Making Friends
It’s safe to say that your favorite florist Scott Hasty and yours truly are a part of that group that “never met a stranger.”
We got to share interesting stories this week of our new friends.
Hasty, “Big Money” as he’s known at the Black Jack table, was in Vegas. He gets on the elevator and sees a young man checking his clothes and his hair in the mirror.
Scott strikes up a conversation and the man tells him he just finished playing in an arena league football game. They carry on the conversation and Scott asked him where he was from and he said a place called Orange, Texas. Scott grabbed him by the shoulders, pushed him against the elevator wall and said, “I grew up in Roselawn!” And the man said, “I was raised on Edgemont.” Which if you don’t know is basically the next neighborhood over.
The man was Morris Joseph, who was a star on both sides of the ball during the WOS Mustangs four year run to State. He played for Memphis and Auburn in college. He’s now playing for the Bay Area (CA) Panthers of the Indoor Football League. The two exchanged phone numbers and have already texted each other.
I attended the CMA Fest in Nashville a couple of weeks ago and each of the four nights ended in Nissan Stadium for the headliner concerts. I realized the young Japanese woman sitting next to me was by herself so I struck up a conversation with her in between acts.
Her English was okay and my ears are old so we had to repeat ourselves many times but what I learned is that she flew by herself from Tokyo, to Vancouver, and then to Nashville, to listen to country music. Tokyo is not exactly a country music mecca although she said there are several country music karaoke bars but country artists don’t play there. So how did some become a country music fan?
Ries Nakashima spent a year as a foreign exchange student at Ole Miss and at the time country music artist Brett Young was going to school there and playing the area bars and I think she had a little bit of a crush. Brett was in Nashville performing and doing some interviews and she had her phone programmed for everywhere he was going to be. Pretty sure she was too nice to be a stalker…
Moving on, the next night her seat was empty for the first two acts and I was genuinely concerned because she was there all alone and she had shown me her detailed daily schedule. But she finally came down the aisle and we had a big hug like we had known each other a long time. She was late because one of the other shows ran late. After the fourth and final night she was visibly upset that the festival was over and she was going home the next morning. Music, especially country music and live performances, brings so many emotions and even physical responses.
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Speaking of…it was an emotional time for Roy Mazzagate of Orange who was in Nashville this week to cross something big off of his bucket list.
Roy, a singer songwriter, set a goal of singing at the historic Blue Bird Cafe where many stars and songwriters were discovered. Let’s start with Garth Brooks and Taylor Swift and add names like Vince Gill, Kathy Mattea, Dierks Bentley, Keith Urban, and Lady Antebellum.
Like an old school radio contest, you have to be one of 25 who call during a short period on a Monday and show up three hours early and I think there’s a secret handshake involved. Well Roy passed and hit’em with a tear jerker he wrote called “Regrets at a funeral.” Congrats Roy!
Sorry to hear about the passing of Robert Carpenter. Robert was a singer and would visit us occasionally at KOGT. We played several of his songs. Ray Price’s “These shoes keep walking back to you” was one of my favorites.
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Congrats to Wes Logan who won the Bassmaster Elite event last weekend at Lake Tenkiller in Oklahoma. He was in second going into the final day and won the $100 grand by two ounces. Two ounces! To make this column scientific I went around the house looking for something that was two ounces and I found it. He won the event by one chocolate covered strawberry. And what do you get for second (and it’s a shame)….$20,000. An $80K drop between 1-2. And Angie ate all the strawberries.
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Watched an interview with Carthage Head Football Coach Scott Surratt and he brought up a name from the past. When asked how hard it is to schedule non-district games after winning a state title, Surratt of course said, “Very hard. Almost impossible.” Then he said, “But I remember what my high school coach Rodney Russell told me. He said to quit my griping. It could be the other way around and everyone is calling me for a game.” Russell, who I believe spelled his name Rhodney, coached the LCM Bears for three seasons.
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I left you hanging last week as we were talking about people who were instrumental in our hurricane coverage in Rita. I couldn’t remember the young mans name and I haven’t seen him since that day. Bill Dixon to the rescue. Thanks Bill.
Back in 2005 if you had a website you could only have so many people on the site at one time before it would crash. Most today are unlimited. Well we were getting shutdown by the number of people on this site and that we were also uploading a lot of photos. I was put in touch with computer whiz Matt Arnold from Bridge City who had evacuated. He drove down one day, got on the phone with the internet powers that be, explained our situation and then made the changes to get us flying at top speed. It was a really big behind the scenes deal. Thanks again Matt. Bill says he now lives in Leander, Tx and is doing well.
Have a great rest of the week everyone!
-Gary Stelly-
gstelly66@gmail.com
Volume 1 No. 21
The Juice is a weekly column where Gary Stelly discusses things that happened the past week and mixes it with 40 years of being involved in the Orange County community. (If we think of a better way to explain it we’ll change it) You can also check out his podcast by clicking on the Behind the Mic banner on the KOGT.com front page.
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