point forward when anyone else on the team has a similar revelation, we call it a ‘Taco Moment.’

·      Allen’s specialty is country music and songs in the 1978 to 1982 window.  I’ve come to recognize Allen’s ‘tell’ sign that he knows the correct answer: He scrunches up his face, rolls his eyes up to the ceiling to think, pauses for three or four seconds and then tells us his guess that I’ve come to know is not a guess but in fact the correct answer.  Also, if he puts his stamp of 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 or 1982 on a song, it’s a lock.  Taco Moment: Into the Night by Benny Mardones (1980).

·      Tim’s specialty is hair metal, southern rock, songs of the late ‘80’s and songs that may or may not have been popular in strip clubs in the early 2000’s (Tim is a man of mystery, he is).  Tim looks exactly like a miniature Travis Tritt and once correctly identified one of his songs, but other than that he’s like me: Tim doesn’t know hardly any country music.  Taco Moment: Summertime Girls by Y and T (1984) as well as any other music by obscure hair metal bands (Kix, anyone?).

·      Mark is another member of the former Rockin’ B’s whose specialty is late ‘70’s, early-to-mid ‘80’s and identifying individual members of the more notable bands of the last four decades that comes in handy when the host asks for that sort of information.  Taco Moment: Driver’s Seat by Sniff ‘n the Tears (1979).

·      Tracey, Mark’s wife is another member of the former Rockin B’s.  Her specialty is mid-to-late ‘80’s and country.  When a song from the mid-to-late ‘80’s is played, Tracey pulls out a pen and a napkin and starts writing a series of numbers that all I can figure is some sort of formula leading her to ‘discovering’ the year the song was released.  Taco Moment: What I Am by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians (1989).        

·      Cindy’s specialty is ‘70’s and to a lesser extent ‘60’s.  Cindy doesn’t have any special superpowers, tricks up her sleeve or what-have-you.  She either knows it or she doesn’t.  Wait, let me amend that by saying she is able to tell if a song is NOT from the ‘70’s, that on occasion comes in handy for the rest of us.  Taco Moment: Best of My Love by The Emotions (1977).

·      Dan, Mark’s brother (making him Tracey’s brother-in-law) is a county sheriff and it gives our team additional cred with he walks in with his firearm in plain sight.  His specialty is country and the occasional novelty song no one else seems to know.  Taco Moment: Lovefool by The Cardigans (1996). 

·      Laura is our newest member, and she does particularly well with country, hits of the last 15 years and identifying what movies songs were featured in (a skill that occasionally comes in very handy).  Taco Moment: Identifying some song that was featured in some movie, neither of which I can remember but appreciate her knowing because I sure as h*ll didn’t. 

·      Karen is the sister of Mark and Dan.  Her area of expertise is country, the mid-‘70’s and periodically pulling the answer to the ‘final jeopardy’ style question at the end of the game out of her a**.  Taco Moment: Identifying the youngest woman ever to win a Grammy (LeAnn Rimes). 

·      Kenzie is the daughter of Mark and Tracey.  She was six when our team was formed and used to love running our answers up to the host; now she’s 14 and we take the answer up ourselves.  Taco Moments: Identifying songs by Taylor Swift.  

·      ‘The Mom’s,’ Les and Betty (mother to Tracey/grandmother to Kenzie and mother to Mark/Dan/Karen, respectively).  Their collective specialty is songs from the late ‘50’s and early ’60’s.  Taco Moment: Filling in the blank for songs the team knows the title and artist but has no clue about the year it was released.  Taco Moments: A whole slew of songs from 1955 through 1962.

·      My specialty is late ‘60’s, ‘70’s, songs from the ‘80’s that had an accompanying music video on MTV and early ‘90’s (excluding boy band songs).  Achilles Heel: Country.  One night I wrote our team name down as ‘No Country for Old Men.’  I wasn’t kidding.  I have to add that not once, twice but three times our team had trouble identifying the artist of a country song and all three times I suggested it was Confederate Railroad (I was guessing each time.).  I was right all three times; I only regret it took them three times to believe me.  Taco Moment: Identifying Vangelis as the artist of the theme from Chariots of Fire (I wasn’t sure if I was making up a word—Vangelis—or if deep down I knew it was correct).

