“Last present,” my dad said as he leaned forward to hand me a small, flat package about the size of a deck of playing cards. I tore off the wrapping to find a blue silk scarf signed Jerry Denny, your Elvis dad in black marker.
“Gladys sewed the scarf and I signed it,” my dad explained proudly. “We wanted you to have a little Elvis souvenir to take back to Boston with you.”
Most of the people I knew in Boston, including my mom, would have no clue what it was. She still hadn’t heard about my dad being Elvis. “I’ll tell her when the time’s right,” my dad kept saying, but that hadn’t happened yet. So the gift wasn’t exactly something I could take back to Boston and hang up on my wall for everybody to see. But my dad didn’t need to know all that. “Thanks,” I said. “It’s cool.”
Reaching behind the couch, I pulled out the round, tissue-paper-wrapped package I’d been waiting to give to him. It had taken a lot of planning to get the gift from the window of Viv’s Vintage to Ivory’s house to mine. Ivory had brought it to school and I had kept it on the top shelf of my locker for a few days before smuggling it home in my backpack. “I’ve got one more present,” I said, handing it to my dad, who gave me a surprised glance.
From the outside, the gift looked like a large white bowling ball because of all the tissue paper and tape I had used. As my dad began unwrapping the layers of paper, everybody leaned forward to catch the first glimpse of what was inside. Finally, after one last tug of paper and tape, it appeared: a plaster head with a chipped nose and rosy cheeks and black-painted sideburns.
“Elvis!” my dad shouted.
It was the perfect gift for him. Seriously, it was.
After the party, I left Chicago. It was snowing when the plane landed in Boston that night and everything looked different than when I’d left. Even the airport seemed strange, as if I had just landed in some foreign country where I didn’t know a soul and where everything felt unfamiliar.
My mom met me at the Arrivals gate. She had gotten there an hour early, she said. “But it gave me time to make up my grocery list for next week.” She held up a list written on the back of an envelope, and I had to admit it was kind of a relief to see my mom hadn’t changed—except for having a completely sunburned face.
“I realized I’d been in Florida for almost four months and I had barely seen the sun because I’d been so busy with Grandma,” she explained. “So the day before I left, I sat outside in one of Grandma’s lawn chairs with a magazine and fell asleep. Wasn’t that a crazy thing to do?” She gave an embarrassed laugh.
Post-it note #5 on the dashboard: BUY SUNBURN CREAM.
Once we got in the car, it wasn’t long before the whole story about Elvis and my dad came pouring out. I could hide things from my mom over the phone, but I couldn’t hide them from her in person. It started with a comment about my sneakers, which weren’t looking great after several months of being worn around Chicago—and hadn’t looked good before that, either. “Your dad couldn’t get you a deal on a pair of shoes while you were there?” Mom said, noticing them as soon as I stepped out of the snowy slush into the car.
“They’re okay,” I replied, trying to shove my feet farther under the dash.
“How’s business going at the store?”
“I don’t know.” I shifted uncomfortably. “Dad’s doing some new stuff now.”
“New stuff? He isn’t working at Murphy’s anymore?” As she backed out of the airport parking space, my mom’s eyes darted from the rearview mirror, to me, and back. “What’s he doing instead?”
I could tell I was trapped. There was no good way to say it. At least none that I could think of. And really, how was I supposed to talk about living in Chicago without ever mentioning Elvis?
“He’s doing some singing,” I said. “As Elvis.”
“What?” From my mom’s shocked expression and tone, you would have thought I’d just told her my dad had shaved his head and become a Buddhist monk. “Elvis? With the jumpsuit and the sunglasses? That kind of Elvis?”
“He has his own singing business,” I tried to explain. “Going around as Elvis.”
Her voice was incredulous. “Your dad dresses up as Elvis?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
“And people pay him to sing? That’s his job now?”
“Yeah.”
My mom shook her head. “I can’t believe that. I really cannot believe that….” She kept on shaking her head for about the next twenty-five miles. I don’t think she got the idea at all. How my dad was just trying something different. How he wasn’t the same old Jerry Denny she knew. How he was pretty good at being Elvis and how people actually lined up for his shows. But right then, as we were speeding along a Boston freeway, I didn’t really feel like getting into some deep discussion about it. So I kept my mouth shut. Let Elvis stay in Chicago and my mom in Boston. Some things (like the divorce plants, for instance) couldn’t be moved from one place to the other.
38. Viva Las Vegas
A few months after I left Chicago, Dad was invited to be Elvis for the spring dance at Listerine—which just goes to show you that life sometimes has a strange way of working out. Ivory told me the theme was “Jump Back to the Past.” I guess he was asked to sing a few songs and pose for class photographs in his Aloha Eagle costume. According to Ivory, there were pictures of my dad everywhere after the dance—in the school newspaper and the yearbook and even taped up in kids’ lockers.
