New Edition Way tour: Boston

Boyz II Men, Toni Braxton

When my wife and I went to Chautauqua in 2023, we saw a lot of performances. The one my daughter was sad not to see was Boyz II Men.

So when she saw that New Edition was going on tour in 2026 with Boyz II Men and Toni Braxton, she wanted to go to the show, either in Boston on February 15 or in New York City on March 14th. We opted for the earlier performance.

The logistics: I would take a Peter Pan bus from Albany to Springfield. Apparently, I  hadn’t taken the bus in a very long time. The Greyhound station was all but empty; I had to go to  the Trailways “station,” which consisted of a couple of trailers not too far away. But it was only five bucks.

The route involved passing by the frozen Hudson River to I-90, then taking an exit that would eventually get us to Route 20, one of the great routes in America, which runs by the New Lebanon Speedway and the Hancock Shaker Village before we got to Pittsfield. Then to the Lee Premium Outlets, where no one got off or on, then back to I-90, eventually to Springfield. 

The Daughter picked me up, and she drove to Woburn, where we stayed at a hotel. In due course, she drove us to the MBTA Orange line, and we traveled to North Station and walked five minutes to the TD Garden (formerly the Boston Garden).

Stand around and wait 

It was 6:30 for a 7 pm show, yet no one was allowed in. Eventually, we all got in. My daughter and I didn’t get to our seats until 7:15, but a DJ was playing music to distract us. The seats in the balcony were very narrow, with insufficient legroom. I got to check out the banners on the ceiling from the great days of the Celtics and other teams.

Finally, the show starts at 7:50 with the three acts performing a new song We Going Out Tonight. Then each artist in turn, including various iterations of New Edition. The group was particularly thrilled to be performing in the city because, in August 2025, the city honored their native sons by renaming Dearborn Street in Roxbury “New Edition Way.” 

I must admit that I wasn’t very versed in New Edition, which formed as teenagers in 1978. When I heard their early hits, which they sang late in the show, and I recognized them, I had written them off as Jackson Five wannabes.  Certainly, I couldn’t keep track of their various combinations, such as Bell Biv DeVoe and their solo careers, with one exception.

Roni

I own Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel album; he sang the three hits at various times.  New Edition, the Boston Globe noted, “had the sort of camaraderie that comes from years spent together and apart, with Brown’s bandmates backing up on his solo smashes like ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ and everyone providing vocal and choreographic assists on other cuts.” This was the real magic of the evening. 

Toni Braxton put out two albums, and I liked a couple of her songs, notably Un-Break My Heart and Breathe Again, but a lot of the other ones seem pretty generic to my ears, and maybe that’s just me. I enjoyed Boyz II Men’s pieces best, but I knew them best, and New Edition shared the stage with their proteges quite a bit. 

All told, it was a satisfactory experience. The Boston Globe’s review concluded this way: “The show ended with a rafter-shaking take on ‘Poison,’ the acid-tongued debut single from Bell Biv DeVoe that’s become a new jack swing cornerstone since its release in 1990. The tune was punctuated by green and white confetti — a celebration of New Edition’s place in Boston, and the way they changed American pop music for the better.”

After the three-hour show, we got back to our hotel around midnight, having had a nice experience with the daughter.

Sunday Stealing Loves Surveys

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week’s astonishingly random questions were stolen from Love Me Some Surveys, who loves surveys.  

Survey Asks …

1. Did you/will you have coffee or some other form of caffeine today? 

I had hot tea with lemon when we went out for breakfast, which is fairly unusual. It was cold outside! 

Tell Me Something Good

2. Who did you last have a text conversation with, and what was it about? 

I almost never have text conversations; reading on my phone tends to make me cranky. BTW, do we REALLY need advice on how to send a sarcastic text?

Yet on February 25, I texted one of my oldest friends, who had been in the music biz for a long time, that it was the birthday of John Doe from the band X.   They had spoken favorably of him in the past. What I didn’t know is that John is a fellow Piscean, born the same year as we were. 

3. Are there regular trains in and out of your town/city? 

Technically, no, but functionally, yes. The Albany/Rensselaer station is across the Hudson River in Rensselaer County.

4. Have you ever been hospitalized due to dehydration?

No. But I avoid walking in deserts.

I Go To Sleep

5. Someone texts/IMs you just as you’re about to go to sleep. Do you reply? 

Not unless it is urgent. Then again, I’ve likely plugged in my phone downstairs before I go to bed upstairs, so I’d be unlikely to know about it until morning anyway.  My daughter knows that if she messages me and I don’t reply in an hour, I’m likely nowhere near my cellphone, the usual state of affairs if I’m at home. That’s why God created the landline.

6. Do you grind your teeth?  

Not to my knowledge.

7. When you listen to music with headphones, do you keep the volume low enough to hear surrounding noise, or do you blast it?

Definitely loud enough to drown out surrounding noise, though I wouldn’t say I BLAST it.

8. Are you wearing nail polish?

Not since Halloween 1978.

9. Do you have an ice maker in your refrigerator door?

Not in the door but in the freezer section, which I used this week.

