Circus Trees

Gliding down a dark alley strewn with garbage cans, barely fitting our minivan in-between brick walls, we first met Jeff as he burst through the heavy door and told us how excited he was to have us there.  We’d heard that kind of thing before, though they never seemed to mean it.  But Jeff was different, as he continued on talking while leading us through the cavernous basement of the building, and describing his joy in finding our sad music.

Jeff was genuine, and we remember how awkward he was at times with us because we’re sure he wasn’t used to talking with young girls about music on his program.  He was incredibly knowledgable though, and really made our interview such a joy to go through.
We remember most the moment while we were setting up our equipment, when he said he too was “in a band” and Edmee ask what kind of band it was and he said, as casual as possible, “The Typewriter Orchestra.”
We stopped everything we were doing and stared, and one of us said “The.  What.” and he repeated it, and then explained it to us as we were laughing and thinking this was total insanity.  But he just paused and smiled, and we slowly went back to setting up while he went back to his board.
We never forgot that, the look on his face, the joy in his eyes.  And we googled it later, and realized it was all true, and so unique and cool and bizarre.
After that, whenever we wanted to blow off some steam, we’d do our own version of it in our kitchen (we still do to this day) and we call it the “Kitchen Chair Orchestra”. We bang the chairs around and make horrible beats and our dad and brothers scream at us to shut-up, and we laugh and we all think of Jeff and how much he had wormed his way into our memories after such a simple little hour with him.
He was good, he was kind, he was knowledgable, he was respectful, he was sweet; we will miss him dearly.

appearance: July 2, 2019

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