“When my brothers and I were growing up, my mother wrote three musicals. She had grown up in upstate New York, and so she was just swept away by the size, and space, and skies of Texas,” Diana Dill Savage says. “That’s kind of what this musical that she wrote is about: the power of the land and the people who have lived on it for a good while.”
Last year, Savage decided to put together a showcase with her mother’s songs and present it at the wine and jazz bar that she owns with her husband. Since she would be singing songs about the beauty of Texas, a pair of cowboy boots was essential.
She posted a question on Facebook, asking friends if she could borrow a pair of cowboy boots her size – and then she forgot about the post.
“I was performing and I saw this guy in the audience and it was Randy Heady,” Savage says. “He lived in my neighborhood growing up in Dallas, but I hadn’t seen him in a long, long time.”
Heady asked her if she had seen his response to her Facebook post. She hadn’t.
“He said, ‘I told you to go out and buy yourself a pair of cowboy boots and send me the bill,’” she says.
Savage went to the Cavender’s store in Dallas and looked at dozens of boots for hours. Finally, she picked out a pair.
“Thanks to my mother’s music,” Savage says, “and thanks to the totally unexpected generosity of a childhood friend, I have a pair of cowboy boots which I will wear the rest of my life.”
Written by Cesar Edmund Lopez-Linares.
