Luck or Something Like It (24 page)

This would be the deciding moment, “accept or kill.” Tina simply said, “May I?” Since I had never heard of anyone asking for permission to kill, I said, “Sure.”

“I want you to know, I don’t respect what you’re doing with my daughter,” she said, “but she seems happy, and that’s what’s important to me. I am surprised you would let me this close to your throat with these scissors, though.” She smiled.

“Me too,” I replied.

I had now met Tina, the other in-law, and gotten a great haircut in the process.

I left Plant City with a feeling that while we might not have had their blessings, we had her mom and dad’s acceptance, and that was big for both of us.

Once we explained to her parents that we were dating and that my intentions were good, it was so much more fun to date in the open. By now the tabloids had replaced me with some other poor soul about to be fed to the masses.

All my adult life I’ve tended to go out for dinner every night. But things were different now. The mere thought of cooking a meal in our Las Vegas kitchen seemed oddly romantic.

Wanda and I considered ourselves the best cooks in our bunch of friends. After all, we had just been given cooking lessons from Michael, the head chef at Spago Las Vegas, and we had learned to make the best pasta marinara I’ve ever tasted.

Settling into our new place in Vegas, we thought it would be fun to have some of our friends over for dinner. This would not be just any dinner; this would be a party concept we had heard about that would add laughs to our evening’s meal. It originally started in small towns as a way for friends to help new neighbors get the basic cooking utensils and small appliances they would need in their kitchen, and for the community to get to know them better.

The idea was for those who came to bring a gift—a mixer, an ice cream maker, a toaster, a set of bowls, and so on—for the newcomer’s kitchen and leave everything at the end of the night. Knowing the game lovers in our group, we decided it would be fun to do something different; we would make it a cooking party with a twist. We all met on Friday and decided what courses we wanted the meal to consist of, then took small pieces of paper with one item written on each and put them in a bowl. Whatever you drew, you cooked. You also had to bring everything it took to make your dish, start to finish. You had to find a recipe, bring whatever pots and pans and special things you needed for your dish, and most important, be responsible for all your own ingredients. No sharing butter, milk, flour, anything. Even salt and pepper couldn’t be shared.

Saturday morning, we jumped in our respective cars and went shopping together. This group was rapidly taking on the feeling of a flash mob. We were not just a lot of people shopping; we were a lot of people shopping fast. Then everyone had to hurry back and claim their spot, their territory, in the kitchen as well as claim their times for stovetop burners, oven use, and even freezer space. Everyone had to cook in the same kitchen at the same time. What was going to make it really fun was this was a competition; we all agreed that after we finished eating, we would vote for the best dish and the worst dish of the night. The person responsible for the worst dish would have to wash everyone’s dirty dishes.

The meal would be that night at seven
P.M.
Once we finished shopping and laid everything out, we ended up with duplicates of almost everything.

6 pounds of butter

4 pounds of flour

4 gallons of milk

3 different packages of Italian spaghetti

3 pounds of sugar

Lots of cilantro and several other bags of exotic seasonings

Here’s how the drawing went:

Kenny: salad and bread

Wanda: main dish—cilantro chicken

Rob: main dish—manicotti (or “manigot” as the real Italians say)

Tonia: main dish—barbecue shrimp

Kelly: soup—tom kha gai coconut soup

Jill, Kelly’s girlfriend: dessert—ice cream

A perfect name for this event would be: “Chaos in the kitchen.”

Six people in one kitchen are both funny and frightening at the same time. People were pushing other people’s food around so they could get their own dish in an oven or in the freezer or on one of the four burners on the stove. We now had flour, rice, spaghetti, and butter all over the kitchen and the kitchen floor, even out into the hall. The smell of so many different dishes cooking at the same time was in some ways actually nauseating.

