Our friend Sally Ann came up from Nashville this weekend. She brought an agenda, and I am pleased to report that each of the items on it were discussed. No one entered new business in a Robert’s Rules of Order sort of way because, honestly, it was nerdy enough.

Every now and then I do some obscure Robert Rules of Order thing in the hopes that someone will call me on it, so I can walk into my home library, pull my tattered edition — the August 1986, 17th printing of Jove Books’ edition — of Robert’s Rules off the third shelf of my first book case and point to to the appropriate passage.

I made it to the state finals in a parliamentary contest in high school, because I knew how to have fun.

Anyway, I’m feeling much better, thanks. Feel just like myself, in fact, except for the cough that won’t quit.

On Sunday afternoon we took Sally Ann to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, which is about an hour away. This was our third trip, and her first, and it’s still a great time. Also, you can get a few nice pictures.

This is Tiger Lilly … or Tiger Jilly. I can’t yet tell them apart. They are sisters, and they live in the same giant enclosure. They came to the rescue by way of an Amish farmer who owned a roadside zoo. He had to find them a new home in 2017, and they’re now the first big stars of the walking tour.

This lion is Cera. She’s from Pennsylvania, where a vet there had an exotic animal rescue center, but he got to a point where he physically couldn’t take care of the animals there, so several of them are at EFRC now.

I think this was Jade. I didn’t take careful note of the enclosures this time. It had rained recently and I was trying to avoid the mud. Let’s assume I have that right: Jade and nine other cats came here from an Oklahoma traveling animal show in 2009 when the Okie lost his federal licenses.

All of the cats here are here to stay. They’re well-cared for, regularly attended and live in carefully planned
spaces. Over the years, EFRC, one of just a few such places in the country, has cared for more than a dozen different species. Today, more than 100 big and small exotic cats, are living out their lives there.

Rocky has been here since 2008. His owners lost their license, and he’s been here ever since, always watching the people passing by.

You think “Cute!” But these guys are all thinking, “If this fence wasn’t between us … ”

I’ve never been to Africa, or seen any of these sorts of animals in the wild, and this might be as close as I can get, but it’s difficult not to be humbled by the power of a lion’s roar.

You don’t even have to be near him to hear him. In fact, each time we’ve heard Zeus get chatty we’ve been around some other cats. They say, though, that neighbors two miles away can hear him.

An animal trainer in Peru, IN retired from the circus and just put all of his animals — lions, horses, an elephant — in a barn. The cats were kept in circus cages, their manes matted from sitting in their urine and feces. For nine years Zeus and his brother, Thor, lived like this. They could barely walk in 2010 when they came to this rescue, but both recovered well. Thor died a few years ago, but Zeus still rules the place, and he runs all over his great big yard. They say he will lose his patience with visitors, though, and that he’ll let you know when it is time to move on.

You go on this walking tour with a volunteer. It lasts about an hour. Though if you are there when it is slow, as we were last Thanksgiving, they will walk you through as slowly as you like. Our volunteer on this trip was a lady who works here when she’s not volunteering at a humane shelter. She’s very pleased and excited about doing all of this, as you might imagine, though some of it involves continually telling people to step back fro the fence. Which is a good idea because, while chain link is a useful invention, it would just serve to slow down a properly motivated tiger. That fence gives you a little head start and a false sense of security, that’s all.

This is Beaux. He’s not an albino, it’s just an exceedingly rare genetic trait. It seems that research points back to one particular line for all of the white cats in the U.S. Three of them live here. And, like a lot of the cats here, he has a ridiculous story.

Beaux arrived, at 14 months old, in 2016. A preacher in Virginia took in unwanted tigers from the circus and used them … to teach Sunday school. Three tigers came to this rescue when the preacher’s health began to fail him.

Beaux was pacing around because as we walked the one way, his friends, the people who are feeding the cats, were working their way toward us. Beaux was hungry, and it was quite something to see all of the cats get fed.

