𝗔 𝗪𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆.

An old Westmount alumnus sent me the attached link last night.

It turned out to be pretty good. I clicked on the link just after taking a good vape toke, so it put me in the right mood to listen to something completely different.

I wanted to drum when I was a teenager. In fact, I think the whole time I was at Westmount after Grade 9 and listening to John Bonham, I spent half the time in every class drumming on my desk. I spent the other half doodling on my French book.

Chris Saunders, Mark Waind and I formed a band one day, between classes, in the washroom, adjacent to the hall that led out to the smoking area and the football field.

We must have smoked some good dope, in that between-classes washroom meeting, because we were flying. As usual, I was standing with my back to the windows, drumming on the sheet metal cover of the heater. Some people would have found that very annoying.

Others, not so much.

Chris spread his fingers and put his hands together, end to end, and put one thumb to his mouth as if playing a trumpet. He mimicked a muted trumpet sound with his mouth.

"Fla, dut dut, fla dut da dut, fla dut dut, fla dut de deedle dut, fluddle diddle, fla dut doggie doogie doggie doogi doodi DUT!"

to the beat I was banging out on the heater cover.

I asked him, "What is that?"

He replied, "It's fla dut."

In no time, Mark, as if the whole thing had been rehearsed, joined in with his interpretation of a Flu-dut horn.

We had unknowingly created the house rocker of 1971. With an audience of three.

It was a rollicking jazz session. A rollicking good time. That's why I can remember it from over a half-century ago. It was like fuckin' Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall.

Periodically, we would pause in unison, every, I don't know, fifteen seconds or so. As if that, too, had been rehearsed. Then we would double over in laughter. It was a pants-pissing level of laughter. Comedy music?

And then we would start up again.

"Fla, dut dut, fla dut da dut."

That was a good day.