A staple of feature news, the “slice of life from the pound” story is almost always affecting and interesting, without being overtly manipulative.
This story originally appeared in The Potomac News.
The calico is clearly starved for attention. The cat meows loudly, as she prowls back and forth, rubbing her face on objects and reaching out with her paw toward the people nearby, trying to get a little physical affection.
But affection is scarce and more precious than the “guest” of the Manassas-Manassas Park Animal Shelter knows. There’s a 50-50 chance that the rest of this cat’s life can be measured in weeks, instead of years.
Fully half the animals in the shelter will find homes, old or new.
That’s a great deal better than the national average of a mere one animal in five surviving its shelter stay. Still, about 500 pets are put to sleep each year at the Liberia Avenue facility, run by the Morganna Animal Clinic, under contract to the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park.
Shelter manager Kim Waugh has seen and heard it all.
One Manassas man didn’t want to spay his dog, because he felt “she liked to breed,” so twice a year for a number of years, he’d come by with a litter of puppies.
Other people drop their pets off, instead of looking for new homes for them.
“We get a lot of bizarre reasons. You look them in the eyes and know they’re lying,” Waugh said. “You’d like them to have to hold the animal when they’re put to sleep. It’s just so convenient to drop the animal off.”
There are other routes pet owners can take to find new homes for their animals, routes that don’t have a 50 percent (or higher) mortality rate. There are newspaper classified ads, ads on cable television teletext channels and three-by-five cards on bulletin boards.
“Most of the people you ask say ‘look, I’m moving tomorrow,'” Waugh said.
Most of the animals that shelter workers see are let out of the house by owners who expect the pets to return home around dinner time. But the animals are, as the shelter staff says “intact,” and go a-roamin’, looking for love.
“It’d be nice to be out of a job,” Waugh said. Then she reconsidered. “We’d still have a few.”
Those few other strays are “indoor” pets who somehow get out or pets who have grown up and are abandoned once they leave the adorable stage. Abandoning a pet, incidentally, is against state law.
“We get a lot of people who adopt a little puppy and they forget they’ll grow up to be a big dog,” Waugh said.
Because of that, the shelter won’t let people take animals home as gifts.
The shelter is filled with puppies and kittens in the warmer months, when amorous animals are most able to roam. In August and September, Waugh says, the place is “inundated with kittens.”
“We end up with gazoodles of cats. Gazoodles. We have a lot [that] end up trapped,” she said.
In the winter, most of the animals the shelter receives are “problem” animals, including feral cats — the grown-up, undomesticated kittens of unfixed cats wandering free — and biting dogs.
Animals that do have collars and accurate identification get sent home quickly. Unfortunately, Waugh said, “the ones that we usually see … [have] a collar with no identification on it.”
Most pets with collars are wearing flea collars (without phone numbers written on them) or choke chains. Only about one pet in 50 is wearing an I.D. tag, and many of those are out of date.
Waugh doesn’t understand owners who don’t tag their pets: “It’s a real simple thing to do.”
Tattoos are only effective as a means of identification if the owner keeps the animal’s tattooed area shaved, Waugh said.
By law, the shelter holds all animals seven days, 12 days if the animal is wearing a collar. And the clock isn’t necessarily ticking after that point: Animals with a realistic chance for adoption are kept as long as space and resources allow.
“There’s no set time,” Waugh said. “It depends on how desirable they are. Certainly, if they cower at the back of the cage, hissing or growling or laying back their ears, that [animal] wouldn’t be held for the public.”
Dogs of all sorts, from mutts to show-quality animals, make their way to the shelter. On Nov. 21, the dogs in custody included a full-bred basset hound, a chow, a spitz, a German shepherd mix and more. All of them had clearly been pets at some time: They barked and wagged their tails frantically when humans approached their pens.
One inmate, a tiny dachshund, was in a rabies-watch quarantine after a biting incident.
“You wouldn’t think it,” Waugh said of the apparently sweet-natured dog. “We think some kids were playing with it rough, and they held him up and he bit them.” That’s the story most of the time, she said. “Usually it’s little kids stepping on tails or whatever. It usually involves children.”
It rarely involves any of the eight shelter workers.
“I probably haven’t been bit in nine years. But you’re always getting scratched,” Waugh said.
The animal smarts picked up on the job make the difference.
“It’s really easy to read [animals]. Most of the time when somebody gets bit, it’s because the handler did something stupid,” she said.
