The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

After a grueling day of multiple airports, missed flight, midnight check-ins, we finallyu woke up in Albuquerque, some hotel off the interstate, (audible traffic in the background). So with a fairly okay night’s sleep we stumbled down to the hotel’s breakfast for some java and juice with our fellow travelers who all watched a program called, appropriately enough, Good Morning America.

From the back of the breakfast nook I couldn’t tell who were the celebrities and who were the hosts. The crawler told us the names of a movie star and TV star while we skimmed a USA Today, about half the size of the last one I read years ago.

If that’s all the news fit to print, yeow, we might as well do like the rest of our fellow sojourners, just spend our morning getting to know the temporarily famous. Some woman from the Walking Dead was chatting it up with some woman I sure didn’t know either alongside a woman from a movie I’d never seen. The sound was off or else I’d gone into involuntary audio shutdown.

In a world rampant with creepy trollers, you might ask yourself who would want to be famous. And the answer — ready made for a PhD sociology paper — is … everyone. We apparently want others to know us, at least superficially. A member of our band came to a practice telling us how she’d met a person who had never heard us live, but knew OF the South End String Band. She was visibly upset. I said offhandedly, ‘that’s cool,’ but she shook her head and replied, ‘they didn’t know who I was.’

‘Isn’t that kinda the point, that the Band got some name recognition?’ I asked. She said accusingly, “they knew who YOU were.’ What they ‘knew’, of course, didn’t matter. They didn’t know HER.

The Band had its 15 minutes, I apparently got 5 seconds, but she got nada. So she quit. The South End String Band got zero Grammy nominations once again this year, our 17th. I play the banjo. I could care less if they know my name. I’m the banjo player and we’re the South End String Band. I feel bad, but not very sorry, some of us lost our way. I hopes she’s auditioning for American Idol. If it’s even still on …

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