One of my favorite stories is one that my Dad told me, and he swore that it was true. It recounted a conversation between my Dad’s friend and the friend’s somewhat senile mother:

Friend: “Today is December 7th, Ma. Do you know what’s special about this date?”

Mother: “I have no idea.”

Friend: “Well, December 7th, 1941 is the day that they attacked Pearl Harbor.”

Mother: “Oh, that’s awful. Was she a Jewish girl?”

Friend: “No, no, no. Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii, and the Japanese bombed our ships. Many, many people were killed and that forced the USA into World War II.”

Mother: “Oh, I don’t remember that. I must have been out of town.”

Thanks for getting past the cellophane. Playing in a trio is one of the most fulfilling things a jazz pianist can do: you get to be the main solo voice, and you also get the satisfaction of collaborating with your peers. It’s doubly satisfying when that collaboration can involve old friends. Thus, it was one of my few regrets upon leaving New York for Chicago in 1993, that in my 12 years in NYC, I had never gotten around to doing a real trio project with my friends Tim Horner and Boots Maleson. So, when in 1995, the Manhattan Rhythm Kings were kind enough to fly me to New York to play with them at the Rainbow and Stars, I took the opportunity to book some studio time so that Boots and Tim and I could record.

External forces threatened the project almost immediately. I had brought my family to New York with me: my wife Mariana, and sons Charlie (then four) and Luke (almost two). On our first night in NYC, Charlie and I got food poisoning from a Greenwich Village barbecue emporium. Charlie suffered no lasting ill effects, but I felt pretty green for a few days. Meanwhile, Luke had come down with a nasty ear infection that left him alternately howling and whimpering in Mariana’s arms for the rest of the trip. By this point, I was pretty frazzled and even wondered briefly if it would be worth it to record with Boots and Tim. We hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years and I could only recall one actual trio gig that we had ever played together. As I said, I wondered–for about two seconds. Then I decided to trust that things would turn out okay; after all, the three of us had known each other for almost twenty years.

When I arrived in Boston in 1977 to attend New England Conservatory (and to study with Jaki Byard), Tim and Boots were already well-established on the local scene. Boots was one one of the two or three top guys in town and gigged constantly, although he (thankfully) still had the time, energy and desire to do even more playing at various jam sessions, which is how I first got to know him. Later, he moved to New York and joined Ron Carter’s group (in which Carter plays piccolo bass). That Boots plays bass in a band led by one of the most important bass players in the history of jazz should tell you something about his prowess. He offers constant musical support, “big ears”, and a beautifully lyrical melodic sense. His easygoing nature and sly sense of humor are always welcome in the studio, and I’m grateful that he was available. Thanks, Boots–you played your ass off.

Tim, like myself, was going to school in Boston in the late ’70’s: at Berklee, right around the corner from the Conservatory. Naturally, there was a certain amount of commingling between the two institutions. I remember playing in a big band at Berklee that featured some of Boston’s finest players; that was one of my first encounters with Tim. Our friendship grew during countless jam sessions, senior recitals (including my own), gigs and general hangs. In 1984 we played a memorable gig in Singapore with baritone sax legend Pepper Adams (along with bassist Ed Howard). Tim currently plays in Maria Schneider’s wonderful big band and can be heard on many, many recordings. Of all the drummers I have played with, he is my favorite.

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My idea for choosing material was to sample the work of some of my favorite composers, ranging from those strictly in the jazz idiom to composers from the Tin Pan Alley tradition.

There’s A Boat That’s Leaving Soon For New York (Gershwin) We began with this song from Porgy and Bess. Originally sung by John Bubbles (love that name), this relaxed medium-tempo tune is often overlooked by jazz musicians and rarely recorded.

Yesterdays (Kern) This tune has received a variety of treatments, and I thought I’d add this Latinized version to the list. I lifted the intro from Bill Evans (So What); the piano figure heard with the drum solo was liberated from Eddie Palmieri. To paraphrase Stravinsky, steal from the best.

Memories of You (Blake) This 1930 Eubie Blake ballad has always been one of my favorites. I discovered the verse only recently, and I think that it compliments the chorus beautifully. Some other versions of the tune worth listening to are by Louis Armstrong (when it was still new), Jaki Byard (my old prof) with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and by Charles Mingus (on piano!)