Dogs and cats usually bite out of fear, although feral cats may be actively aggressive, Waugh said.
The second the humans turned to leave, the chorus of barking stopped dead, as though a switch was flipped.
There are eight dog pens and seven cat pens. The shelter usually keeps only one animal per pen, unless all the animals are from the same litter. Isolation cages are used for sick animals or those that don’t mix well with the others as well as for the overflow from the pens. On Nov. 21, the sole occupant of the isolation room was a grayish brown lop-eared rabbit. Other unusual inmates have included white rats, guinea pigs and ferrets.
“Every person that works here, they take a pet home,” Waugh said. “Then it comes to the point where everyone you could sucker into getting an animal has one.”
Waugh currently owns six cats, four dogs and a cockatiel. All her pets, except the bird, came from the shelter.
Waugh has worked at the shelter for 19 years, enjoying the work and believing she makes at least a small difference. That longevity makes her an aberration.
“It’s a very short-lived profession,” she said. Employees last, on average, about two years.
“Everybody comes in thinking it’s going to be all puppies and kittens,” Waugh said.
In addition, there are the cage cleanings, trips to court to testify in animal cruelty cases and, of course, the euthanasia. That’s the great irony of the profession: Animal lovers are the ones who must put unwanted animals, the ones they can’t take in, to death.
“You would think it’d be a real rewarding profession, but it makes you lose faith in a lot of things,” Waugh said.
Animals are put to sleep with an intravenous injection of anesthetic.
“It’s very peaceful,” Waugh said. “There used to be shelters that would back up a truck with a hose and let the dogs die of carbon monoxide.”
The idea of putting to sleep any of the animals is difficult for new employees, she said.
“Then you get to the point where you realized this is what’s best. [But] some pets, you just hold ’em and hold ’em and hold ’em.”
This story originally appeared in The Potomac News.
The mass of people, dressed like the cast of one of Don Ho’s nightmares, parted for something even more surreal.
An electric car, modified to serve as a small stage, rolled into view. It was decked out with fake palm trees, an inflatable beer bottle and fake, oversized bananas.
Welcome to Jimmy Buffett’s 1996 tour.
The fans, dressed in Hawaiian shirts, hats of various descriptions, grass skirts and bearing beer, beach balls and inflatable sharks, are known as Parrotheads.
The musicians in the car, playing a mix of Caribbean steel drum music and jazz fusion, are Buffett’s opening act: Robert Greenidge and Mike Utley.
“The whole point of Buffett’s show this year is to play more music,” Utley said, before their June 22 show at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland. Buffett also has been playing a few numbers out in the lawn on the tour himself, as a gesture to the financially challenged.
In addition to promoting their new album, “Club Trini,” Greenidge and Utley had more work to do that night. Long-time members of Buffett’s band, the Coral Reefers, they joined the rest of the ensemble on stage for the two-hour concert.
They were there when Buffett’s Caribbean country rock — best known for such late 1970s light rock standards are “Margaritaville” and “Come Monday” — stopped attracting normal fans, and shows filled up with Parrotheads.
“They entertain us. It’s unbelievable from the stage,” Utley, 49, said. “We work because they’re having such a great time.”
Things started to change about 1986, Greenidge and Utley said.
It began, improbably enough, in Ohio, especially Cincinnati and Cleveland.
“I don’t know, I think it has to do with cabin fever,” Utley said. “They have such hard winters there.”
Even when the weather was still cold outside, the band started noticing enthusiastic fans in shorts and grass skirts, making concert halls into a makeshift beach. And the phenomenon just spread from there. Now, it is an audience member dressed in a way that wouldn’t bring out the fashion police who stands out.
“It’s a cult,” Utley grinned.
“Very live, very live,” Greenidge, 46, added.
The “family” description may be old hat, but it seems to apply to the Coral Reefer organization. The two were interviewed as the musicians and crew all sat on an outdoor patio before the show, scarfing down Maryland crabs together, stars and techies elbow-to-elbow.
“We come out this early to hang out with the crew,” Utley said. “A lot of the people here are friends.”
The two first collaborated in early 1985 at the suggestion of MCA executive Tony Brown, now the company president. He created a series of jazz albums, mostly with a New Age feel.
Although Greenidge and Utley’s “Mad Music” album was different in tone than the rest of the line, especially given Greenidge’s steel drums, it was successful enough to spawn two more disks, “Jubilee” in 1986 and “Heat” in 1988.
