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sounded like horsewhips cracking—it was some relief from the heat. The crowd had grown to about 4,000. It was clear the prediction of 80,000 had been nuts.
    Darkness fell. My old pals Kris Kristofferson and Roger Miller showed up. Kris was, as usual, in an uproar. In the newspaper that morning had been a story that accused Kris of throwing away a plaque some Vietnam vets had given him after he played a benefit for them up East the night before.
    â€œHow could they say such shit?” Kris yelled. “In all the confusion backstage, I didn’t know the plaque got left behind. For God’s sake, I’m on these guys’ side, I’m busting ass for these guys, I’m not gonna do anything stupid and humiliating like throw away their plaque!”
    Kris would be happy if this was coffeehouse time again, like the fifties and early sixties, where he could sit on a stool with his guitar and sing his songs to a packed house of beatniks. Kris is, of course, one of the best songwriters of all time. He shows more soul when he blows his nose than the ordinary person does at his honeymoon dance. But commercial is a word Kris refuses to hear. He has written a lot of hits and some standards, but he writes what he wants and sings what he wants—even if the record labels drop him—and formy Picnic he was going to do his new songs about the Sandanistas in Nicaragua and about Jesse Jackson. By now the night wind had dropped the temperature into the 80s, and the crowd had grown to an estimated 8,000.
    My manager, lawyer, and accountant arrived, counted the house, looked at the bills, and slunk around with subdued and mournful expressions. The Picnic stood to take a $600,000 bath.
    Zeke was a pardner for profits but not for losses. That was understood from the start. I would never put Zeke in a loser. The money to pay the losses would have to come from Tim, Carl, and me.
    Carl got drunk as soon as he saw the size of the afternoon crowd, had slept it off and was back aboard
Honeysuckle Rose
telling me with all the certainty a forty-seven-year-old guy born in Kleburg County in South Texas, father of seven children including a two-year-old, could muster that in another hour we’d have a crowd of 50,000. He hit the tequila again.
    â€œWant to play some dominoes?” Carl asked.
    â€œMix ’em up,” I said.
    â€œWhat’ll we play for?” Carl said.
    â€œYour town.”
    â€œShit, you own it already. Let’s play for cash,” Carl said.
    I went onstage with my band to play the last set at 2 A.M . I couldn’t tell how many people were listening down there in the dark. I knew I was going into the tank financially on this Picnic. We had made some major miscalculations. But none of that mattered when we struck up “Whiskey River” to open the final set. That was only money—this was music. The excitement I felt at that moment was too powerful to carry a price tag.
    Standing in the spotlights, with the old stars above me in the Abbott sky, I saw the satellite TV truck sending our picture and our music all over the cosmos. And from that stage at Carl’s Corner I could see, too, the dark blanket of the fields where little Booger Red had picked cotton and busted his back baling hay so many, many years ago.
    Regardless of what this 1987 Picnic may have cost me, in the end we wound up with a good permanent concert site not ten miles from the barbershop where I used to give a shoe shine and a song for fifty cents. How’s that for using the creative imagination?

The Chorus
MILDRED WILCOX
    It was about sundown when Myrle’s waters broke. I remember the period of day because Mama Nelson and I were doing the evening milking of our cow, and Myrle had wandered out to watch and talk with us. She was too pregnant to work, but maybe she could sense it was near and wanted company. Anyhow, Myrle’s waters broke while Mama Nelson was milking the cow. Mama Nelson sent me