Just as hearing a lion roar is a humbling experience, hearing these powerful jaws snap bones is another reason to glance down to make sure your shoelaces are tied … just in case.

Our guide told us about the recent Big Cat Safety Act, which was signed into law in December. Essentially, this law prohibits the private ownership of big cats and makes it illegal for exhibitors to allow direct contact with cubs. The second half of that, once you hear all the details of how those normally work, is a good development. The first part should, effectively reduce the need for large cat refuges in the United States in the next 20 years or so. If people can’t own them, they can’t abuse them, can’t be outgrown by the cats, can’t need to give them to a rescue center. This should be a good thing.

I got in a little ride Saturday morning, before our company arrived. It was just 20 miles, and a little slow, but it felt a lot more comfortable than I did on Wednesday, when I was still recovering from my cold.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 75 routes down, 44 to go.

Time for a quick pass through the Re-Listening project. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I picked them up, and writing a bit about them here, and I’m well behind. These aren’t reviews, but they can be fun, or prompt some nice memory, or, really, just an excuse to put some music in here.

Which is what we’re doing today, as we do a quick scan through a compilation, Son of Frat Rock that was, I am sure, desperately desired in 1988. This one was part of a trilogy, it seems, and this was the second one, which has some great old tunes, and some fun one-hit wonders. This was a giveaway, I’m sure of it. And I’ve probably listened to the whole thing four or five times. Mostly, it was good for a quick tune here or there. But for the Re-Listening project, everything gets heard.

And this is a good policy because, wouldn’t you know it, there’s some fun stuff on here. This one cracked the top 20 in 1964, and I am only vaguely familiar with it.

The Music Explosion, The Kinks, Tommy James and the Shondells are on the front half of this thing, and then there’s the timeless Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels.

And then Bill Deal & The Rhondels comes on and you think, “that sits at the intersection of doowop and big band, and, thus, that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”

Which is silly, that’s blue eyed soul and the beach, and it works.

At which point this huge blind spot in my musical education is unavoidably apparent. (My in-laws will be aghast. I’m going to play them a few of these songs on our next visit, and see how long it takes them to name the groups.)

This one they’ll nail. It isn’t the same on the computer, but in the much-better speakers in my car I found myself thinking, “This is a Rev. Horton Heat song, 30 years too early.”

That’s Ernest Maresca, he was a songwriter first, a record exec second, and then a reluctant singer. He wrote some of Dion’s biggest hits, like “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer,” but never thought much of his own singing. That one made it to number six in 1962. He also wrote hits for acts like The Regents, Dean & Jean, Bernadette Carroll and Jimmie Rodgers.

All of which makes part of the experience, here. I’ve had this CD for a quarter century, I’m discovering music almost ready to retire, finding mostly positive things to say about it. And then a song pops up and think, “I see here why we were so ripe for the British Invasion in 64 …”

I’m a generation behind this stuff, and there’s no fault in that, but about half of it was new to me when I picked this up in the late 90s, and some of them still feel new to me, today. Like this cover of a young Stevie Wonder song.

Who knows about The Blendells without using Wikipedia? And when does there music come into the public domain? After running across this in the Re-Listening project I started searching for some of their other stuff, this was a good band. Mexican American brown-eyed soul from the 1960s in East LA. It certainly fits a tunes, probably helped define a place, and there’s still some life in these tunes.

The next song was La Bamba. If I play that here I’ll have to watch the movie again. It’s a rule or something.

Gary U.S. Bonds is 83 and is still playing shows. He’s got one coming up at the end of this week in New York, and that’s worth playing the gold record. He sold a million units of this after it was released in 1961, when it sat atop the charts for two weeks, and here we are, 62 years later … dancing to a quarter to three.

A lot of ink has been spilled about the recorded quality of that song. Accidental, deliberate, whatever it was, the lower fidelity is a signature part of it, at least these days. There are a lot of people trying to do the same sort of thing now.

This is less a gloss over than I intended, but we’re going to make up for it tomorrow, when the Re-Listening project continues with a record that … just wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s for you though. Come back and find out.