On the road

Abstract

Life on the road is a long-standing tradition in show business and a necessity in the continual search for the audiences that are the only means for the performing artists survival. Its a tough way to live, even in present day times with modern modes of transport. On the major tours in which I have been involved, travel was generally by means of bus, and because distances in the States are so great it was not at all unusual to spend up to ten hours at a time covering distances of 500 miles or more between dates. It’s a very exhausting schedule and after a while you begin to feel you’re living in a different world, almost a different dimension from the one you observe through the windows of the bus as you pass through towns and cities. The bus becomes your own self-contained private world and in a strange way you become very attached to it. Your seat on the bus becomes your own little haven and must be respected by your fellow travelers. Each day, as you return to your seat, it develops its own characteristics, different from any other on the bus and reflecting your personality. The other seats are occupied by owners who have their own characteristics too; you can always identify the health-kick guy by the bags of nuts and wheatgerm alongside his seat or the drinker with his stash of booze. Then there are the readers — the lightweight readers with their magazines and the serious readers using the time on the road to study some subject that interests them, anything from astronomy to the works of Chekhov.