The Jitterbug Waltz (Waller) In addition to being one of the great pianists and entertainers in the annals of jazz, Fats was also an incredibly prolific composer. Despite the “waltz” in the title, we messed around with the time feel a little bit on this one.

Orange Was The Color of Her Dress (Mingus) Like Fats Waller, Mingus is another example of someone whose larger-than-life persona made people tend to overlook his prowess as an instrumentalist and composer. If you’re into numbers, this is kind of cool: while thousands of 32-bar tunes have been written as either four 8-bar sections or 2 16-bar sections, Orange must be the only one written in THREE sections. It has an AAB form (11, 11 and 10 bars) .

In a Mist–In the Dark (Beiderbecke) Best known as a legendary cornetist and tragic figure, Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931) first picked up the horn at 14, but he had been playing the piano since the age of three. Here are two selections of suite for solo piano that he wrote and recorded in 1927. As a composer, Bix shows a sensibility more strongly influenced by Debussy and Ravel than by the jazz idiom of his day. I wonder how his composing would have evolved had he lived longer.

Edda (Shorter) Wayne Shorter’s tunes helped to change the language of jazz in the 1960s and he could not be omitted from my list of favorite composers. I included this tune (along with the title cut) to add a little 3/4 balance to a jazz world dominated by 4/4 time.

The Single Petal of a Rose (Ellington) Duke Ellington was surely one of the greatest figures in 20th Century music. This infrequently-heard little gem comes from The Queen’s Suite. I thought I had “discovered” it, until I saw an excerpt from it, in Duke’s handwriting, framed and hanging on the wall of Tim’s apartment! There’s no improvisation on this one, just the statement of the melody.

Trinkle, Tinkle (Monk) Blessed with a unique sound and style, Monk was a bebop pioneer as well as a seminal jazz composer. This quirky tune with the finger-busting melody is one of my favorites from the voluminous Monk catalogue.

Lost In The Stars/Surabaya Johnny (Weill) And finally, a pair of show tunes from the German composer Kurt Weill. I think they work well as a medley because they contrast with each other so strongly–the first tune lyrical and hopeful, the second dark and cynical. In fact, Surabaya Johnny, employing harmonies reminiscent of Wayne Shorter, translated especially well into the jazz idiom once we deconstructed the rhythm a little bit.

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See how many of these musical quotes (of varying degrees of taste) you can identify on this recording: Bessie’s Blues, Birdlike, Chloe, Exactly Like You, Theme From “Gilligan’s Island”, I’m Getting Sentimental Over You, Manhattan, Mysterioso, Petroushka, Remember Rockefeller at Attica, Seven Come Eleven, Theme From “The Twilight Zone”.

More Pepper Please

My first recording as part of this Pepper Adams project was a trio date in June of 2006. It must have gone well enough, because producer Gary Carner enlisted me for a second go-round with the trio, this time adding baritone saxophonist Gary Smulyan. It took place in June, 2007, in the same studio that had been the setting for our first session: Steve Ford’s great space on Clark Street in Chicago, with the mighty Grotrian piano.

Although I had one nagging concern about the project, I chose not to voice it: When putting players together who have never played with each other (Gary Smulyan had never played with Rob Amster, George Fludas, or me), a “slam dunk” is not guaranteed, no matter how impressive the pedigree of the musicians involved. It’s just not possible to predict if a good musical chemistry will materialize in the short time allotted, even if the Producer has decided that there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. Also, no matter how sterling someone’s reputation, there’s no way of knowing how he will respond to unfamiliar (and difficult, as it turned out for us) material.

Certainly, going into the project, my preconception of Gary Smulyan was that he is a great player. My extremely limited knowledge of him included the fact that he had been in the Mel Lewis Orchestra for many years, and that, in the small world of great baritone sax players, he was considered to be the Baddest of the Badasses, our generation’s Pepper Adams. I also assumed that Pepper was, undoubtedly, a big influence on his musical approach.

Although I had never played with Gary. I think we crossed paths once in Brooklyn in the early ’80s at an ongoing, all-musician softball game in Prospect Park. This was a great hang. Guys like Tim Horner, Ed Howard, the Eubanks brothers, Michael Weiss, and Branford Marsalis, to name a few, used to come and play ball. It was a rotating cast of characters, and we called ourselves the “Reeferdome All-Stars,” but I digress.