Wanda’s chicken would have been perfect, except it was burned. It seems she set the timer for the wrong amount of time, by about thirty minutes. She swore someone changed it for their dish after she had set it, which ruined hers. Tonia’s shrimp, a recipe she had gotten from her ex-boyfriend, was exceptionally tasty and ended up winning first place as “best dish of the night.” Rob, our undercover policeman, went out into the hallway to mix his priceless “manigot” so no one could steal his hundred-year-old family secret sauce, direct from Italy. I have to say his family had strange tastes. Either he didn’t really know the family secret or that was their reason for keeping it a secret. He was smart to protect that personal treasure from us.

Jill, Kelly’s girlfriend at the time, was making ice cream that was going to be better than Baskin-Robbins, she said. As it turned out, it ended up being a sweet soupy dish that never gelled and became ice cream. Kelly made some kind of a Thai dish no one could pronounce and no one fully appreciated. He called it “tom kha gai” soup, a form of coconut soup. Now who on earth makes coconut soup? Kelly.

Since I had been assigned to do a salad and bread, I purchased a bread mixer and put in all my ingredients. The water, the flour, the yeast, the salt. Now all I had to do was flip the switch. Then Wanda brought it to my attention that I had accidentally forgotten to put the little kneading blade in the machine. Unfortunately, the blade needed to go in first, before the dough. So this was never going to work, and there was no correcting it. This was a mess, plain and simple.

For a salad I chose to make a potato and cilantro salad. The bread had been one thing, but this was what I had drawn for the competition. I have no idea why I chose this recipe, because I don’t even like cilantro in Mexican food, much less in a potato salad. Everyone agreed.

Between my bread and cilantro messes, I received five out of seven votes as the worst dish of the night, and I truly deserved them. I had tried to dress up my potato/cilantro salad with bell peppers and then even basil, but nothing I could add would salvage that disaster. It was really bad and everyone knew it. I had lost fair and square, and a deal is a deal. I would wash the dishes. Everyone’s dishes, and there were a lot of them.

To add insult to injury, my son Kenny Jr. came by at the very end. After tasting everybody else’s contribution, his remark stung: “Dad, I dropped everyone else’s food on the ground and yours was still the worst.” I got it, stated as only family can do.

Everyone offered to pitch in and help with my punishment. Everyone, that is, but Kelly. He was watching a football game and he knew the rules. The fact that he was next to last in the voting did not matter. He wasn’t last.

It took me two and a half hours just to get the uneaten food in the compactor and the dishes cleaned off and ready to wash. Then at least another hour to wash all of them. No dishwashing machines were allowed, this was grunt work.

I had lost that night and had learned a very valuable lesson. Stay as far away from cilantro dishes in competition as you can and invite fewer people when playing this game. Fewer people = fewer dishes.

I continued recording music
throughout this period, including what I consider one of the best albums of my career,
Timepiece,
released in 1994. It was a collection of some of the best songs of the 1930s and 1940s, standards like “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” “When I Fall in Love,” “My Romance,” and “My Funny Valentine.” I find it hard sometimes to juxtapose these songs with songs like “Just Dropped In,” “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” “Lucille,” and “The Gambler.” How could all those songs happen in one career?

I’ve lived my life and made most of my career decisions based on one concept or another, so here’s another one for you: “An artist in motion tends to stay in motion, while an artist at rest tends to stay at rest.” I know it’s not really my theory, it’s Isaac Newton’s, but I do believe it applies to music as well and explains how those songs I mentioned relate. Artists who stop moving forward, stop expanding their vision and setting off in new directions, become museum figures, relics of the past. Lose your momentum, lose your options.

The music of the ’30s and ’40s, when you analyze it, is really all insinuation and very little statement, while the songs of today are all statement and little insinuation. I think music is simply a reflection of the times we live in. During and after World War II, the music of the ’30s and ’40s was a form of escapism, and songwriters, composers, and singers chose romance over confrontation. In the 1960s, that all changed. As Americans realized the futility of the Vietnam War, they became angry and expressive. They protested what they didn’t like and drugs became a form of escapism and the music reflected it.