Over the years the Fried Mushrooms have won our fair share of competitions, including one night when we missed the year of release by… forty-three years!!!   When the song played it sounded to me like a young Aretha Franklin, so we (meaning ‘I’) went with 1965 as the year of release.  The song (Mercy) was actually by a new artist named Duffy.  The year of release was actually 2008.  In my defense, I ask that you play the song sometime; then tell me it doesn’t sound like a young Aretha Franklin.         

It would be difficult to miss the year of release by 43 years, but if I was in charge of identifying it for a country song I’m sure I could do worse.    

No Country for Old Men

For the past eight years Cindy and I have become ‘regulars’ on the music trivia scene.  We were originally recruited by the ‘Rockin’ B’s’ and played under that name until the woman who owned the Rockin’ B, a local antique store stopped playing with us.  We played with the team name ‘Chicago’ for a few weeks, the result of a Chicago Greatest Hits CD that wouldn’t eject or stop playing on the CD player in my car.  I was to the point that hearing 25 or 6 to 4 caused involuntarily convulsions; flip side is I rarely get any of Chicago’s songs wrong anymore.  Then we tried the name ‘That’s What She Said’ for a while because we got a kick out of hearing the music trivia host say it when she read out each team’s score following every round of songs.  One week we used the name ‘In First Place’ because it was hilarious watching the confusion on the faces of everyone else when the scores were announced:  ‘In third place, the Usual Suspects.  In second place, In First Place.  In first place, the Mufftones.’   I crack myself up sometimes.

The game is pretty simple.  A song is played, and teams have to come up with the title of the song, the artist and the year it was released (plus or minus one year).  Over the years I have religiously studied the ‘60’s, ‘70’s, ‘80’s and ‘90’s stations on satellite radio, as all three (title, artist, year) is displayed on the radio screen as the song is playing.  On long drives—to Gainesville, Florida for a Gator football game, for example, I can get in quite a bit of ‘studying’ done along the way. 

The team name we’ve been using the past five years is ‘Fried Mushrooms.’   I wasn’t there the night this particular name was selected, but it stuck.  I don’t particularly care for the name so I never took the time to ask where it came from.  Besides, I appreciate our team name on the answer sheet to ‘FM,’ which sounds a whole lot cooler than ‘Fried Mushrooms,’ although the music trivia host insists on calling us by our full (albeit dumb and inappropriate, for that matter since none of us has ever ordered any fried mushrooms in the eight years we’ve been playing) name.

Our team has quite a few members.  The most we ever had were 23, although the usual number hovers around 10 or 11.  We’ve also played with as few as three.  Regardless of how many are playing on any given night, the prizes are always the same: A $30 gift card to the host restaurant for the first place team, $20 for second place and $10 for third.  So on the night we had 23 players, our first place award equated to approximately $1.30 each, not even enough to cover our gratuities for the evening.  So what we do is accumulate our winnings until we have a sum large enough to pay for the entire team’s meal for a predetermined night that all of the regulars will be playing.  It’s worked out quite well over the years, and if I had to guess I’d say right now we have almost $250 in gift cards that we’ve won in the past few months.

I’d like to introduce you to some of the regulars of the Fried Mushrooms:

·      Ginger, one of the original Rockin’ B’s.  Her specialty is novelty songs, late ‘70’s and assorted pop music she has on her iPod that she listens to during her workouts.  Standout moment: Puttin’ on the Ritz was the song being played.  We knew the title and the year but none of us could come up with the artist.  Ginger went to the restroom while the song was playing so she could think.  Two minutes later she came barreling out of the restroom running towards our table and it was all she could do to refrain from shouting out ‘Taco’ before she leaned over and whispered it to all of us.  From that point forward when anyone else on the team has a similar revelation, we call it a ‘Taco Moment.’

·      Allen’s specialty is country music and songs in the 1978 to 1982 window.  I’ve come to recognize Allen’s ‘tell’ sign that he knows the correct answer: He scrunches up his face, rolls his eyes up to the ceiling to think, pauses for three or four seconds and then tells us his guess that I’ve come to know is not a guess but in fact the correct answer.  Also, if he puts his stamp of 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981 or 1982 on a song, it’s a lock.  Taco Moment: Into the Night by Benny Mardones (1980).

