My Kentucky Fried Ascension (Memoir)
by Rick Rofihe
In the Nova Scotian Hotel in Halifax, Canada, as a boy I rode once in an elevator with Colonel Harland Sanders; he was there for a food-service convention and I was attending a wedding reception. At the time, we were both about the same height, and that day we were both wearing white suits—his had no grease spots, and he left no fingerprint on the "up" button.
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Author's Note
"The moving finger writes, and, having moved, gets licked..."
Other stories by Rick Rofihe
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yes to this. i like the detail and the fact that you left colonel sanders' image untainted.
Colonel Sanders in Halifax for a food convention struck my funny bone, and like Marcus, I like that a figure easy to be ridiculed was left untouched. But what struck me the most was the narrator, identifying himself as a boy, but there to attend a wedding reception, was the same height as the Colonel.
Well, it's nonfiction -- maybe I was 11-12-13, attending the wedding reception with my parents -- and it seemed to me he wasn't much taller than I was. If I was 12, he'd have been 72; I remember him as a little hunched, maybe with a cane. And I held onto my boyhood tenaciously -- even just last night when someone referred to me as "Mr. Rofihe", I informed them that my father had been gone for over two dozen years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miHgCYvPZmU&feature=related
Marcus, thanks for the fave -- and not only was Colonel Sanders a very nice man, he was also a kind of mentor to another guy with a compelling life story, Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's.
Just nice to see you. I like all you do, including this, and I like the video, too. I suppose I'll be thinking about form, how it's a kind of memoir haiku. I like memoir (and haiku and short forms). This memoir has a celebrity in it, prerequisite for sale. On my ears lately, from writers whose instincts are memoiristic a distrust, even a disgust for memoir, and a claim they're writing anti-memoir, but I haven't seen it, that what they're writing is memoir-against-memoir, and I haven't seen their argument written, just heard it on the street, so I think it must be a fad to be against it more even than it is a fad to do it.
*
Thanks, Ann; I appreciate it. Not long after I "met" the Colonel, Johnny Cash mysteriously (to me) played the hockey rink in my small home-town of Bridgewater, Nova Scotia; other than that, where I grew up, the only celebrity I could count on seeing was Santa Claus, and even that would be just once a year!
Oh, here's Johnny now... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRlj5vjp3Ko
What a moment. Well told.
Thanks, Lou!
My older brother Barry Rofihe likes to ask -- "Who in this room shared a drink with Johnny Cash?"
The story goes, he was in the front row at Johnny's show at the rink, drinking straight from the bottle with his friends, and they passed it to Johnny who took a swig and passed it back.
(Johnny's daughter Roseanne Cash says the retellings of her father's life are often exaggerated.)
aw hold on i'm faving it
You're the BEST, Nicolle!
http://blog.fictionaut.com/2009/11/06/nicolle-asks-rick-rofihe-for-advice-on-behalf-of-all-writers-in-the-universe/