Who is on the phone?

My dear friend Angela is coming to see me this week all the way from Nashville!  I am so excited and in honor of this, I would like to share a story regarding our similar cases of mistaken phone identities. 

When we were in college, Angela used to get calls in the middle of the night of people asking for Cash, who was apparently also a person or drug dealer or both.  This happened repeatedly until one night she answered and the person on the other line said, "Yo, is this Cash?" and Angela said, no, this is not Cash.  The rest of the conversation was pretty one-sided and went something like this:

"Who is on the phone?  WHO IS ON THE PHONE? (then, to someone else) Man, I don't know who the f*ck I got on the phone."

She has a different number now, but we still laugh about that line.  Then when I moved to LA and changed to a local number, I started getting calls from someone named T-Bone's assistant.  They would always come in during business hours, and at the time I was working a normal office job and could never answer and say it was the wrong number.  But despite the fact that my voicemail stated my full name, this T-Bone person's rather dimwitted assistant always left desperate messages for whoever to call T-Bone back.  Finally one day I got a text from T-Bone himself telling me he was running late for our meeting, and I so wish I had just texted back to ask the address so I could meet this T-Bone in person.  Instead, I texted to tell him he had the wrong number.  That was the end of that.

Fast forward to last night when I was reading US Weekly (hold your judgment), specifically an article about Reese Witherspoon's wedding to CAA agent Jim Toth. (Coincidentally, the office job I was working during the era of T-Bone phone calls was at CAA.)  There I was, mindlessly glancing over details about decor, flowers, and food, when I came across this paragraph:

"Inside, producer T Bone Burnett's pals, rockabilly band the Americans, played during dinner. 'Reese and Jim . . . thanked T Bone for the band.'"

Como what?  I sat up straight.  Somehow, I knew this had to be the same guy.  How many T-Bones or T Bones could there be working in Los Angeles who have frazzled assistants that call about how their boss is late for meetings?  I always assumed T-Bone was some kind of gangsta rapper name, but maybe I wasn't that far off if T Bone apparently is this music producer legend. 

Who is on the phone, indeed.

Excerpt from "California Plush"

The only thing I miss about Los Angeles

is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing

--pimps, surplus stores, footprints of the stars

--descending through the city
fast as the law would allow

through the lights, then rising to the stack
out of the city
to the stack where lanes are stacked six deep

and you on top; the air
now clean, for a moment weightless

without memories, or
need for a past.

-Frank Bidart