Note: My dad’s face with sideburns and sunglasses smiling inside everybody’s locker at Charles W. Lister was something I didn’t really want to imagine.
Dave Ernst was elected “King” of the dance by the seventh grade, so his picture was in the local paper. Ivory mailed a copy to me. The photo showed him standing next to my dad with the caption “Dance King Meets Real King.” Jeesh.
My dad eventually got to Las Vegas, too—although he didn’t get there by being Elvis or by winning a Chicago contest. He got there by marrying Viv.
Yes, I said marrying.
He called to tell me the news one night while I was doing my homework: algebraic equations. Fun. “I wanted you to be the first to know,” he shouted into the phone with music blaring in the background. “I proposed to Viv at the show I was doing tonight. We’re going to get married this summer.”
This might have been a complete surprise to me except that Ivory had already hinted that something like this was going to happen. She had e-mailed me a few weeks earlier. “Check out your dad’s horoscope. Romance rules his sign,” she’d written mysteriously.
Romance and my parents was also something I didn’t want to think about.
Dad and Viv got married in June at the Elvis Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Where else, right? Dad wanted me to be there for the ceremony, so I flew to Las Vegas with them. The chapel was inside a hotel, although the place was a lot smaller than I expected. More like an Elvis living room than a church. There were just six white-painted pews and a small keyboard at the front.
The master of ceremonies was an Elvis impersonator named Tony who seemed like a nice guy, even though he had major wig problems. Every time he’d lean over to read from his notes during the ceremony, his Elvis wig would inch forward. He’d read a line and have to push his wig back into place.
“We are gathered here today [push wig up] to celebrate the marriage of [push wig up], Jerry Denny and Vivian Mahoney [adjust gold sunglasses].”
It was pretty humorous.
But he could belt out Elvis’s songs. The way he sang “Love Me Tender” at the end of the ceremony probably would have brought tears to most people’s eyes. Not being a big fan of love songs in general, I stared at my shoes throughout the entire piece, hoping the musical torture would end soon. Even though there were only four of us and two wedding assistants in the room, everybody still clapped when he finished because you always clap for somebody being Elvis. “Outta respect for the King,” my dad says.
Ivory and I sat in the first pew during the ceremony. She
had dyed the front part of her hair pink, and when my mom saw the official Elvis Wedding Chapel photo I brought home, I think she was kind of shocked. (Okay, a lot shocked.) There we were: pink-haired Ivory, me with a zit starting on my chin, my dad in a Hawaiian shirt, Viv with some overly large white flower stuck in the side of her shiny penny-colored hair, and of course—in the back of it all—our smiling, wig-wearing Elvis named Tony.
Pointing at the picture, my mom said the pink-haired girl looked like she was going to be trouble someday. I told her Ivory was okay. “She isn’t as strange as she looks,” I said. Although, in fact, she was.
The wedding only took about thirty minutes, including the pictures—and yes, the vows really did include the words “I promise to be your hunk-a hunk-a burning love forever.” My mom would never, in a million years, have gone for that. But Viv just looked over at my dad, laughed, and answered, “I do.”
My stomach felt kind of strange throughout the whole ceremony. All shook up. That’s what Elvis would say. I was going to be related to Ivory. To Viv. To Viv’s Vintage. To more of Chicago. Jeesh, too weird to think about.
After the wedding, we decided to walk to a restaurant across the street—Chinese, my dad’s usual choice—because it was way past lunchtime. As we headed out of the hotel, I asked Ivory how Digger was doing. “Paul,” she said, correcting me. “He’s going by his real name now. You wouldn’t recognize him. He’s lost about twenty pounds.” She held up her wrist, which had a green leather band etched with flowers and ivy. “His latest creation.”
“And how’s Gladys?” I asked because I knew from my dad that she had been moved to a nursing home at the beginning of May. At the time, my dad and Viv were pretty upset about it, but there wasn’t much they could do. She’d been having a lot more bad days than good ones.
Ivory said Gladys was doing okay. “She asks about you a lot.”
“Me?”
Ivory mimicked Gladys’s voice. “She says, ‘When is Elvis’s friend—that polite young man who sat next to me at the show—going to stop by and see me again?’” I promised myself I would visit Gladys when we got back from Las Vegas. Maybe I’d even smuggle in a box of donuts, too.
While we waited on our food at the Chinese restaurant, my dad told us he and Viv had a special announcement to make. Right away, my mind thought the worst, of course. Please don’t say you’re planning to have an Elvis baby.
But thankfully, the news turned out to be about Viv’s Vintage, not babies. The store was going to be expanding, my dad said. He and Viv had decided to add a new area: a vintage shoe room called Blue Suede Shoes. “It’s a corporate merger,” my dad explained, smiling widely at Viv. “I’m going to help out in the store when I’m not busy being Elvis, and Viv will help out at my shows when business is slow. From now on, we’ll be known as”—he gestured at an invisible sign in the air—“Viv’s Vintage and Jerry’s Blue Suede Shoes. Won’t that be great?”