Greenidge and Utley stayed busy — the two are successful studio musicians, and say being Coral Reefers is essentially a “summer job” — and eight years slipped past before the release of “Club Trini.” They feel it was worth the wait.
“I think it’s probably the best one we have done by far,” Utley said.
Both say they worked enjoying playing on a mostly instrumental album.
“When you play instrumental music, you have a chance to step out some more,” Utley said. Most of the Coral Reefer Band played on the album, and the album’s one vocal track is by Nadirah Shakoor, a Coral Reefer formally with brainy hip-hop band Arrested Development. The end result is an eclectic album that would be right at home in an upscale Caribbean restaurant.
Both men have been professional musicians for years. Utley’s last “real job” was janitor work one summer before college.
“That lasted about three days,” he said. Although he was studying zoology and planning on entering the medical field, he dropped out to try and make a go of it in music. “I said, I had to give myself a chance to do this. … I’ve been real lucky. I’ve taken my opportunities.”
Greenidge’s last real job was working at a print shop in his native Trinidad, but calling it a “real job” may be a stretch.
“The thing is, the guys I worked with were in my band,” he said.
In addition to ably playing keyboard with the Coral Reefer Band, Utley has produced eight of Buffett’s 27 releases. In the month-long July break in the summer tour, he put the finishing touches on Buffett’s forthcoming Christmas album, to be released in October and tentatively called “Ho-h0-ho and a Bottle of Rum.”
Although they have both played with some of the biggest names in music, including Greenidge with John Lennon on “Double Fantasy” and Utley’s work in “A Star is Born” with Barbra Streisand, they are inevitably linked with Buffett.
The two are philosophical about it.
“I don’t have any regrets,” Utley said. “There are other people I’d like to play with. But I have time.”
This story originally appeared in the June 16, 1996 edition of the Potomac News.
Baby vomit. Temper tantrums. Dirty diapers.
These are just a few ingredients in Jerry Scott’s and Rick Kirkman’s recipe for success. Since 1990, the two Arizona cartoonists have distilled the chaotic world of parenthood into the popular “Baby Blues” comic strip.
Kirkman and Scott first met in the mid-1970s, when they worked at a commercial art firm, drawing ads for the Phoenix, Ariz., Yellow Pages.
“We drew our share of Roto-Rooter men and all that stuff,” Kirkman said in a telephone interview recently.
Kirkman, 42, had been selling cartoons to magazines since college, and encouraged Scott to try his hand at cartooning. The two discussed working on a comic strip together. Their first short-lived strip, “Copps and Robberts,” featuring two police offiers, one fat, one thing, appeared in about 40 papers at its height in the late 1970s.
“We look at it now and think, ‘Boy, that was sad,'” Kirkman said.
Scott and his wife moved to California for several years, returning to Arizona in 1988. IN the interim, he spent 12 years writing and drawing “Nancy,” picking up experience that would be invaluable with his original comic strip.
Kirkman and Scott decided to try again, but their career ambitions took a back seat to Kirkman’s newborn second child.
“Rick and I would try to get together on Thursday afternoons to work on ideas for strips, and we would just spend all our time talking about his new baby,” Scott, 41, said. “Finally, we just looked at each other and said ‘Duh, this might be our first strip right here.'”
The two hashed out a new strip idea, “Baby Blues,” that followed the trials and tribulations of first-time parents Wanda and Darryl MacPherson and the childhood of children Zoe and Hammie.
One of the ironies of the strip — missed by readers — is that Scott, the strip’s writer, was not a father when “Baby Blues” began. It’s something he belieevs worked out for the best.
“It’s funn. With [young] kids like that, and when you’re right in the middle, it’s really not that funny. You have to be able to step back,” he said. “I really think that’s the reason the strip works so well. Young couples can look at the strip and see that they’re really not alone.”
And then, 2 1/2 years ago, he became a first-time father, and his entire outlook changed.
“I was amazed at the heightened level of frustration and helplessness and the intensity of the emotions, too. The love you feel for these babies is so amazing,” he said. “I think I did a passable job for the first four years, but now I see I missed so many opportunities.”
The strip became nationally syndicated in 1990, and now appears in more than 250 papers nationwide, including the Potomac News. Last month, Kirkman and Scott won the National Cartoonists Society’s “Best Newspaper Comic Strip” award.
“Baby Blues” has also spun off a fair amount of merchandise, including eight books and various baby goods.
