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I rolled in last night from my overnighter in Nags Head with Joe, Al and Mike deeply exhausted, even more deeply sunburned, yet feeling considerably more rested and just better overall than I've felt in weeks. Just the amazing healing powers of not being in the same place every day for months on end for at least 48 hours -- or at least some place that serves better food and a less nasty body of ocean water to swim in for a change. We stayed at Al's aunt's beach cottage over on Mile Post 4 which overlooks the ocean, and it's funny how being a person who grew up at the beach here in Virginia rarely appreciates what she has in her own backyard (or at least earlier this year when the beach was practically in her back yard) until she really gets to bond with it in the way that she did as a child -- especially with Moe Larry and Curly squabbling with each other in the beach chairs next to me while I idly tried to make a giant sand boob at their feet. Joe and I buried Mike up to his waist and then we all went swimming, which again I haven't done in the ocean probably since high school. In fact I haven't even been to Nags Heads since the summer before my Freshman year of college, a month or so before I ever met Joe, and Joe hasn't even been to Outer Banks at all except for the one time when he had to drive down and pick up his former roommate and drive back, almost 15 years ago. So Al took the keys to my car and drove us around to show Joe all the little landmarks in that side of the peninsula, like Jockey's Ridge and the Orville & Wilbur Wright Memorial site in Kitty Hawk. Oh, and Nags Head finally has a music store now. Sort of. For years whenever I wanted to buy music down there I would always have to go to the Roses' department store in Kill Devil Hills for whatever abysmal cassette collection they had, but now it appears that a tiny indie record store with actual compact disks (Outer Banks is finally dragged reluctantly into, well at least the 20th century) has sprung up and then... um, systematically assimilated by a Radio Shack. So basically it's now a Radio Shack with about roughly 500 CDs, which I guess is something. (I guess?)
Wednesday Al wanted to go to karaoke (i.e. get drunk in a bar and yell at people on stage) and since I've never been to nor performed in karaoke I figured what the hey anyway. Although I was very tempted to get up there and sing Charlene's "I've Never Been To Me" my voice was soon too hoarse from laughing so hard at the boys and their antics, with Joe singing "Cut The Cake" by Average White Band, mistaking it for "Pick Up The Pieces" which is mostly an instrumental and he thought it would therefore be an easy selection, so Joe had to sing all those "Gimme gimme gimme gimme's" and soon pretty much resigned himself to screaming out "CUT THE CAKE!" at random intervals and spazzing out on stage, which had the bar audience in stitches. Joe also did a very sincere "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" straddling a chair with his back to the audience, and a duet of "Ebony And Ivory" with Mike where they ironically couldn't be standing further apart from each other. Best of all, mixed in the catalog with all these dreadful Jewel songs and typical karaoke fare was "Dinah-Moe Hum" by Frank Zappa, which Mike the Zappaphile knew the words to by heart, so picture if you will a 50-year-old black man in shorts and a T-shirt that says Silence Is Golden, Duct Tape Is Silver sitting in a chair on a stage, not even reading along with the prompter as he droned in his usual baritone monotone lines like "I whipped off her bloomers 'n stiffened my thumb an applied rotation on her sugar plum" and that's pretty much the mental image I took home to bed with me that night, as well as the rest of the hootin', hollerin' contingent present that night. Then Mike topped the evening off with "Theme From Shaft" before we all collectively passed out on Al's couches watching Wattstax for the 14,598th time.
So yeah, not a hugely exciting two days off, but it was just what I needed: Sun (well not really), sand, saltwater, and three other music geeks arguing heatedly over which damn Big Audio Dynamite song was playing in the dining room during dinner at the Black Pelican. Pretty much my kinda vacation.
