Roger Reid

I want to write about my friend and fellow Escape 2 Create artist Roger Reid.



Roger is by all accounts one of the most subtle humorists I know, until you get to know him.


THEN his humor ain't so subtle!


I never made the distinction between an author and a writer until February 2010. That's 55 years after Frank Sinatra's 'Wee Small Hours' landed on the charts.

Look, Roger and I had more fun at The Great Southern restaurant happy hour than I thought possible.

Happy Hour - Where one goes at the end of a grueling work day to celebrate life. 
I can't say that Happy Hour is the most healthy choice for anyone, but for about 11bucks I could get a stiff Whiskey, a beer and a dozen raw oysters, with some of the best hot sauce I have tasted. Plus Curling was on at 4:30...approximately the same time as Happy Hour was getting under way.

Happy hour was where I got to know this jovial man, who loyally sipped his Coors Light almost every day, creating a place to go, a zone of "Hey I just worked my ass off for ten hours on my own stuff, let's have a party!"

It was a decadent ritual. If I find such a place in KC, both mentally and physically, that's where you'll find me. It's not about drinking so much as it's the CHURN. The DOING or the fact that you are doing something.

Used to be my churn place was YJ's Snack Shop. It was where artists went after working on their stuff. Then I got caught up in the Walsh's Corner where Mike Murphy holds court, and before that was Java Gaia, and subsequently Cafe Cantata 211.

So in hanging with Roger I learned powerful lessons about life. It's ok to not have to have conversation all the time. Be your own person, be you.

Roger and I would sit there sometimes just lost in our work, the hard wood of the bar denting our forearms as we leaned over it enjoying the brash sound of Chestnut responding to the other denizens with a raspy "Hay Baby, what can I gitcha?"

The think about Roger was he just wrote. In his mind pages and quotes were flying off nestling onto whatever corner that particular thought should be categorized. Certainly some of those quiet moments were some prosaic undertaking.

After a while Roger began to share some of his blurbata with me and the others. There were times when we just kinda sat there a little slack-jawed that this totally unassuming dude could check into such dangerous territory and come out with a treasure of verse.

Also, stuff that was just plain ol cute was not beneath him, he just wrote. Heavy, light... verse, all was within his virulent mind.

Here's to the USA Curling Team and here's to Roger the marathon man of writing.

He has a written a couple of young adult novels based on the natural environment of Alabama. Longleaf, Space and the next coming this fall I hear, all about a boy named Jason, who, when travelling with his folks always gets mixed up in some crime scene and has to use his wits and science to extricate himself from certain doom at the hands of the particular criminals. "In his next adventure, Jason will travel 312 million years into the past. "