the musical fruit: movement #3.
song: "fee," phish (camden, nj - 07.06.09)
fruit: nectarine



as i'd mentioned a little while back, i rekindled the college years back in the beginning of june by going to back-to-back phish shows in mansfield, ma & camden, nj. the camden show was my favorite of the two, as they busted out a bunch of the old faves like "guyute," "lizards," "tweezer," & "wolfman's brother." after opening the show with "chalkdust torture," they moved on to "fee," the opening song on their first album, junta. as slightly shaky live footage from that night shows, phishheads went nuts when they broke into the song & went even more nuts when during the second verse, trey totally forgot the lyrics.

those lyrics tell the story of a weasel named fee ("a buddhist prodigy long past the age of maturity"), milly (the woman he loves, "a gospel singer with pocks on her face") & floyd (a chimpanzee who "was jealous and alone" & "wanted milly for his own"). as the story goes, floyd tracks fee & milly down on a ship, where they're on a "lover's trek." floyd goes after fee with a bottle & milly comes to fee's defense. her weapon, which she slams floyd in the face with...a nectarine. it's such a powerful nectarine that floyd is knocked over the edge of the ship & eventually plummets into the water, allowing fee to be "finally free." it's a touchingly joyous multianimal love story that phish has been telling for over twenty years now & i've been jamming to pretty regularly over the last two months.

tonight, in honor of fee's triumph, i'm having a nectarine for dessert. in the interest of full disclosure, i'm not the person you want to ask to pick a nectarine out of a fictional fruit lineup, especially if those who set up the lineup also toss a peach into the mix. in fact, during the fruit run where i procured tonight's nectarine, i also bought a peach. when it came time for nectarine snacking, the only way i could tell the difference was the tiny labels affixed to their respective skins. in the future, i'll just i have to recall that peaches have the furrier exterior of the two. as long as some other fun fact doesn't push that one out of my phish-rattled brain, it's all good.

once i'd cut up my nectarine & started popping slices into my mouth, my taste buds were all "oh c'mon. this is so a peach. it's got the pit, the yellow-orange fruit with stains around the pit--the whole shebang." this led to an interweb research tangent & the discovery that nectarines are actually a subset of the peach. well there you have it, reader. now that i know that, i feel much better about the whole thing. it means that i can eat one or the other despite the differences between their skins, because they're essentially the same on the inside. that's right...fruit tastiness isn't just skin-deep.