And whose leprechaun are you? (Smug's on Drugs, part 2)

“¡Ahi esta! El ladrón de mi galletas.”

The woman in the aqua-blue housekeeping uniform was maybe four-feet-eleven and about as wide.  I’d put her age at over 40, but anything more specific would be a guess; she was simply moving too fast.  After bursting into our rented conference room and pointing a stubby, accusatory finger at one of my team members, she elbowed aside an Armani-clad product manager from Glaxo Smith Kline who, along with three other representatives from that company, had convened at the Minnehaha Conference room of the Nicollet Island Inn that Saturday morning to be convinced that Smugglers’ Inn was, indeed, capable of handling all domestic marketing needs for Glaxo’s new happy pill, Flumoxidol. (Street name: fluffies).

“Estas galletas no son para ustedes.  Tienes que comprar galletas.   Alguien pagó por ellos,” the housekeeper said, and leaned her stout body over the tasteful, pickled pine conference room table in order to grasp the only thing that had impressed our potential clients fifteen minutes into SI Powerpoint presentation #3. This being a platter of the Nicollet Island Inn’s justifiably famous, made-on-site chocolate chip cookies.

“Ustedes no comprar los galletas.”

Seeing chocolate being taken away, one of the Glaxo clients, an attractive woman with short, steel-grey hair, snatched a cookie from the disappearing platter.  It was an automatic response, like a fish striking at a lure or how you or I might grab one more bacon-wrapped shrimp from a passing waiter’s tray as we were hustled into a banquet hall at the commencement of an awards dinner.

“Wap!”

The steel-haired woman was speechless.  We were speechless.  The maid wasn’t speechless, but what she was saying was in such rapid Norteno-Mexican Spanish that Ricky Ricardo, speaking from some lost episode of “I Love Lucy” would have had to just hold out his upturned palms in a gesture of surrender, shrug and say, “Don’ look ah ME.  I’m from Coo-ba!”

This maid had slapped our client’s hand.  Slapped it hard, like a mother reprimanding a child attempting to filch a coin from the collection plate.  The steel-haired woman stared at her hand.  The rest of us stared at the maid.  The maid turned away so as to prevent any eye contact.

“Sorry,” the maid said in English.  She set the platter of cookies down on the carpeted floor of the Minnehaha Room and slipped out, head down.

We apologized to our clients.  What else could we do?  Clearly, the meeting was terminated.  The Flumoxidol account would go to some agency who could make through a presentation without having their snacks being repossessed or their guest’s hands being slapped by foreigners in teal uniforms.  Smugglers’ Inn, the world’s only restaurant/ad agency, would need to go back to being just being Smugglers’ Inn, the restaurant for a while.  We still owed vendors $4,000 from our last foray into marketing consultancy, but that’s what credit cards are for.  We would fight another day.

Carol, my co-creative director at Smugglers’ Inn, actually gave a pretty funny impromptu speech in which she quoted Harry Truman, her favorite president.  The third member of our team, Smuggler’s Inn’s Irish Bartender, Scotty, bowed like a bad stage actor and said something like he’d be playing the room all week.  Lame, but with Scotty’s brogue, it was passable charming.  For my part, I acknowledged everyone in the room by name and made a show of taking a bite out of one of the cookies just to lighten the mood.  But it was over.  We packed up quickly and were almost out the door when someone spoke.

“We are not done here.”

It was the Armani suit man.  The leader.  The Alpha.
Carol and I exchanged looks.  Were we still in this thing?  We did have five minutes left of our presentation, SI Powerpoint #3.

“OK!” I said, a smile breaking out across my face.  Carol and I started to take our positions at the table while Scotty hurried to re-connect the MacBook Pro containing SI Powerpoint #3.  “I think we were just getting to the good part,” I continued.  “I’m pretty sure that one else is will bring you ideas like these.”

Armani Man waved his hand in unambiguous dismissal.  What?  Now he didn’t want to hear us?  I was confused.

“Of course, we can just talk you through the high points,” I said, looking for help from my compatriots, who also seemed lost. “If you prefer to skip the dog and pony show.”

“I need YOU to get that woman back in here.  That maid.”

“Why?  She left the cookies,”  said Scotty.  I thought it was a funny line.

