"Who is this man," you may be asking, "with his guitar, a puckish glint in his eye, and his old-fashioned Welcome to my website greeting?"

He's none other than Tim Cavanagh, the Chicago-based song parodist and composer of such Dr. Demento standards as "99 Dead Baboons" "Let's Have a Drug-Free Christmas" and "C'mon, Drink up, Chuck and Di."

While we're almost namesakes, Tim and I can be easily distinguished. He spells his surname without the superfluous "u" that makes my name so difficult for customer service representatives. I play a left-handed guitar, while Tim is clearly a righty. And when I study Tim's mastery of the mischievous but innocent, "Folks, ya gotta love him!" shrug, I can only look on in envy.

It's for all these reasons that I've always been reluctant to make contact with Tim Cavanagh. You see, long before simpleton was born, even before the World Wide Web existed, I had heard of Tim, a man In Chicago calls "a wonderful original whose songs poke fun at yet embrace people." But what was I to make of a man with such an intriguing life story? (Among other things, Tim has a graduate degree and has taught religion at an all-girls school). I've never been much of a song parodist myself, and frankly I was intimidated by the prospect of meeting the guy whose fame presents such an open challenge to my jealous stewardship of what seems to me to be a pretty distinctive name. After all, what if he poked fun at without embracing me? "I've got enough questions of identity in my life," I thought. "Who needs the worries?"

February 24, 1999: Reader Mail
Volume 28: Booze, Rye and George Washington
February 23, 1999: Answer man
Our first-ever advice column
February 19-22, 1999: Absolut simpleton
Rolled in the cold
February 18, 1999: Loco-grams
Found messages from the marginally insane
February 17, 1999: Dear simpleton
Reader Mail, volume 27
February 16, 1999: The Booze Liberation Page
Hemping for a drink

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