Repeat or Evolve: Starting a Blog and the Mushroom Tumblers

 

I write.

(wo)Man*, do I write.

I write a lot. Notebooks full of half-finished stories, random thoughts, musical musings, doodles, lengthy lists and hilarious stories from "back in the day" take up a lot of space, notebook-wise, here in my home. 

I have notebooks up the yinyang. 

I realize up the yinyang means nothing to most people but I have idiosynchratic phrases I enjoy using and that is one of them. Beep bop boo is another. Lots of people defer to "umm"; my old friend LeRoy quips, "Know what I'm sayin?" and many good folks shift from foot to foot and stammer when there is a break in their speech. I myself throw out a hearty Beep bop boo. I don't know exactly from whence it came. I cannot think of a time when I wasn't saying it to myself. Only within the last few years, however, have I been launching it loudly, proudly, and verbally among my peers. (That's what happens at a certain age, you don't give a shit any more.) Anyway, I suspect it might be an off shoot of Disney's Bippity Boppity Boo combined with Jetsonesque Eep op ork ah-ah, shortened and seasoned with my own flavor. Who knows? All I know is it says something about me. 

Beep bop boo.

My creativity abounds today which is hard to explain because I have a killer headache and it's pitch black outside. Okay, full disclosure...I embellish a little. It's not pitch black. It's gray and there's freezing rain and when the min pin barks to go out I feel bad for her little black pebbly winter worn pads but it's perfectly light out. Well, not perfectly light...

Dear reader, can you see why I have scads of notebooks strewn about? Yikes. I have a brain that never shuts off. I also remember EVERYTHING. More about that later.

It was suggested to me by an intuitive that 2020 is THE year I write and get my thoughts out there. FOR OTHERS to read. FOR OTHERS to judge. It's the judg-y part that makes me want to eat caramel covered pretzel rods dipped in chocolate but who wouldn't want to read about dirty magazines in the family bomb shelter or my college friend who was engaged to two guys at once or my neighbor's propensity toward drinking all weekend on the couch sobbing her heart out to Elvis's GI BLUES soundtrack on vinyl while she fed her kids blueberry yogurt for dinner? Ok, maybe breaking out the pretzels might be advisable. 

Anyway, I started a shareable writing project in October that has brought me great satisfaction and heaps of praise so it gave me the push and the confidence I needed to get this blog slog clog** going and I have to start somewhere and today's as good a day as any. Whew...I'd normally rework that horrid run on sentence but I'm in a hurry to tell you a story. 

Here goes!

The Mushroom Tumblers was a folksy rock group formed in 1982 by two middle school girls with wicked senses of humor, an out of tune acoustic guitar, no formal musical training and lots of fodder for tuneful ditties. One of those girls was me. It was a very creative and amusing time in my life and I will always think of myself as a Mushroom Tumbler. 

We named ourselves after my mother's favorite drinking glasses, a 1970s pattern of fancy gold fungus on a rust colored Tupperware tallboy.

Cool, we were. Chill. Ice cold. Hypothermic.

A forthcoming blog post will detail our album which was titled "All Over"; including songs, inspirations behind the songs (names may be changed to spare the afflicated, the affected and the abysmal) and maybe, if I can figure it out, an audio sampling of a song I think is fabulous. And by fabulous I mean hideous, like the time we tried cooking Stove Top stuffing in a paper grocery bag within our upright vacuum cleaner because it got so hot and we wanted to see what would happen. Crazy kids. 

Thanks for being there. Now go do something fun like eating a pickle spear and putting that green rind part over your teeth and scaring your spouse by saying "Where is my tooth brush?!"

*Just in case I have any of Egalia's Daughters tuning in, here. 

** it's a blog that sort of moves at a heavy pace even though it's really fantastic like my favorite shoes from the 80s

#1970s #1980s #mushroomtumbler