A couple of months after making the Pepper Adams trio recording in 2006, serendipity dictated that my path would cross with Gary’s. My family and I took a trip to New York City, and I went to hear my old buddy Tim Horner sit in with the Vanguard Orchestra. (This was what the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis band was now called after Mel’s passing.) Who should be playing baritone sax? Why, it was none other than Gary Smulyan, playing some great stuff. (I recall a Pepper-like quote of “Harvest Moon” on the bridge of some Rhythm Changes.) And, since I had my bari-playing teenage son with me, I introduced myself to Gary on a break. He remembered me, and we had a real nice chat about many things, including the ongoing Pepper Adams recording project that was Gary Carner’s labor of love.

Little did Smulyan or I realize at the time that, within a few months, plans would be finalized for the two of us to embark on the next chapter of this Pepper-palooza. So, by early 2007, I needed to coordinate the music that had been chosen for this recording. Luckily, I had copies of the leadsheets that had been written out by Pepper (courtesy of Chicago bari sax guru Ron Kolber) for every tune except for one, a simple 12-bar blues.

These leadsheets were extremely helpful. I came to regard them as “Sacred Texts” that represented Pepper’s original intentions, no matter how much they may have evolved in various recordings. I arranged little intros and codas for the tunes, but, for the most part, I think that we played them fairly close to Pepper’s intentions. One exception, however, would be “Dylan’s Delight,” where, at the Producer’s request, I messed around with some (hopefully) Mingus-like sudden changes of time feel. But even that one was still pretty faithful to Pepper’s original concept, when it came to the solos. Okay, another exception would be “Diabolique II,” but that was just Rhythm Changes, performed as a duet for sax and drums, in which Gary and George simply let it fly in a minimally arranged fashion. These melodies that Pepper wrote were obviously best suited to be played by a baritone saxophonist, so it was great to have them in their “natural habitat.” Plus, I was just glad that someone other than me would be doing the bulk of the soloing.

At Gary Smulyan’s request, I was able to book a couple of nights for the quartet at Chicago’s coolest jazz venue, The Green Mill. The Garys arrived on Friday afternoon, and the weekend’s schedule shaped up thusly:

Friday: The Green Mill, 9pm-1:00am
Saturday: Recording, 1-5pm
Saturday: The Green Mill, 8pm-Midnight
Sunday: Recording, 3-11pm

That’s a whole lot of togetherness. I remember hoping, with great fervor, that Gary Smulyan would be 1) pleasant to be around, and 2) musically compatible with Rob, George, and myself. Otherwise, it could prove to be one seriously long-ass weekend.

I’m glad to report that the answer was a resounding “yes” to both. For our gigs at the Mill, we deliberately avoided any of the Pepper tunes, even though, on a certain level, it might have been helpful to use the gig as a rehearsal for the recording. But, truth be told, they were just too hard to risk playing them unrehearsed in front of a paying audience. Plus, Gary had just gotten over a three-week case of pneumonia, and he wanted to have fun playing with the band. Instead, we wisely chose a bunch of jazz standards with which we were all familiar and comfy. I think that this helped to quickly establish an underlying chemistry that enhanced this recording.

Regarding the tunes on this recording, or other Adams tunes I’ve played, Pepper Adams (like any jazz composer who is also a great instrumental soloist) clearly wrote his tunes as vehicles for himself; vehicles that would bring out the best in his playing. And these tunes are derived from the same genetic material as virtually all those that come from this post-Hard Bop style: a healthy mix of minor, major, and dominant chords, along with the usual ii-V-I chord progressions that can journey through a variety of tonal centers. Those of us who are given the challenge to create something beautiful from a piece of paper containing these kind of instructions eventually start to notice recognizable patterns after doing it a few hundred times, and these recognizable patterns create a comfort zone that enables the improviser to be relatively free from the burden of having to think too much. Why then, we all wondered in the recording studio, did Pepper’s tunes largely deny us that luxury? Our short answer: With the exception of the 12-bar blues and Rhythm Changes, while they did consist of the usual harmonic components, Adams’s unique combination of these components created a landscape that studiously avoided taking the soloist to the usual destinations, thereby making it difficult to ever really settle into a comfort zone. Because of this, I can honestly say that I’ve never played any tunes that were quite like Pepper’s.

