The Tale of Dolly & Donna...& Charley

Here's the second...

After a day of site-seeing at Plimouth Plantation and traveling, at about 5:00 PM we were on Cape Cod and realized we hadn't eaten since breakfast. We required seafood. So we found a restaurant called "Clancy's" in Dennisport on the Nantucket Sound. It was very crowded, so not wanting to waste time waiting for a table, we decided to sit in the bar and order dinner.

Throughout the whole trip Peter and I have been thinking of songs about the places we have seen that I can play on the tour as we travel..."Old Cape Cod", "New York, New York", "Falling Leaves", etc. So Peter mentioned a song but couldn't remember the name of it.

It's about a guy named Charley who "rides forever 'neath the streets of Boston", "and his fate is still unlearn'd", "he's the man who'll never return"...these are some of the lines that we could remember. We kept coming up with snippits of the song but never the title.

We asked the waitress...she didn't know.

We asked the bartender...he didn't know.

I told Peter to "call Jack in California, he knows every song ever written"...he didn't know.

As we finished our stuffed shrimp dinner and were getting up to leave we tried once more and asked two women at the table behind us. Peter sang the part of the song that we knew and one of the women, Donna, said..."Was the guy in the song named 'Charley'"?

We said yes it was. So she took a card out of her wallet...an "MTA Charley Card"...used to purchase multiple trips on the Boston MTA. On the card is a cartoon character named Charley on a train. (Did I mention serendipity?)

So we struck up a conversation..."where are you from?", "where are you going?", "what's your name?" and on and on and on.

Donna's cousin Dolly said she is visiting from San Francisco. I told her I just came back from San Francisco, and why I was there, and what does she do there, and on and on and on. Then we all said our goodbyes--they went to their table for dinner and we went to the coach to leave.

Before we left I googled the song and found out that the name is "Charley on the MTA" by the Kingston Trio. I printed the lyrics of the song, http://www.mit.edu/~jdreed/t/charlie.html, and we went back into Clancy's to deliver the lyrics to Dolly and Donna. Again we had a big conversation about where we are going, and what everyone does for a living, and on and on and on. I told Dolly about my blog and that I am writing about the trip and if she looks at it she will see the posts about my San Francisco trip too.

At that point I decided that tonight's blog will be about our new best friends, Dolly and Donna.

So as we sit in the coach parked in the East Falmouth Walmart parking lot I raise my glass of wine in a toast to Dolly and Donna...

and to Charley, whose fate is still unlearn'd.