who teaches music once a week at our school,
though Ma says he’s no teacher at all,
just a local song plugger,
Arley Wanderdale asked
if I’d like to play a piano solo
at the Palace Theatre on Wednesday night.
I grinned,
pleased to be asked, and said,
“That’d be all right.”
I didn’t know if Ma would let me.
She’s an old mule on the subject of my schooling.
She says,
“You stay home on weeknights, Billie Jo.”
And mostly that’s what I do.
But Arley Wanderdale said,
“The management asked me to
bring them talent, Billie Jo,
and I thought of you.”
Even before Mad Dog Craddock? I wondered.
“You and Mad Dog,” Arley Wanderdale said.
Darn that blue-eyed boy
with his fine face and his
smooth voice,
twice as good
as a plowboy has any right to be.
I suspected Mad Dog had come first
to Arley Wanderdale’s mind,
but I didn’t get too riled.
Not so riled I couldn’t say yes.
January 1934