Some 60,000 meteors fell every hour that night, and, when it ended, young William peeked out from under the wagon "and looked to see if there were any stars left up above." Local Indians portrayed the meteor storm on deer hides and used the event as a fixed marker in time - pre-starfall, post-starfall. William Fillingim was a young boy traveling in the Yellowhammer state with a wagon train, and when the meteor storm began he and everybody else got under the wagons to protect themselves from the falling stars. Many Alabamians thought it was the end of the world. But there's never been a Leonid storm as luminous as this one. Leonid meteor storms supposedly originate in the Leo constellation, have been recorded since AD 903, and show up every 33-and-a-bit years. One hundred and eighty-eight years ago, a spectacular Leonid shower rained down on the eastern United States, but most especially Alabama. Which comes first – the words or the music? Well, in this case what came first was the meteor shower. That's Frank Perkins' lone enduring contribution to the American songbook - his tune, and Mitchell Parish's words. Perkins had a non-meteoric career, except for one very meteoric hit: The apogee of his time in Hollywood was conducting the score for the screen version of Jule Styne's Broadway masterpiece Gypsy. He was a studio conductor and writer of serviceable film music for such landmark pictures as The Incredible Mister Limpet. The composer of the above is a one-hit wonder called Frank Perkins, born on April 21st 1908 in Salem, Massachusetts. This is several degrees past too cute by half, but a lot of people seem to dig it: Do you know She & Him? The actress Zooey Deschanel ( Elf) and her musician chum M Ward. It is not, in any real sense, a Sinatra song - a song one would expect him to sing in concert or on TV - but his record of it put the number back in circulation, and that's why other singers post-Frank sing it: from Sinatra to Jimmy Buffett, from Sinatra and Buffett to She & Him. So I travel mostly in my mind these days, and this song just dropped into my head the other day like stars falling from the sky. So it occurs to me that, if I haven't already been there, I probably never will, and, for many of those places I have been, I've seen them for the last time. Domestic air travel has become even more miserable, which I would not have thought possible: The mandatory masks on long-haul flights mess me up for days, and leave me with insufficient voice for stage appearances and broadcasting. Such international travel as survives will require multiple passports and endless guile, bluffing one's way across frontiers and forging the relevant forms. I have never in my life traveled less than I have this last year-and-a-half, and I realized some months ago that the pre-Covid world is never coming back. But instead you do everything you're told to do - and then they tell you to do some more: wear a mask over your mask get a booster shot of your last booster shot - and wherever it is you were planning on going has a completely different and contradictory set of rules: wear a mask over your booster shot get your antibodies surgically removed. God Almighty, part of me wishes they did have vaccine passports: you do as ordered, are issued the necessary paperwork, and get your life back.
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