Alison

Thursday night

Alison Krauss was giving me a ride in her car. I was in the front passenger seat, and was talking about her career, but in the third person, as if she wasn't there. I said, "I like Alison Krauss'es music, but I love her early records. She was a child prodigy. Have you heard her album 'I've Got That Old Feeling'? She really belts out her vocals on that one."

Eventually we got to her home, which was next door to mine. My wife joined us there for dinner, and we had a nice time.

Later, I was at work (at my former job in Nashville), and I was talking to my boss, Ken P. I bragged, "Alison Krauss helped us move into our house. We piled a bunch of our stuff into her yellow Volkswagen Beetle."

*****

Alison Krauss does live in Nashville, and I've seen her a few times, but don't know her, and she doesn't live next door. The bits about the dinner, the move and the VW are all bogus.

Ken P. was my boss for a short time. He was a big music fan, but was also a celebrity hound and unabashed name-dropper. Sometimes he and I got into a game of celebrity one-upmanship, trying to impress each other with the concerts we'd seen, or musicians we'd met. It all seems rather silly and pathetic now. I didn't like those aspects of his personality, and thought to myself that it was time to grow up and change those aspects of mine.

Chasing celebrities, getting autographs and bragging about it is a young person's game, anyway. I still have a great deal of respect for some musicians, but nowadays I try to see them as regular people with talent as opposed to superheroes or something. It probably helps that in Nashville it's not considered cool to bug famous people -- instead, the thing to do is to let them be.

The rather amusing postscript to this story is that Ken ended up getting a pretty important newspaper job, which means that he's famous now -- in some circles, anyway. So, when I type up my September Dream Blog Roundup, do I list him as a coworker/acquaintance, or as a celeb?