Built during WWII by a Catholic brother and sister, it resembeled a small castle. There are 2 actual bombshelters in the basement. When my Dad was bidding on buying the place, he was bidding against a guy who wanted to turn it into a funeral home.Yup-it's that fancy. Obviously something went right for us, as Dad eventually bought it. My bedroom was above the breakfast nook, enclosed in a battlement-like structure. The music store was on the main floor, our bedrooms upstairs, kitchen in back of the store, and living room and the eventual bar in the basement. On Sundays, the store was closed, and Dad usually had a Dixie-Land party. He could play the piano with one hand, and the organ with the other. There was usually a guy on sax, another on trumpet, and sometimes one on clairinet. Sunday strollers would stop outside, listen to the music and check out the house. I saw plenty of strangers out tapping their toes, wishing they weren't strangers...inside, was Dad's in-crowd. Singing, dancing, drinking, and that's just what they let us kids see. The music was not my style, because, of course, it was Dad's music. "Begin The Beguine," "In The Mood,"Stardust"," Sentimental Journey", and anything remotely related to Louis Armstrong tunes. Parties were the norm. Parties remained the norm at The House of Music, after I left, my brother left, my lil sis married, and Mom took the two remaining kids with her and left. I used to call Dad" the Jerry Garcia of Smalltown, Indiana." Always the Good Time Charlie, always playing gigs around the area, always partying hearty, always chasing around an altered state. Years later, I spent a winter in New Hampshire teaching myself to drink Scotch, so that I could be his drinking buddy when I came home. Johhny Walker Black, the older the better, was a warm teacher for an impressionable young girl on her own in New England, weathering the multiple snowstorms so far from the strange scene that had once been her home. I learned well. It was a small hospital in Portsmouth, with a tight-knit staff of enlisted folk who did our best to be hippies in the service of our country. There must have been 12 of us, all hanging out in an old school house we had converted into a club. Playing chess, all of us reading Hobbit Trilogy and discussing the latest chapters,listening to Zepplin, Cream, and Jethro Tull on a stereo contributed to the cause. I continuted the norm, and it was a good time to be me. Those were the Hash daze. More than 30 years later, I can still taste it. Off and on Purple Haze got in our brain. Or chocolate mesc. "Bare Trees" was more than a Fleetwood Mac album, it was beautiful and everywhere we went. We'd go to Boston for concerts, and once to Watkin's Glenn, NY to see The Allman Bros, The Dead, and another band that I cannot recall as I spent most of the time they played contemplating the mud puddle I found myself sitting in. More and more, as time went by, I found myself to be walking in my father's footsteps, the life of the party. In Maryland, 8 or 10 of us rented houses in nice neighborhoods and parties were the norm. They needed a nickname for me, and "Bite-Size" is the one they originally wanted for me. It just didn't set well with my quest for a low-profile for my crowd to shout, "Hey, Bite-Size, over here!" in the hospital cafeteria when I stood with my lunch tray looking for a friendly face. One night, jovially in the grasp of another self-taught Scotch lesson, one pal commented that I was "loose as a Moose-but pretty sweet about it" I pounced on the moment and procaimed SugarMoose was the name I wanted for myself, and so, it came to be. Years later, a few folks still refer to me as Sugarmoose, and as they still love me decades down the line, they've earned the right. When I was married, and he wasn't calling me "Bitch," he always referred to me as "Moose"...he never called me Cher. I always let it slide. I let so much slide. Parties were always the norm.
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