The Truth of the Sharpie Legend

Well, I guess it’s time that the guilty must come forward. If you thought that JD carrying a Sharpie all the time was cool, I guess it was mostly my fault. If he ever ruined anything that belonged to you by writing on it, I deny all knowledge.

Some (many actually) years ago, Jim Randall came to my house for dinner one night, and during the course of our conversation he shared an idea he’d been working on. Jim said that he wanted to do a choir tour, but not a choir tour like most churches and youth groups do. He told me that he wanted it to be cool, not cheesy, and like nothing anyone else was doing. I told him that it would be easy. All you’d need is a sound system WAY bigger than was necessary, video projection, some intelligent lighting flashing all over the room, and a LOT of fog juice! Jim loved it!

At the time, I was working for a company doing concert audio for all types of acts and had traveled a great deal and met a lot of famous and interesting people. So, I started calling in favors, and before you knew it, we had all the stuff that we “needed.” Jim had another idea for the choir tour. He wanted to involve all the kids that didn’t really care about singing in the choir. So, he created the drama team, the set designers and of course, the technical crew. Although there were about 10 kids on the tech crew, the real protégés were, you guessed it, JD and Matt Ervin (Irvin? I can never remember). They thought what I did for a living was cool, and they enjoyed sitting and talking about the people I had worked with. They did work very hard, and they seemed to really enjoy learning all about how audio and lighting systems worked.

Anyway, amongst all this vast technical knowledge that they believed I was sharing with them, I taught them the 2 “Rules of the Road.” First, duct tape will fix anything, and if it doesn’t, it’s too broke to fix! Second, never get caught without a Sharpie. JD and Matt took Rule 1 to new heights. Some of the things they made work with a little duct tape and imagination would boggle the mind, and it was always fun to see their creations. Rule 2 is where I personally had the most fun. After a few days of asking to borrow their Sharpie (which they didn’t have), JD decided to never get caught Sharpie-less again. He began to carry one on him at all times. Therefore, it began to be my job to sneak into his stuff at night, or in the morning, and steal all his Sharpies. It was priceless! I’d get up early, steal his Sharpies, and then all day long I’d ask to borrow his. When he’d tell me that he couldn’t find it, I’d accuse him of slacking on the job, not listening to a thing I’d said, and any other lines I’d heard from my parents and bosses a million times. Finally, after a few days of the disappearing Sharpies, I got caught laughing as he frantically searched for his Sharpie that I’d asked to borrow. We all got a great laugh, and of course JD never minded being the focus of a friendly joke. Lord knows, he pulled enough of them on all of us! Anyway, after that I would periodically ask if he had a Sharpie, and I don’t remember a single time that I caught him without one.

The day we said “goodbye for now” to JD, I felt like it was only right that I leave a Sharpie for him to make up for all the ones I had “stolen” from him. I miss him, too.

--Kiley Ham