Bo Diddley died today. You probably already knew that, but it bears saying again and thinking about.
My last job in New York was at Agency.com. They laid almost all of us off on the day of the Christmas party. It was a ridiculously lavish, dot-com era sort of party in a grand hotel near Wall Street. There was a huge buffet table and an open bar. We’d all been told to expect a special musical guest. We were a little surprised it wasn’t cancelled, but it had all been paid for in advance, so there you have it.
The President of Agency.com was known to consider himself something of a musician. We, newly out of work, drank too much and wondered if we could be gracious if his band turned out to be that special surprise. I was sitting at a table of my much-younger coworkers (all of my coworkers in those days, it seems, were much younger…) when an old black man with a square quitar walked to the microphone at the front of the room.
“Oh my god!” I squealed, jumping out of my seat. Everyone else just looked at me. “Don’t you know who that is?” I asked, incredulous.
“Uhm, no. Who is it?”
“Just wait,” I said, “you’ll know as soon as he starts singing.”
He sang. As was his wont, he started out with the song bearing his own name. “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring…” I waited for some sign of recognition. There was none.
“Oh, c’mon!” I said. “That’s Bo Diddley!” I probably squealed a little again.
They looked at me, every face blank. “Who?” they asked, genuinely perplexed.
I left. I hailed a cab and went to visit a friend who lived uptown, someone old enough to know Bo Diddley. We shook our heads. We clucked our tongues.
“Can you imagine,” one of us must have said, “not knowing Bo Diddley?”
We could not, we agreed, imagine it.
Posted by sarahemc2 
Posted by sarahemc2 
Posted by sarahemc2 
