the people you meet

no day is ever like the one before it and everyday is an adventure.  in my life this is very much true.  this evening i find myself in a swanky hotel in lower queens, NYC with the university of richmond basketball team.  u of r hired a professional pep band to play at their major sporting events.  it's a rather lucrative gig.  the u of r student newspaper did an article on us which you can read here.  we play at football and basketball games.  i do a lot of the musical arrangements as do several other gentlemen.  in the past couple of years the team has done well and we've been flown all over the country and played for thousands of people.  we were voted best pep band in A10 one year.  last week at st. joe's in philly a large group of school boys got a picture with all of us.  it's a blast because i'm traveling all over the country with my best friends.

this evening i was sitting at the hotel bar enjoying some wine when the bus driver saddled up to the bar.  this guy is incredibly interesting and charismatic, easily holding the attention of all the women at the bar.  smooth with a gentlemanly swagger that went for days. 

we start talking about music and eventually celebrities we've worked with.  turns out this dude worked as a bodyguard in the eighties for people like will smith, albert king and a ton of other people.  one of the guys he worked for was the late and great roger troutman.  roger troutman was the gentleman who provided the robotic 'voice' on hip hop tracks such as tupac's 'california love' and snoop dogg's 'what's my name'.  here he is doing his thing with his own band.  he's the gentleman playing the guitar shaped like a rifle.  i ask the bus driver to tell me something that i may not know about mr. troutman and the bus driver replies that mr. troutman was a homosexual, which kind of blew my mind. he was saying that in the inner circle of the entertainment biz you learn things about people that aren't shared with the public.

crazy.  the saying goes that everybody has a story to tell and as i get older it rings all the truer.

it was a good hang this evening: marcus, david, kevin and kevin's friend whom i just met