John Mc masters, the secret life of a choir director in Mayberry North Carolina

John Mc masters, the secret life of a choir director in Mayberry North Carolina

fiction
edward w pritchard

A work of parody. No copy right infringement is intended of characters created by Mr. Andrew Griffith.

It's difficult to be stuck in a small town in the middle of North Carolina. It's not even on the ocean. First working as a desk clerk at a very small hotel and then as the choir director. As choir director we always do traditional things and for excitement we let a farmer/moonshiner or a gas station mechanic sing solo.

The reason I started the choir director job was to meet girls. Not that there are many here to meet. The local Sheriff gets all the desirable girls here anyway. The Sheriff, what can I say about a guy who shoots rats at the dump for fun. Still he sings well and plays the guitar.

My perversion started at the try outs for the founders day pageant. I became fixated on women wearing a bonnet, you know the kind of hat proper women wore in the late 1700's. I had each woman here in town who auditioned for the best part in the pageant as the leading female citizen of our town just before the battle of Mayberry read in character by wearing an early pioneer style dress and a bonnet. It's the bonnet that has come to possess my thoughts.

Clara E. widow should have got the part for she has the most acting talent and she plays piano. I didn't pick Clara for the lead, begging off that I needed her at piano and she bought that. Miss Bee was just ordinary at tryouts so I selected her to be in charge of cooking pies and cakes.

I picked the nurse Miss Peggy as the female lead. She sings well but I picked Peggy for how she looked in that bonnet. I think about her all the time now, years later even after she left town. I didn't get anywhere with Peggy. Miss Peggy dated that Sheriff I mentioned earlier who got all the women here. Sometimes I fantasize about Miss Peggy coming by and cooking me dinner and us eating by candle light. After we would sit on the porch and sing together.

That was a long time ago. I live in a much bigger City now. I moved to Morgan town WVA for a while but now I am in Mt. Pilot, just twelve miles from Mayberry, but it seems worlds apart. Looking back now all that happened in Mayberry seems less than real to me at times.
end

Lotte Lenya and Friday nights

Lotte Lenya and Friday nights


see-beware a woman with [an alias] February 26th blog
fiction
edward w pritchard

Since I was a teenage boy I wanted to call Lotte Lenya the actress and singer every Friday night. Not because of the movie role in the Bond film but because of the German accent and how she sang Mack the Knife in German in the original recording for the Three Penny Opera.

She was very old before I discovered her back in the 1960's and it wasn't her as an old woman that I wanted to know but her as a young girl in Vienna, trying to break in as an actress, and just getting that breakout role.

I never made it to Vienna and by the time I made it to New York City Lotte Lenya was long gone. Alas we missed each other; still it would have been nice to know a mysterious woman with an alias, especially one who sang Mack the Knife in German or Pirate Jenny conspiratorially.