From the Top Read online

  FROM THE TOP

  ALSO BY MICHAEL PERRY

  BOOKS

  Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace

  Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting

  Truck: A Love Story

  Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time

  Off Main Street: Barnstormers, Prophets and Gatemouth’s Gator

  Big Rigs, Elvis & The Grand Dragon Wayne

  Why They Killed Big Boy

  AUDIO

  The Clodhopper Monologues

  Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow

  I Got It from the Cows

  MUSIC

  Headwinded (Michael Perry and the Long Beds)

  Tiny Pilot (Michael Perry and the Long Beds)

  FROM THE TOP

  BRIEF TRANSMISSIONS FROM

  TENT SHOW RADIO

  MICHAEL PERRY

  WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS

  Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

  Publishers since 1855

  Text copyright © Michael Perry 2013

  E-book edition 2013

  Portions of this book are adapted from material previously published by HarperCollins and in Men’s Health and the Wisconsin State Journal.

  For permission to reuse material from From the Top (ISBN 978-0-87020-680-1; e-book ISBN 978-0-87020-681-8), please access www.copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of users.

  wisconsinhistory.org

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Perry, Michael, 1964-

  From the top : brief transmissions from Tent Show Radio / Michael Perry.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-87020-680-1 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-0-87020-681-8 (e-book) 1. Perry, Michael, 1964—Anecdotes. 2. Tent show radio (Radio program) I. Title.

  AC8.P577 2013

  814'.6—dc23

  2013041080

  To the founders of Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua.

  They raised this tent in every sense.

  To the volunteers.

  If you’re at a show and see someone

  in a blue vest, please thank them.

  And to the audience.

  It’s empty without you.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  A FINE PLACE TO START

  Victoria’s Secret and the Cosmos

  Teetotal

  Here We Go Again

  Re-decaffeinated

  The Big Thankful

  Avulsion Aversion

  Logger Clogs

  Ring On, Ring Off

  Walking Nowhere

  Cheaters

  Gozzled

  No Limits

  The Road

  Priorities

  Reasonableness

  PAST TENTS, PRESENT TENTS

  First Time

  Taking the Air

  Sweaty Cheese and Injured Cereal

  A World Away

  Flying above the Canvas

  Black Dog

  Canvas Rain

  THE INNER CIRCLE

  Song for My Daughters

  Pet of the Week

  Dumpster Date

  Chicken Coop Campout

  Typhoid Mary

  That Cat

  Used Car Shopping

  Firewood Friend

  Tough Granny

  The White Pine

  Christmas Tree Kids

  Neverending New Year

  A SENSE OF PITCH

  Happy Mourning Music

  Coolsville

  Steve Earle, Life Coach

  Advice from a Grammy Winner

  Guitar Girls

  Blues for Amateurs

  LOCK UP THE CHICKENS

  Asparagus

  Unfarmer

  Haute Pig Feed

  Skunk War

  E-I-IPO

  Cock-a-Doodle-Ego

  Snow Plow Trouble

  Really Free-Range Chicken

  Pathfinding

  FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS

  The Cutting Edge

  Friendly Fencing

  Truck Talk

  John Deere Funeral

  Ambulance Karma

  Tom and Arlene in Love

  In the Wake of the Wake

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  Ah, it’s great to be way up north here under the beautiful blue and pearl-gray canvas, this fine, stout tent at the foot of Mount Ashwabay, overlooking the ancient waters surrounding the Apostle Islands and just one sailful of breeze away from Chequamegon Bay.

  The performance you’re about to hear is one in a long, long tradition of singing, dancing, and storytelling performed live and in person beneath this beautiful tent. We keep ’er pitched from June until the autumn moons, and we’d be most grateful if you choose to join us; you’ll find a complete schedule at bigtop.org. We hope you join us, and if you do, when the first note rises from the stage we think you’ll understand why patrons and performers alike love to say: Big Top Chautauqua … it’s the Carnegie Hall of Tent Shows.

  For the past three years it has been my privilege to approach a microphone and recite those words as the host of Tent Show Radio, a production originating from a spacious canvas tent pitched at the base of a ski hill overlooking Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin.

  I invoke the term privilege with specific intent. The history of Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua extends back over a quarter-century now, and I am a late arrival. The tent didn’t pitch itself. It was raised by a small band of freethinking optimists, and every time I step to the microphone I keep that in mind. I offer the contents of this book not from a position of propriety but rather as a grateful guest. I’m just a guy allowed to sneak in through the backstage flap now and then.

  • • •

  The best seat in the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua tent is not for sale. I don’t say that to be snooty or snotty, I’m just letting you know the way it is. Don’t obsess over it, because the seat is located in a section theater professionals refer to as “obstructed view”—so obstructed, in fact, that you can’t even see the show from there. The spot in question is situated in a brace of old drop-down theater chairs set up along the backstage walkway between the stage and the dressing rooms.

