This song’s origins run a bit deep. When I graduated from Elementary School, my parents gave me an 8mm movie camera with the old reel-to-reel film. I shot all kinds of scenes on my last day of school, but the film slipped the sprockets and I got nothing. (Fortunately, I had also taken some still photos, so not all the memory moments were lost.)

My parents felt really bad that the present they had gotten had caused problems instead of joy, though honestly I wasn’t really down – it was more just parental thing where you want your kids to be happy and hate it when you do something nice for them and it doesn’t work out.

So, though they really didn’t have any money and were always scrimping to get by, they bought me a new Super-8 movie camera that has just come out from Kodak and used film cartridges that just snapped into it – nothing to thread.

I took to that straight away and started doing all kinds of special effects shots, timelapse, and animation. I started putting together my own films and eventually put an expensive (for me) Canon 814 Autozoom Super-8 movie camera on lay away for a year as I saved up the money. That whole 12 month span I only spent 29 cents on myself for a bag of sunflower seeds, and all the rest of my allowance and money gifts went to the camera.

Once I got it, I really delved into filmmaking. I read everything I could find about it, and made a whole string of movies. I entered one of these in the Kodak Teenage Movie Awards and got Honorable Mention in one of the categories. Even got my picture in the local paper with a half-page write up! Wow.

Well, by the time I was this far into my Composer’s Sketchbook, I was also well into making movies. I was particularly interested in film history and loved the silent era – especially the comedians, such as the Keystone Kops. The music for these comedies was played live in the theaters on whatever piano they had around and was always some soft of spin on Honky Tonk.

So, I set my mind to teaching myself how to play rinky-dink piano, and this song came from right in that era.

How about that – a long, boring story that (though it took its sweet time getting there) ultimately hardly ended up anywhere, and clearly wasn’t worth the wait.

Imagine that.