Don't have to go to the Getaway to get away with this.

Last summer (2003, when we had SOME leisure) us gals (Jeri, Ramona and me) would gather around Carol Caronis' swimming pool on Monday afternoons and settle in to some serious musical research (and margaritas). The topic of the summer -- "Dead Date" songs. You know, "Tell Laura I Love Her," "Leader of the Pack," "Dead Man's Curve," "Ebony Eyes," "Laurie," "Last Kiss" . . . ad nauseam.

Then, one night at the Friday night Press Room session I got up and did a long, intricate intro about how we had been gathering information about an under-researched sub-genre of American traditional music and how we hoped to get some funding and publish, etcet etcet . . . and then we broke in to "Patches" which I think, maybe, we had actually sung together once.

And then later the same evening I got suckered into singing "Long Black Veil" while Curmudgeon cringed.

Linn