I got to sing karaoke on Doc's channel today

Getting to sing with the big boys (the guys who can sing) is what I always wanted to do just like I wanted to ride horses and punch cows with the real cowboys. (as my header by Connie suggests I got to do) Most of my early singing BFs and husbands never even thought of letting me sing. Pierre who was close to sixty when I met him first started letting me sing but he wasn't able to give me much confidence because he did not have a whole lot having learned to sing country mostly just by having the country western station on all the time. But I did end up singing to a few of the karaoke Westward Ho parties he was responsible for, but I was scared to death and never had any fun with it.
But after all what is karaoke for but to encourage everyone to try to have fun singing? So I kept buying karaoke discs.
Doc sneered at country western for the first few years of our relationship so I was not able to get past that to the fun. But finally he realized we can just ACT like a country western karaoke singing couple even if we aren't one.
My son Raymond is going to be singing with the band he got together and named "Out on Bond" this Saturday night in his dad's hometown. Doc wrote and told him he should have named his band "Jack: we're Mormons!" Raymond and his cousins advertised their singing group after Raymond drove all the way to Utah to sing to an old cowboy's funeral, "We put the fun in funerals" Raymond is going to be singing in a bar but he is not going to be drinking. That should be interesting. I got so I never drank a drop of alcohol in bars. I tried to set an example to my sons while still having fun. My philosophy was we had to take singing back from the beer companies!
I am going to embed the video we made this morning in my blog, then I will go down and put it in Rick n Doc Emde's blog. Doc is a lot of fun. In fact I think that has been his downfall just like the song says. He liked to have fun so much he spent way too many hours in bars and ended up an alcoholic, supporting the business. That's the story of most alcoholics. They are basically fun loving guys who got hooked on what pays the bills in the bars (they like to make you feel guilty for not drinking as fast as you can).
I will never forget when my mother who hated my dad's drinking started selling beer in her store because she said the profits were so good. In fact, up in Escalante, I always thought it was funny that the Bishop ended up running the liquor store in town, because when he sold his retail business he and his wife decided to retain the liquor store to earn a little bit of extra money while retired! People seemed to accept it, but my dad had a fit over my mother's fall into selling beer. Guess he expected the women to stay pure. My mother gradually starting letting the guys drink on the premises even though that was supposed to be against the law. She didn't have a bar license. She had put in a couple of booths so people could come in and visit in her old fashioned country store. Now it was like a combination bar and country store, so we five girls spent our teen years selling beer to guys who loved to hang around our store and party with the King sisters, only my mother didn't drink the beer and neither did we so that usually kept the party from gettin' too wild. My mother did not have to drink to turn into a very rebellious wife. My dad just made her too angry while she was stuck home having five kids.
We sure did get to be fun loving bar tenders and were undoubtedly the talk of the country side, courtesy of our mother. I thought it served my dad right because the pool hall where he always went didn't really welcome women so the men could give the women the slip.
Now she was going to get even, as I do in my song today, "I just stepped in from catching you steppin out on me". That song could have been the story of my mother and dad's married life. Only my dad stepped out in a way my mother never imagined, but there was no mistaking her intentions to get even with her beer selling.
Then they would meet at home and fight about it.
When my dad built his last home, he designated one big room the pool room and bought a pool table, and that is where I started to play pool. I met a guy just before he died who sang all night the first time we went out, and then he proceeded to teach me how to play pool, a game I tried to master I loved so much. Guess I took after old dad. I broke the no women barrier when I played pool in the Escalante pool hall where my dad hung out.
Anyway, that guy named Ron became my second husband and the father of my two younger kids, Ronda, my dancer, and Dan, the basketball player. Ron spent his life on the road driving 18 wheelers. We soon parted so the kids hardly ever knew him, but he was a fun loving guy in the days I knew him, partying his way all across the US. And always singing to his CB radio. Why, he sang me songs I had never even heard of. He could imitate a lot of singers, including Johnny Mathis, Earnest Tubbs, and a bunch of other country western singers. He was really good on Johnny Mathis songs, sounded just like him. That voice really got me. Which is why I had two kids by him. He was also the picture of grace dancing on roller skates or ice skates. He grew up on skates. Ronda inherited her grace dancing the west coast swing from him.
So I have always loved fun loving guys, but if any violence started, especially after I was divorced from my first husband because of his behavior when drinking, I would invite that man right back out the door.
These old guys like Doc aren't too violent while drinking but I still won't ever live with him just in case. I keep myself independent and go home when the fun loving guy gets drunk.

