Sports fans? We got trouble. Walt and Bert and their three-year-old baby are humming right along when Walt grows restless. No longer playing drums at night and none too happy with his dead-end job, Walt watches as his buddies enlist in the Air Force and go off on their adventures. Bert was never wary of Walt’s musician lifestyle, but an idle and disappointed Walt threatens to derail Bert’s precarious state-of-mind.
One day at work Walt gets called into the Tannery office and he’s offered a job as Department Specialist with an increase in pay. The only hitch: the job is in the Tannery’s Newark location and their little family would have to move over an hour away. Walt takes the job on the spot and then goes home to discuss it with Bert, but there really isn’t much point discussing a done deal. Just like there isn’t much point trying to make Walt understand that when he throws all of the cards up in the air it reminds Bert of the instability of her childhood. Just like there’s no point trying to explain that when Walt is itchy
in his life it feels to Bert like abandonment.
But Walt is on a mission, and that mission is escape. So Bert packs up, and she and the baby catch a bus to New Orleans to stay with her sister Jenny and her husband Sam, who recently moved to the port city for Sam’s war-related job. The bus to New Orleans is crowded with soldiers and therefore Bert’s three-year-old baby has to perch on her petite mother’s lap, where the baby belts out the blues lyrics, “I got a Big Fat Mom-ma,” all the way across the country.
Walt hastily sells off the contents of the apartment and his life and moves to Newark.
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