HUMOR: Music City Splendor
Drew Gallagher’s take on making beds, pickin’, and grinnin’ in Music City.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
I work for a Fortune 500 company which means that occasionally I have to participate in Corporate America type things instead of writing humor columns and researching fantasy football sleepers. One such obligation came up recently when I had to fly to Nashville to spend three days with a few thousand insurance professionals and 6,000 of my closest friends at the Gaylord Resort which was designed by the same people who designed the diminishing hallway in Willy Wonka.
To spice up the proceedings, my company brought in motivational speakers, including Admiral William McRaven who was the Navy SEAL commander who oversaw the mission to find and kill Osama Bin Laden. Admiral McRaven did an exceptional job of showing the gathered insurance professionals that bitching about the cold conditions in the convention center was nothing like swimming three miles in freezing shark-infested waters off the coast of San Diego, at night. We gave him a standing ovation.
Admiral McRaven also suggested that the best way to start your day is to make your bed. I would have loved to make my bed at the Gaylord, but by the time I actually found my room on most days, I was too exhausted to care, and in the mornings, I had to set out an hour earlier than anticipated in hopes of finding the trail of broken bodies dressed in business casual leading me to the convention center.
The convention center was half a mile from my hotel room even though they were in the same building if not the same zip code. Unfortunately, the gondolier who paddles around much of the Gaylord does not go to the convention center which led me to write a strongly-worded note for the suggestion box about the gondola and also how the resort spa could offer sherpa services which would have been very helpful in navigating this nine circles of hell.
The leadership of my company apparently had trouble finding their rooms, too, because they also brought in a speaker to talk to us about stress and suicide. This speaker suggested that a way to minimize stress was to recognize the source of your stress. My source of stress was easy to recognize every time I looked at the Gaylord app for directions and discovered that, unless I was Christ, I was not getting anywhere without getting my shoes wet in the waters that soothingly flowed through this indoor mecca in the middle of Tennessee.
Our speaker did assure the gathered masses that those same soothing waters were not suitable for intentional drowning. We did not give her a standing ovation.
This speaker helpfully suggested that a way to minimize stress was to remove yourself from the stressful situation which I took to mean catching an Uber from the Gaylord to Broadway in downtown Nashville as quickly as possible. She was not wrong; my stress melted away with each beer.
Despite the fact that I once won a contest at Mary Washington College for writing a feature on a drama teacher who threw his dried-up markers out an open second floor window, I am not certain that I am equipped to provide an adequate description of Broadway in Nashville other than to say that if I had discovered this hotbed of music 30 years earlier, I would likely be dead or, at the very least, unable to hear. It is truly an orgy of the senses (which I may copyright because I never did catch that slogan on a t-shirt or modestly priced cowboy hat).
There are bars and music for every taste, and you don’t need to be a humorist to appreciate the splendor, but it certainly helps. The first hole-in-the wall we found was called MJs, and, as far as I could tell by the modest décor advertising 12 different kinds of moonshine, it had nothing to do with NBA legend Michael Jordan. MJs featured a helpful sandwich board for passing motorists which read: “Slow! Drunk Adults at Play.” (This type of sandwich board would have been very helpful in the lobby outside of the convention center at the Gaylord for my friend Perk who mistook a very clean window for a pathway to the outside deck area and smacked his face against the glass which proved not to be an opening to the outside deck.)
MJ’s also had a variety of board games and featured a very large Jenga game which patrons were encouraged to write on which Johnnie Cooper did to let everyone know he was there on 11/17/23. We were sorry we just missed Jamie, Kurt, Scott, Derek and Clinton who were there in 2025 or the chap who wrote “F**k Hamas!” on the side of one of the pieces.
MJ’s is vastly different from a lot of the bars on Broadway which are mostly owned by country music stars and have more than the five bar stools that MJ’s has (one of which wobbled). Music is everywhere on Broadway, and the larger bars have different bands on different floors within the same bar. If you don’t like the first-floor band’s version of a Fleetwood Mac cover (sorry, but it’s a special set of lungs that can pull off the vocals on ‘Rhiannon’), you can go up to the third floor and hear a Fleetwood Mac cover better suited to your tastes and their musical talents.
Of course, there is a lot of country music on Broadway, but you can also drop $10 into the hat at the front of the stage and ask the band if they know any Steely Dan or Al Stewart and then have your friend Perk hit you in the head like you’re walking into a clean pane of glass. Fortunately, the beer is flowing faster than the lazy river of the Gaylord and any head trauma is short-lived. I could have stayed in the bars of Nashville all day and all of the night just as the Kinks once suggested, but I also knew that if I didn’t leave at some point there was no way I would be able to find my room at the Gaylord in time to sleep in it and not make my bed. They apparently do not have housekeeping at Navy SEAL training.
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