The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        Well, sir, the band started playing, and pretty soon Double-Bubba Bilgewater began to get overly excited by the down-home Hillbilly music; he started flinging his partner around the room as if she was a gunny sack. In fact, when I looked hard at his partner, I realized that she actually was a gunnysack, but that didn't stop Double-Bubba from being carried away with all of the music and the Fizzies, anyway.
        He began to whip around that dance floor like a Dervish wired on Cappucino, flinging the gunny sack at arm's length ahead of him, arcing the dingy Beige Bombshell in bizarre Byzantine spirals that seemed like dance steps trippingly tapped from the brain of the great Wilbur Baryshnikov.
        Double-Bubba Bilgewater spun past the gaping Hicks like a desert sandstorm blowing through a row of American Gothic farmhouses, peeling the tin off of their roofs and rattling their shutters with the mighty force of his blow-by. The Rednecks scattered before him like chickens before a blizzard; like a rack of billiard balls smacked soundly by a well-aimed cue.
        Nobody knew what to do about him, so we all just sort of stood around and watched while the dust puffed from the half-full sack in mysterious counterpoint to the grunts, snorts, yee-haws, and yippedee-doos from apparently maddened Double-Bubba.
        After a while he seemed to tire of it, and then his cousin Bosco stuck out his foot and tripped him as he danced by. Well sirree, Mr. Double Bubba just folded like a weak hand in a tough game, holding on to that gunny sack as he fell and proceeded to slide up underneath a table. He stayed there the rest of the night, either too ashamed or too tired to show his face.
        The dead silence that had fallen during Double-Bubba's dancescapade was quickly replaced by the typical murmuring burble of a bubbling tub of hubbub that infests such public places. Of course, since the band was now on break we all got to meet the players, and then an emcee got up on the stage and told us that tonight was talent night.
        I suppose that I don't need to mention that this was some serious bad news. Talent night in just about any establishment is almost invariably a tribute to the triumph of mediocrity, and a talent night at The WildSide Roadhouse and Deepfry Grille hinted of calamities more doleful than those a refined Hayseed might abnormally inspect to encounter at such a gathering. Billy was sitting beside me at one of the knotty-pine tables when the emcee delivered this sorry news, and the Grand Playmaker immediately voiced his woe:

How truly did the Beauregards -
Those men who lived when noble blood
Still coursed in human veins -
Attach ill bodings to the cankerous blight
Of then-proliferous talent nights,
Which, like hideous, bitter weeds,
Had reared their unwelcome, loathsome heads,
And sprung up, uninvited,
In the lounges of their day!
O wretched weeds! O blighted nights!
O prating whales cavorting there
In that dead sea of infamy,
Spouting fetid blasts of air
From yon foul, facey blow-holes!
O Sunshine State! O sun! O fun!
O, for a dram of White-Out
With which to end our misery!

        Billy squealed these last few lines in anguish, in an unfeigned fit of angry angst, bleating them from the depths of his stomach.
        "What's White-Out?" I asked Egghead, but he didn't know, so we dropped the subject. Now the emcee continued his emceeing.
        "We only have one contestant tonight," he plopped, "and so we all know who the winner is going to be." He raised his eyebrows comically at this point. Well, sirree, the people acted like they had never heard such a joke in their lives; they howled with laughter, slapping their thighs and the thighs of their neighbors in fit of unabated Hillbilly glee.
        About this time, somebody lit some fireworks, causing the crowd to laughed louder than ever. I saw an old-timer with a scrawny gray beard fall out of his seat and roll across the dance floor. He rolled past the revellers and right out the door, he was laughing so hard. Some kid tied some cans to a cat's tail when the laughter died down, and that started them to doing it all over again. Finally, they quieted down, wiping the tears from their eyes and shaking their heads at one another as they heard the emcee continue his spiel.
        "Tonight's contestant," he announced, reading from a sheet of paper, "is Uncle Elmo Thigpen and his Musical Saw!"
        I never saw a place go silent so fast.
