Sure 'nuff! Just found out I do have a small tidbit to add here. Didn't know I did, but it was something niggling at me.
LOL, it's not about Roger Miller, it's about his wife Mary! When I turned 21, I had just started back to school that semester at SMU. On my birthday, my BF took me out someplace to get my first "legal drinks."
(That wasn't quite true, because girls only had to be 18 to buy beer in Oklahoma in convenience stores or grocery stores. Guys had to be 21. We couldn't go in package - liquor - stores or order drinks out anywhere, but could buy it.
Like a dolt from TX, my 18th BD I was at OU, and didn't know that last part. My BF then took me out for pizza there in Norman and I ordered a pitcher of beer, proclaiming loudly to the waitress that I was 18 that day! LOL, beer disappeared fast. Learnt that tricky little lesson about Oklahoma liquor laws, which were bizarre, the hard way.)
Anyway, the place we went to for the Big 21 was some little dark club which I think was over on Greenville. Not sure about that. The headliners were Kenny Rogers and the First Edition.
The place was tiny and I wasn't sure why the people who had had the hit record "Just Dropped in (To See What Condition my Condition Was in)" a few years earlier were playing there, but it seemed like a good deal. We had a bunch of former New Christy Minstrels floating around Houston who played at pizza places and down on Market Square, so we were always running into them.
Kenny was from Houston, and I knew some people he knew - I also was a friend of a friend of one of their singers, or so I thought. My BF told them early on that it was my 21st, so the whole night, they sang whatever I requested (maybe not Boomer Sooner, but everything else) and played like it was exclusively for me. It was a special night!
Sometime during the evening, I asked about Thelma Comacho, who was the FofaF. She wasn't with the group any more, they said, so I remember being kind of bummed.
Well, hello! The girl that was so nice to me that night and took so many of my (eventually drunken, I'm sure) requests was Mary Arnold, now Mary Miller - Roger's widow.
*It's a small world, after all, it's a small, small world.*
Way cool! When I turned 18, disco was in, and I was in LaCrosse, WI. I don't think I got TOO crazy, but that was a LONG time ago!