Riverboat Acting Dreams
Sushi. Myers-Briggs. Main Street, USA. The Golden Eagle. Institutional Balancing Act. The Devils. A Pitching Masterpiece. Counting Crows.
My kid and I were driving through downtown Franklin, TN, debating lunch, and eventually settled on a sushi stop—avoiding the all-you-can-eat conveyor belt option. Yes, this is a thing.
After ordering, with summertime servers bouncing between tables, he asked me about my career. I figured he was getting to that age where one wonders what to do with life. Maybe, he had taken a college career survey—most universities offer the guidance. Choose your favorite, be it Myers-Briggs or the color game or some new variation with a slight twist. I can’t say if any of these ever helped, but I did find certain nuggets of value.
For my own journey, I lucked into it, stumbling from gig to gig. Or perhaps the wand chooses the wizard, but I like to believe you make your own luck.
But no, he didn’t want to learn the towering wisdom behind the shadows of a LinkedIn profile—it’s only truthful when the job doesn’t matter. He wanted to know the early history, the before college era.
So, I told him.
I worked at the world famous Golden Eagle Dinner Theatre during the formidable High School years. Being a waiter paid little, but I loved showing up in coat and tie, greeting guests as they walked in, balancing three salad plates on an arm, and watching the shows. The next summer, I welded and tried odd jobs at a wheel factory, often clocking in before dawn for ten to twelve hours. I do stress try as I was more than awful with weld lines. And my acetylene torch skills were barely passable. Somehow, I made it work; I didn’t die. I give due credit to my mother, who prayed daily and begged the higher powers to keep me from harm’s way. That’s a guess. She never tells her secrets. My mechanical savant brother-in-law helped too.
After my shift, I’d clean the dirt out from under the nails and wipe off the oil and soot. Yes, the theatre called. I’m not sure why I kept both gigs. The check barely covered expenses—gas costs money no matter the the decade.
But there was something about the place. Storytelling changes a person and transforms realities into the magical. I love Pawn Stars reruns because the provenance matters; millionaires are made with signatures and proof of ownership. Rick always did his homework; a sword from antiquity is valuable, but one tied to Harpe, the legendary blade that slayed Medusa, is priceless.
In hindsight, my first employer had its flaws. For one, the riverboat theatre wasn’t really a boat. Yes, it had a plank, the owner crafted the structure with smokestacks and painted it to look like a true Twain-era vessel. And it was located near a river—the marketing literature showed off its location.
But this was very much an aging building.
I was always a bit surprised when people showed, thinking it was going out on the water. I’d reply, “Of course, we’ll be leaving soon.” Being on the wrong side of a natural levee with a concrete bottom didn’t matter. I’ll admit—some didn’t get the joke.
But after they walked across the magical plank, something happened; a transformation of sorts. Stay with me; each cast member, dressed to impress, showed ticket holders to a table that had been personally selected on their behalf. The ornate red carpet led the way accompanied by the sound of a grand piano playing in the background. And this immense golden eagle presided over the crowd until the show began.
Sure, with a dose of reality, anyone could spy the chipping paint, know the piano was out-of-tune, and taste the overcooked buffet-style food. But why ruin the night?
Most left more than satisfied. Memory may be fallible, but magic spells are stubborn. It’s what gives places power. The story matters.
Still, hard truths can pierce the fragile cloud of pixie dust; the cobwebs were real.
One season, the owners contracted the food service out to a local college. I can’t speak to the business decision, most likely it became tiresome to manage. There were only so many hands in charge of routine maintenance, cooking, playwriting, and the list goes on. The owners were boot-strapped entrepreneurs without the promise of Silicon Valley Riches. Somehow, they made it work, despite the place not raking in mountains of cash. Personally, I don’t think it mattered. The people, the lives it touched were probably infinite. That’s the power of story.
Perfectly cooked roast beef? That’s not why they came—it was only a small ingredient in the broader spell.
Yet, the contract caterers arrived, determined to do their efficiency thing and make a mark. I do remember that season the food improved. But the strawberry cheesecake was also more expensive and the employees preparing and serving the food were too. They didn’t clock in for work because of the show; they wanted to make a buck, which impacted the bottom line.
And that additional cost siphoned away other needed improvements. Fresh paint. Writing. Music. That gold paint on the eagle.
No, it’s not one or two things that make a business or project successful. Sometimes, there are hundreds of threads. And if you pull one, a little luster can dim the shine. Be careful making tweaks to complex systems. It’s a lesson Disney understands better than its peers.
Main Street, USA.
Walt meticulously designed this nostalgic vision, using forced perspective and painstaking attention to detail to evoke a sense of cozy, idealized Americana. It’s famously inefficient. There’s no logical business sense in maintaining charming but non-essential features: the horse-drawn trolleys, the barbershop quartet, or the sculpted hedges. The cast touches up chipped paint daily. A start-up or corporate efficiency expert, wielding spreadsheets and cost-benefit analyses, would slash these unnecessary expenses immediately.
However, families don’t flock to either Disney Park for its profit margins; they come for these meticulously preserved inefficiencies—the pristine flower baskets standing tall with the castle looming close behind. The experience works precisely because people embrace the illusion.
It’s not just the Mouse House. All businesses have unique models through tinkering and finite adjustments. Non-profits. The corner grocery store. Consulting companies. Even our Federal Government.
