Alex and I do maintain a friendship and I did consider joining The Limeliters upon his retirement. He has now opted to bring in Gaylen Taylor as his replacement for various reasons. Gaylen actually filled in for Alex on a Limeliter's fan cruise a few years ago when Alex was in the hospital. The cruise was booked and the group was obligated. Because of that past short stint Gaylen is familiar with the repertoire. It would have taken me quite a bit of work to get up to speed on the tunes and, in reality, my vocal range is a little higher than Alex's. That plus the fact the the group doesn't work much just made it something that Alex and I mutually opted out of. Meri and I are working on booking the group, however. I'm great friends with The Brothers Four as well. In fact, Meri and I booked them as our headline act for our two December "Concerts For A Cure" here in Colorado. They invited me to join them on Mark Pearson's banjo medley (Mark and I had the same banjo teacher when we were youngsters) and that was a blast. I'm pretty sure that Bob Flick would give me a call if they ever had an opening, but that's not likely to happen. The line-up now with Mark, John Hylton and Mike McCoy (plus Bob Flick) is solid and I don't expect anything less than illness to change that. At this point I'm biding my time, writing and working on "Concerts For A Cure". We have several of those events in the planning stages and that takes a lot of my time. The occasional solo gig keeps my chops up and gets me in front of a live audience, so I'm booking about 3 or 4 shows a month right now, all here in Colorado. I'm pretty comfortable not getting on a plane every week to leave home for 4 days or more. Working close to home also allows Meri to come to all my gigs, so it's a good thing for us right now. I am open to accepting shows out of town, but I don't have a booking agent and that means that I would have to get on the phone and try to book myself. I'm honestly more involved with our "CFAC" and don't have time to work on setting up a solo tour of some sort. As much as possible I am putting myself on the bill as an opening act for our "CFAC" dates, so as those develop I'll be doing some traveling for those events. Hope that answers your questions - thanks for asking!
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