What We Play

Paris Hilton... The ubiquitous socialite. She’s plastered on the cover of every magazine in the grocery store checkout lines. Stories of her vacuous exploits abound, but perhaps the only substantial story about Paris Hilton comes from the day she showed up at a Without Paris concert. This was only the second gig the band had ever played, and at the time we were calling ourselves “The Sumo Wrestlers,” and we actually performed in these fat suits and bounced up against each other on stage and stuff, but after the first show we were so sweaty that we dumped the suits and decided to call ourselves “The Skinny Sumos” instead, and that was the name on the marquis the night Ms. Hilton stopped by. We were having snacks in our dressing room after the show when we heard a faint knock. Our road manager answered the door and there she was, and he said, “Man, you look just like Paris Hilton.” The rest of us just stared at her, silent. She said, “You guys were fab, and I loooove the name!” And away she went. Back on the tour bus that night we all agreed that if Paris Hilton likes our name then there must be something wrong with it, and that’s when our driver simply said, “Without Paris.” We didn’t get what Jarvis meant, and Jarvis is a man of few words, so we knew that he wasn’t about to explain himself, and so we didn’t ask, and to this day we really don’t know for sure if he was suggesting a new band name or making a random, Jarvis-like comment, but from that moment on, we were and always will be, “Without Paris.”