Have you ever had some weird random encounter just go in a completely amazing direction?

Several years ago I had a bit of a health scare. Back in the early 2000s, I had to go in to have a portable heart monitor hooked up to me for a couple days. I was, understandably, a little nervous.

I went into the doctor's office and was told to go back so the nurse could hook me up and calibrate the monitor. When I walked into the room, the nurse said "CBGB'S. I remember playing there. " It took me a minute to realize that she was commenting on my CBGB'S T shirt that I was wearing. So, as I was getting all hooked up, I asked her what she meant by playing at CBGBs, because she looked like a high school librarian to me.

Over the next hour or so, she proceeded to tell me a bunch of fucking incredible stories about the 1970s punk scene in NY and how her band, The Bee Girls, got to meet and play with some of the great bands that were coming up at the time.

I'll try to lay out a few of those stories in my upcoming entries. Here's a sample...her and her boyfriend lived down the hall from Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls and used to hang with him a lot. One day they come home and notice one of the hallway lamps is smashed outside Johnny's apartment. The next thing they noticed was an extension cord spliced into the wiring of the smashed light. They follow the cord and it leads under the door of Johnny's apartment. So, naturally, they knock on his door. He opens it and invites them in. When they walk in they see a folding lawn chair, a candle burning, and his guitar plugged into the jury rigged extension chord. They're like "What the hell is this shit, Johnny?" He replies, "Oh...motherfuckers shut off my power. So I hooked into the building's power so I could play my guitar". He then sits down in the lawn chairs and just starts jamming like everything is completely normal.

I almost wished that I had some major heart condition so that I could keep going back to listen to that lady's kick ass stories. Unfortunately, I was fine.

More to come later. Stay tuned, y'all. 😉