A Crystal Weekend

I'm cheating a bit with this entry. Some of it is copied from an email I sent off earlier this week to my friend Jeremy. I hope you, my Bull Roar! fans, don't mind!

This last weekend I drove up with my mom to the untamed shacktowns of Northern Michigan to visit my sister and her family. It's a trip that I won't forget (even though I left my battery charger back in Wisconsin and my camera ran out of power THREE pictures into the trip! grrrr!) - I had a lot of fun. My sister and I took my mom to see this old country singer named Crystal Gayle ("Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue") whose latest stop was an Indian casino up there and seemingly her only fans are all collecting and gambling away their social security checks. At one point an elderly couple cornered my sister and I asked us what on earth we were doing at a Crystal Gayle concert. We were like, our mom likes her and we kinda do too. They kept asking us questions. Stuff like: "What was her greatest hit?" (the song I listed above) and "Who's her famous sister? (Loretta Lynn). After they were done interregating us I felt like asking them a question myself, "What's the name of your nursing home?" SNAP!!! But, I didn't, though. They were just being nice and making awkward conversation with some out-of-place youngsters!
Crystal was great! She put on a great show even though the casino's concert hall was out-of-order and she played in a makeshift tent. The tent itself was impressive. It had a real wooden door at its entrance. That's probably something the house that Crystal Gayle (originally Brenda Lee Webb) was born in didn't even have! Anyways, she played a lot of her greatest hits, I don't think she really wanted to challenge her elderly audience with songs they didn't recognize. She sang, "Why Have You Left The One You Left Me For," "I'll Get Over You," "I'll Do It All Over Again," "Wrong Road Again," "Somebody Loves You," You Never Miss A Real Good Thing (Till He Says Goodbye)," and for the obvious encore, "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue." Yay!
After she was done my mom had to use the bathroom, and since there were none in the tent we had to take her into the casino. Uh-oh! My mom never gambled before, but she all of a sudden wanted to give it a try. She lost two dollars on the nickel slots. Nice try, mom! Haha, after Crystal played some country dude named Lee (Something) did his thing. He was some old country singer with a moustache. We didn't really want to stay and watch him all the way through, though we were surprised when Crystal came back out to sing a couple duets with him. He kept making goofy-eyes at her like she was hot-stuff and that she was really interested in him. As if! Haha!

Here's some blurry digi-pics of Crystal that I promised:


In this one, you can see that Crystal still has her long hair:

I assumed that most people attending the show were just there to see whether she had cut her hair or not.

When we got back home, my sis and I logged onto the internet in search of some Crystal Gayle trivia. We were wondering if she was a grandma and stuff. This was the best thing we found:

She considers Gallagher, comedian and inventor of the Sledge-o-Matic, one of her old friends. Maybe next time I go up to see my sister, he'll have a show in a tent at the casino we can attend!