“It’s something that we’re being very careful with,” Scott said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to be in the business of putting the characters’ faces on any flat surface.”
That, and the moderate level of the success the strip has had so far, has meant the merchandising hasn’t turned the two into overnight millionaires.
“We were talking to a guy at the airport who says ‘[Garfield creator] Jim Davis flies in here sometimes in his jet … it seats 30.’ We’re kind of a long way away from that,” Kikman laughed. “We still fly coach.”
“Overnight sensations 20 years in the making,” Kirkman and Scott both feel that although the strip is about raising small children, they won’t have any problems coming up with material indefinitely.
“So far, the plan is to keep on aging [the characters]. But it’s at such a slow rate, it’s not like we’re going to be running out of childhood soon. The pace that ‘For Better or Worse’ runs, it’s almost real time. And that’s a little too fast for us, because there are things we want to get in there,” Kirkman said.
“Some people have said, ‘Well, you’re going to have to keep having babies,'” he continued. “But the answer I have for that is, once you’re a parent, you’re always a parent. And you tend to think of them as babies, even though they get older, get independent, that they’re taller than you.”
“It’s a very tiny subject area with an almost limitless interior,” Scott said.
The strip, which was a natural outgrowth from Kirkman’s life, has become an integral aspect of both creators’ worlds.
“It’s really something that’s near and dear to us. I can’t imagine that we would feel like this about some other strip ideas that we had,” Kirkman said.
Early ideas for strips included the split personality of a man with two heads and two guys who would do anything for money.
“Those are ideas that are formulas, that you would do just for the commercial aspect of it,” Kirkman said. “In this, we’ve stumbled into something that’s part of our lives.”
They say both the Scott and Kirkman children now serve only as loose inspiration.
“I think the reason for it is that they’ve really grown way past the age of the strip. It’s not like I’m following them around and feeding Jerry information for gags for the script,” said Kirkman, whose children are 12 and 9. “I’m sure if we could directly exploit them, there could be a problem. But there’s not much chance of that.”
Scott still gets a fair amount of ideas from his daughter, Abbey.
“I have this fear,” Scott said, “That she’ll turn three and all of the sudden say ‘pay me.'”
People periodically ask me what was my favorite story I covered. Sure, I could say it was my time in Bosnia, or the exorcism I covered in Egypt, but the truth is that it’s a story about a normal guy and getting inside the head of someone we see every day. The following story was originally published in the Potomac News, March 28, 1996.
Life no longer resembles the world of Norman Rockwell, if it ever did. But here and there, around the margins, things continue as they were.
Children still cry on their first trip to the barber. Families still gather ’round the Thanksgiving dinner table. And letter carriers like Royce Robinson are still integral parts of their communities.
His day, like those of other Manassas postal workers, begins early. Robinson punches in at 7 a.m., then goes to the parking lot to give his van a safety inspection.
Roughly 80 letter carriers work out of the main post office on Sudley Road, servicing 53 routes through the city.
“A lot of people, especially your everyday Joe, think we just grab the mail and go. That’s not the way it is,” Robinson, 41, said Tuesday, as he filed mail into labeled slots.
Increasingly, mail is mechanically sorted using bar code readers, but oddly sized mail, misfiled mail or envelopes with shiny windows atop their bar codes must be sorted by hand, a task that takes about three hours every morning.
Atop the rack of mail slots, a small statue, given to Robinson by his three children, sits, bearing the legend “World’s Greatest Postal Worker.”
“A regular carrier should not make a misdelivery,” Robinson said as he put aside mail intended for slots with plastic inserts in them. (Blue inserts mean “hold mail,” while red signifies a vacant address.) “To me, that’s a cardinal sin.”
Robinson has delivered mail on Postal Route 1016 about 300 days a year for seven of the 15 years he’s worked for the U.S. Postal Service.
“It’s a great job. I couldn’t have fallen into a better job,” he said of the job that often requires him to carry a sack full of 35 pounds of mail.
Born and raised in Manassas, he tried the police department briefly – “That little badge right there becomes a great target” – then worked construction before his brother, who does vehicle maintenance at the Manassas post office, suggested he apply there as well.
“When you’re out on the street, you’re your own boss. You know what you have to do and you get it done,” Robinson said.
The post office workroom floor is surrounded by a covered catwalk pierced at regular intervals by one-way mirrors. They serve as a blind in which postal inspectors can hide, making sure the sanctity of the U.S. mail is protected.