My old alcoholic BF sings Anytime for me karaoke style

Well, Doc and I finally launched off our new season of singing after receiving our 200 classic country and Christmas karaoke songs. I hope to persuade Doc to do most of the singing while I do the acting. I also picked out the songs. They still have him cussing and wondering what made him do it. I told him he won't sing jazz either, so I had to light a fire under him. I don't think this first video is half bad because he found a way to be Doc and I found a way to be me and we got through three old country western songs, including Anytime which I probably heard my first husband Dean sing more than any other besides Cheatin' Heart which I think now was also a message to me. I didn't realize it at the time since I was spending my precious time with him not with somebody else. He was too mean a drunk for me to stay with too long beautiful singer or not. Doc is not mean but he is still a boozehound.

Dante and the Pink Guitar! He's coming home in two weeks!

Trust Dante to see that a dramatic photo was taken of him with the pink guitar. He is taking lessons, but he is always the showman. I am getting a charge out of the bits of philosophy and quotes he is posting on Facebook. Here is one today: "Dante Hitt: There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done: school and prison." That could make a grandma scratch her gray locks.
I told him to get ready to make a video as he wrote he is coming home in a couple of weeks. It is summer and he probably decided he needed to spend some time in Phoenix before going back to school. His dad Dan is up in Utah working hard and helping his cousins get ready for the Boulder Heritage Festival in July. He is walking a couple of miles to work as he could not get his motorcycle up there, so he should be nice and trim by September. Dante said we ought to take in a movie, and my computer has started to tremble and shake at the very mention of Dante coming near. I will tell him his dad is gone and would not be able to restore what he did to it, so he better be very careful! Computers have a great overwhelming fascination for him.
It is finally getting hot enough for me in Phoenix to go into the pool. Just a few more days! I will have to tell Dante so he can come over and swim. I will need to pick up an extra pair of bathing trunks for him at the thrift store.
Raymond just wrote a charming blog (Cowboys and Bohemians) post about his "Dog Gymnast", Baby. Trust Raymond to teach his dog to turn somersaults. He also catches us up on the trials and triumphs of trying to 'make it' in this world. He doesn't know if he will get to work on a movie or not, but will have to wait until fall to find out. In the meantime, he is singing and playing for his supper everywhere he can.
I am sure he will relate to Doc and me setting out to practice karaoke now until Christmas. We plan to make a few videos of the grizzled reluctant country singer and his country bumpkin GF who insists on him singing what he regards as lousy country ditties he cannot believe are songs. Yesterday he discovered Loretta Lynne's hit song back when called "I just stepped in from seeing you steppin' out on me." I assured him that was a valid country song, yes! Give me the day when I could sing as well as Loretta Lynne. But I am still tryin'.

Don't you love this butterfly header Connie sent me? Down on Doc's computer it looks great out on the road with green on either side which doesn't show up on my little bitty monitor.

