not having a great time with Billy Bob Thorn- ton. I pity him for giving me his cell phone number one time. He invited me and Mommy out to watch him direct a movie, and he gave me his number. I would just start calling him too much about things. I had to stop using it because I was becoming the person you don’t give your number to. But we are on the movie set, and I’m over there sitting with Kinky Fried- man.


(Laughing) Oh no! Not the Kinkster! (Laughs) I’m there with Kinky, and he gets bit by a bee. I guess it was attracted to those big lights they have outside the trailer, but this bee or wasp or whatever bit the heck out of him, or stung him or whatever, and his neck was on fire! Swelling up bad. So I went and got a ciga- rette and spit on my hand and put the tobacco in it... some folks say to pee on it, but I wasn’t gonna pee on it, besides the fact that his name is Kinky... (Both Laughing) So I just mix that up in my palm and put it on a piece of toilet paper, put it on the sting and slap a band aid over it. It worked too. He was sitting there and I was run- ning back and forth in this little golf cart going to get him some ice, because it had turned pur- ple. So I was Kinky’s nurse. I know you teach singing, and you have mentored quite a few really great artists in the past like Chuck Negron’s daughter Charley, and the dynamic young duo known as Pinkletank. Do you have any other artists you’d like to tell us about? Oh yeah! I love this kid - actually, I’m not ever gonna call him a kid again, he’s 24 now, and when he came in he was 23. His name is Max Milner, and I met him at Bourbon Street Blues here in Nashville. Someone told me he was in from England and he came out to write and you’re on his wish list. You know how you make the wish list and then see if you can wrangle them to work with you?


Of course. Well I was about to leave later in the evening,


14


and he came outside to meet me. I just came right out with it, “Well, are you any good?” (Laughs) He said, “Yeah...uh... I think. I can’t believe you just asked me if I was any good. I said, well, I need a good answer. Right? I mean, if you don’t think you’re good how can I? So I told him, I just needed to know, I wasn’t trying to hurt his feelings, I was just asking a straight- forward question. So he says “Yeah,” and I said good, how ‘bout singing me something. And he says, “Right here?” And I said, “Yeah, here!” I mean, I’m sitting down in a $200 dress on a curb, it’s the perfect spot. (Laughs) So he launched into a song he had written, and it was all acapella and beautiful. And I go, “Wow!” And then I asked where he was staying, and he says “I’m not sure yet.” And I say, well, get in the car. And he came and stayed a week. (Laughs) And we started writing, and he’s my little brother now. There’s no getting out of it, he’s my little brother now. He’s just miraculous. And I was thinking, how can I help him? And here I can’t help myself (Laughing). So I said, let’s shoot a little video or something so that people can see you on You Tube - just some- thing to get you seen. Then I found out he was runner up on either England’s Got Talent or their version of The Voice. (Laughing) I didn’t know that! Here I am trying to make a cheap video of him on my iPhone, and he has profes- sional videos already. He said that he had been kind of intimidated by me at first. See, I like to meet people who don’t know that I am a singer. It’s nice when that comes as a fringe benefit. I like to know that they like me for who I am. I want to see if they see me as a good, likeable, tolerable human being without even knowing that I sing, you know? And how about this, I wonder if people find you attractive if you don’t sing? We all have insecurities, and not just women, we all do. Most people just don’t talk about it a lot. But I wonder why I would intimi- date anybody, that’s not my style at all. I believe the best thing a friend can do is sing with you. Have you ever had a friend who said, “I’m not gonna sing with you, you’re too good?” What do


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