“I don’t give a shit what language she does it in, but SHE is going to apologize to HER.”  Armani Suit indicated the Steel-haired woman, who did not like this plan.

“Kyle, really.  Let it go.  Please...”

Armani Man held up his hand, silencing his underling.

“No one strikes one of my employees.  No one.  What happened here was unacceptable.  It wan an insult to our company and to me, personally, as the senior representative.”

I re-stated our earlier apology.  The woman whose hand had gotten slapped tried to talk sense to her boss.

“Kyle, the woman said she was sorry.”

“Jesus! We have the cookies,” Scotty repeated.  He was grinning, but I could tell that this prick was getting his Irish up.  With his own legal status murky, no doubt our bartender had sympathy for this fellow immigrant, whose only sin was to take her crap job too seriously.

Alpha Kyle didn’t blink. “And when the maid comes back,” he said, “I want the manager with her.”

The Steel-Grey haired lady protested even more strenuously.  The other two bodies from Glaxo said nothing.  Just like they had said nothing during our presentation.

“Kyle,” I said, affecting a contrite tone that I wasn’t feeling.  “I have to acknowledge responsibility.  I thought you’d like this place, but it’s pretty clear that they weren’t at their best.  Frankly, neither were we and we’re sorry about that.  We know that Flumoxidol is an important product for your company and for the people who would benefit from...”

“Get...the maid.”

Carol started to talk.  No doubt, she would have smoothed things over and possibly even left the door open for another run at a Glaxo product, (with a different brand manager), but Scotty cut her off.

“I did it.  My fault.  Blame me.”

“Scotty...(Don’t say fookin’.  Please don’t say...)”

“I stole the fookin’ cookies!”

Armani Man flinched as if someone had spritzed his face with water.

“There.  I admit culpability.  I looked in the other conference room and I saw that they had this massive stack of chocolate chippies smelling like heaven and then when I got to OUR conference room--no cookies.  Just some bottled water in a salad bowl with ice.  Horrible presentation.  I assumed that someone just forgot our cookies, so I took theirs.  Kind of like, if there’s no pepper shaker at your table you get up and nick one from a table no one’s sittin’ at.  I didn’t tell these guys,” Scotty indicated Carol and me. “I didn’t tell these guys because, well, I didn’t think much of it, you know?”

“That doesn’t change the fact that one of my employees was ASSAULTED today in this room.”

“Oh, fer fook’s sake, Kyle.  You can’t be fookin’ serious.  It was a mistake.  Human beings make them.  Obviously, it was this woman’s responsibility to put cookies in yon conference room and she didn’t want to get blamed for a cock-up.  Not enough she’s probably scared off her tits that she is about to lose her job.  Not enough she apologized.  Not for you. No, YOU need to shame her in front of her manager.  Are you a sadist, Kyle?  You like seeing women humiliated?  Fair enough. Everyone’s got their little kinks.”

Scotty continued talking and no, it did not get any better. He eventually allowed Carol to lead him out of the conference room by his arm, but not before he’d offered to pull our would-be client’s pants down and “bugger you like a proper choir boy”.

The ride home was quiet.  Workmen were stringing lights on the Nicollet Bridge prior to the evening’s “Holidazzle” parade.  Two of them were a good 40 feet off the ground on these bizarre-looking scissor lifts.

“You wouldn’t get me up on one of those,” I said.

“Oh, they don’t move,” Carol said.  “Not hardly at all.  They adjust for any wind with GPS.  I talked to the guy whose company manufactures them.  They’re the shit, as far as industrial lifts go.”

“They’re local?” I asked Carol.

“Their corporate office is here. They assemble them in Hayward, Wisconsin.  My brother with the cement business was one of their first customers.”

Someone in the car, I forget who, said that it would be fun to see a bunch of these things move like synchronized swimmers and then we were talking about shooting them at night with neon so that they made trails and could you have an app that let you demo one remotely?  If this things moved to music, what music would be they move to?

And so it begins.  Again.

***
This concludes the last Smug’s entry for the very odd year of 2016.  Prince is gone.  Bowie is gone.  We’re still on the merry-go-round and, presumably, so are you. (Prince? If you can read this, we are STILL your biggest fans.) From all of your friends at Smugglers’ Inn both real and imaginary, merry Christmas.  Happy Hanukkah.  Feliz Navidad.  Please check back for our annual New Year’s Eve post-mortem sometime after the first.  Until then, we shall be in the bar.

