I've recently discovered that John Travolta is playing a friend of mine in a movie!

Our university radio station (WUWF) does a locally produced four-hour acoustic music program on Sunday afternoons, and while I was listening to last Sunday's program a song about someone named Bobby Long came on. I had known a fellow named Bobby Long seventeen or eighteen years ago, but I just assumed that the songwriter's use of that name was coincidental. There must be a few thousand Bobby Longs in the US. But, as I listened to the song I started to get intrigued, wondering if it could be that Bobby Long. Then, when the singer mentioned that Bobby would deliver sermons about how Flannery O'Connor was the greatest American author, I knew it had to be the same guy.

Bobby Long was a poet, a drunk, a defrocked professor of literature, a philosopher, a retired US Marine Corps officer, and one of the craziest people I've ever known. We knew each other back when I was helping run a Friday night open mic in Pensacola. Bobby would sometimes recite his poetry, or the poetry of others, or sing unaccompanied, or deliver a mini-lecture about Flannery O'Connor or T.S. Eliot, or tell us why the girl in the front row that everybody knew as Susan was really named Lilith but just didn't know it.   Then, he'd go out in the parking lot, fix himself a fresh drink, and pontificate, philosophize and soliloquize to anyone who'd listen.

Well, it turned out that the song I had heard was written and performed by a fellow Floribamian named Grayson Capps. I recognized his name from having heard some of his other material on the same radio station and knew that he was originally from Brewton, Alabama, which is only about fifteen files from my house. The song mentioned that Bobby was a friend of Grayson's dad, and I knew that Bobby also lived in the Brewton/Atmore area.

So, being a curious fellow, I got on the Internet, found Grayson Capps' website and discovered that there's going to be a movie coming out in December called "A Love Song for Bobby Long" (which is the title of the song I had heard) in which John Travolta is playing my old friend Bobby. It seems that at one point in his career, Grayson was approached by an independent movie producer about doing some music for a film she was working on. In passing, she mentioned to Grayson that she was always looking for material upon which to base films and he remembered that his father, Everret Capps, had an unpublished manuscript of a book he had written based, in part, upon his friend Bobby Long. The producer apparently thought the manuscript was good enough to base a screenplay on and the rest, as they say, is history.

So now I'm patiently awaiting the release of this movie to see if there's any chance the Bobby Long in it will resonate with my memories of the crazy son of a bitch who used to recite his poem about the time he found a wee fairy frolicking in a flower bed. When he asked the little guy what he did all day, the fairy rattled off a laundry list of the types of cutesy activities one would expect a fairy to be involved in, ending up with "Well, whattaya think of that?", to which Bobby replied:

"'Well, I don't.
In fact, it makes my sick to hear such viscous drool.'
So I lifted up the heel of my boot,
And I crushed the Goddamned little fool."