  It’s cozy back there, and quiet. From this seat you can see the artists preparing to take the stage. Some are “one-namers”—so famous they’re recognized worldwide by their first name alone. Some should be famous but are not, and some are making their first stage appearance ever. Actors shuffle to and fro, muttering their lines. Black-clad stagehands hurry through, bound to set a last-minute prop or string a mic cord. You’ll see a musician leaning in to bring his guitar in tune, or a vocalist, her throat wrapped in scarves, hunched in a chair and cupping a mug of honey-lemon tea. Novice performers pace back and forth, checking and re-checking the dry-erase board for curtain times. Veteran performers check email or discuss health insurance deductibles. The lights are low, and everyone is getting ready for the show.

  I especially cherish this seat on those nippy nights early in the spring season or in the final few weeks before strike, because the crew keeps a pot of good coffee going just off the wings stage right, and the smell is even better because of the edge in the air. It’s enchanting to sit in that theater chair and observe this charmed space where performers take one last deep breath before heading out to the lights and applause. Sometimes they leave behind hints of their preparation: a scribbled set list, a curled and highlighted page of script, a cellphone still glowing with the last number dialed being the number h
ome.

  Then the show begins, and even from back here you can feel the electric momentum of it, the way the performer and audience agree to dive in and see what happens. Sitting in the suddenly empty backstage space you can hear little things that don’t go out over the sound system—the scuff and twist of a dancer’s slipper, the thump of a musician’s heel keeping time, the creak of the stage as an actor crosses. You can see into the tangle of cords and girders beneath the stage where an electronic light blinks, relaying some information that means something to someone, and then—and this is the best, best part of all—through a gap in the velvet skirt at the stage front come distinct sounds from the audience: an anticipatory titter, an appreciative gasp, an over-loud clapper, and sometimes, when the performer has drawn a tent full of strangers deep into the center of the moment, the fragile, expectant silence.

  • • •

  Many of these shows—even the silent bits—are recorded and put together for broadcast on Tent Show Radio. My job is to introduce the show, close the show, and during intermission—right in the middle there—have a little talk about anything I wish. Those little talks are what led to the book in your hands.

  As a writer I’m used to working in long form over a long time: essays that take weeks to finish, magazine pieces that take months, books that take years. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of words. Tent Show Radio monologues, however, have to be written once a week and must be brief enough to fit the six-minute sandwich between two thick slices of music. I’ve been typing for a while now, and it’s been a challenge to find my voice in this format. I have also renewed my respect (established twenty years ago when I worked as a newspaper stringer) for anyone—be they plumber or poet—who produces under tight deadlines. (In fact, the radio show monologues led directly to a gig writing a weekly column for the Wisconsin State Journal, an opportunity for which I am grateful and baggy-eyed.) When preparing these brief transmissions, I strive for a more conversational tone and spend less time excavating the ol’ thesaurus.

  I was invited to host Tent Show Radio in part because of my books, which I drew on for many of the early show monologues. I also often try out material on stage or in the recording studio before I commit it to print. All this is to say, you may recognize some of these stories in whole or in part.

  For the purposes of this book I have tuned a few things. For one, I’ve restored a lot of gerunds. Folksiness tends to play better on the ear than the eye, and even then I’ve been known to overdo it. For the most part I’ve also stripped out certain prefatory and referential comments that become repetitive or make little sense outside the show. That said, I’ve left in quite a few anywayses, as in, “So, anyways … ,” as that is just the way we talk around here.

  Not every Tent Show Radio monologue made the cut, and rather than run them in order of their original broadcast, I grouped them in loosely thematic clusters. You can read the book backward if you wish. Or scattershot. I’ve navigated much of my life in exactly that manner.

  I hope you enjoy the pieces. And I hope you enjoy the radio show. But most of all I hope one day you have a chance to enjoy a show inside the Big Top itself. If you have the desire and constitution, I recommend you arrive early and hike to the top of Mount Ashwabay. Don’t look back until you’re all the way up there where the skiers unload from the lift. Then turn, and you will see the picture I try to paint every single time I introduce Tent Show Radio: the tent, plopped high atop the land like an Alice in Wonderland pearl-gray-and-blue-striped mushroom, a benevolent psychedelic aberration amidst swathes of verdant green sloping to a backdrop of Great Lakes blue, the distant water dappled by a scatter of treasured islands.

  What a place to see a show.

  A FINE PLACE TO START

  One of the great freedoms of the Tent Show Radio format is that I am allowed to ramble on about whatever comes to mind: oddly shod loggers, my last cup of coffee, love and lost fingers, useful cheaters, gratitude, and guys who get gozzled.

  Also, timeless infinity.

  And Victoria’s Secret.

  In the same essay.