Smug's on drugs.

This is our Thanksgiving story.  Sorry.

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“Wugga-mugga! By the tits of Saint Agatha, I’m trollied! Bandersnatch! Rostrum, nostrum, Bostrum...MEIN FUEHRER, DER LEIBENSTRAUBEN IST BURNINGK!”

Carol held up a fist to bump; these were the first intelligible words that the human-shaped lump in the back seat had uttered in well over an hour.  Carol, my co-manager and co-creative director at Smugglers’ Inn, had had the inspired idea to hit Starbuck’s drive-through before giving in to temptation and dumping Bucket Boy outside the E.R. of Coon Rapids General and retreating.

“Shy of a syringe of Haldol,” Carol stated, ”caffeine is the best thing you can give someone who is experiencing a psychotic reaction to anti-psychotic drug.” 

I resisted the temptation to say, “And you outta know!”  The truth was, all three of us had ingested the same drug earlier in the evening.  While I wasn’t an incoherent, incontinent mess with pupils like pinwheels, neither was I the happy clam that my day manager seemed to be.  As I took a hand off the steering wheel to bump fists with Carol, the 4-runner veered across the center line, eliciting a long “HONK!” from a passing Chevy Tahoe that I had not even seen.

“Jesus!” I said.

“Wept!” said the lump in the back seat.

“The coffee is working,” proclaimed Carol. “See?”

I didn’t.  I re-occupied the right lane and dropped the 4-runner’s speed to a stately 48 MPH.  I was going nowhere and in no hurry to get there.

Are you following along, reader?  I’m afraid that if I back up far enough to give you a complete accounting of the events that led to me driving about on a school night with our day manager and a hallucinating Irish national with no legal status, you would simply stop reading.  Besides, I am drowsy (a common side-effect of Flumoxatal).  Suffice it to say, America’s favorite restaurant-cum-ad agency had taken it in the shorts when we’d lost our only paying client, the 2017 St. Paul Winter Para-olympic games.  Some philanthropist from Aspen had dashed the city of St. Paul’s hopes of hosting the competition, along with our hopes of ever getting paid.  The Saint Paul Winter para-olympic committee disbanded, leaving Smugglers’ Inn, the agency of record, on the hook for a video shoot and miscellaneous expenses amounting to four grand.  Which Smugglers’ Inn did not have.  Suggestions, anyone?

“Pharma is the new dot-com,” had declared my co-manager, Carol, (who really is crazy and doesn’t just play a crazy person on TV). Carol felt that it was high time Smugglers’ Inn snagged one of these fat ethical drug accounts and didn’t she have just the drug?

“Fludoxipole?” I was reluctant to pitch any piece of business before I could pronounce it.

“Flu-mox-ah-TALL,” Carol corrected.  “Or “Fluffies”. 

I don’t know how Carol got us into the Flumoxatal pitch without even submitting a statement of capabilities to Glaxo Smith Kline, Flumoxatal’s manufacturer.  She is on a first-name basis with a surprising number of business heavies, a benefit from years of volunteering at PGA golf events. 

“We’re pitching in 9 days,” Carol had informed me this morning. “We’re going 2nd.”  We would be pitching against two pharma agencies.  Their names were not being disclosed to us, but it was safe to assume each was an in-house agency for Glaxo, who have the reputation of being dicks about conflicts of interest.

“Before we do anything, I think we should experience this drug for ourselves.  Dr. Pants was good enough to provide some samples.”  As Carol said this, she was shaking out two pills each for herself and me and one for Scotty.  Scotty’s real name is Ian.  He hails from Derry, in Ireland, but countless customers had remarked that that Ian sounds like Scotty from Star Trek and at Smugglers’ Inn, the customer is always right.  Scotty came to us by way of an Irish seating hostess who had worked at Smuggler’s Inn for about an hour and a half in 2015.  Scotty’s third name is Lazy MF and while the man is barely passable as a bartender, he is one world-class liar.  Carol and I thought we might employ Scotty’s blarney-spewing skills in our upcoming presentation, where the two of us would feel constrained to exaggerating our experience and not craft case histories out of whole cloth.  It was a gamble. 

“Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of sheep and other animals!  Jaysuz, I need to find a bog.”