If you feel you’ve achieved some degree of success in any new project, then the satisfaction you derive will be all the greater if it comes despite not having been allowed into your comfort zone during the process. We do hope that you appreciate our humble efforts at keeping these masterful works of the great Pepper Adams alive in these recordings by enjoying the contents herein.

Jeremy Kahn
January, 2008

Pepper’s Take

Of all the horns that are associated with jazz, none occupies a more perplexing place than the baritone saxophone. It is essential to the success of a large ensemble: A big band without a great sax section is doomed to mediocrity, and a sax section without a great bari player can not be great. Would Ellington’s band have sounded the same without Harry Carney? How about Woody Herman without Serge Chaloff or Thad Jones-Mel Lewis without Pepper Adams?

Why is the list of baritone saxophonists who have made their mark as soloists so maddeningly short? Look at any grade school’s music program. You’ll find a million alto and tenor players, and very few bari players. Often as not, the school’s band director had to cajole an alto or tenor player into switching over just to have a complete section. (I know this first-hand. My 16 year old son is one such convert.) Bari players are greatly outnumbered by all the other instrumentalists. And, in a way, it’s understandable. Have you ever tried schlepping one of those beasts around?

Another reason might be that, unlike other horns that are typically heard in jazz, the majority of the baritone’s range lies outside the human voice. Perhaps that makes it less attractive to beginners. In any event, there have been just enough baritone sax soloists through the years to have left a legacy of great music. I was fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to play with one of them: Pepper Adams.

 

How Many Miles?

My gig with Pepper Adams is well chronicled in Gary Carner’s forthcoming book, Joy Road, but here are the Cliffs Notes. Tim Horner, the great drummer (and my old pal), took advantage of a connection that he had in Singapore (an ex-girlfriend, to be exact) and wangled a gig for us at a jazz festival there. It paid enough that he was able to hire a “name,” and Pepper was his choice.

Tim, bassist Ed Howard, and I were all in our twenties, and Pepper was in his fifties, in the twilight of his outstanding career. I oscillated between youthful arrogance and sheer terror at the prospect of sharing the stage with him. It was supposed to have been a tour, with dates in Japan and Indonesia, but they all evaporated, except the date in Singapore. It was a long way to go for one gig: about thirty-six hours from New York. For me, though, it was well worth it.

Pepper was friendly enough to his fresh-faced, smart-assed rhythm section, but he was borderline curmudgeonly when things displeased him. The two things that I remember were not being paid in American dollars before the gig, and a perceived dragging of the tempo on “A Child Is Born.” On the former, Adams threatened not to perform. On the latter, Adams pointedly suggested that the tempo stay where he had set it, before counting off the next tune.

Most of the concert, though, featured Pepper the Badass, the one we all know and love. He was tossing off some amazing, long lines of eighth and sixteenth notes, all with that in-your-face sound. The concert was a success. They loved Pepper. We made the tiresome journey home. I never saw Pepper again after that.

 

Harmonic Convergence

While living in Chicago, I’ve had the opportunity to play many times with Ron Kolber, the local patriarch of the bari sax. He enjoyed a close relationship with Pepper, and he very kindly offered to give me copies of about twenty Pepper tunes (written in Pepper’s own hand) that he had acquired. I accepted, of course, and gladly added them to my personal library. Every jazz player welcomes the chance to add to his repertoire a bunch of well-written tunes that are seldom played by anyone else.

Upon learning, right around this same time, that Gary Carner’s first book on Pepper was soon to be published, I passed this thought on to Gary: Why not promote the book by producing a CD of Pepper tunes, featuring someone very much along the lines of me? (That’s something else that every jazz player welcomes: The chance to go into a recording studio under the financial auspices of somebody else.) To my delight (and palpable surprise), he agreed to it. At Gary’s request, my contribution would be in the form of a piano trio.

 

Not a Drive through Wine Country

The next step in the process would be to familiarize myself with these tunes well enough so I could play them comfortably. Not to “dis” Pepper, but I found that they didn’t flow as easily as tunes by, say, Jerome Kern or Kenny Dorham or Antonio Carlos Jobim or Wayne Shorter, at least as far as my own facilities were concerned. I got the feeling that many of Adams’ melodies had arisen from lines that he might have played in a solo and was pleased enough to fashion a composition around, kind of like Charlie Parker in that way. And remember, Pepper was a quirky and idiosyncratic player, so it makes sense that his compositions would be too. This means that, as tricky as they are to play on the sax, they’re even trickier on other instruments (like piano, for example).

