All Hail The Queen

George Jones & Peggy Lee painting by Paul Dodd
George Jones & Peggy Lee painting by Paul Dodd

I’ve will soon be able to cross one of the items on our summer to do list off. Our garage is almost organized. It had become a dumping ground since we moved in. People keep asking us if we’ve seen the Hoarders show. We don’t get cable so we haven’t but I can imagine. I’ve been pushing the limits of our Waste Management pick-up service each week for the last month. I have a pile of old paintings out there including the one above. I’m stripping the old canvases and saving the stretchers.

I’ve been a fan of Peggy Lee since “Lady and the Tramp“. Now that we digitized our music library iTunes calculates it will take months to hear it all but we can’t go an hour in shuffle mode without hearing a Peggy tune. As it should be. So I was ecstatic to see Kevin’s post this morning. We played it three times in a row. Stunning arrangement. Minimal for maximum impact. Please stop reading this and visit “So Many Records” now.

Our old band, Personal Effects, covered “Is That All There Is?” and our new band, Margaret Explosion, covers “Fever” and we don’t do very many covers. Duke Ellington called her “The Queen”.

Peggi and I were watching tv at her parents house in the mid eighties and a Peggy Lee tv special came on. We flipped out and scrambled to get a VHS cassette in the machine. Peggi’s dad said, “Not that old broad?”. Peggy (with a “y”) had already had a stroke and she was having trouble with one side of face but she was god like.

Soon after we visited Peggi’s (with an “i”) sister in LA and asked if she knew where Peggy Lee lived. She had a hunch so we headed up in the Hollywood Hills. We bought a star map and Peggy Lee was not on it. We asked around and had it narrowed down to a particular street in Bel Air. We walked the whole street and looked at every house so I’m sure we saw it.

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