10. Do you have a friend named James?

Definitely good acquaintances – a regular and occasional speaker at the FFAPL book reviews on Tuesdays, a guy I’ve known since grade school, a local author, a couple of guys at church,  a guy from Alaska who took me to lunch when he was visiting his daughter in my area, and probably others. My great-great-grandfather, James Archer, fought in the American Civil War. 

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.

Who was Hazel Scott?

HUAC

Who was Hazel Scott? The jazz pianist and singer was the first Black American to host her own television series, well before Nat King Cole. It aired on the DuMont network from July 3 to September 29, 1950, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, from 7:45 to 8 p.m.

From here: “Hazel Dorothy Scott was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, on June 11, 1920. She was the only child of R. Thomas Scott, a West African scholar from England, and Alma Long Scott, a classically trained pianist and saxophonist. Scott displayed her talents for music at an early age and, by the age of three, she could play the piano by ear.”

Someone at church told me this story: A teacher at Juilliard overheard an audition of someone improvising on a Rachmaninoff classic, Prelude in C-Sharp minor. “Appalled, he went to confront the blasphemer, but found an eight-year-old Black girl, whose hands were too small to hit all the right keys.” Hazel was deemed a prodigy and accepted immediately, though the usual age of admission was 16.

From WRTI: “Throughout the 1940s, Hazel Scott was a household name, traveling the world with her ‘Bach to Boogie’ repertoire under contracts that stipulated her outright refusal to perform before segregated audiences…  

“By the time Hollywood beckoned, her reputation as a consummate professional but no-nonsense businesswoman preceded her.. She agreed to  appear in five films in just two short years, but under very strict contractual conditions—she would never wear a maid’s uniform or play a subservient character of any kind (her own gowns and fine jewelry would suffice), and her billing would always be: ‘Hazel Scott as Herself.'”

ACP

“Scott returned to New York City from Hollywood, where she began an affair with Harlem preacher and politician Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who in 1944 became the first African American elected to Congress from New York. She and Powell married the following summer, amid great scandal (he divorced his previous wife just days earlier) and great fanfare…. Scott gave birth to their son, Adam Clayton Powell III, in 1946.”

The Red Scare stalled her television career. “When her name appeared in Red Channels and CounterAttack, the right-wing journals that tracked suspected communists in film, television, and radio, she insisted on going before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to defend her good name” in September 1950. But it backfired, and her show was canceled a week after her HUAC appearance.

“In the mid-1950s, Scott and Powell separated, formally divorcing in 1960.” By 1957, she would “seek solace in France. Along with her young son, Adam III, Hazel struck a new path, joining the Black expatriate community of artists and scholars living in Paris. There, she was able to heal her emotional wounds and reconcile the anger and frustration she felt about American injustice.”

When Hazel returned to the US a decade later, the music scene had changed. She passed away from pancreatic cancer on October 2, 1981, “just two months after her final performance.”

Watch Whatever Happened to Hazel Scott. An American Masters program, The Disappearance of Miss Scott, was released in February 2025; you can watch it with a PBS Passport, but there are clips worth viewing. See also her Wikipedia page.

Tunes

A Hazel Scott mix (mostly)

Autumn Leaves  – w/ Charles Mingus, Rudy Nichols

Dark Eyes (1942)

In a performance filmed for World War II soldiers, she begins with a section from Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2” and ends with a jazzy tune. 

February rambling: One of Us

Vote for Rebecca Jade in the San Diego Music Awards!

It Always Could Have Been One of Us— Crises are often invisible until they reach communities insulated from consequence
Fact Check of FOTUS’s SOTU
Prison-Style Free Speech Censorship Is Coming for the Rest of Us
Marine Detained in Minneapolis Says Feds Copied His Phone Without a Warrant
Twitter and ICE & DHS: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Measles Hits an ICE Facility: What Happens Next.— When infectious disease and incarceration collide, the outcome is predictable
The EPA Just Made Our Air Less Safe to Breathe— Repealing the Endangerment Finding will shape our clinical reality for years to come
In South Korea, ex-President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to life in prison after he was found guilty of carrying out an insurrection in his country when he declared martial law in 2024 to try to seize control from the opposing political party.
Kremlin officials used the February 23 Defender of the Fatherland Day holiday to set conditions to mitigate any domestic backlash that may result from limited rolling reserve involuntary callups in the future.
Chinese New Year 2026 and the Fire Horse
Obits and more
Jesse Jackson Witnessed Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination. Here’s How He Carried the Torch for the Civil Rights Movement Into the Future. ‘I am somebody.’ The Common Ground speech.
Robert Duvall, a Chameleon of an Actor Onscreen and Onstage, Dies at 95. I saw him in To Kill A Mockingbird, The Godfather, The Conversation, an episode of The Twilight Zone, and a bunch of other projects.
Eric Dane Dead at 53, 10 Months After Announcing ALS Diagnosis. In the final year of his life, the ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and ‘Euphoria’ actor was a leading advocate for ALS research.
What Happened Was… (in memoriam, Tom Noonan)
The Tariff Decision. Gorsuch takes aim at fellow Supreme Court justices in the tariff decision
The Clock May Be Ticking on ‘60 Minutes’ as We Know It
Honoring Lincoln: Character Matters
Stephen Colbert’s interview with one of the Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate seat in Texas, James Talarico. Talarico is a Matthew 25 Christian, which I espouse. 
The Soul in the Creases (photography)
Voice actor Brian Hull wandering around Disneyland, doing Disney voices for the characters he imitates.
Want to Reach Nirvana? Try a Colonoscopy.
“Civilization”
Under Destruction: Munich Security Report 2026
Heather Cox Richardson, February 15, 2026: “At the Munich Security Conference last year…Vice President J.D. Vance announced the U.S. was switching sides in global affairs. Henceforth, it would work to destroy the values of representative democracy and the global systems of trade and security that the U.S. and partners constructed after World War II.