“It’s a high pressure job. You’re out there all alone, and sometimes it grates on you,” Robinson said.
“Everybody who touches registered mail has to sign for it. [If registered mail is lost,] you could lose your job.”
Even so, Robinson prefers the life of a letter carrier to the in-office supervisory work he sometimes does, he said as he stacked the sorted mail in plastic bins, setting each bundle down with an authoritative thunk.
At 10:30, he added machine-sorted mail to the hand-sorted pile and wheeled the whole collection to his truck, one of the Long Life Vehicles that replaced the old Postal Service Jeeps.
“These things aren’t built for convenience, I’ll say that much,” he said, surveying the LLV’s interior. “They’re noting but cast aluminum. Just old beer cans.”
The LLVs have a Chevrolet engine and chassis, but no radio and no air conditioning, and are built by Grumman, “the same people who made the lunar explorer.”
After parking, Robinson marched up and down the hills of the streets branching off Sudley Manor Drive and Copeland Drive, past Christmas decorations still up and Easter decorations newly arrived.
Robinson’s route consists of 14 “swings,” or delivery trips made from the parked van.
“Hello, Mrs. Carter. Beautiful day, isn’t it?” He greeted a woman who opened the door at his approach. “I think spring might finally be upon us.”
Contact with the people who live on his route is important to him.
“You get to know them real well, mostly. Some of them are real reclusive. Most of them you see on the weekends.”
Dealing with post office patrons is just good customer service, he said.
“Those people, the residential customers, are the ones buying the 32-cent stamps, and paying your salary.
“You’ve got a bunch of people you see every day. You should know where they are, what they should be doing. If something’s wrong, you should know that, too,” Robinson said.
His route consists of about 11 miles of driving a day and more than seven miles on foot.
“You have to get yourself in street shape. I know, when I’ve spent several weeks inside supervising, it takes me a while to get back in shape again.”
It was good walking weather Tuesday.
“We got a beautiful day out here, beautiful, The kind of day mailmen live for,” Robinson said.
The Blizzard of ’96 and the grim past few months were seemingly long gone. The sun was shining. The water was nice. Squirrels and flowers were in good supply and even a brilliant red cardinal or two could be spotted.
“How ya doin’ today, Colonel?” Robinson asked at another house. “Got a whole lot for you today.
“Holy God, you’re not kidding.” Resident Alex Mutch shook Robinson’s hand. “How’s the golf game?”
“Fine. I’m not playing as much as I’d like to.”
With other residents, Robinson discussed car repair and the weather.
Some residents, of course, are notorious for their much rockier relationship with their neighborhood letter carriers: the dogs who seem to be at every other house on Robinson’s route.
“I’ve had dogs come after me. You have to know what to do. One thing you don’t do is run. You may back away, but you don’t run. Because then, the chase is on,” he said.
To deal with just such emergencies, the U.S. Postal Service issues tear gas to letter carriers, although it is seen as a weapon of last resort.
The constant barking, yipping and woofing that accompanies Robinson’s deliveries on foot no longer gets to him.
“You get to the point where you just block them out, really. You just block them out,” he said.
A black lab in a town house on Campbell Court leapt against the storm door, barking furiously. Robinson, not batting an eye, put a toe against the door frame and continued putting mail into the box.
“We had one dog come right through a screen door one time,” he said as he walked away. “Right through.”
Not all dogs are problems, of course.
On Roxbury Avenue, two cocker spaniel puppies on the opposite side of a chicken wire fence vibrated with ecstasy upon seeing the mailman approach. Robinson reached over and scratched one puppy’s head. A boy of about four raced up to the fence to retrieve the mail, then shot off into the house, yelling “Mom! Mail!”
On Botsford Road, another of Robinson’s canine fans rolled onto her back as he approached.
“How ya doin’, Molly? How ya doin’, girl? Let me scratch your belly.”
Other times, it isn’t the dogs who are the problems.
“I tell you, on the very first house on this shift, there was this cat,” Robinson said. “If you walked past his bush to deliver the mail, and he knew you didn’t know he was there, he would jump out and attack your leg.”
Even such attacks don’t dim Robinson’s enthusiasm.
“Well, I could have gotten into postal management a long time ago, but right now I enjoy doing what I’m doing.”
The last portion of his route, taking him through the end of his shift at 3:30 p.m., is a “mounted” one, where he distributes mail from van to roadside mailboxes.