Wednesday Al wanted to go to karaoke (i.e. get drunk in a bar and yell at people on stage) and since I've never been to nor performed in karaoke I figured what the hey anyway. Although I was very tempted to get up there and sing Charlene's "I've Never Been To Me" my voice was soon too hoarse from laughing so hard at the boys and their antics, with Joe singing "Cut The Cake" by Average White Band, mistaking it for "Pick Up The Pieces" which is mostly an instrumental and he thought it would therefore be an easy selection, so Joe had to sing all those "Gimme gimme gimme gimme's" and soon pretty much resigned himself to screaming out "CUT THE CAKE!" at random intervals and spazzing out on stage, which had the bar audience in stitches. Joe also did a very sincere "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" straddling a chair with his back to the audience, and a duet of "Ebony And Ivory" with Mike where they ironically couldn't be standing further apart from each other. Best of all, mixed in the catalog with all these dreadful Jewel songs and typical karaoke fare was "Dinah-Moe Hum" by Frank Zappa, which Mike the Zappaphile knew the words to by heart, so picture if you will a 50-year-old black man in shorts and a T-shirt that says Silence Is Golden, Duct Tape Is Silver sitting in a chair on a stage, not even reading along with the prompter as he droned in his usual baritone monotone lines like "I whipped off her bloomers 'n stiffened my thumb an applied rotation on her sugar plum" and that's pretty much the mental image I took home to bed with me that night, as well as the rest of the hootin', hollerin' contingent present that night. Then Mike topped the evening off with "Theme From Shaft" before we all collectively passed out on Al's couches watching Wattstax for the 14,598th time.
So yeah, not a hugely exciting two days off, but it was just what I needed: Sun (well not really), sand, saltwater, and three other music geeks arguing heatedly over which damn Big Audio Dynamite song was playing in the dining room during dinner at the Black Pelican. Pretty much my kinda vacation.
posted by Melissa at 7:43 AM
4 Comments:
I LOVE the Black Pelican. Did you sing karaoke at Jolly Rogers? All this Outer Banks talk...feeling homesick. We'd vacation there every Thanksgiving. Love it.
The Black Pelican was wonderful. Joe had this baked crab and shrimp thing that he can't stop talking about, so we might even make another trip all the way out there again just for that (and now I'm curious too). We also ate at this place called Port-O-Call, or something like that, a little more upscale but Mike wanted to go to show us where he used to play back in the bar area every week way back when he was in the Gibb Droll Band.
I can't remember the name of the karaoke place but it was almost literally right next door to the Pelican, or in that little strip of shops. Tiny little bar with pool tables in the back and three big screen TVs over the stage. There was a group of kids there from Belfast who completely fell in love with Mike and took dozens of pictures with him. He seems to have that effect on people.
I'd love to have Thanksgiving there. You know down in nearby Wanchese the locals there celebrate Christmas as "Old Buck Day". Every year two guys dress up in a donkey suit (Old Buck) and visit neighboring houses, running through the streets while local children chase it and throw things at it. Or something like that. My friend lived down there for a year and saw it all happen. Strange and bizarre things happen down on that island, I say.
If you get another couple or so to go in on it, a whole week during Thanksgiving is quite affordable. Houses (semi-beachfront, even) go for 700 a week in November and they usually sleep 9-10 people.
I HIGHLY recommend you check out Duck and Corolla, that's where we've always gone. They have a much more quaint, tucked-away feeling to them. Less touristy. Trust me on this, I'm a bit of an outer banks expert, my family has gone practically every year for the last 12 years. So, next time you're down there, take a drive to the Southern Beaches (Duck, Corolla) and stop in to Jolly Rogers (not in the Southern Beaches) it's on Beach Road MP 4 or something like that. They are one of the oldest Italian restaurants in the Outer Banks, and it's in this old building with a long narrow bar in the back and has Karaoke every night. The restaurant section has a Santa decor, weird, and the ceiling is covered in tin foil with hundreds of Christmas ornaments hanging from it. But it's quite a local fav.
Oh, I love Duck and Corolla. In the past we often stayed down in that end more often than Nags Head. Nags Heads is so busy and touristy, but I love Duck and Corolla for their quiet and, just as you say, tucked-away isolation to them. Last time I was ther I stayed in Corolla with my childhood friends family, and they had this little shopping area called Scarborough Faire right on the main road -- do you remember that place? They had a book store in there and my friend and I used to sneak into the back and read The Joy Of Sex.
The water down in Duck is clearer too, for some reason. I remember once it was so clear you could see the skates gliding down on the bottom of the sea bed.
We used to camp down at Hatteras a lot, me and the same family, and one year we did it on Ocracoke Island, which was spectacular.
Thanks you for all the updated info about Outer Banks. Literally I haven't been down there since I was 18 years old, after summering there almost every year since I was a baby (that and Hilton Head Island). Funny to see how much of it has been built up over the years. I think I was less surprised that they had a record store in a Radio Shack and more shocked that Nags Head finally got a...a Radio Shack!
A big week down there would be awesome. Come back to VA and let's do it! :-)
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