  VICTORIA’S SECRET AND THE COSMOS

  Lately I have been contemplating the cosmos, which is to say standing out behind the chicken coop after battening the hatches for the evening and staring at the stars. You can see the stars pretty good out back of the coop if you look down the ridge, where there’s nothing but one mercury vapor farm yard light in the distance. If you look off to the north you won’t see quite as many stars because someone built a big house off that way and put up their own faux vintage streetlights to line the driveway and then additionally surrounded the house with a row of halogens apparently uprooted from the runway at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. No sense building a place like that if folks can’t admire it all night long, I guess. And then off to the northwest, well, it’s tough to see any stars at all because the horizon is always gauzy white from the glow of the parking lot lights over at the mall. It can be odd sometimes, standing in the pig pen knowing you’re less than ten minutes from the fall collection at Victoria’s Secret.

  The lights keep coming closer, and I suppose unless the Mayans were bad at math they’ll keep coming. There’s no sense in me getting too snippy about it, since I’m part of that parade. Our house began as a log cabin built in the 1880s, and you know for a fact the first time an Ojibwe or a trapper looked up the hill and saw a lantern in the window they figured there goes the dang neighborhood, and in truth whenever we say that we’re generally right. In a small gesture of nocturnal regard, when our mercury vapor yard light burned out I left it that way, but that was less about me taking a stand against light pollution than me taking a stand against climbing ladders anywhere near power lines.

  The other reason I don’t get too snippy is because when we get snippy we tend to snip ourselves right in our own behinds. I still get letters and emails from readers who tell me how much they enjoyed the essay I wrote back in 1996 taking to task people who live in houses built atop hills, and as I read those emails and letters now in our house atop a hill, I pause to consider the view and reflect on my own inconsistencies. I didn’t build this house up here, and you can hardly call an old mismatched, slant-floored, crooked-windowed farmhouse ostentatious, but nonetheless the paradox is sufficient to tap my self-regard on the shoulder and give me that look that says, Umm, take ’er down a notch.

  So I stand out there behind the coop, and I look at the stars, and I pick out the constellations, going through them one by one: Orion … the Big Dipper … the North Star … aaand that’s it, ’cause I don’t know any more unless I fire up the iPad app. But even staring up and out at the stars in ignorance is worth my while because we can all use some cosmic recalibration now and then. And nothing calibrates your snippy, nothing tempers your self-regard, nothing tamps down your own ego like thirty seconds spent staring into a depthless universe of countless howling gas balls. In a darker form of comfort, when I lower my gaze and reencounter the encroaching lights of creeping humankind, I am re-reminded that we could pave and streetlight this entire blue ball and still not be so much as a blink against what’s out there and furthermore the universe is capable of shutting us down in an instant, in the manner of someone triggering a Cosmic Clapper. But then my heart becomes cozier as I look back over my shoulder to the glow of the mall and realize that despite all the black holes in the universe, I have managed somehow in this instant to place myself in perfect equidistance between timeless infinity and Victoria’s Secret.

  TEETOTAL

  I have never had a beer. Or a shot. Or a glass of wine. I did chug some high-octane cough syrup when I was a tot (Mom kept a bottle of stuff that tasted like crushed pine needles). And once in my youth after digging the last spoonful of chocolate syrup out of an ice cream cup at a wedding reception, I was surprised to find it tasted bitter. I sat there with my head tilted quizzically for a second only to realize as it slid down my gullet that I had just ingested demon rum. So perhaps I can’
t claim to be a total teetotal, but those few teaspoons represent the lifelong sum of my recreational boozing.

  Whenever someone offers me a drink and I decline, they invariably react in one of two ways. Some back away with eyes wide and hands spread in a “no harm, no foul” stance, saying, “Okay, that’s cool, no worries,” clearly thinking they’re about to receive a temperance lecture. More commonly, the person pauses, then—as the false realization dawns—says “Ohhh” and surreptitiously slides his own drink out of sight while giving me a meaningful nod to acknowledge my struggle for sobriety.

  Truth is, I just don’t drink.

  Once after a romantic shipwreck that had me all mopey, I accompanied my friend Al—a connoisseur of small-town bars, cigars, and cold beer—to a local tavern. As I spilled out my troubles and toyed with my water glass, Al listened patiently. I confessed that I was finally tempted to begin drinking.

  “Oh, Mikey …” said Al, in the tenderest of tones. “There would never be a better time to start!” Raising his beer and displaying it on the open palm of his other hand in the manner of a game show hostess presenting a prize, he said, “Happiness in a can, my friend, happiness in a can.”

  After reading several reports by experts touting the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, I finally turned to the one person who is an expert on me: my wife. Anneliese is a moderate drinker and nutrition fanatic. “Do you think I should start drinking?” I asked, to which she replied, “Not if you handle your drinking anything like you handle your sugar.” Recently she has been forced to hide her baking supplies (specifically, the chocolate chip bag) in the freezer beneath a fortress of pork chops. I know because that’s where I found them last Tuesday at 3 a.m. Those were harsh words from the one I love, but having weighed the available research against the limits of my willpower and all other options, I’m going to stay on the wagon. After all these years it’d be a shame to find out I’m the guy who can’t hold his booze. Nothing sadder than a fellow my age woo-hooing in a sports bar.