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games, and it didn’t take me long to notice that Colleen was there, too. She never missed a game. So I started practicing fast-pitch softball with Ronnie. I worked and worked and finally got good enough to be the pitcher on the team. It got even better when we started winning.
    One day after I had pitched a big win for the team, I swaggered over to where Colleen was standing. “Hi, Colleen!” I said, ready for her to tell me how great I was and start up the romance of my young life. At the very least I expected a hi or a giggle. Instead I got, “You are such a show-off!”
    I was mortified.
    It hurt so much because she was right. I had developed a big windmill pitch that helped get batters out but was really designed to impress Colleen. Obviously it didn’t.
    I’ll let you in on a secret: entertainers—no matter how old they are—should never take themselves too seriously. Years later, in the early 1980s when I was at the peak of my success, I came to Houston for a show. You always want to look good for your hometown, so I was excited about playing before eighty thousand people at the Houston Astrodome. The show was great. The crowd cheered with every song and laughed at all my jokes. It couldn’t have gone better.
    As I was leaving the building with my mother, it suddenly got a lot better. There she was . . . Colleen Mays! I recognized her immediately. I hadn’t seen her for years, not since we were kids. What a rush! She’d come to see her old friend, the boy with the razzle-dazzle windup who used to pick pecans in her yard.
    I stopped the procession leaving the arena and went over to her, thinking, This is so cool .
    “Hello, Colleen!” I said.
    “Hello,” she said, with a completely blank look on her face.
    “I’m Kenneth Rogers. We went to Wharton Elementary together. I used to pick pecans at your house.” I was feeling a little less cool. It appeared that Colleen had come to a Kenny Rogers concert, advertised as a show from a hometown boy, and never made the connection to the Kenneth Rogers she knew as a child. She really had no memory of that little awestruck boy from the projects.
    “Remember, I pitched on the softball team?”
    “Yeah, I kind of remember that.”
    You bitch! I thought. You “kind of remember that”? Come on! Throw me a bone, Colleen. My mom is standing right here! You could at least pretend that you remember me!
    I guess I had been more successful at being anonymous in grade school than I thought.
    If a celebrity likes people to read about his successes, he should be willing to share his humiliations as well. In my life, more than a few have fit the pattern set by Colleen.
     
    As early as grade school, I began to see music and singing as a respite from all the awkwardness and embarrassment of growing up poor, shy, and often an outsider. Developing a little confidence from singing and playing around the house, I entered my first talent show in Houston. It was 1949, and I was ten years old. The event was sponsored by Foremost Dairy and held just prior to a big Eddy Arnold appearance at the Texan Theatre, where I later worked. Eddy was a big country star at the time, at one point that year having five hits on the charts at the same time. The grand prize of the competition was a half gallon of vanilla ice cream, quite the prize for a ten-year-old from the projects. And the grand grand prize was that the winner would get to meet Eddy in person.
    I marched out on that stage and sang and yodeled a song called “Lovesick Blues.” Originally a show tune from the 1920s, this song had been released by the great Hank Williams and became his first No. 1 hit. I heard it on the radio and figured that if Hank had hit the jackpot with it, maybe I would, too. I threw myself into the performance, even the yodeling parts, and ended up winning first prize. Either I was better than I thought or the other kids were awful. In any case, that half gallon of Foremost Dairy’s finest ice cream was