"Bukra fil-mishmish is kinda the Egyptian version of the Mexicans' Mañana. It translates as 'Tomorrow, in the time of the apricots.' But dig: There isn't any apricot season on the Nile...." — Charlie Perry

Pleasant Hill, OR
St. Pat's Day, 1992
Charlie Perry
Camp Mogen David, CA

Dear Charlie:

Downwind by a couple decades, peeking back through cracked mind mirrors. You see, Rolling Stone is publishing a chunk of "The Search for the Secret Pyramid" they sent us on in '74, and Jann has asked me to come up with the Most Memorable Scene from that historic assignment. A grand gallery of Egyptian etchings comes flapping to mind:

— like that first night in Cairo, when Ramadan ended and 7 million uproarious believers broke out in a teeming rash of discordant harmony, heralding the rise of global Muslim might...

— or that afternoon our motor-mad taxi driver T'ud ("Thud?" you screeched from the back seat. "This gear-grinding tire-burning pedal-to-the-metal maniac's name is Thud?") drove us out to Sakara, where a tunnel beneath the sand led us past hundreds of stone boxes big as Buicks, all of them coffins for the bulls that were elaborately sacrificed every year for hundreds of years thousands of years ago, each of them carved from a solid block of rare black granite, and every one of them empty, enigmatic and depressing...

— or that chilly dawn my shadowy little Not-guide, Marag (pronounced with a soft g, remember? Mah-rahzh-zh...), guided me down through the dark throb of his ancestral village to score me some hash so you wouldn't have to listen to me complain anymore that I was "highless in Gîza."...

Great memories, Charlie, but I'm afraid I'm gonna have to disappoint Jann; the Egyptian memory that stands out most in my gallery actually happens on another trip, four years later, when I finally persuade friends and family to return with me to that fabulous land of the pharaohs...when hard-shell Baptist Jimmy Carter is getting hard-nosed Hebrew Menachem Begin to sit down and schmooze with moderate Muslim Anwar Sadat in the name of Peace...

— in the Time of the Apricots, when the Grateful Dead played the Great Pyramid.

Sadat's old lady helped put the gig together, explaining to unenthusiastic Arab allies that she understood their concern about infidel Rok'n Rolies playing the World's Most Ancient Temple, but she did not consider it blasphemous in as the promoters agreed that all prophets from the concert would go toward the construction of a soccer field for the underprivileged children of Cairo.

Right. Prophets zero, lions ate, as usual. But the Arab elders went for it. How could they have known what rough beast was lurching toward them across the desert by the truckful? How could they have imagined the prophet-gobbling appetite of a Rok'n Rol army on a full-scale campaign? Even the gig's promoters never dreamed how unprophetable the gig was gonna be. Only 700 tickets sold, mostly to hard-core Deadheads, government operatives and spoiled Saudis who motored over by the limo load. Local sales are zip.

"Oh, well," the promoters sigh as they strap on their most philosophical Woodstock Grin, "some things you gotta write off as the Will of Allah."