 

“In their place, officials in the [regime]  and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying ‘western civilization.’ Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies…”

“In his speech to the conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was less confrontational than Vance was last year, but the message was the same. He attacked all three of the pillars on which the U.S. has previously stood in foreign affairs. Global trade has ruined the U.S. economy, he said, while international institutions have undermined sovereignty, and ‘a climate cult’ has imposed energy policies that are ‘impoverishing our people.’

Newsweek: “On the surface, the applause for… Rubio’s weekend speech at the Munich Security Conference suggested he had assuaged European concerns. In reality, the speech underlined the immense division between Europe and America. It may have deepened it.”

MUSIC

VOTE for this year’s San Diego Music Awards! Rebecca Jade (the first niece) is up for Best R&B, Funk, or Soul Song –  Not Me No Way, and for Artist of the Year. You may vote once per day.

Montgomery Variations by Margaret Bonds
I Love To Tell The Story – Emmylou Harris, Robert Duvall, from my favorite Duvall movie, The Apostle (1997)
Sarah McLachlan: Tiny Desk Concert – February 12, 2026
Here Comes The Sun – Richie Havens
New York, New York – Tim Waurick four-party harmony
Walking On Sunshine  – Katrina & The Waves
She’s Leaving Home – Peter Sprague
I’m Just A Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)  – The Moody Blues
Blackbird – Dionne Farris
Coverville 1569: The Ed Sheeran Cover Story and 1570: Cover Stories for Otis Blackwell and MGMT
Hey Jude – Wilson Pickett

Genre Delve #12: Funk vs. Soul

And I Love Him – Esther Phillips

Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay – Danny And The Juniors

Michelle – Luther Vandross

K-Chuck Radio: The Romantic Pop of Nino Tempo and April Stevens

Eleanor Rigby –  Wes Montgomery

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown – The Ed Sullivan Show for November 17, 1968

Kate Smith, Irving Berlin, and God Bless America

Lydster: fixing up the house

Washington County, 2:30 a.m.

landingMuch to our astonishment, our daughter decided to start fixing up the house. One notorious area involved the second-floor landing.  There was a whole bunch of miscellaneous crap, and iterations of it have been there for years.

My wife and I decided someday we ought to do something about it. Well,  our daughter decided that “someday” had arrived in January. But she wasn’t going to do it alone. While my wife was at a work training event on a Saturday, my daughter and I went through everything, item by item, and sorted, shredded, and tossed. 

Within about an hour, we got it down to one big container, which turned out to be her books and other childhood items. It was so heavy that even she couldn’t carry it up the stairs – and she is quite strong. So she got three boxes, separated the items, and we carried them up to the attic.

There’s a space that was designated for her stuff. Of course, we had to rearrange the attic well enough to GET to the space. The Christmas stuff had not been put away from Christmas 2024, so we had to tackle those items first.

The landing is not empty, though. It has a basket full of reusable bags I utilize for trash, a small bookcase for my oversized books, the vacuum cleaner, and a spot for Stormy to hang out. But it’s tidy. 

My office

I had started cleaning my office in September, and, actually, it was a whole lot better than it had been, but not up to her standards. We spent an extraordinary amount of time sorting things into various bins. I was exhausted by the end of it, but not only did it look a whole lot better, but I also found things that I had been missing.

Moreover, she decided to hang the pictures that had been sitting in our living room downstairs. There was a stack of framed items against the wall near the television.  It was really boring to see them because they’d been there seemingly forever.

A couple items we got for our wedding 26 years ago. Back in 2012, my wife said we should paint the living room walls, then put up some pictures. The painting happened, but the pictures never got put up then.

The daughter decided to rectify this, and not just in the living room, but also in the hallways, and notably in my office. One of them was a picture I bought: Chuck Miller’s 2020 photograph, Washington County, 2:30 a.m., still in its packaging. It’s up with my Lennon photo c. 1972, and a Beach Boys photo that I received when I retired in 2019. 

The painting, The Bookworm, I got from my late father-in-law’s belongings. I didn’t realize the joy of having stuff on my walls.

Ramblin' with Roger
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial