I moved to Columbus 30 years ago. A lot has changed but one thing that hasn't is the town's reputation for rolling up the sidewalks at 9 PM everynight. We have our night spots, of course, but in general, it's not a city where one can walk around and go from one thing to the next as part of what you'd do on a given night.

So where does one go for that kind of atmosphere? Point your front wheels on a vector of 40 degrees from Broad & High, then set your distance-marker beacon for about 45 miles as the crow flies. You'll end up in Mount Vernon, a.k.a. "Tidy Mount Idy." I don't know the population numbers but suffice it to say that it's big enough to have a hospital but not big enough to land an NFL team. Perhaps the most well-known favorite son in the city's 200-year history is Daniel Emmett (1815-1904), who wrote "Dixie's Land" in 1859, which we recognize as the anthem of the Confederate South. (And that's about as incongruous as Irving Berlin, a nice Jewish boy, writing "White Christmas"!)

Fast-forward 150 years. Since there are no more traveling minstrel shows, how does one bring his music to the masses? By standing in line! On a hot summer weekend in 2004, about 750 intrepid souls spent hours underneath a hot sun so they could spend 90 seconds singing in front of a TV camera and a judge. When the dust cleared, twenty lucky people (and two alternates) got to spend another 90 seconds performing, this time under hot spotlights, in front of a panel of four judges, a studio audience of about a hundred people, and four TV cameras. "Gimme the Mike" was in town and open for business!

The first episode aired a few weeks after the auditions. Columbus was treated to four contestants that Tuesday night. You saw the first one take the stage and met the rest on a peek into the "green room" but something seemed a little out of place among the young contestants: a man with a hat who looks old enough to be somebody's grandfather, lounging like he didn't have a care in the world. Your curiosity's piqued...you want to know why there's a DC-3 among the F-16s, and why he's so calm and confident. It's almost as if he doesn't even know -- or it doesn't matter -- that he's in a contest. And that it's going to be broadcast to most of the state.

Now it's time for the last act and the show's hostess introduces our grandfather. She steps out of the way and "Sweet Lew" Sleeman emerges from behind the set and plants his foot on the stage and you can't take your eyes off the screen. Yes, there's that hat! You wonder how far he had to chase Joliet Jake and Elwood to snag it. Now his music track starts. You recognize it as a Vince Gill song and your brain says "Does Not Compute" because nothing you're seeing or hearing adds up.

The lead-in has run its course. Lew raises the mike and belts out a bluesy rendition of a song that is as far removed from The Blues as Mount Vernon is from Dixieland and Irving Berlin is from "White Christmas." His swagger tells you he's been here before. Two minutes later, you're cheering along with the studio audience. Five minutes later, he's singing the show out under the credit roll, the first winner of a five-week series. He made you a believer.

I was already a believer. I'm the guy who edited those 750 auditions for each of the elimination rounds. I'm also a semi-professional musician, having played guitar and bass in every state and country in which I've lived for the last 40 years, so I naturally played judge in my own domain. In Sweet Lew's clip I saw experience, talent, and style. I knew he was a winner. And the judges agreed.

That was two months ago. This is now. The leaves are falling. School's back in session. "Gimme the Mike" transmissions are now in outer space. All that remains of the five shows (plus the Grand Finale) are the prizes and the memories. Fame is fleeting. Everybody's feet are back on the ground and I would guess that they're pretty much doing what they were doing before they stood in line that weekend. That includes a certain taxi-driver who, after he's dropped off his last fare under the long shadows of the setting sun, trades his Crown Vic for a Shure SM58 (wireless, of course).

Since I work nights, I don't get out too often. When I do get a rare day off during the week, I choose my diversions wisely. That's why I wanted to see Lew in his natural element, and on his home turf. After dodging various animals along Route 3/36 (as well as police agencies who feast on out-of-county licensed cars), I arrived in beautiful downtown Tidy Mount Idy a few minutes after 9:00. I knew I was on to something when I could barely find a parking spot in the town square after dark. I saw people walking around. They were going from one place to another or just hanging out. They were having fun. There were food stands by the statues and plaques and there wasn't even an annual festival. This was my idea of "Friday Night," and I had to drive for an hour and five minutes to find it.