Aside from the melodies, the other important aspect for me to consider was the relative ease (or difficulty) with which the chord changes flow, because that’s what the soloist is dealing with during the bulk of the performance. Pepper’s chord changes, while obviously well thought out, take a lot of twists and turns that deliver you to some unexpected destinations. If you’re not comfortable playing rapidly changing chords in tonal centers less traveled, you’re going to be in deep “doo-doo.” Or, as Jaki Byard used to say, it will be obvious if “you’re lying on those changes.” Pepper’s tunes deserve better than to be skated through. They are masterworks, written by one of jazz’s greats, containing rock-solid ideas and a unique, lyrical individualism, albeit wrapped in challenging frameworks.

Challenges are good, though. That’s why Bird and Diz occasionally practiced out of oboe method books. Passages that are meant for other instruments will likely be awkward on your own, and successful navigation will make you a better player. Feeling somewhat secure on Pepper’s tunes was a gratifying feeling, because they were nothing if not challenging.

 

Nip/Tuck

Be careful what you wish for, right? My next step was to deal with this stack of Pepperabilia and come up with cogent, coherent, playable, and enjoyable piano trio arrangements. To my mind, there were a couple of fine lines to be negotiated. First, I knew I wasn’t re-inventing the wheel. I wanted to be faithful and respectful of Pepper’s intentions by playing his tunes fairly close to the spirit in which they were written.

There was one notable exception. “Doctor Deep,” a jazz waltz, gave me artistic constipation. I just couldn’t get anything going with it. I decided to give the tune a totally new set of chord changes, and morphed it into a McCoy Tyneresque Afro-Cuban kind of thing. Forgive me, O Ghost of Pepper’s Past.

I also didn’t want to be a rubber stamp of previously recorded versions. So I dressed them up with some new intros, tags, and background figures, and I also tweaked a few of Pepper’s original tempos. I wrote all of these arrangements over the course of a couple of weeks, while sitting in the orchestra pit, waiting for my steady gig of the Broadway musical “Wicked” to begin. The result filled my head with a very unusual combination of music. Pepper Adams and Stephen Schwartz: Now that’s an odd couple worthy of Neil Simon!

The other fine line was negotiating the writing versus “blowing” conundrum. You can listen to a jazz record with the sense that the music is so controlled and pre-determined, that any sense of unencumbered improvisation is all but snuffed out. The other end of the spectrum is when you sense that things are so loose, that it seems like no serious preparation has been given to the music. Either way results in an unsatisfying experience for the consumer. My solution was to make sure that the written aspects of the music stayed within my decided parameter of doing the dates without benefit of rehearsal. For this to succeed, it was crucial to have the right personnel.

 

Bring in the Stunt Rhythm Guys: Rob Amster and George Fludas

Before this session, the only time we had played together as a trio was when we were brought in to comprise the rhythm section on a horn player’s recording date. The challenging part was the fact that we were laying down tracks to some big band arrangements before the rest of the band was scheduled to record their parts. This was hard, because, without being able to hear what the fully realized music sounded like, we were asked to create something in a vacuum. I thought we did a good job with it, though, and I felt like the three of us established a strong musical rapport.

Drummer George Fludas won me over some years back when we were playing together at a jazz salon kind of thing. We’d play for some rich patron of the arts, then answer questions and expound on the state of jazz and the creative process, then play some more. Someone asked George what was his favorite music to play, and he responded, “Ballads.” It blew my mind to hear a drummer give that answer because ballads don’t present drummers the chance to show off all their party tricks. You’ll often see young drummers roll their eyes when a ballad is called, because they really don’t know what to do. George clearly does. He can play convincingly in all jazz styles because his musical vocabulary covers an astounding range. He has been asked to make music with Ray Brown, Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Cedar Walton, Milt Jackson, Eric Alexander, and Diana Krall, just to name a few. Mainly, though, he swings his ass off. We’re extremely lucky that he lives in Chicago, and I’m very grateful that he was available for this session. His presence added more than I can say.

