Talking stick.

Hey, wait ... isn't it my turn? No? What the hell - you just had it. I'm not going to listen to another of your drunken yarns, you ne'er do well. Jesus, what a stupid tradition. Let's start over.

Oh, hi. Well, since we're living so close to the ground these days, an almost traditional life style you might say, we've decided to take on some of the old practices, just to keep in step with our new way of living. Not sure what ancient peoples dwelt in potting sheds ... perhaps there was a Potsylvania after all. (Jay Ward may have been onto something!) Nevertheless, we thought it might make the time go by a bit faster to appropriate some old traditions that we'd seen on TV at some point.

One was the talking stick. You know how it works, right? Whoever has the stick can speak to the group, tell a tale, reveal a secret, cop to a fault or instance of wrongdoing, etc. Then they pass it along. Or sometimes they don't, and you have to grab it from their ass. God damn, I feel like knocking Anti-Lincoln on the head with the thing, he keeps it for so long. Last time he held it upside down while reading the Gettysburg Address backwards. (I didn't even know he had an address in Gettysburg. Yes ... I know.)

All right, Lincoln. You've had that thing long enough.

Anyway, I have the stick, so it's time for me to spin a tale. Ahem! Oh ye, oh ye ... I will tell of a time before Big Green ... a time when we were playing dive clubs under other forgettable names. When we played with our friend and former guitarist, Tony "Ace" Butera, there was a certain configuration of our band that we decided to call "The Space Hippies"; a moniker we gave to these characters in a Lost in Space episode, one of whom was played by Daniel Trevanti. Tony was calling area clubs, trying to book us, and one guy he talked to - a local bar owner - took exception to that name. "I can't book a band that calls itself the Space Hippies," he told Tony. "If I did, I'd be laughed out of Utica."

After that, I wanted us to be called "Laughed Out Of Utica". I got voted down on that one, though. Probably just as well. Some things sound like better ideas than they actually are. And that's one of them. Now who gets the talking stick? Or are we on to another bogus appropriated tradition?

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