What Could've Been.....

Lynsey requested the Brad Paisley story......

I moved back to West Virginia in 1998. The husband, although he wasn't the husband at the time, lived in the town twenty miles north of my old hometown and I decided to live in sin with him because my parents hotfooted it south three months earlier. I liked it there because I didn't know everyone like the hometown and, likewise, they didn't know me.

I took a job teaching gifted kids at an elementary school in town and got to know the teachers. I loved the teachers there and looked forward to lunch everyday to get the good gossip and learn more about my new hometown. I started getting bits and pieces about the fourth grade teacher's son being away at a college in Nashville and trying to make it as a singer. I wondered why she didn't put her foot down and make her kid major in something "real" and, honestly, imagined a long-haired, tattooed, honky-tonk singer making his way from bar to bar every weekend trying to make ends meet. Now, none of these teachers knew that I was living with a guy. I didn't think it would look good for the teacher to be shacking up, so I just omitted Derick from all conversation alltogether because I am not a very good liar. So when the fourth grade teacher came in one lunch to tell everyone her son would be home for a couple of weeks another of the teachers suggested she bring him in and introduce him to me because he was soooo cute and I was soooo single and oh, my golly, wouldn't we have a great time together! I had no idea how to get out of that one without giving myself away, so I finally just told them all that I had recently met someone and was not available for blind dates and that was that.

A couple of months later the whole town was all giddy crazy because the hometown boy had released his new CD and it was selling like hotcakes. I assumed it was just a little local CD until I was flipping through and caught the end of the "Who Needs Pictures" video on CMT and the name Brad Paisley flashed up and I eventually put two and two together and realized, duh, Mrs. Paisley's son! He wasn't hairy. He didn't look like a drunk barfly. He was cute. And selling CDs. All over the country. For lots of money. DOH!

So that's how I came thatclose to Brad Paisley and didn't even know it at the time.