·      Tim’s specialty is hair metal, southern rock, songs of the late ‘80’s and songs that may or may not have been popular in strip clubs in the early 2000’s (Tim is a man of mystery, he is).  Tim looks exactly like a miniature Travis Tritt and once correctly identified one of his songs, but other than that he’s like me: Tim doesn’t know hardly any country music.  Taco Moment: Summertime Girls by Y and T (1984) as well as any other music by obscure hair metal bands (Kix, anyone?).

·      Mark is another member of the former Rockin’ B’s whose specialty is late ‘70’s, early-to-mid ‘80’s and identifying individual members of the more notable bands of the last four decades that comes in handy when the host asks for that sort of information.  Taco Moment: Driver’s Seat by Sniff ‘n the Tears (1979).

·      Tracey, Mark’s wife is another member of the former Rockin B’s.  Her specialty is mid-to-late ‘80’s and country.  When a song from the mid-to-late ‘80’s is played, Tracey pulls out a pen and a napkin and starts writing a series of numbers that all I can figure is some sort of formula leading her to ‘discovering’ the year the song was released.  Taco Moment: What I Am by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians (1989).        

·      Cindy’s specialty is ‘70’s and to a lesser extent ‘60’s.  Cindy doesn’t have any special superpowers, tricks up her sleeve or what-have-you.  She either knows it or she doesn’t.  Wait, let me amend that by saying she is able to tell if a song is NOT from the ‘70’s, that on occasion comes in handy for the rest of us.  Taco Moment: Best of My Love by The Emotions (1977).

·      Dan, Mark’s brother (making him Tracey’s brother-in-law) is a county sheriff and it gives our team additional cred with he walks in with his firearm in plain sight.  His specialty is country and the occasional novelty song no one else seems to know.  Taco Moment: Lovefool by The Cardigans (1996). 

·      Laura is our newest member, and she does particularly well with country, hits of the last 15 years and identifying what movies songs were featured in (a skill that occasionally comes in very handy).  Taco Moment: Identifying some song that was featured in some movie, neither of which I can remember but appreciate her knowing because I sure as h*ll didn’t. 

·      Karen is the sister of Mark and Dan.  Her area of expertise is country, the mid-‘70’s and periodically pulling the answer to the ‘final jeopardy’ style question at the end of the game out of her a**.  Taco Moment: Identifying the youngest woman ever to win a Grammy (LeAnn Rimes). 

·      Kenzie is the daughter of Mark and Tracey.  She was six when our team was formed and used to love running our answers up to the host; now she’s 14 and we take the answer up ourselves.  Taco Moments: Identifying songs by Taylor Swift.  

·      ‘The Mom’s,’ Les and Betty (mother to Tracey/grandmother to Kenzie and mother to Mark/Dan/Karen, respectively).  Their collective specialty is songs from the late ‘50’s and early ’60’s.  Taco Moment: Filling in the blank for songs the team knows the title and artist but has no clue about the year it was released.  Taco Moments: A whole slew of songs from 1955 through 1962.

·      My specialty is late ‘60’s, ‘70’s, songs from the ‘80’s that had an accompanying music video on MTV and early ‘90’s (excluding boy band songs).  Achilles Heel: Country.  One night I wrote our team name down as ‘No Country for Old Men.’  I wasn’t kidding.  I have to add that not once, twice but three times our team had trouble identifying the artist of a country song and all three times I suggested it was Confederate Railroad (I was guessing each time.).  I was right all three times; I only regret it took them three times to believe me.  Taco Moment: Identifying Vangelis as the artist of the theme from Chariots of Fire (I wasn’t sure if I was making up a word—Vangelis—or if deep down I knew it was correct).

Over the years the Fried Mushrooms have won our fair share of competitions, including one night when we missed the year of release by… forty-three years!!!   When the song played it sounded to me like a young Aretha Franklin, so we (meaning ‘I’) went with 1965 as the year of release.  The song (Mercy) was actually by a new artist named Duffy.  The year of release was actually 2008.  In my defense, I ask that you play the song sometime; then tell me it doesn’t sound like a young Aretha Franklin.         

It would be difficult to miss the year of release by 43 years, but if I was in charge of identifying it for a country song I’m sure I could do worse.