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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Hank Williams story reminds me I’ve always wanted to be a star

By David McElroy · February 23, 2020

Hank Williams is an unlikely choice as a potential role model for me.

He was a singer and songwriter, but I’ve never had the least bit of musical talent. He was closely identified with country music, which I grew up hating. He was a hard-drinking man who was closely identified with the honky-tonks that I’ve always found distasteful.

I grew up hearing about Williams and his music, though. My father used to sing some of Williams’ old songs and I was struck by how emotional and authentic they sounded. (Williams had been popular when my father was in high school and college.) That didn’t seem like country music to me. It just seemed like the music of loneliness and heartbreak and redemption.

I haven’t given much thought to Williams and his music over the years, but I’ve been watching the Ken Burns documentary “Country Music” in the last few days. As I’ve come to understand more about this Alabama musician who’s been called the Hillbilly Shakespeare, it stirred something in my soul that I rarely allow myself to look at anymore.

And I couldn’t help admitting — quietly, where no one could hear — that I still want to be a star.

Hank Williams was raised by his mother after his father was sent to a veterans home to live because of issues related to shell-shock that he suffered fighting in World War I. They moved around south Alabama and ended up in Montgomery, where he would spend most of his short life.

Williams learned music from a black street musician, but he never had formal training. That didn’t stop him from getting early music gigs in local clubs and on Montgomery’s WSFA radio. His mother was his manager, but his early drinking problems made it unlikely that he would ever amount to anything.

Then he met Audrey Sheppard, a young woman who had a daughter and was still married when she met Williams. But they quickly became a couple and they married as soon as she could get a divorce. At first, they worked menial jobs — including a stint at a ship yard on the Alabama Gulf Coast — but Audrey became his manager and she drove him to make use of his dormant talent.

With Hank’s stage presence and ability to connect with audiences through deeply meaningful music — combined with Audrey’s ambition and guidance — Williams became a star, first for a radio station in Shreveport, La., and then for the biggest country music stage of them all — the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville.

For awhile, Williams stayed away from alcohol, but he ended up under its influence again. He and Audrey split after eight years, but he was a huge star by then. He was on his way to a concert date in Ohio one cold New Year’s Day when he died in the back seat of his car — he had a driver — under the heavy influence of alcohol and prescription drugs.

I have no desire to sing and I have no talent for writing songs. There aren’t that many things about Williams’ life which look like my own. But there’s something about his need for stardom — and his desire to connect to people emotionally through the confessional art he made — which somehow feel familiar to me.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a star in the worst possible way. At different times, I saw myself as a courtroom lawyer, a politician, an actor and probably a dozen other roles. But in every role I imagined for myself, I was a star. I wasn’t just a lawyer or actor or politician. I was a renowned star.

When I was a teen-ager, I used to perform on stage from time to time. I had some acting roles at church, but I mostly found myself doing stage oratory. I can still quote much of Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, which I performed at a volume that could wake the dead. I won a regional speech contest in high school and I constantly seemed to find ways to be on stage.

I liked being a star. I liked people treating me as though I had special talent.

Over the years, I’ve suppressed most of that. I’m not quite sure why. I guess it seemed as though those were the fantasy dreams of youth — and I needed to be practical. But there are times — even now — when I know I still want to be a star in some way.

It’s mostly when the night is dark and quiet, in the wee hours of the morning. When there’s no one around to disturb the silence — that’s the time when I have the most clear picture of all that I want in the world and of all that I still want to be.

In the light of day and with other people all around, it’s easy for me to get sidetracked with either fears or with the things others tell me I have to be.

But when everything else is cleared away and there seems to be so little to fear, I feel that I can still do anything I need to do — that I can still be the star of my own little personal show — and just have faith that some people want what I need to make, even if they don’t know it until I find a way to give it to them.

There’s still something in me that wants to be a star. I try to suppress it. I try to deny it. But it’s still there.

I want to be a star.

I don’t know how to manage it, but I know I can still do great things — things that people will pay for and which they will love — in a way that will make the teen-age version of me beam with pride one day.

I know that’s still possible, even if I don’t know how to get there.

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Briefly

I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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