The Balancing Act of Unraveling Institutions
When National Parks outsource management of visitor services to private concessionaires (they often do in concessions and certain services), operational costs for the government might decrease, and certain guest services may improve in efficiency or quality. However, private vendors can prioritize short-term profit over broader public values. This can lead to higher prices, reduced accessibility, or conflicts over environmental stewardship—trade-offs that ultimately risk undermining the parks’ long-term mission rather than saving money in a straightforward way.
I’d argue the nation I call home is the greatest on earth, dwarfing Rome, the dynasties, and that tiny empire managed by a certain tea company (the same empire this nation once declared independence against—over tea, of course). Yes, our government can be woefully inefficient. And, as voters, we’re often whiplashed between cuts and efficiency. Every president talks a big game. Yet, this inefficiency can be a feature, a safeguard of fairness and trust not captured on a balance sheet.
And the government employees who manage social security, serve in the bureau to keep our nation safe, and enforce environmental protections aren’t part of a deep-state conspiracy. Government jobs don’t even have private sector upside. It’s an entirely different model parties fight over.
Pulling any single thread—like our riverboat’s outsourced catering—can unravel the magic. Each piece of the illusion is interconnected, relying on a somewhat collective devotion rather than pure economic rationality.
Perhaps that’s why applying a ruthless efficiency model, whether to Main Street, my lost riverboat theatre, or even broader institutions, can feel like a betrayal.
Yes, magic rarely survives when reduced solely to numbers on a ledger. Maybe that’s why I ran in the red for that second job, nothing to do with the cute blonde who worked there too, right? That’s a love-story for a different day. Onward.
Be Cool, Pass The JPLA On …
The Devils I’m Reading:
I’ve been on a fantasy kick of late, working through Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy. I admit, the man shows a certain passion in his writing. He wrote multiple novels before trying to get any published—some are still on the cutting room floor. Yes, he wrote the bad ones out of his system.
Sure, I read Tolkien as a kid. Who didn’t? But I gravitated to the original Sword of Shannara series by Terry Brooks. The author penned multiple sequels; still, nothing surpassed the original trilogy of Sword, Elfstones, and Wishsong. These are classics. And the plot moves. Same reason I loved Mistborn.
But now that it’s finished, I found myself walking the stacks at Barnes and Noble (my backlog be damned) because magic still exists in book stores. I grabbed The Devils blindly. Last copy. Beautifully illustrated—some publishers will want to keep costs in check but not here. Checking out, the cashier mentioned this had to be the last one. Apparently, people were lining up for the book, and I didn’t recognize the author. Of course, these were fighting words and the cashier responded, “Better be careful walking out to the parking lot with that in hand.”
The style has long, run-on sentences. Me? I write shorter, moving fast. There is a rhythm here. And after I found it, the tale moves in its violent, haphazard path. There be monsters here, er devils, they’re demanding beasts that kill anything in their path.
Glorious through the first act. Nobody writes quite like this.
Maddux-style Pitching (What I’m Watching):
I keep waiting for the Cardinals to decide on what they want to be when they grow up. As I write this, the birds are seven games over five hundred (five ahead of my statistical model). They split with the Cubs series. Swept the Guardians. Then, were handled by the worst team in the division.
Hard to say if they’re truly in the hunt; however, the season proved its worth for last Friday night. Sonny Gray tossed one for the ages. He changed speeds, spins, and moved the ball at will—up and down and in and out. Jason Sheridan in Knights of Legend, my baseball opus, didn’t throw this good. Here was the final line: complete game shutout, gave up a single hit, eleven strike-outs, and zero walks.
But here is the kicker, he only threw 89 pitches.
The so-called Maddux, a shutout on less than 100 pitches, is a rarity in the modern age; even rarer when there are this many whiffs. I did a quick search and this hasn’t been done in the last decade (tell me if I’m wrong). Maybe ever, grant MLB only started pitch-count tracking in the 80s. Still, it’s one for the ages—worth a rewatch if you’re an AppleTV subscriber.
Magic in Applications (What I’m Tinkering With):
I used to love the app store; I’d find numerous applications to try—games, productivity, books, etc., It used be magical. However, I haven’t really downloaded anything new in a year? Longer? Mostly, I want to chuck my phone into the river. That was until my wife recommended Merlin. Developed by Cornell Labs, they built a tool to identify birds by song.
And it is glorious on morning walks. Yeah, the days of a 1,000 songs in my pocket may be gone, but magic still happens, even if it’s for the birds.
The Crows Return (What I’m Listening To On The Morning Run):
Adam Duritz has always written about possibility. He writes with demons, his lens peers through a cracked door leading through a somewhat bleak darkness. Then, a saxophone blares. Yes, there is always a little hope and fiery red hues to the sunrise.
It’s been ten years between Counting Crows albums. I’m thankful he delivered. Suer, AI can slop out song lyrics with a tap but it doesn’t know grit, the suffering hides in the undertones. Butter Miracle, The Complete Sweets was worth the wait.
Other Notes:
The title picture comes from an Adobe project gone wrong—it’s a filtering error modifying a levee photo taken in Canton, MO. How wrong? I don’t typically post this newsletter to my proper website until weeks later, if ever, but I went ahead so everyone can see the original. Be careful with AI, you never know what you’re going to get without proper change control.
I’m not trying to be misleading on our government contracting out certain services. This is a common practice as noted here. That doesn’t mean everything is entirely perfect.
When Words Fail (AI Citation Problems):
“We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News.”