        Their faces fell at once with a collective clunk right down onto the sawdust-covered floor, and they looked around uneasily at one another. It was so quiet that I could hear a hungry beetle scrabbling up on top of a rafter. The people looked like a bunch of sailboats in the water waiting for a breeze, with all the wind out of their sails, drooping, not knowing what to do next; it was downright pitiful. Then a rawbony old-timer stood up to address the people. He was as thin and as straight as on a rail, and as tough-looking as a railroad tie, but I could see that he was strongly perturbed by this latest turn of events.
        "Folks," he began, "you all know what to expect tonight." He looked around nervously, and tried to laugh, but it didn't go anywhere. "Let's do our best to be polite, so's we don't hurt old Uncle Elmo's feelings. "He sat down to the sound of a thunderous silence, a silence in which the smell of fear figured prominently. In fact, fear palpably permeated the room, stinking like a skunk that had slipped, unseen and unbidden, into a fancy baby shower. Then the right side stage door eased open, and...HERE CAME UNCLE ELMO!"
        He gimped onto the stage like he was walking onto a yacht, his hat strategically placed below one eye; his bandana was apricot. He had one eye in the mirror, and he watched as he walked by. Then he sat in the chair there at center-stage, and pulled the saw out of its leather case. The people watched, transfixed, with dull, glazed expressions in their Redneck eyes.
        Their eyes.
        Their poor, dumb, pitiful Redneck eyes.
        Only their eyes displayed a glimpse of the fierce, inchoate fear that swam deep within the depths of their souls. Only their eyes showed us the dread, the horrid hints of prior debacles at unnamed talent shows in unmentioned former times. The stage lights flashed dramatically from Uncle Elmo's stainless-steel saw blade as he assumed a bow-legged position and pulled the microphone in front of his mouth.
        "Wildwood Flower," he croaked. And then he commenced to draw his bow across the saw.
        Friend, if you have never heard a saw played, you have a lot to be grateful for. I suppose that I have never heard worse. Saws were not designed to be played poorly, but to cut wood well. But no one had ever convinced Elmo. He was an unregenerate saw fiddler who played several levels below the unacceptable norm.
        As he began to play, the whirly, whistling whine of the wobbling blade sent chills down my spine and stood my hair on its various ends. It seemed to me as if a clammy hand had gripped me by the throat, and the crowd looked like they were feeling the same thing. My ears buzzed like the guts of a kazoo. In fact, my whole head began to hum as it resonated to the eerie warbling of this dude's deadly tool. Billy coughed out a filling that flew across the table and embedded itself in the back of an empty chair.
        Finally, somebody broke. It was the same old man that had warned us to be kind to Uncle Elmo. He had put up a good fight, but I reckon that he just couldn't take it anymore. He stood up and started shrieking like a banshee.
        "No more!" he cried, "Stop it! I just can't take it, I tell you! I just can't take it!" He started blubbering like a baby, and then somebody stood up beside him and let the old boy cry in their arms for a while.
        Uncle Elmo was knocked over when the crowd rushed the stage, and there was some talk of jailing Uncle Elmo, or maybe just tar-and-feathering him. Nobody knew what those words meant, so they couldn't have done it even if they'd a'wanted to, which maybe they really didn't want to do anyway, even if they'd known what if was.
        Anyway, old Uncle Elmo was escorted swiftly from the stage, and I reckon that if they'd taken a vote that night, the old boy who had cracked under pressure and ended the show would have been elected the mayor of Nowhere City. I heaved a sigh in the direction of the door and wondered what was coming next.
        About that time the band got back up on state and invited us to sit in and jam, but we were too worn out to do it, so old Zeb got to do the honors. Man, oh, man, he sure didn't let us down. He showed all of us why he is up there on the Grand Ole Opry, rubbing elbows with Minnie and Roy and Buck.
        Zeb started the set off with the title cut from his classic C.D., "Rocking Out the Furrow," which was the first big hit for Zeb Hendrix and the Iron Plow. Then he cut loose with "The Redundant Cacophony," a cut from "Redneck Redux." Finally he did my all-time favorite Zeb Hendrix tune, "Electric Country Jam."
        It was thrilling and nostalgic, and it reminded me of our first big break, when as a young pup I had first gaped upon the Hickoryville Axe-Handler while my mouth caught mosquitoes in the moist Georgia night. Ah! Those were the days!
        Little did I know that the good old days were about to come back again. I was just about to meet Mr. Franz Kafka!