Enter Flappers. To me, one watering hole is pretty much the same as the next so I take them all in stride and don't expect a lot out of the ordinary. I took the first pie in the face as soon as I walked in: The floorboards sagged underneath my feet. It was the type of wooden-plank flooring I hadn't seen since my elementary-school gym, and that school was built in 1924! The patterned ceiling was a dead giveaway as to the joint's genesis, during the era when Art Deco was king. If I had to compare it to a woman, it would be an aged Grande Dame...there are younger, prettier girls at the party but this is the one you walk over to first to pay your respects and put on your best David Niven. Thank goodness for preservationists: many big-city architects would have gutted this place and turned it into glass & steel. I walked over to the bar, ordered my poison, and as it was being mixed , I felt like I stepped back in time about 75 years, looking at the full-length mirror behind the bar and patterned-tile bartender run. Only the TV screens and an occasional nose ring reminded me that I was still in the 21st century.

The stage is the front corner display window. It was shuttered and darkened now, but I'd be willing to bet that as late as the 1960s, you could walk by and see an easel advertising the day's specials as you peeked in to see if your friends were there yet. (Or as in New York or Chicago during Prohibition, a policeman could peer in and look down the line to see who might belong to that unfamiliar Packard sitting out front.)

Until I walked into that bar, I thought I had the world all figured out: Taxi drivers sit on barstools on Friday nights and gripe about their fares. Grandfathers eat dinner at 4 in the afternoon and think about white belts (with matching shoes) and Florida and golf. Then, across the room I see Lew, who shatters all my comfortable stereotypes. Yes, I'm sure you'll find other singing cabbies in this great land of ours, but how many morph into human dynamos when the sun goes down? Here we have a guy who's dressed in black from head-to-toe, spryly chain-feeding CDs into a music machine, singing songs society tells us men his age should have outgrown by now. But sing them he does, and with conviction. However, he doesn't take himself so seriously that he can't have fun with it (especially when he walks out on stage with that red towel and the -- well, just check out the pictures below!).

I elbowed my way to a table in front of the stage to get the full effect. I was treated to 3 hours of Lew Does Karaoke: Bob Seger, The Beatles, Marshall Tucker, Ray Charles, Tom Jones, and of course, Elvis. If it's only one testament to his skill that he covered every station on the dial (except for the classical ones at the lower end although he did include the gospel stations at the upper end), I hasten to add that he didn't skip a beat or screech a note all night. He gyrated and danced and gestured...the same trademark moves that helped him win Week One. He walked over to his hat rack and changed lids according to the type of song he was singing. Young girls in the audience sauntered over to that hat rack and helped themselves to his fedoras, then danced in front of the stage. (Their warning shot across the bough came when they moved the empty chairs at my table out of the way.) The old ladies sat at their tables and beamed. Every male of the species watched and wondered which of his appendages would be sore as hell tomorrow.

Lew told me that he sang in bands in the early 60s but it was his peers who gave me the rest of the story: He was the first one to start a local rock band in Mount Vernon. When he and his posse cut loose, the kids got off their seats and started dancing in the aisles. Upon seeing this, an old woman plowed through the crowd, leading with her cane, and exclaimed, "We'll have none of that sort of thing in THIS town!" Looks like she was wrong then and wrong now, because Sweet Lew still has them dancing in the aisles.

Liquor is a great truth serum and a bathroom stall the poor spy's listening post. I overheard a conversation between two patrons; one knew that Lew is over 60, to which the other replied, "I wish I could be able to do this when I'm his age." (I'm 10 years younger and I wonder how much longer I'll be able to walk my ***s.)

I was so chilled-out when I left, I didn't even take the freeway back home. No, instead I took my good old time and stayed with Route 3 all the way back to cowtown...rolled-up sidewalks and all.

(All pictures are thumbnailed)