“Was that from a movie?”  asked Carol, talking over some nonsensical chittering from the back seat that, upon reflection, might have been Irish.

“James Joyce.”  I’d recognized the first line of the 2nd Chapter of Ulysses. “Not the part about finding a bog.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means Scotty isn’t going to piss himself in my backseat twice.”

“Dr. Pants says that only one in eight subjects has a negative reaction to Fluffies,” Carol announced. “That compares to one in four for Thorazine.”

Again, more good news.  After the summer we’d had, I was counting every blessing.  Not only had our advertising division lost its only paying client, but Smugglers’ Inn, the restaurant, had been under-performing.  July and August saw some of the most dismal table counts in our 40-year history.  What hurt more, though, was losing our popular dishwasher and marketing strategist, Pongo.  Pongo had failed to return after leaving to assist with earthquake relief in his native Sumatra.  His ticket had been subsidized with donations from our entire staff and we were, frankly, expecting to get something for our money in the form of regular reports from the field.  After one email sent from a kiosk in the Jakarta airport to say he had arrived, though, Pongo had gone black. 

“Crap,”  I said.

“What’s crap?”

“We could really use Pongo on this.” 

Carol sighed. “He really relates to people in pain. Do you know if he’s coming back? ”

I didn’t.  And I don’t.  Is Pongo even alive?  Might he return in time to save our asses on this pitch?  How long can we keep putting off the creditors?  Will baking soda remove the smell of urine from car upholstery? Questions.

“Safeway,” Carol said, pointing out the window. “They’ve got restrooms. Should we...?”

“--For fook’s sake, pull in, will you?” came a voice from the back seat.  “What was in that pill Carol?  I feel like I’ve downed three pints of lager, absent the feeling good part.”

“The Spirolactone in Flumoxatol is a diuretic.”

“SO love when you talk dirty, Carlotta.  Scoot up to the front, will you?  Time is of the essence.”

“Scotty’s back!”  I announced. “He’s gone through the Flumoxatol worm hole and come out the other side with all atoms re-aligned flush-left.”  Being around Scotty has the effect of making me try and make my own speech as colorful as an Irishman’s.  As you see, I only embarrass myself. 

“Yes, well, “back” might be a BIT of an an overstatement.  Help me find the door handle, will you, beautiful?”

I threw the car in “park” and Carol walked around to open Scotty’s door.  Scotty got to his feet, exposing the wet patch on his Khaki pants.  He steadied himself, like a man on the deck of a ship.

“You going to be OK?” Carol said, putting a hand on Scotty’s back.

“Actually, I’m a bit rocky.  Would you mind coming in and aiming for me?”

“Go!” Carol shouted, pointing to Safeway’s automatic doors. (Carol points a lot).  Scotty sprinted into the store on sure legs, a broad grin on his face.

“Asshole!” Carol said.  But she was smiling. 

Scotty came out several minutes later toting a six-pack of Heinekin.  If he had tried to clean up in the bathroom, it didn’t show.

“Right, then!  Flumoxidol.  I think our tagline should be, “Never, never mix this shit with Ketamine.”

“Ketamine?”  Carol’s eyes widened.  “What’s Ketamine.”

“Driver, onward,” said Scotty, cracking a beer. “For the night is young.”

“And full of terrors,” Carol added.

The night was young, but all the sweaty-palmed terror had gone out of it, along with any fun.  I drove (slowly) to a nearby park where Scotty could drink himself sober without me losing my license.  Carol and I tossed out a few marketing ideas for Flumoxidol, while Scotty shouted, “Brilliant!” and “Fooking genius!” to everything.  It was no good, though.  The lingering effect of the drug was to make the world seem slowed-down and non-threatening.  This may be what you want in an anti-psychotic, but I was missing my writing companions, ego, paranoia and fear of failure.  We had experienced the client’s product.  That, and the three of us sitting through “Fifty Shades Darker” at the Coon Rapids Cinemart would have to stand for the evening’s achievements.  Actually, Scotty did have one inspired marketing idea, which was to parter with the studios who make chick flicks. 

“You have a fookin’ big bin of fluffies next to the 3-D glasses and a sign that reads:  Men, we realize that you will be quite bored for the next 120 minutes, so here is a free sample of Flumoxidil by Glaxo somebody or other to make the time go and by the by, if she asks, tell her you liked the part where they made love in the rain the best.  And fer fook’s sake don’t say “screwed”.”

