A Pirate Cap to Bilbo Marx

An odyssey of coincidence

My new friends in Cafe Society, Half Moon Bay, CA, and the cap that started it all.

In the seaside town of Half Moon Bay, California, just a few miles down the road from me, there’s a coffeehouse on Main St called Cafe Society. As I was leaving one day, I saw a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap on a table and it grabbed my attention. I’ve been a hardcore Pirate fan since my childhood — my dad having taken me and my brothers to see games from an early age, and got to watch some of the greatest players roam the field such as Willie Stargell, Bill Mazeroski, and the great one, Roberto Clemente. I’ve noticed people wearing Pirate caps before, of course, and usually they’re not nearly as fanatic as I am. Often they say something like, “I don’t know anything about the team, just liked the hat.”

The lady sitting at the table answered my “Hey, Pirates!” greeting quite differently. She said she and her husband were genuine fans and were transplanted from Pittsburgh like myself. The gentleman who owned the hat, her husband, appeared and proceeded to demonstrate detailed knowledge of the team on a level as great as I had always held in my lonely way so far from home. After talking about the state of the team, the fresh faces, and the mutual frustrations with team management and chronic underperformance, we started getting into the good stuff.“

So, how’d you get to be a Pirate fan"?” he asked, and I told him I’d lived in and around ‘the burgh’ from infancy until heading west after college. I’d gone to high school in Greensburg, PA, about 30 miles west of Pittsburgh. We were both amazed to find out he’d attended a school just down the road in Latrobe, PA, a revelation which built to the next big coincidence. We were both class of ‘75, and beyond that our actual birth dates were only two days apart!

I asked how they’d met and his wife said it was at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). That was exactly where one of my brothers met his future wife and one of my sisters met her future husband. Not super surprising as a lot of my high school classmates went there, but still, one more coincidence along the line.

I asked them where they lived now, assuming they must be local to the area, but no, they were visiting from their home in Sacramento, a place where I had formerly been a resident back in the early 1990’s. How long had they lived there? Well, it turned out that they were on their second tour in Sacto, the first being back in the early nineties.

Where had they lived? Near Sacramento State University on the east end of town, not far from where I lived. The woman had been on the faculty of the college’s drama department, and finally the last stunning coincidence dropped.

The gentleman, who’s name I learned was Gary Weinberg, turned to his wife, Melanie Smith, and said something like, “Those were the Bilbo Marx days.” At this point my jaw dropped open in utter amazement. It had been a long, long time since I had first heard this phrase composed of a hobbit and a renowned philosopher, but it wasn’t the first time.

Byron, Jupiter Sheep’s lead singer, opening the Playwrights Theater premiere: “We’re definitely not as funny as Bilbo Marx, but we’re better looking, so there!

In the early 1990’s in Sacramento, California, a band by the name of Jupiter Sheep played their first gig ever on the stage of the Playwright’s Theater at Sacramento State University. The opening act was a band called Bilbo Marx. Gary was the lead guitarist for Bilbo Marx, and I was the bassist for Jupiter Sheep under my stage name Max Wyvern. As far as I know, despite sharing the stage that night and on another occasion later, we never met. I was so excited about the debut I don’t remember anything about the opening act except for their name on the flyer.

Jupiter Sheep with Bilbo Marx played more than once together

Apparently, Melanie being on the faculty had something to do with our two bands securing the Playwrights Theater for our opening gig. She vaguely remembered someone named Byron, which was our band’s lead singer’s name, and he had been a student in the drama department at Sac State, so there was likely a deeper connection there as well.

Gary still plays guitar as a member of a band called The Bagmen in Sacramento, and I plan to finally close a thirty year loop and make a trip up soon to hear them and allow Max Wyvern to finally meet the distant echo of Bilbo Marx.

This chance meeting is also what pushed me to finally tell the fuller story of Jupiter Sheep — the music, the people, how it all started and how it ended — which I’ll be posting here soon. In the meantime, a good chunk of it is already up at the new website, if you want a head start on where this is going.