Tim Miles and Don Kuhl - The Monday Morning Memo

I enjoyed the opportunity to text my friend Don Kuhl this week…

Don, one of my partners, Tim Miles, texted me this morning regarding your birthday message to Kate:

“I relentlessly wonder if America is doing everything it can to protect this national treasure… so thankful you introduced me to his work and words. – Tim”

This is the ‘Aging with Don Kuhl’ birthday message to Kate that Tim Miles was writing about:

Dear Kate,

Happy birthday. I don’t keep track, but I think you broke the 50 mark. I am so proud of you.

Memories I treasure:

Your first romance with Walter in Denver. You were both three. You told him what to do (in a kind way, of course — most of the time).

Our Dairy Queen get-togethers through grade school and beyond. We solved so many important matters over ice cream.

Our trip to Northwestern to move you into a “luxury” dorm room. A sad day for me. A new world opening for you.

I had the first dance with you at your wedding. My little girl had blossomed into a beautiful woman.

My visit to Paramount Studios to celebrate your first professional marketing job. I was certain you made “Forrest Gump” a big success.

Our road trips that helped make The Change Companies a national success. I’m sorry I made you work over your lunch hour.

Your guidance as my daughter-psychologist. You keep sneaking me “suggestions” to help keep me on track. It’s a big job.

I love you so much.

Daddy Don

“One Sunday, as I waited to go on the air, a stranger dropped by KRAB’s rather ramshackle one-story wood-frame studio. Thin as a spaghetto, the guy had long, wild black hair, a pointy black beard, and wore a Mexican poncho across which like a bandolier was strapped a cheap guitar. In other words, he looked not unlike a thousand or more other skinny, hairy, ostensibly musical young men then yo-yoing up and down America’s West Coast. He talked like them, as well, scarcely introducing himself (he said his name was Charlie) before treating me to an earful of peace, love, and total liberation. Even as he mouthed the prevailing hippie philosophy, however, he did it with an articulation that was impressive and an intensity that was nothing short of galvanizing. . .

At any rate, the dude said he wrote songs and wished to perform a selection of them on Notes From the Underground, with which he was somewhat, somehow (he was not a local resident) familiar. Ordinarily, I would have consented, for while my shows were fairly well organized, it would have violated their spirit, the spirit of the times, not to be open to – even eager for – change and surprise. The following morning, however, I was leaving on a monthlong jaunt to Arizona and for that show only I’d scripted a program with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Any interruption of the Aristotelian flow would have sabotaged it, completely wrecking the desired cumulative effect. So, I turned Charlie down and sent him on his way.

Visibly disappointed but polite enough about it, he shuffled off into the summer night and vanished there. Two years would pass before I recognized his picture in the newspaper and realized that for better or for worse, I’d rejected – and tuned down an opportunity to tape a live performance by – Charles Manson.

“

- Tom Robbins, Tibetan Peach Pie, p. 240-241