"Me Canse de Rogarle...Ai Yai Yai Yai!

Last night Plot, Duck and Brother Jimmy Street went to Roosevelt Tamale Parlor for dinner. The food was good and the pitcher of margaritas made it better, but the best part was a guitar player and singer named Diana who now plays there on Fridays and Saturdays. She takes up the space of one table in the front of the restaurant and gets the audience involved in singing her familiar songs. It's fun. When you're wailing along to "Cielito Lindo" or "Ella" you forget the $15 plate of shrimp doesn't come with very many shrimp.

Plotnik knows the words to "Ella," perhaps the saddest song ever written, or as Diana put it: "this is a slit-your-wrists cantina song." Since Plot already had a glass of tequila in front of him it was easy to recall this tear jerker which begins with: "I got tired of begging her -- I got tired of telling her that without her I would die of my misery," and ends with "...but that mariachi band, and that tequila made me collapse into tears." WHAT a great tune!

Afterwards, walking down 24th Street in front of the Brava Theater, there was a costumed Day-of-the-Dead Mariachi playing just inside the door. They were really good, so the three margarita'd-and-enchilada'd friends popped inside to listen.



Don't ask who that woman in the middle is. She popped into the picture just before Plotnik snaped the lens.

Brother Street left this morning, with the gift of an extra hour. Although he lives in the mountains of Idlewild, near Palm Springs, his drive home takes almost twice as long as it takes the Plotniks to drive to Mummy P's house. Jim is as much fun as always to be around and his alto sax tone is still the sweetest in the world. But his back aches and he's worried about his health, having already had one heart attack where he saw the white light about to envelop him, and he's still driving immense distances to gig as a saxophone player in a world of disc jockeys.

That endless exhausted drive is what ultimately made Plotnik decide to escape from that world, and he hopes with all his heart that his buddy's song remains a happy tune in a major key.