I can’t speak for Carol, but I, for one, am looking forward to nine days from now.  How could these clients not go with us over some no-rep pharma shop?  We are Smugglers’ Inn, America’s restaurant/ad agency.  We are gonzo marketers.  We have a liquor license.

Yes, Carol and I will wow ‘em with Power-point presentation #3 (our best) while Scotty charms one and all with his color commentary.  Should things go irretrievably pear-shaped, we’ll whip out a chart showing how we propose to expand Flumoxidol’s market share using a pre-existing network of drug dealers, bikers and corrupt DEA agents.   Maybe we'll smoke up some Flumoxidol right there, just to prove that it can be done.  I’m tired now, like I said.  Happy Thanksgiving, Dr. Pants, wherever you are. 

Young, gifted and orange.

Pongo, our Sumatran ball of energy, has been back on the job for a few months now and the Smugglers’ Inn dishwashing/prep area is beginning to resemble an American automobile from the 1950’s with every surface that isn’t painted or tiled gleaming like triple-dipped chrome. Whatever happened to Pongo during his time away, it did not make him lazy. We’ve had to ask our employee-of-the-month-for-life to take easy on the obsessive cleaning after going through two $18 mop heads in as many months.

We recently lost our bar boy and Pongo had begun filling in on Friday and Saturday nights, making sure our bartenders could concentrate on pouring booze without having to cut limes, clean glasses or run to the freezer for ice cream to make the dreaded Grasshoppers. This represented a much-deserved raise for Pongo, since bar boys make tips in addition to minimum wage.

While his English might have kept him from becoming a full-fledged bartender, Pongo was showing real flair as a bar boy, flipping fresh bottles into the well from a great distance and running to the cooler to and returning with two cases of Amstel Light on balanced on his head. Our customers ate it up.

All save one. A broad-shouldered lass in a blond wig and dark glasses had been nursing a 7-7 for an hour and a half when she stood up, pointed at Pongo and did a fair imitation of Donald Sutherland in the remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. This happened a couple of Saturdays back and we’ve since learned that this person had been an employee of the Blaine Police Department and had, coincidentally, visited out restaurant on the same night when she’d experienced a psychotic episode brought about by PTSD.

While we officially 86’s former officer Corrine Chessman from our establishment, we still thought it prudent to pull Pongo from the bar and dining room. Pongo didn’t say anything (Pongo never does), but by the way he attacked his duties, it was clear that he was working harder than ever. Like most recent immigrants, Pongo thinks that this is how you get ahead, a quaint notion to anyone who has logged any serious time in the Home of the Brave. As compensation for his loss of tip income, we gave Pongo the additional title of food prep technician.

The Ecuadorians and Mexicans who work in Smug’s kitchen stopped talking to Pongo after their hours were cut. The fact that Pongo was handling virtually all of the food prep in addition to his dishwashing duties meant that we could run a leaner kitchen. This actually made the cooks’ jobs more stable, but try explaining that to a 21-year-old with two kids. In a show of solidarity, Smug’s Hispanic workers, meaning everyone who didn’t interact with our customers face-to-face, started referring to Pongo as “puto” or “El Naranja” (the orange one).

While I, personally, find spiders scarier, believe me when I tell you there is nothing more unsettling to the average restaurant manager or manageress than the specter of brown people acting in concert. I could take Pongo’s food prep duties away from him, but this would send all the wrong messages. Like I didn’t care about money.

Poor Pongo. He’d done nothing to deserve it, yet half of his coworkers (OK, 75%) were going out of their way to be nasty to him. I knew that by shifting just a few more hours of prep work back to the cooks, I could remedy the situation. So, I went looking for another job that I could assign Pongo. Our advertising sideline always needed digital enablers.

I was going to see if Pongo had any interest in learning WordPress when he showed up for work one day, sporting a tiny American flag on his white chef’s jacket and a smile that indicated Sumatra is not a nation awash in orthodontists.

“Pongo!” I said, “What’s up? Find another Kennedy half dollar in the street?”

Pongo said nothing (did I mention he does this?) but he handed me a red folder, which he had managed to fold in half twice in order to fit it in his pants pocked. I couldn’t believe what was inside. There was some stuff about the silver standard that made no sense to me, but there was no confusion that it was, essentially, a contract.