Have to put writing more of my memoirs off for a while

I thought I was getting to the point of resuming my memoir writing, but after this weekend I don't think so. I do think that Utah relatives have to get more used to the idea of a family member writing a memoir that is for the world not just for family. I have been heading this way for a long time.
This morning Doc insisted I sit down and watch a documentary he had recorded called "When Doctors Got It Wrong" about the treatment of the mentally ill, particularly the schizophrenic and what happened when states started closing the big mental institutions and sending the mentally ill back to the communities as they called it. In the opening of the documentary a former patient was saying that you could go to a psychiatrist in the days of years of incarceration and be locked up for life on the basis of a 2 minute interview! That kind of snap judgment is what led to my being locked up after possibly only a 1 minute interview with a psychiatrist and being put through a terrible ordeal before I could get out that caused me to be a whole lot sicker when I got out than when I went in.
These were the kind of abuses that led to these big institutions closing down, but what followed was somewhat of a horror, too, and still is. Mental patients ended up on the street or in jail before the communities were prepared and funded to receive them at all. At the close of the documentary it is stated that the Los Angeles County jail is the biggest mental institution now in the state of California.
Mental patients who are deemed able to maintain an apartment are certified to come in a HUD housing complex like this one, even though some of these prove unable to avoid trouble and must be evicted. Group homes for the mentally ill is another solution that parents of the mentally ill were able to get together and lobby for. They were desperate to help their mentally ill children who had been turned into the street.
Schizophrenia, it was explained, is a condition of the brain that the person may be born with or may develop later. They account for a certain amount of mentally ill patients. Many in here have been diagnosed as 'bi-polar' which appears to be a less serious mental illness. The psychiatrists have to determine this condition from behavior, history, etc, since there is no test that will prove its existence. Brain abnormalities in schizophrenics can be detected by brain scans. Those are really sick people with the only treatment drugs especially effective for this condition. Schizophrenics with brain abnormalities have been able to get stable for years with the help of these drugs.
I had an uncle who was hospitalized a number of times and finally diagnosed with dementia praecox as it was called in those days, deemed the worst mental illness and incurable. The drugs developed later on might have helped him however, but drinking was taboo, which he would sometimes do when he got out of the hospital. The family was always trying to keep him from drinking.
I thought there were conditions of work, alcoholic patterns, and generational influences that produced an unusual amount of bisexual men in that country. Which is why I decided to write a memoir about my dad whose alcoholism was compounded by a bisexuality abnormality as well. Since the bisexuals were very secretive this has led to a lot of reaction to my memoir.
My poor mother did not seem to have a clue as most of the women did not. I thought if she had been educated as to what the signs and symptoms were she could have coped with my dad's behavior with more insight and less craziness of her own in handling him.
My Grandmother who did not seem to have a clue either about my dad's problem retreated into religion and remained ignorant as other women did who were married to such men. Or had sons who were alcoholic and looked to be bisexual as well.
Since my dad did not have any sons he tended to try to turn his daughters into sons which is how I became more aware of his activities. I was encouraged to ride horses from the time I could be taken for rides on a horse when I was just a toddler. I would walk down to my Grandpa King's when I was only four years old and ask him or the hired men for a horse to ride. I would take my younger sister with me and we would be put on some old nag deemed safe enough for us.
I certainly did not think my dad was the only bisexual in that country. I thought bisexuality was fairly common among the older generation, his and my generations, as well as in those that followed, especially in the alcoholics.
I suppose that is a fairly shocking claim to those who are not used to hearing about such a topic, so that is why my memoir may already be causing a stir. I was 5 years old when molestation forced me to become wise beyond my years, as happens to every child who is molested. Some of these poor children must face death. They are going to endure the tortures of the damned at the hands of some abductors before they die. I feared that could happen to me. I did not know if I would be let go each time, following three abductions by the hired man when my father was absent from the ranch and my mother was otherwise preoccupied in the house.
To save myself I learned to curb my wandering ways and to stick close to the house, keeping my mother in sight. While I tried to figure out who I could tell and whether this man had done something bad enough to be shot. I thought he would be killed if I told my dad. As it was somebody did shoot him not long after I started surfacing the story three years later, but from what I heard he did not die, but was never seen around that country again.
I no longer felt entirely safe again and indeed was not safe as I was targeted again for inappropriate attention by another hired man I became deathly afraid of.
Well, it is sometimes hard to put the plight of children first and allow unpleasant facts about the past to surface. So I will persist in trying to get this memoir written even though it looks as though it is going to take more time for me get the strength to do it.

I thought my cowboy dad struggled with his bisexuality and suffered over it, so I loved him for that

