Friday, June 1, 2007

Colonel Peaches

Pictures will be added later!!

I have a friend in the army who was being promoted and I wanted to be in San Antonio for that. You have to understand something: this is a guy I've known and been friends with since 1998 and was our best man...both times. (German wedding remember...don't think we married & divorced...it was 2 ceremonies.) But a promotion is a big thing, especially to his rank. And Maren & I are PROUD to know him and have really enjoyed getting to know his fiancee over the last year.

Now, first of all, I don't know if I can just state his name & rank here on the blog, but the initials belong to Major Andy Hartman. But for the sake of anonymity, I'll just call him "Colonel Peaches." So Colonel Peaches and I met in the musical "Oklahoma!" on post in Hanau, Germany (which is also how I met Maren). Colonel Peaches is a bit of an actor, though most of his army friends probably wouldn't know that. We needed guys for the show and Peaches was a low ranking officer dragged to the theatre by another low ranking officer, but higher than him, because he doesn't want to become another Elvis Presley. So he comes in and dances, he sings, he blows them away with a killer "To be or not to be" speech...but all behind closed doors. But German buildings still use skeleton keys, so I was the eye through the keyhole. And they said to him, "Sorry, but we already gave some idiot Will Parker...how about 3rd Cowboy on right?" Peaches replies, "How about Curly?" They replied, "No, that guy would win a Tony if we were doing this on Broadway." He asked, "Do I get to carry a shotgun?" They said, "No." Peaches asks, "Where do I sign up?" They said, "Actually...just put your initials on the cast list to let us know you accept the role."

And that's how it got started.

From there, Colonel Peaches filled in for a performance for Ali Hakim. Later he went on to the "Not-so-" Mute Monk in Monkee Business (no relation at all to Adrian Monk), in which he was nominated for "Best Performance by a Soldier" in the 1999 USAREUR Tournament of Plays. Again he was singing, dancing, and delivering lines with the greatest of wit and ease. Finally, Peaches starred in the 1999 USAREUR Search for the Stars in a NY Times* award winning** rendition of "Who's On First?", of which I still have my baseball jersey we created just for the occasion.

So...Colonel Peaches, we love you. We're proud of you. Congratulations on the promotion.

*Not really.
**Really.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations to Andy on his promotion. It was greqat meeting you in Germany, then seeing you later in Waco. May you be General soon.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for coming down and making this special time even better.

Anonymous said...

Do you have any pics of him in Monkee Business or Oklahoma? I would love to see them. I have seen a couple from Oklahoma that he has, but it is always great to see other ones :)