Maybe they shouldn't

This weekend besides being chilly, nasty , and depressing was made even more miserable because KET was having a fund raiser, and was featuring rock music of the 60's with a lot of the original stars singing their hits. I wish to go on record that I love KET and music is one of the greatest pasttimes in my life, but watching your college age idols as they attempt to sing their greatest hits is not a pretty sight! I watched with amazement as a group of fat , bald or balding men tried to sound like The Grass Roots, The Birds , And even Steppenwulf! What mockery was this, and who had the audacity to sing the Sacred songs like this decrepit aging bunch of old men!? Then the awesome truth befell me that this was a gathering of the real artists that I had listened to and worshiped as a wet-behind -the ears college freshman at old EKU. It didn't help that the cheering audience was an overweight, aging group of men and women that were swaying and dancing in stiff arthritic movements like they would have done back at Specks on Water Street in 1968. Could this group of glassy- eyed, post- menopausal females be the same group of babes that set my heart ablaze over 35 years ago?? Good Lord!!! 35 years ago?? My own mortality settled on my shoulders as I realized that this pitiful audience was ME! What happened to the star struck lad from Mckinney that travelled to Richmond for an education. To become the first person on either side of his family to obtain a college degree was my goal. Success is in the eyes of the beholder as Maynard tells me he knows "fools who graduated from Eastern."Maynard himself measures success as "Marrying the first girl down the street whose daddy owned a Ford Dealership."I can't argue with his yardstick for success but that's a different story. As I started college during the "Summer Of Love" I was stunned with new ideas , people, and life. South Fork didn't have sorority babes and a long legged blond gymnastic star that talked like an angel. I became tongue-tied and awkward every time she smiled with those deep dimples and crinkled those brown eyes. Mckinney High didn't have gymnastics, and this 6 foot tall goddess of svelteness and muscletone like a cheetah troubled my mind like nothing had ever done before. The same emotional overload had only previously been felt when screaming Baptist preachers had screamed about the fires of hell and coming damnation on those hot summer nights as heat lightning had played across the black country skies. I just knew the devil was reaching up to snatch me away as the katydids screamed outside. With this tall girl /goddess from Columbus I had the same intense emotional overloads to my little mind. She troubled me like the Baptist preacher but she offered no redemption. The same heat lightning flashed across the hot autumn skies and she had her own intensity and heat that scared and fascinated me , even today not totally understood. I would go to class and parade around the parking lot in Uncle Sam's green ROTC uniform with 2000 other unwilling cadets that Eastern said had to attend for four semesters. This was the year of Kent State,as we put a whole bottle of Vitalis and slicked down our hair to fit newly grown, but forbidden locks of hair under the ugly little, flat army caps. We shared 1-S deferrments, bottles of Vitalis and Brasso , and the gathering storm clouds of Southeast Asia . I would walk to class filled with dread of Corp Period Day and Sergeant Gregory as he encouraged us to sign up for Advanced ROTC , my only hope that some of the upper class babes who were Sponsors would be out there strutting with their tight little mini-skirts, shiny black high heels, and green ROTC blouses. If they weren't there I would think of the gymnast and helping her with chemistry at the John Grant Crabbe Library until 3 o'clock in the morning. That always helped with cursings from the ROTSIE lifers about unpolished brass and long hair. They hated for us to call it ROTSIE and we hated everything about them. We listened to the Temptations and the Four Tops, ROTC listened to the Star Spangled Banner. I liked a blonde tall goddess ,and they liked the idea of killing Cong. I watched Earth Day 1968 down at the Ravine and heard "Hell no ! We won't go! " for the first time. I watched Bobby Kennedy gunned down on tv, and observed both cheering and tears when Martin Luther was killed in Memphis, all the time listening to the music that later came to be called the "Sixties". Some went to Vietnam, and all came home , either in body bags or changed forever. I was a pallbearer for a friend I started first grade with, graduated high school with , and 1 year of college with. He went to Vietnam , returned in one piece, and I saw him at the drive in movie, full of plans to go back to Eastern the next semester on the GI Bill. He was killed in a car wreck the next weekend at Ft. Dix, New Jersey; not a victim of Uncle Sam's war but his own wild ways. He'll always be 21 years old. I hope he's somewhere good , and laughing at me and those aging rock stars down here as we take anti-cholestrol medicine and watch our blood pressure. I watched KET's segment on the Carpenters and renewed my bond with Karen Carpenter, the greatest female singer ever to perform,but I wish I hadn't seen those Fat Boys with pony tails and those audience grandparents making fools of themselves. I wonder what my heat lightning gymnast turned into, but not really. I wish Karen would sing "A Song For You" for her and Frankie.