Some of us have mixed feelings about a dad who was an alcoholic and may have even had criminal tendencies as well as bisexual issues, but I always thought my dad was struggling with his severe problems. So this inspired love and compassion for him because of his very difficult life. He could not talk about it. That just wasn't done. He had to suffer in silence. And sometimes I did not think he was going to live to be a very old man, but he fought his alcoholism and lived to the age of 64.
There were many things my dad did well. He knew how to train horses. He knew how to run a ranch. Everything got done at the right time of the year. The water got tended. The ranch produced. He always took pride in his work.
My sisters and I did everything we could to help him to live, because we knew it would be a big loss to our families if he died. We valued and appreciated his strengths. Thanks to him we girls always had financial security. We always knew he would help us out of a bind, and when he died he left us with a considerably larger than usual inheritance.
I felt I had been crippled by all his problems in my youth, so that money was a godsend for me, enabling me to live a more normal life until I became too disabled to work. He made up in his old age for his early years of excess. He took care of his family and helped relieve some of the health problems he had helped cause.
He also tried to keep my mother around because he thought a family should stay together, but his early years of partying had done the relationship too much damage.
He wanted all his daughters to build houses and live on the property he had bought in Arizona. That was the dream he was talking about when he died quite suddenly of a heart attack. I think he thought he might live on and on, so he wanted all his five daughters close by.
I got furious at him when I detected some inappropriate behavior in his attitude toward his grandson. I thought it must have harkened back to the days when the cowboys all camped out in one bed and one tent on the range, but I figured this was how my dad's sexual nature became split. I thought the absolute worst thing that could happen was for him to do anything further along these lines that would so upset and violate my son's trust in him. I called and asked my son when he reached adulthood if he had done anything more than offer to pay him to sleep in the same room with him, and he said no. What he said to me back when my son was only 13 was that he wanted him to sleep in the same bed and that is when I hit the roof! Wouldn't you? I told him my son would not be comfortable with that, so my dad backed off. He could see I had fire in my eye and was suspicious of his motives.
But I think parents can't be suspicious enough when somebody wants to do something that doesn't seem right with their children. I feel if I had been suspicious enough at an earlier time one of my sons would not have been molested by a much older kid in his teens who wanted to join the younger boys in their slumber party. We were on vacation and my little son said the teen liked kids. Oh, my word, if I had just been more suspicious of an older teen that wanted to join a little kids' slumber party! But I wasn't. I could have absolutely denied my permission, but I didn't. I was too soft, too easy. Yet, I felt uneasy. I didn't like the feral look in the kid's eyes when I met him. Shifty-eyed I thought.
I just don't think we can be too careful, too suspicious when it comes to kids. It is a long life and most parents are apt to get careless now and then. And then follows years of regret.
But let us face it, we have many in our society with criminal tendencies. This older kid predator told me he had been violated nightly by a teenager when he was five his mother took into her home and allowed to sleep with him! Those who have been molested extensively as he was, he said this went on for two years, grow up to be pedofiles. We have to accept that people we love and depend on may have had these experiences in their lives and may molest in turn when they are adults, if there is opportunity. Painful as it is, we must face those possibilities to protect our children.
I knew one mother who trusted the kids' grandfather enough to let her children stay with their grandparents. Her oldest daughter finally told her he was molesting them. She was going to have him arrested, and before that could happen he shot himself, but what dreadful pain the family endured when a trusted member of the family could not resist a temptation to cross the line.

The buses that never came!

I had to go to Walgreen's to pick up my meds this morning as I was not able to take one of my pills because I was out, so could not wait. I sat on the bus bench where I was joined in a half an hour by Jack, another Westward Ho senior. The bus had not come after an hour. I finally noticed a bus going north on a street west of the Westward Ho and began to think something was amiss. Another disabled resident joined us after some more time passed and I said no buses have gone that I have seen. What could have happened to all the buses??? So she called Metro Transit and was informed that early that morning all buses going up Central had been rerouted. We were told we would have to walk up to Roosevelt to catch the fast transit or 0 or to 7th street to pick up that bus.
Old Jack took off on a slow shuffle to walk the seven blocks to 7th street, while the other lady and I trudged north, caught the fast transit and then transferred to 17 going east on McDowell and to Walgreen's.
Two hours later than I was expected I finally shuffled into Doc's who said he read in the paper after I was gone that a large sign was being installed on a tall building across from the terminal and with helicopters buzzing around it the buses had to be rerouted as precaution. I read the paper before leaving but just did not read that! So he guessed what had caused my delay.
I had to stagger home and take a nap before I could make it over to the Farmer's Market store. The outside market was long gone, but the inside one complete with big sunflowers for sale was open. I purchased a large container of maple yogurt and
milk and fresh cherries and here I am ready now to complete the day inside.
One more of life's little adventures that gives us something to talk about. All that walking around just as it was getting hot was probably good for us as long as it did not kill us!