So “Just Dropped In,” the psychedelic song I did with the First Edition, did nothing more than show the average person how far he or she could go to avoid reality, and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” was about the reality of war. It was another time and a socially appropriate song. You throw “The Gambler” and “Lucille” in there and you get a group of country songs with some real depth and a peek into where society and music were at the time.

I was an artist in motion. I had options.

Thanks to my friend David Foster, I was allowed to completely change course and do the
Timepiece
album of twelve standards from that earlier era. For some reason, I’ve always felt guilty about loving jazz. I don’t know why, I just have. When I was in jazz, I felt very comfortable liking country music, but in country music, I feel this guilt about jazz. But jazz, or at least the jazz-influenced music of the ’30s and ’40s, is such a rich blend of melody and thought. Don’t get me wrong; I actually love both forms of music, and one is not necessarily better than the other, they are just different. That is the beauty of it, and to have the opportunity to perform and record both at such a high level is a true gift.

The
Timepiece
album done and released, I can’t tell you how excited I was when I was then offered a TV special to perform music from the album. No hits, just the album.

To tie my career together, we decided it would be great to reunite the Bobby Doyle Three. We had a full orchestra conducted by David Foster and Jeremy Lubbock, and the setting was the House of Blues in Los Angeles.

To get a head start and a little rehearsal in, I swung through Houston with my airplane and picked up Bobby Doyle and Don Russell. It was the first time we had seen each other, much less sung together, in twenty years. We were all genuinely excited. It would be one last big hoorah for the group—big band, big audience. Bobby suggested that we rehearse on the plane on the way. He was still the leader. We huddled together and started singing a cappella what had been our signature song, “It’s a Good Day.” We were halfway between Houston and Los Angeles when we realized how bad we sounded. There were no flashbacks of past brilliance, only fears of future failure.

Fortunately, the hours of practice that we had done years ago came forth when the big band started playing. We sounded great. And it’s a good thing because in the audience were Dustin Hoffman, Quincy Jones, Johnny Mathis, and a host of others from the Hollywood community.

Sometimes there are unexpected benefits from things we do. It made me feel really good to share this magical moment with my old friends Bobby and Don. We had gone out with a bang.

After the show Wanda remarked she was surprised how comfortable and happy I seemed in that environment. She had only known me doing country music.

During the same period, I was doing
Gambler V
in Galveston, Texas. Once again my character, Brady Hawkes, would be placed into history with real-life characters. This time Brady’s son had joined Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Hole in the Wall Gang and he had to go out and bring him back. I had promised Wanda and her sister, Tonia, that we would use them as extras in the movie. They would be dressed as saloon girls, the twin girlfriends of Butch Cassidy, and sit in Butch’s lap during their scene. Now, by definition, an extra doesn’t get to speak. Once you speak in a movie, you have to join SAG (the Screen Actors Guild), and more important, the production company has to pay you.

Wanda and Tonia were told they absolutely could not speak for those reasons. So when Butch says to them, “My now, aren’t you two beautiful ladies,” they both answer instinctively together, “Why, thank you.” There was complete silence on the set for a few minutes. The girls had no idea what they had done; they were just doing what they had been taught by their parents—always say “thank you” when you get a compliment.

Finally someone said to Kelly, who was producing, “I thought they weren’t supposed to speak.” Kelly replied, “If Kenny wants ’em to speak, let ’em speak. We’ll just pay ’em.” And so it was that Wanda and Tonia joined the Screen Actors Guild, and they still get their residual checks to this day. They also received acting credits at the end on-screen alongside future Emmy Award winner Mariska Hargitay. I guess having good southern manners does pay off after all.

Before I made my next big move, I had to write a song for Wanda:

“AS GOD IS MY WITNESS”—
A WEDDING SONG FOR WANDA

Once in a lifetime the right love comes by and with no rhyme or reason, you never know why.

You just wake up one morning . . . and nothing’s the same for you. The kisses taste sweeter, the touch just feels right.

You rush through the morning to get to the night.