Fifty Four Minutes

Plotnik has been working on a story/song to give his Mom for her Christmas present, since her CD player is her lifeline to the outside world these days. The story is in five parts. Plot recorded the narration and then had The Great Wes McBoopy play guitar on as much of it as he had time for. (Wes McBoopy is the stage name for the artist also known as Isabella's Father.)

(Plot had parts for McBoopy's sister to sing too but everybody runs around at Christmas. There wasn't enough time.)

So Plottie finally got the project done and got ready to email it to his children, and then he realized it's 54 minutes long. Does anyone really want to listen to a 54-minute long story-with-music? Do you know how long 54 minutes is? 500 megs. That's half a gigabyte for one story.

So forget e-mail. He burned a few CDs and will take one down to Stiletto this weekend. Plot and Duck will visit with Mummy Plotnik for a few days and then Plot will stay on and do some recording on The Perfect Pitch Monday and Tuesday.

The story is called "Rabbi Karpas Hates Me." It's about the time Plottie got cabnapped in Bangkok in the middle of a thunderstorm, while trying to get to a gig to play music for a bunch of Orthodox Jews, in a country where Jews are unknown. The amazing part is that every word is true; the more interesting part is that after seeing two wildly different monologists on stage this week, one who is a friendly guy, and one who comes off as a total a-hole, Plot realized something about any story -- especially a travel story:

It's never about the place -- it's always about the person who went there. It is no longer possible in this day and age to find anywhere on the Earth, no matter how remote, where somebody isn't twittering about it already. So you can't be first, and since you can't you'd better do some personal growth while you're there, or you'll bore the hell out of everybody.

A 54 minute story may do that anyway, unless you're 96 and almost blind. But Plotnik thinks it's pretty damned good.