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"Les Missouriables": Our Fun-Filled Friday Last Week in MO
Sun., Feb. 20. 2005 10:19am EST
Thanks to all of you who came to see us at South West Bible University in Bolivar MO (near Springfield) last Friday, February 18. We played a mini-concert at the morning chapel service for the students and a full concert at night. It was a great turnout; the place was packed with people, and they were very vocal. Special thanks to Julia Orrell, Purple Walt, Kurt Caddy, Brent Watkins and all the others at the university who worked so hard to help make the event such a success! Thanks also to Spirit FM for their help with promoting the event.
As a special Bolivar twist, because it was a rare instance when we had some free time (between the two concerts), we had invited all area ApologetiX fans to join us for a mid-afternoon dinner at the local Country Kitchen. We were pretty amazed at the turnout! It was great to meet (and eat) with so many fans.
In the time between chapel and dinner, we scoured the streets of Bolivar, searching for secondhand stores and pawn shops, led by our bass player, Keith Haynie. As many of you know, Keith loves old video games, toy trains, miniature race cars, eight-track tapes, and anything having to do with the Three Stooges, Star Trek, Godzilla, old-time studio wrestling ('60s-70's), and, especially, Christmas. If you want to talk with Keith about any of those things, please feel free to send him an email message by clicking this link: http://www.apologetix.com/bios/keith.php
Ironically, even with those diverse tastes, Keith was the last one of us to buy anything, and when he finally did, it wasn't even for himself ... just gifts for his kids! Our lead singer, J. Jackson, and lead guitarist, Karl Messner, both bought belts; our keyboard player, "Cool" Bill Hubauer, bought a book; and our drummer, Bill "Moose" Rieger, bought books for his wife and an old camera with a half-used roll of film still in it, figuring it was worth a dollar just to finish up the roll and find out what the other pictures were. A trip to the local Wal-Mart for film processing yielded only one murky-yet-too-mundane-to-be-mysterious photo from the past -- even the photos Bill took of us didn't turn out!
All in all, it was about three hours (15 band-man hours) invested in about $10 worth of used stuff. But, oh the cherished memories we now have of Bolivar, including:
- the coffee shop, where the room temperature is even hotter than the coffee
- the book store, where hardbacks are only a dollar but paperbacks are half the original cover price, and
- the music store, where we sampled the wares but the only person who bought anything was the one guy who isn't in the band, our roadie for the weekend, Micah Clausen.
Don't get us wrong; the coffee shop's beverages were fine, the bookstore had a book "Cool" Bill needed to complete a set, and the music store (Childress Music) had some of the best prices we've ever seen on instruments. But that didn't stop J. and Karl from needling Keith by questioning the "investment vs. return" value of the time spent in the secondhand stores, based on the slim pickings found there (and J. is a former flea-market vendor, who also used to have an extensive collection of baseball cards, comic books and records, so he's certainly not opposed to such establishments).
Keith had the last laugh, though. At the special fan-club dinner shortly thereafter, J. and Keith sat next to a longtime fan named Matt, who informed J. that he'd first discovered ApologetiX when he purchased a used (or shall we say "pre-owned") copy of our "Spoofernatural" CD at ... are you read for this ... a Missouri pawn shop/secondhand store!
Never one to let Keith have the last word, J.adds, "Yeah, thanks a lot, Keith ... my belt started falling apart after the concert that same night! I hope you're prepared to face your kids if their stuff does the same :)"
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