Bassist Rob Amster and I have played a ton of gigs over the years, from wedding bands to jazz clubs. I remember that (shortly after I moved back to Chicago from New York in 1993) while we were setting up to play our first gig together, he took a look at my somewhat antiquated electric keyboard and started laughing at me. That was how Rob welcomed me to town, and it still gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling when I recall it. He is surely one of the only bassists to have played in Buddy Rich’s band to emerge un-fired. (Buddy went to The Big Crash Cymbal in the Sky before he had a chance.) Rob also had a stint in Maynard Ferguson’s band, but his main gig, over the last few years, has been to tour the world with vocalist Kurt Elling, an intensely creative endeavor.

Amster does what great bass players do: He can take the music to surprising and wonderful places, or he can just lay it down and make sure that things are simply locked in and swinging hard. He picks good spots for knowing what muscles to flex. He never mails it in, and he’s one of my all-time favorite bass players because he’s always reaching and challenging. I’ve done some of my best playing due to his on-the-bandstand motivating. I was thrilled to be able to record with him in this trio setting.

You will, however, find one non-trio tune on this recording. We invited tenor saxophonist Eric Schneider to join us on “Beaubien” as a special guest. Eric is one of a diminishing breed of sax players who can acknowledge in his playing that there was music before 1960. In fact, he can play in styles that go WAY back! But, whatever kind of music he’s playing, Eric’s flawless time, limitless ideas, and his ability to inject humor into his playing have always inspired me.

We’ve tried to do justice to Pepper Adams and his compositions. I hope that these tunes provide you with an enjoyable listening experience.

Jeremy Kahn
September, 2006

I’ve gotten a lot of very amused (and amusing) responses from the very short video attached here.

[jwplayer mediaid=”163″]

Let me take a minute to put it into context (Kahn text?):

I spent a summer playing in the band for a production of “The Wizard of Oz” at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. I bet you didn’t know that Shakespeare wrote that, did you now? Lauren Frost was our Dorothy; she had garnered a relatively high profile around that time by being on a Disney Channel TV show called “Even Steven”, and had also performed with Barbra Streisand (I think that she portrayed young Babs). The producers booked Lauren on a locally-produced interview TV show in order to generate some publicity. The tremendous honor of playing the piano for this was bestowed upon me.

We discovered upon arriving at the studio that the show’s other featured guest was none other than Barry Manilow. BM was interviewed while sitting at the piano, and he seemed like a pleasant guy while being interviewed. I did notice something strange, though: when responding to questions, he played quiet chords on the piano. It was like he felt more comfortable doing it that way, kind of providing a spontaneous soundtrack for his commentary.

But wait! I’m getting ahead of myself a wee bit here. I remember that the show’s host approached me prior to taping, dutifully and professionally asking my name. When I replied, “Jeremy Kahn”, she said. “Oh, that’ll be so easy to remember; it’s just like the nut!” Having no idea what she meant, but always trying to be agreeable, I simply nodded and began the mental preparation necessary to make a positive impact on our television viewers.

In retrospect, it’s now quite obvious what she meant by “just like the nut”. But, for chrissakes, this woman’s job seemed to be relatively simple: look somewhat telegenic, be perky, ask softball questions and accurately identify the guests. I mean, have YOU ever met anyone with the last name of Pecan? After the taping, I approached our hostess to let her know that she hadn’t gotten my name right. “It’s actually ‘Kahn’, not ‘Pecan'”, I told her. With no apology, she started laughing hysterically. Tee-freaking-hee.

I wondered what my on-camera reaction had looked like while being introduced as a nutty morsel. About a year later, I emailed the show and asked if I could have a copy for my personal use. Hostess replied that, gee, she’d love to, but that the station’s policy precluded her from doing so. Disappointed, I got to thinking about it: Baloney, I thought to myself. What if Barry Manilow had asked for a copy? Would he have gotten the same blonde cold shoulder? I think not. I prayed to the Patron Saint of Awkward Television Moments (St. Ashlee?) and was rewarded when a DVD was delivered to my door. I edited out the chaff so as not to waste your precious time.

Moral of the story? Once again, none. But no one remembers when everything goes according to plan. It’s those little screwups and surprises that get our juices flowing and make life interesting, even when the initial reaction feels like someone squished a grapefruit in your face.