My Buddy Craig Bowers

 Way back in the summer of 1980 I decided to stop hiding out in my parents' house, and get a social life going. As was my usual pattern, when I decided to do something, I did it on a grand scale. I became one of the hard core theatre people at Riverside Theatre, and I became a regular patron at a watering hole in downtown Vero called Copperfield's. 

The bartender at Copperfield's was a lovely, nice, funny woman named Linda, and we became friends almost immediately. One evening in November, there were a couple of weirdos in the bar at closing time, so Linda asked me if I would walk home with her, for protection. Once there, she invited me in to talk and smoke and have a beer or three, which I did. About an hour later her husband came home from the gig he had been playing. I was nervous that he might be upset that I was there, but no, it was totally cool. He picked up the acoustic guitar beside his chair and began just playing notes and chords which I soon recognized to be the musical soundtrack to our conversation. 

He was very interested in the fact that I was employed as a graphic artist at Emerson Art Service. He said he had always been interested in that stuff, and he showed me some drawings he had done. I was polite and appreciative, but you know my dad and I were constantly bombarded with drawings from people who believed that they could do our work. Our work required a specific skillset that had very little to do with the ability to draw nice pictures. Craig was also interested that I was involved in theatre; show biz was his life too. 

As time went on, the Bowers houses (they rarely lived in one house for very long) were my after-theatre hangouts. If one or both were home, I stopped in to talk and smoke and have a beer or a Coca-Cola. I met their younguns, Cyndie and Heather and they hung out with us sometimes. I had a family away from home and away from my theatre family. I enjoyed this time very much. 

Before the beginning of my second year at Riverside Theatre, their long-time sound guru Mike Gerbhart announced that he was resigning, so they'd better get someone else to do it. I volunteered, having some experience with microphones and speakers and reel-to-reel recording. It was great fun finding just the right music and just the right sound effects, turning them into sound cues and running a sound show as part of the show. About mid-season, I had a Western thriller, The Chase to do and I thought, "I know someone who could effortlessly create a musical soundtrack for this." Of course Craig agreed to do it. He watched one rehearsal, came up to the sound booth with his guitar and he and I, musician and technician, created a multi-track block of music for pre-show, entre-act and curtain call, all in about an hour and a half. We were both very proud of it.

1982 was a big turning point, because Copperfield's closed, squeezing off Linda's income. Bartender jobs were impossible to come by in Vero Beach. Her occasional gigs at Dodgertown were not much help. Craig needed to step up his music game and maybe even (God forbid!) get a job! At this same time, a very popular band called High Tide was losing its lead guitarist/ singer to severe hearing loss. Their drummer and their bass guitarist/singer approached Craig about creating a new hybrid band with Craig and one of his sporadic bandmates, keyboardist/singer Randy Jones. Craig had heard High Tide and was hesitant. He knew that they made so much noise, you could barely hear vocals or instrumental leads. He asked me if I would be willing to be their sound man, to control the noise as much as I could. Of course I agreed. Craig told them he'd do it if they took me on as sound man. Streettalk was born.

While the band was rehearsing and I was familiarizing myself with their music, Craig's automobile tag fee came due. I showed up at his house to go to rehearsal, and he was affixing his sticker to his tag. I was just waiting around for him to get done, when something about the sticker caught my eye. It was a flaw, something you'd never see from ten feet away, that told me it was a fake. "Did you make that?" He admitted it. Hmmm. So the next day at Emerson Art Service, I told my dad that I thought Craig would be an asset to the business. That evening I asked Craig if he would be interested in a job at EAS. He said he would. He met with Gil, my dad, showed him some samples of his work, and my dad agreed to give him a  try. From September, 1982 until sometime after my dad sold the business in 1988, Craig worked for Emerson Art Service, his first long-term full time job..

So now, on rehearsal nights and performance nights, Craig and I worked together from 9:00am to 11:00pm or 2:30am. And still we were friends. Then, to make matters even more complex, The Bowers Bunch was bumped out of yet another house just as one of my dad's rental properties was coming up empty. Once again I asked. Once again everyone agreed, and my two families became one, all within a couple of months, all within a couple of blocks. 

This shows how close we were. Heather, then 13, said she wanted to see snow. I said I would make it happen. In December of  1982, I bought two 7-day Greyhound Ameripasses, and with Craig and Linda's blessing we got on busses and spent two days in New York City and one day playing in a foot of snow in Buffalo, took a short side trip to Niagara Falls, Ontario, and made it home on Christmas Eve. Before that the farthest she had been from Vero Beach was Daytona. We have pictures.

I left Streettalk in the spring of '83 because I was involved with a woman with a toddler that desperately needed a dad. I did theatre sporadically, saw Streettalk occasionally, but worked shoulder to shoulder with Craig for eight hours and was still part of the Bowers family. Linda was helpful planning my wedding in '83, which rattled on until the summer of '85. 

Then in the fall of 1985 a cute young legal secretary named Carmen showed up at the theatre. My wife was living with her boyfriend, so I asked this cute young legal secretary if she would write me up a dandy divorce, which she did. So Carmen and I married in 1986, and as soon as the Dodger programs went to press in '87 we moved to St. Cloud, Florida. Craig and Linda came over to visit us a couple of times, and we visited them every time we went to Vero Beach to see my parents, but when we moved to Boston, then Albuquerque, then northwest Pennsylvania, we fell out of touch. 

We recently reconnected through Facebook, but the magic was gone. And now so are Craig and Linda. I cherish a decade or more of memories of  the whole family, but mostly of Craig, my friend, my co-worker, my collaborator, my brother from another mother.