Connections

My father travels a lot for business. Well, not so much a /lot/ anymore, but still...some. Well. He was on a plane from...a city to a city, and something interesting happened.

He gets on the plane, and an older man is in front of him, giving a guitar case to a flight attendant. He thinks to himself about how strange it is that he gets to carry his guitar on, since his son (my brother) always has to check his. Then he puts it from his mind and goes to sit down, and finds that he's sitting next to the man who had the guitar. He sits down, and the flight attendant comes back with the guitar and says to the man, "Why don't you play us a song?" He looks at her and looks at the guitar, and says "I don't know how to play that thing." The flight attendant gives him a funny look, but goes away. My dad says to the man, "I could've sworn you had that guitar when we were getting on the plane..." "Must've been someone else," the man says. My dad makes some offhand comment about how funny it is that the flight attendant seemed to think he was some kind of a rockstar. The man then said something like "You never know who's a rock star." My dad, being male and thus quite dense, didn't catch anything, and they proceeded to spend most of the flight talking about environmental issues and eco-conscious...things, since that's what my dad does.

He also at some point shows the man a picture of me and proudly explains that I'm a singer. Which you will see the irony of in a moment, when I reach the climax of this story.

Finally, at the end of the flight, he thinks to ask the man what /he/ does for a living. The man points to his hat, which says 'the Beach Boys' on it. "I'm with the Beach Boys," he says. My dad gapes at him for a moment and says something along the lines of "I'm not a /huge/ Beach Boys fan, but I know there's Brian Wilson, Mike Love..." He sticks out his hand to shake and says, "Mike Love. Nice to meet you." He then proceeded to point out the other four band members, who were all on the plane. Flying coach.



My dad not only met Mike Love and chatted about eco things, but told a member of the Beach Boys that I'm a singer. Good lord. It's really too bad they didn't become besties and exchange phone numbers or something. I'd have a really massive in into the music world. Instead of all my measly semi-impressive jazz connections.