Note to anybody in Chicago: If you’re looking for a nice pair of patent leather shoes or a plaid polyester suit, now you know where to go.
At the end of the meal, the waiter brought out some fortune cookies for us. Ivory and Viv got the same fortune, something like, “A positive attitude creates a positive day.” Mine said, “Your smile fills a room,” which might have been okay advice for Miss America but wasn’t very helpful for a guy.
My dad opened his cookie last and started laughing when he read the fortune. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s from Elvis.”
“What?” We leaned across the table, trying to see the paper.
“It’s a line from the song ‘Don’t Be Cruel.’ It says, The future looks bright ahead.’” My dad looked up and smiled at the three of us. “I gotta agree with the King,” he said in his Elvis voice.
No matter what the future held, I was pretty sure of one thing—the King would be a big part of it. Because, trust me, Elvis is everywhere.
A Little More About Elvis
Elvis Presley (1935–77) remains a legendary figure in the world of music. Say his name and almost everybody has a story. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis Presley came from humble beginnings. His mother, Gladys, bought him his first guitar at the age of eleven. In 1953, he went to Sun Records to record two songs as a gift for her. Three years later, he cut “Heartbreak Hotel,” which became his first gold record, followed by more hits like “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Hound Dog,” and “Love Me Tender.”
In addition to singing, Elvis appeared in thirty-one motion pictures from 1956 to 1969. His career was interrupted briefly when he was drafted into the army for two years, but he returned to popularity wearing black leather and singing to a small stage audience in his televised “comeback special” concert in 1968. The 1973 Hawaiian concert (where he wore the famous Aloha Eagle jumpsuit) was the first concert ever broadcast by satellite around the world. In his later years, he was a popular Las Vegas performer, often opening his concerts with the dramatic theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Although more than thirty years have passed since his death, Elvis Presley’s music and legendary stage presence live on. Today, it’s estimated that as many as thirty thousand people around the world perform as Elvis impersonators—or Elvis tribute artists (ETAs). While working on All Shook Up, I watched shows by both amateurs and professionals. I saw performances by Las Vegas Elvises, Canadian Elvises, Ohio Elvises, nationally known Elvises—and even an eight-year-old Elvis. (I managed to get a few of my own Elvis scarves, too.)
What I noticed about all of the tribute artists I met was their appreciation for Elvis’s music and their love of performing. They consider it an honor to bring back memories of Elvis for people who grew up with his music—and for those, like me, who didn’t. I believe they share the best side of the King: his music, his legendary performance style, and his generosity and kindness to his fans. Like Elvis, tribute artists sign autographs, give out scarves, shake hands, and raise money for charity at their shows.
Most tribute artists re-create Elvis’s look by wearing authentic reproductions of his costumes and jumpsuits, which are known by names like the Gold Lamé, the Peacock, the Powder Blue, and—of course—the Aloha Eagle. Some professional tribute artists perform with a full band and backup singers, too. I heard Elvis’s former drummer D. J. Fontana and backup singers the Sweet Inspirations perform at one special tribute concert. I’ve also talked to a lot of people who knew somebody—who knew somebody else—who once met Elvis. The real Elvis.
In a speech, Elvis once said, “I learned very early in life that without a song, the day would never end. Without a song, a man ain’t got a friend.” He recorded more than seven hundred songs in his lifetime. My all-time favorite? “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”
But don’t look for me to be performing it onstage anytime soon.
Special Thanks
I’d like to offer my own “thankyaverymuch” to my editor, Joan Slattery, my husband, Mike, and my three student readers, Daniel Kuerbitz, Ellen Kuerbitz, and Nick Cirino. A big hunk-a, hunk-a hug to all of the Elvis tribute artists who answered my questions and shared their music with me. Special thanks to Ohio’s own “Danny G” and Canadian tribute artists Mario Cervini and Kevin Bezaire (pictured on the jacket).
About the Author
Shelley Pearsall met Elvis impersonators of all kinds—and watched more performances than she can count—in the course of writing All Shook Up. She is the author of Trouble Don’t Last, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, Crooked River, and All of the Above, an ALA Notable Book. A former teacher and museum historian, Shelley Pearsall now writes full-time from her home in Ohio. Please visit www.shelleypearsall.com to learn more about the author and her books.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Wh
ere real-life historical and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Shelley Pearsall
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pearsall, Shelley.
All shook up / Shelley Pearsall.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When thirteen-year-old Josh goes to stay with his father in Chicago for a few months, he discovers—to his horror—that his dad has become an Elvis impersonator.
[1. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 2. Single-parent families—Fiction. 3. Elvis Presley impersonators—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction. 6. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P3166Als 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2007022931
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
eISBN: 978-0-375-84954-1
v3.0
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