About this poster

"Story #1 - Back in the 80’s my sister and I used to stay in Spring Hill, FL with my grandparents during the summer. We loved our grandparents, but Spring Hill was not exactly a hive of activity for young children (it was almost all retired folks) and as you can imagine Florida during the height of summer was brutally hot so playing outside was kept to a minimum. We did make annual pilgrimages to the theme parks though, Disney, Epcot, Universal, etc. with Busch Gardens being the closest. I loved seeing the animals there and one year convinced my Grandpa to buy me a stuffed animal boa constrictor at the gift shop. I named him “BoogieRah”.

Our other big pastime was playing poker. My grandparents loved going to the casinos, craps was Gram's game of choice and the one rule later on as we were old enough to join in the fun was “don’t talk to Gram when she’s at the craps table”, I abided. Gram did try to teach me craps once but it was way over my head, a game we could grasp though was poker. This is where I first learned of 5 card stud, suicide kings and one eyed jacks, intriguing terms for a young boy. It was competitive too, Gram did not cut us any slack, probably because we were betting with real money albeit loose change. There was also only one rule for our kitchen table poker games - we played for silver, pennies were not allowed.

So not unlike the crazy bingo people you see at casinos, a young superstitious me would do everything in my power to get an advantage over my competitors. This included setting up trinkets, performing OCD rituals before every hand was dealt, and yes the ultimate good luck charm - tying BoogieRah around my head like a bandana or even better - a crown. Did it work? Who knows, but the memories of BoogieRah and those heated poker games will stay with me forever.

Story #2 - Again there was not much to do down there in Florida. Every once in a while we’d go to the mall to get out of the house. This was probably a bit later than BoogieRah, think more teen angst age, and I had very recently discovered bands like the Doors and Pink Floyd. I had saved up some money by mowing lawns and whatnot and decided to buy every Pink Floyd album I could. At the time Pink Floyd was still around, at least the David Gilmour/Momentary Lapse of Reason version of Floyd, so that's what I thought all their music was like. Imagine my surprise when I came back from Sam Goodies and threw Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother on my Sony Walkman, my little adolescent mind was blown. I spent that entire summer deep diving into all things old school Pink Floyd, which in retrospect was one of my gateway bands into the Grateful Dead. And as they say, the rest is history…" - AJ