TIM: Welcome to the bar. Pull up a stool. I'm Tim, I'm 45, I run the mail room at an insurance company in Cincinnati, and for one night every summer I am a different man.

TINA: He's the same man. He's just wearing a coconut bra.

TIM: That was ONE year.

TINA: I'm Tina, I'm 43, I'm the dispatcher for a school bus company, so I spend all year getting eight thousand kids where they need to be on time. Once a summer I get to be somewhere I don't need to be on time. We've been married twenty-one years, we have two kids, Jason and Monica, and we have been to see Jimmy Buffett every summer since 1986. Fourteen shows. This page is about all of it.

TIM: And I'm wearing the grass skirt in the picture on the fridge. You'll have to take our word for it. The film's still at the drugstore.

TINA: First, what it is. A Parrothead is a Jimmy Buffett fan. And here's the part we can't get over: the name got started right here in Cincinnati. The story is that at a show out at Kings Island in 1985, Timothy B. Schmit, who was playing bass with Jimmy then, looked out at all the people in Hawaiian shirts and parrot hats and called them Parrotheads, the way the Grateful Dead have Deadheads.

TIM: 1985. Our first show was 1986. We missed history by one year. I will never get over it.

TINA: He brings it up every summer. OK, the rules.

1. Dress loud. Hawaiian shirt at the very least. Leis. A hat. Bonus points for anything with a parrot, a shark or a cheeseburger on it. There is no such thing as too much.

2. Get there early. The parking lot is half the show. People set up whole beach scenes out there, with sand and kiddie pools and grills going, hours before the gates open. Walk around. Say hi. Everybody's friendly, and somebody will hand you a cheeseburger.

3. Learn the fins. When he plays "Fins," you put your hands up on top of your head like a shark fin and move them back and forth with everybody else. Twenty thousand people doing it at once is a sight you won't forget.

4. Pick a driver. Every year, no exceptions. Tina drives. She drives buses for a living, in a manner of speaking, so she's not about to let anybody else drive her.

5. Be nice. Fourteen years and we've never seen a fight. Parrotheads are the friendliest crowd in the world. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong.

6. Start with the right album. If you're brand new, get Songs You Know by Heart, the greatest hits. You probably know more of them than you think.

7. Remember it's a lifestyle, not a vacation. That one's mine. Tim says it doesn't mean anything. Tim isn't the one who painted the back porch turquoise.

TIM: James William Buffett was born on Christmas Day, 1946, in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama. His grandfather was a sea captain, which explains a lot. He tried Nashville for a while, didn't fit, and ended up in Key West in the early seventies, and Key West is where it all came from: the boats, the bars, the characters, the sunburns.

TINA: He calls his band the Coral Reefer Band. He has his own Margaritaville store and café down in Key West, which we finally got to visit for our twentieth anniversary last year. And he flies his own seaplane, which is how he ended up getting shot at in Jamaica in 1996, when the police there mistook it for drug smugglers. Nobody got hurt. He wrote a song about it, of course.

TIM: Of course. That's Jimmy. Something goes wrong, you write a song about it, everybody sings along, and then you go get a cheeseburger.

Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes (1977)
The one with "Margaritaville" on it, which went top ten and made him famous. Also the title song. Order it if: you're new. Start here. (Tim)

Son of a Son of a Sailor (1978)
"Cheeseburger in Paradise," and the title song, which is about his grandfather. Order it if: you're hungry. (Tina)

Volcano (1979)
"Fins" and "Volcano." Recorded down on Montserrat, where the volcano there really did go off a few years ago, so it isn't funny now the way it was. Order it if: you want to learn the fins. (Tim)

One Particular Harbour (1983)
The title song is the prettiest thing he ever did, and I'll fight anybody about it. Order it if: it's late and the porch light is on. (Tina)

Songs You Know by Heart (1985)
The greatest hits. Every Parrothead's first record. Ours was worn through by 1988. Order it if: you just got here. (Tim)

Feeding Frenzy (1990)
Live, and the closest thing to being in the lawn seats with us. Order it if: it's January in Ohio. (Tina)

Banana Wind (1996)
Has the song about getting shot at in Jamaica. Order it if: you like a man who can laugh at himself. (Tim)

Don't Stop the Carnival (1998)
Songs from the musical he wrote from Herman Wouk's novel about a man who buys a hotel on a Caribbean island. Order it if: you've ever thought about chucking it all and running a bar somewhere warm. (We have. We will not.) (Tina)

Beach House on the Moon (May 1999)
The new one. The title song, "I Will Play for Gumbo," and "Math Suks," which Monica, who is a senior and taking calculus, has adopted as her personal anthem. Order it if: you want to know what he's up to now. (Tim)

We own every one of the others too. Ask us. We'll tell you about every one.

TINA: Most people don't know he writes books. Good ones! He's one of the very few people to have a number one bestseller on both the fiction and the nonfiction lists.

Tales from Margaritaville (1989). Short stories, full of the same kind of people as the songs. I read it on the beach at Hilton Head and got the worst sunburn of my life because I couldn't put it down.

Where Is Joe Merchant? (1992). A novel. Seaplanes, islands, a missing rock star, and a lot of characters you'd want to have a drink with. Tim read it twice.

TIM: Three times.

A Pirate Looks at Fifty (1998). For his fiftieth birthday he flew his family around the Caribbean and down to South America, and this is the story of the trip and his life. Tim turned forty-five this year and announced he's going to write A Mail Room Supervisor Looks at Fifty. I said you'd better start flying.

TIM: He also did a couple of children's books with his daughter. We read The Jolly Mon to Monica a hundred times when she was little.