Jonathon Joe Herzog
June 25th 1978-July 2nd 2023Its no secret Jon had a persona that was larger than life.
It’s a lesser known fact that jon also had a magical alter persona. Like a literal magical persona. I was reminiscing with midge in the shop one evening recently with midge and she reminded me about jons entrance to our wedding reception. A couple weeks before the wedding night jon stopped by to visit and we were filling him in on all the crazy details like how were gonna make splatter paint art during the ceremony with rifles, paint filled balloons and of course explosives… and how our photographer had wear a ghillie suit and I was gonna wear a plum purple suit and how we were putting together a last minute wedding band “the squeaky deaky dashikis” complete with matching band outfits… jons eyes lit up with wonderment and asked “what do I get to wear?” and we said “ummm… surprise us” and continued on not giving it much more thought…
Fast forward to an hour or two into the reception party, midge and I were greeting guests near the back of the room and the band was playing their make shift set list when all of a sudden theres a commotion and we hear somebody say “oh my gosh, theres even a wizard” and we look over to see jon busting out the finest late 90s dance skip jumping through the crowd. And this wasn’t like a sub par just got into the wizard trade type of outfit. It was complete with a hand carved staff, the hat, a luscious gray haired wig
and facial hair wig, wizard cloak, spell satchel and pair of chaco sandals. It was like Gandalf and jerry Garcia conceived a magical son and jon was the bi product. And the magic didn’t end there. Not only did he completely full send the wizard outfit… a half hour later he disappeared and came back wearing a matching outfit that the band was wearing and completely played it off like he just got there and was sad he missed wizards appearance but informed me he prepared a wedding gift for us and proceeded to pull out his guitar and sang a song he wrote for midge and i. jon always had the most unique gifts in general. But the best gift he gave us was the gift of calling him a friend.