“How ya doin’?” Robinson asked a young child waiting beside his mailbox. “Good? Just ‘good?’ On a beautiful day like this?”
At some mailboxes, blocked by parked cars or trash cans, Robinson had to get out of his car to deliver the mail. The post office has a remedy for such offending residents: a snippy little note known as Notice 38.
“I never carry it,” Robinson said. “I figure if I’m too lazy to get out, I should do another job.”
Originally published in the January 25, 1996 edition of the Potomac News.
Eddie From Ohio’s sound is hard to describe, even for band members, who call it “acoustic rock” or “new-folk-calypso-grass.”
It might be clearer to say what the Northern Virginia group’s songs consist of — very tight four-part harmony, acoustic instruments, often spare arrangements and narrative lyrics. Think James Taylor (multiplied by four) with a sense of humor.
The songs run the gamut from the occasionally heart-rending to the more-typically whimsical. Eddio From Ohio’s 1993 album “Actually Not” provides good examples of both. “Paradise,” the track that ends the CD, is a post-mortem farewell from a child to her mourning parents. “The Porter’s Tale” tells of a naive Virginia tourist hoodwinked into believing he’s visiting sites from “Gone with the Wind.”
The band’s music almost always features Virginian settings and never shades over into the crybaby schlock so many people associate with folk music.
“I think, at least for my writing, I really kind of just go with the flow, with whatever’s coming out,” said guitarist Robbie Schaeffer, one of Eddie From Ohio’s two songwriters. Schaeffer shares the songwriting chores with guitarist-bassist-harmonicist Mike Clem. Vocalist Julie Murphy and percussionist Eddie Hartness round out the band.
Both Schaeffer and Clem consciously try to write unique songs.
“It’s a tough wire to balance upon,” Schaeffer said. “You want to write things that are universal, that people can relate to, [but] there can only be so many love songs.”
Formed only five years ago, the band is quickly gathering a following: Eddie From Ohio bumperstickers can be spotted onc ars on the Beltway, and sales of the group’s three albums and a solo album by Murphy have been brisk.
“We’ve seen a real jump in sales at record stores,” Schaeffer said. Previously, the band sold nearly all its CDs at shows.
“Outside of [Washington], we’re also getting a little more airplay with our most recent album, ‘I Rode Fido Home,'” Schaeffer said.
In the wake of the multi-platinum success of Hootie and the Blowfish and the Dave Matthews Band and the rising stars of Dillon Fence and the Connells, all of which recently played the same circuit Eddie From Ohio does, the band seems at least as worthy of the big time.
“We’re not quite as accessible, as mainstream as those bands. While we’ve had a lot of success at the college markets, I’m not sure the MTV generation is our audience,” Schaeffer said. “Our demographics tend to be the young professionals. … It remains to be seen if we have that kind of success. I don’t think anybody ever really knows.”
But if multi-platinum albums and superstardom escape Eddie From Ohio, the band wouldn’t necessarily miss them.
“Ultimately, we’re not shooting for that kind of thing. Our goal is to build a steady, solid, loyal audience, which is what we’re doing. If it reaches that kind of scale, wonderful.”
But what’s more important, according to Schaeffer: “We want to be around for a while.”
Its regular Tuesday night gig at Bad Habits in Arlington averages several hundred audience members each week, and Eddie From Ohio appears at such high-profile venues as The Barns of Wolf Trap and New York City’s legendary Bottom Line. But the band still plays small bars and frat houses from Colorado to Georgia to Boston.
“Each seperate area has its own life as far as growing an audience,” Schaeffer said. The key to expanding audiences in North Carolina, for instance, is the college market.
“Plus, fraternities pay well, and it’s a guaranteed audience. We enjoy most of those kinds of audiences. It’s also fun to get your ya-yas out at a fraternity party, as well.”
Last, but not least: No one, not even percussionist Eddie Hartness, is from Ohio. It’s a college nickname given him by an ex-girlfriend at James Madison University, and was used as the band name on a lark by the newly formed group.
A note on Schaeffer’s comment about the Virginia/Maryland/Carolina fraternity house circuit: Hootie and the Blowfish played my fraternity house at Virginia Tech in the spring of 1992. I have no idea how they were — other than expensive — because I had a semi-formal for my girlfriend’s sorority that night. We also had Dillon Fence once and I believe the Connells the year after I graduated.
|
|