“You’re bringing in an account? I dunno, Pongo...it says here they won't be paying us anything until mid-2013.”

Pongo gave me a look like a little kid asking for permission to keep a dog that had followed him home.

“OK, Pongo. We'll keep it. But you’re going to have to take care of it.”

And that’s how Smuggler’s Inn got our very first national account and how an immigrant dishwasher from a fourth-world country became the account supervisor on the Ron Paul for President in 2016 account. Only in America.

Our song. Because someone asked.

After one harmless crack about his "harem",  Mr. Funny Hat declared that the Vienna Boys Choir will NEVER sing "The Ballad of Smugglers' Inn".  Line forms  to the left, Papi.

The Ballad of Smugglers' Inn 

(To the tune of "Ho da fare un drama buffo" from Rossini's Il Turco en Italia) 

SINGER:  Our restaurant was, like, awesome, great.  Each night we served 200 plates, of lobster, shrimp and blackened steak.  Our bartenders scored like Penn State.  But that was 1978.  Oh, cry for SMUGGLERS’ INN! 

CHORUS: Smugglers’ Inn!  Smugglers, Inn!  Oh, glory days, where have you been?  You’d think that puffed sleeves weren’t in.  Oh,  cry for Smugglers’ Inn!

SINGER:  The take is off more every year.  Theme restaurants have grown passe’.  We keep the lights on, god knows how, but the chowder’s sometimes nas-tay.

CHORUS:  Smugglers Inn!  Smugglers Inn!  You might have died like Gunga Dinn.  But you didn’t know when to pack it.   'Da World don't need one more has-been.  You’re evicted, Smugglers’ Inn!

SINGER:  The end had come, we couldn’t doodle.  We had to sell kits and kaboodles.  We broke out a case of Boodles.  Martini-fueled, we wrote some ads.  To hawk our broiler, bar and dishes.  Plus some pretty fake stuffed fishes. 

Suck the corpse of Smugglerss’ Inn!  “Disco’s dead but we’ve kept its balls.” “Two hundred for a wine cooler?  We must be drunk.”

Our ads stood out in “Trading Times”, In “Business Trader”,  a sensation.  Then Conan reads some on Late Night, in front of the whole nation. 

“Who would have predicted?  To creativity we were now addicted.”

CHORUS:  Smuggler’s Inn!  Smugglers’ Inn!  From Surf ‘n Turf to new business wins.  The unlikliest agency that’s ever been!  And if we don’t run out gin, we’re bound to win a lion or at least a pin.   Hurray for Smugglers’ Inn!  God Bless America! 

VOICES (OUT):  “Let’s do lunch.”   “I’m Ramone, I’ll be your creative director…can I start you with a web page?”  “Ha-ha-ha!  You should be writing this…”

Garth Brooks to sing Smugglers' Inn theme song.

by Lindsay Cheltenham-Pierce, society reporter, Anoka County Shopper

“We’re pinching ourselves, I mean, holy sand dabs—Garth Brooks!” said an obviously star-struck Smugglers’ Inn representative who had donned a black hat for the announcement. Brooks, the second-highest grossing solo act of all time after Elvis Presley, reportedly was “touched right here” when he had read the never-recorded lyrics, which recount the story of a struggling business’ fortuitous transition from restaurant to restaurant/ad agency, leaving out the part about the hepatitis scare in 1989 from which this restaurant never fully recovered.

Continued the spokesman, “Garth Brooks is the quintessential American and Prop 291, which is all about American freedom, is right up his alley. Frankly, I never liked what’s-her-name’s music. (A reference to Shakira whom, it had been previously reported here, had been slated to sing the Smugglers’ Inn Theme song.) She’s from Colombia, not the District of--the Colombia by Chile and Brazil. Those people have no conception of time; I think its something in their genes. Anyway, she had conflict. The guys at Lagos were P-O’ed. Well, they sure made it right. Yee-ha! Garth Brooks.”

“Lagos” is Lagos Star Entertainment, the promoters of the concert event known as “Soupstock”, which seeks to raise lobbying money to promote measures granting fast track status to undocumented kitchen workers. Lagos is reportedly in “final negotiation” with the country superstar.