(This first ran February 27, 2011, in The Times and The News-Star.)

Good chicken salad is like pornography. I can’t really define it, but I know it when I see it.

We live among a people bent on throwing wrenches into what should be the most simple things. Pee wee ball. Music awards shows. The high school prom. Chicken salad. Instead of just playing, singing, dancing or eating, we end up injecting  everything with steroids, putting it under strobe lights, and driving people crazy.

In the words of my man Jimmy Buffett, these are the people our parents warned us about, the kind of complicated folk who mess up one-car funerals. And it’s not because they’re stupid. Instead it’s because they want to add seven more cars, two taxis and a tow truck — just because. Too much time on their hands. Big problem.

No where is the disease more rampant than in your foodstuffs. I offer, for your consideration and contemplation, chicken salad. So simple, yet so misunderstood. It falls into a troublesome category of food that can be either really good or really bad. Usually it turns bad when people try to glorify it and lift it above its reason for being. Think of a jacked-up VW with chrome and mud flaps. Some things just aren’t meant to be.

My friend Ma Parker came back from lunch this week lit up like a Christmas tree. The reason was music to my ears. “I just had,” she said, “some really, really good chicken salad.”

Sweet. It’s hard to come by in these modern times, so hard that, when you find it, you actually have to seek out a friend and comment, spread the love.

Chicken salad need not be complicated. I am no pro but I think chicken, a little mayo and hint of mustard, some ground pepper, a smidge of lemon juice, and you’re ready to roll.

Remember when you were little and you got sick and had to go to the doctor, and your mom always tried to do a little extra something special for you to get you over the hump? Mine bought me a chicken salad sandwich at a pharmacy that had a grill in the same town that had a doctor. Spoiled me for life. David’s Pharmacy in Mullins, S.C. They had a sandwich press deal and it would toast the bread with your “chick sal” stuff already inside and it came out crisp and heavenly. The word I’m looking for is succulent. So succulent. It was almost worth getting sick just to get one.

So I had David’s when I got sick and every other day I had my momma’s understated chick sal in a clear Tupperware bowl in the icebox at the house. You just snatched a bit, put it on a piece of white bread, fresh and lush, folded it over and went back to your bicycle. Sweet.

But today … cranberries and grapes and nuts in chicken salad? Apples? Seriously? Would you put pork butt roast in your jello mold?

I’m on a campaign to get celery, whose popularity defies logic, out of tuna fish sandwiches and chicken salad and I know my work is cut out for me there, but grapes? Nuts? Really? I love trail mix. But not in chicken salad.

Where we error is when we think “adding stuff” makes things better. Not always.

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(This originally ran Sunday April 14 in The Times and The News-Star.)

We have a big break in north Louisiana because the musical Mamma Mia! is running this spring and summer.

It’s a fun show that requires zero thinking, which, as a theater goer, I appreciate. I enjoy serious plays, but I’d rather read them than watch them. Drama comes at us each day in real life; when I pay money to go to the theater, I want to laugh. (Although I saw The Miracle Worker about four times at Shreveport Little Theatre, knew what would happen with the Helen Keller character at the end, and cried every time anyway. Sometimes, the arts just won’t play fair…)

Mamma Mia! is relaxing. Took some time, but it grew on me.

A woman named Catherine Johnson gives us a story on a Greek island on the eve of a girl’s wedding. She doesn’t know who her father is and invites to the wedding three gentlemen she’s discovered from her mom’s past. Songs from ABBA—they had quite the run back in the day—make the show go. Lots of dancing and singing.

It’s a far cry from 42^nd Street or Chicago or Guys and Dolls, but it’s a fun 100 minutes or so. A feel-good show. I like that.

In Monroe, the show runs at Strauss Theatre Center April 25-28 and May 3-4. Louisiana Tech professor Cherrie Sciro directs and DH Clark is the musical director.

In Shreveport we’ll have even more chances to see it. Mamma Mia! will run July 11-13, 18-20, 25-27, and July 14, 21, and 28 at Shreveport Little Theatre. The pop musical will be directed and choreographed by Laura Beeman Nugent; Adam Philley is the musical director. I actually know from experience that they are studs. Gonna be a good time.

When you go, be nice, and here’s why: auditions are nothing short of torture. And no matter what play you see and support, remember that all those people had to audition.

I have never been involved in the harder part of childbirth but I can’t imagine it being more painful than an audition.

You have to go into a little room, probably with other people auditioning for the same part, and read or even, gulp, sing. Out loud. In front of not only the people in charge of the play but in front of other shell-shocked auditioners.

And I forgot about the mandatory dancing. Yes. You have to at least try to dance, which involves moving.

I’ve done it, and it is humbling, because you realize fairly quickly the limits of your talent. And the limits of your courage.

Cheerleader tryouts. Football tryouts. Auditions.

They’re bears.

We’ve all been there. Back in your dating life, your first date was basically an audition. Sometimes it worked out and you got the part. Most times you came in at least second.

Sometimes you got what they refer to as a “call back.” This is a second audition. You got another chance to make a fool of yourself so your date/director could decide if you had what it took.

Everyone I know, even the best local actors and actresses, look at auditions like a mouse looks at a cat. With fear and trembling.

I actually auditioned—and you can hardly call it that—for a part in Mamma Mia!, the Shreveport production. They needed middle-aged-plus guys, I was told, to play the prospective fathers, and middle-aged-plus guys are hard to come by in this arena.

Let me say this: when the actor who got the part as Harry sings Our Last Summer, give him a standing ovation. We had to sing it in the audition, and I was hardly (actually not at all) prepared to sing that. I needed to have on much tighter underwear to hit notes that high. I can’t properly describe what I sounded like but a small animal caught in barbed wire is a start.

It was not pretty. So neg, I did not get the part. If they ever need a guy who can pretend to be a bad tenor or if somebody ever writes a Merle Haggard biopic, I might try out for that.

After navigating the audition game a few times, I’ve decided that my true talent when it comes to the arts lies in being a patron, an audience member who buys a ticket, sits, listens, is quiet, and applauds when appropriate.

I have the build for it. It’s my true calling. It’s like a life lesson I learned from watching Grease: if you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter. And if you can’t be an artist, be an art supporter.

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