Tambourine Girl

When I was in college, my roommate Aimee and I took a fair number of road trips. We went to St. Louis with regularity and made it to Louisville a couple of times. There were two items required for any trip over two hours, (1) graham crackers and icing and (2) every single piece of music ever released by Counting Crows.

The roles were simple. The person not driving was the navigator and road trip DJ. They had control over the music and the maps, but they also had to make graham cracker and icing sandwiches whenever the driver demanded. The driver was expected to pay attention to the road and keep an eye out for rest stops (Aimee had a bladder the size of a walnut). With these well-defined roles, our trips went off without a hitch.

As you might expect, the soundtrack for our journeys was a continuous stream of Counting Crows tunes. They only had two albums out at the time and we sometimes listened to them over and over, singing along to every word. Aimee had a dream of being a tambourine girl/interpretive dancer for the band and she invented an endless array of hokey dances to perform while sitting in the passenger seat. It takes extreme measures like these to make Illinois seem interesting.

Nowadays whenever I get a little tired of driving during a long trip, I slip in a Counting Crows CD and sing along to every word, often at the top of my lungs. It always wakes me up but it sometimes makes me wish I had someone to make graham cracker sandwiches for me, too.