My mom preferred to live in fantasy and denied her attraction to gay men

I am wearing the cowgirl outfit in the video below I might have worn in Utah to a summer celebration complete with music, dance, rodeo, whatever. I used to look forward to those celebrations every year, but these are the years of my exile from Utah because I have undertaken the task of writing about the homosexual husband and my father in my mother's life, and I suspected in the lives of a number of other women married to the cowboys and ranchers of those days who spent so much time camping out tending to their cattle. My grandfather did not marry until he was 30 years old, my father until he was 26, plenty of time for those behaviors to become a way of life, but anathema for the naive but very strong minded women they married who simply were not going to register such abnormalities in the men they preferred to glorify and try to make into the romantic figures of their fantasies. I am afraid too many women are addicted to romance instead of to the truth. So the truth is made into an unwelcome stranger they must fight with all their might and banish from their ken if possible.
I always hated my mother's addiction to romance in the midst of her very unhappy marriage to my father. She never stopped talking about how unhappy she was and how miserable a man my father was. As a result I thought her memoir about her life with my father, the Kings, and Boulder was marred by such negativity about him it stopped short of being a great memoir.
I now am faced with the task of revealing what she did to endure the marriage which she left out of her memoirs completely. She could not bring herself to admit that she started a long string of affairs after she got a tubal ligation ten years into the marriage. She was only 30 years old, unhappy, and now could not get pregnant.
I feared the worst and my fears I thought were soon realized. Even if I suggest affairs it would appear that I would feed gossip about my mother. She was gossiped about a great deal as it was, I am sure, even though she never admitted to having the affairs. She was so hot tempered none of her girls tried to force our adverse opinions on her. I remember once I made up my mind to talk to her about chasing after a movie maker who came to town. She said in a very cold voice, "If you don't shut up, I am going to run this car off the road into a ditch!" I did not know but what she would carry out her threat, so I shut up.
I felt very depressed for many years over what she was doing on top of what my father had been doing. In fact, just as she was getting a good start, he began winding down from impaired health with emphysema and alcohol abuse. My mother said he had become impotent, so that was even more reason for her to stray. Once she even ran off with a young hitchhiker she picked up on the road when she was in her fifties. She bragged he was only 28, but then one awful thing leads to another.
Even though my mother never seemed to be able to connect my father to homosexual behavior, I thought his affairs over the years she was having children led to her having affairs. She was dissatisfied, miserable, but did not want to leave the marriage poor and unable to earn a very good living. She wanted a big settlement which he was not willing to give her so they wrangled for years over that. He knew very well she was not sure of what he had done except drink a lot, so he made her feel as guilty as possible over her affairs.
I thought this was so unfair of him, and when they divorced and he was going around trying to get sympathy over her adultery, I said coldly,"Daddy, you weren't even attracted to women, so how can you claim virtue for not having affairs with them?" He didn't like where this was going and never mentioned Mother's adultery to me again.
He had blame in this awful marriage. All men who marry women and can't stop their homosexual affairs need to tell the women in their lives the truth at some point. I realize that is a lot to ask, but in the most advanced circles of gay men I think most would agree this is good conduct toward women. Some men want to marry, have kids and live 'normal' lives the worst way, so the temptation is very great to try to play into the fantasies of some women. Most of the women end up being deceived, and in some cases the men are deceived as to the woman's penchant for homosexual affairs.
In the big cities gay communities address these problems much better than they do in the little towns across America where the attitudes of the churches toward homosexuality prevails. People can take a line in the bible and use it to club the homosexual nearly to death. Some churches, as the Mormon one in my home state of Utah, has rehabilitation for guys who believe themselves to be gay, probably generally a failure if the truth were to be told.
Imagine a church that does not love the truth, but if a church claims to be the only true church on earth and that all people must be baptized into it to enter heaven, I can't think this church can love the truth too well. I did not think the Mormon church handled homosexual problems well. But instead persecuted just about everyone they could that was connected to them. Including me. I am just about at odds with the church on how to handle every aspect of this problem.
Another reason why I do not believe in Mormon heaven, but some people like to live in fantasy about that, too, and do. And will have to await the hereafter to see whether there really is only a Mormon heaven and everyone will have to join the church to enter.
I will take my chances! In fact I am busy imagining a hereafter where therapy is offered for Mormons who are disappointed in a heaven that is not Mormon!