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The way we sang off-key

Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Charlie Mingus

Here’s more Mixed CD music. “The way we sang off-key” comes from one of the songs.

Hey Bartender– Floyd Dixon and I Don’t Know – Willie Mabon. I have these on an Atlantic Blues CD. I assume they made the cut because they both appear on that Blues Brothers album, Briefcase Full Of Blues, here and here, respectively. The label was implicitly saying that those songs came from somewhere.

Salt Peanuts – Gillespie/Parker/Powell. That would be Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and the rest of the Quintet, Max Roach, and Charlie Mingus. I almost certainly learned of the song from the Pointer Sisters’ version.

They Can’t Take That Away from Me – Sarah Vaughan. I LOVE the way she sings “off-key” intentionally off-key.

45 Men in a Telephone Booth – Four Top Hatters (1955). My father had a 45 of this song. When I saw this tune, and a few other songs, on a Cadence Records CD compilation, I HAD to buy it.

Walkin’ the Blues – Willie Dixon. The shot at the singer’s MIL sounds like something my father might have thought.

More than 98.6F

Fever – Little Willie John (#28 pop, #5 RB in 1956). I heard the Peggy Lee version (#8 in 1958)first.

Stranded in the Jungle – the Cadets (#15 in 1956). This is such a strange song.

Why Do Fools Fall In Love – Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (#6 in 1956). I always loved the bass vocal intro. It’s so iconic that Joni Mitchell covered the song on one of her live albums.

Blue Suede Shoes – Carl Perkins (1956). This was a massive hit for him, #2 for four weeks. But he was in a severe car crash at the time and was unable to exploit the momentum. Lots of folks only associate the song with Elvis Presley.

April in Paris – Count Basie (1956). I’m a fan of the Pop Goes the Weasel version that signals the two short encores. I know someone who is irritated by it; so it goes.

Old maps, old directories

Tanganyika and Zanzibar

When I was growing up, my grandfather, McKinley Green, gave me the maps included in his subscription to National Geographic magazine.

I still have many of those old maps he provided from about 1958 to 1971 when I went to college. For a time, I thought to throw them out. But there’s a fascinating thing about these documents. They become historical relics.

Remember Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, which are now multiple countries? East and West Germany, now one nation? British Guyana and British Honduras, now Guyana and Belize, respectively?

The most interesting, however, were the maps of Africa. Generally, all of the territories controlled by France were green, while the British colonies were pink. (I could be conflating these with other maps of the time.)

I remember when Tanganyika and Zanzibar each became independent of Great Britain before merging into Tanzania in 1964. (And I remembered the year – why IS that?) Northern and Southern Rhodesia became Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively. The Belgian Congo eventually changed to Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The maps tell a history. An 18-year-old car is ancient, but one that is 25 years old is antique. Old maps are vintage.

Another choir funeral

I was thinking about this after our most recent choir funeral for one of our basses, Michael. Some of us were trying to recall people who had been in the choir but had moved on, moved away, or passed away. I had some old choir and church directories. They’re not very useful in contacting current members as emails change and cell phones replace landlines. But as historical documents, they’re pretty interesting.

Michael and Jerry were in the choir in the 1980s, left for a time when Jerry was in grad school, then came back at some point after I joined in 2000, and indeed after 2004, per that directory. One cannot rely on one’s memory.

Photos are helpful, too, but they are intrinsically artistic/exciting/attractive/collectible, whereas directories are not.

Or is this just a rationalization for never throwing anything out because I might need the information some day?

You want to present a book review

or an author talk

I may have been too subtle, Capital District people. You want to present a book review at the Albany Public Library branch located at 161 Washington Avenue. You know you do. They take place every Tuesday at 2 pm when the library is open.

Unless you are a local author, in which case you want to give an author talk. You can even sell copies of your book. Feel free to use your social media to plug your talk.

The auditorium has a microphone and can show visuals on the screen. We’ll even reserve a parking space for the speaker behind the building. Please note the parking is BEHIND the Washington Ave branch, and Elk St is a one-way street heading west (towards Schenectady, away from the river), so you should turn on Dove Street near the Albany Institute, head north for one block, then turn left.

We intend to create an eclectic array of books. The organizers are always working well ahead of the date. We need to nail down the book title, author, speaker, and a brief speaker bio to get it onto the Albany Public Library calendar. Our July and August talks deadline is the last week in April.

In recent months, three of us have been securing speakers. Because of health issues, there are currently two of us. And our MIA comrade has a deep address book of contacts.

We’re also looking for people to put out snacks, make coffee, then clean up afterward. So, if this interests you, please let me know.

Upcoming

May 7 | Book Review | The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America by Jeffrey Rosen. Reviewer: Bill Shapiro, retired attorney & lifelong student of international relations.

May 14 | Book Review | Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War by Scott Christianson. Reviewer: Mara Drogan, Director of Community Engagement & Education, WMHT Public Media.

May 21 | Book Review | Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston. Reviewer: Donald “The Soul Man” Hyman, teacher, actor, singer, writer, TV host/producer, & veteran.

May 28 | Author Talk | Susan Oringel discusses & reads from her book, Carnevale, a journey in poems through the lives & deaths of her parents (from Coney Island in the 1930s & 40s) & of her partner Don Howard — they all died between 2002 & 2007 — a journey also of trudging steps through grief back toward the living.

June 4 | Author Talk | Emily Sherman Marynczak, a childbirth educator & coach with a background in modern dance, discusses & reads from her book, Emily’s Birth Book: Your Guide to a Conscientious Birth.

June 11 | Book Review | A Tale for the Time Being, a metafictional novel by Ruth Ozeki. Reviewer: Alexis Bhagat, former executive director, FFAPL.

June 18 | Book Review | Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic by Emily Monosson. Reviewer: P. Bryon Backenson, MS, director, NYS Department of Health, Bureau of Communicable Disease Control.

June 25 | Book Review | Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are by Rebecca Boyle. Reviewer: Sherrie Lyons, PhD, science historian & author of both From Cells to Organisms: Re-envisioning Cell Theory (2020) & Species, Serpents, Spirits, & Skulls: Science at the Margin in the Victorian Age (2011).

My wife could have been a doctor

WellNow

My wife, who has been a teacher and worked in the insurance industry, could have been a doctor. When I got an occasional cut or bruise, she would examine it thoroughly and attend to it with a degree of curiosity that was clinical.

She was so good at this that when my daughter’s college friend suffered an injury, the friend attempted to apply the bandage themselves, but it did not adhere. From watching her mother, my daughter knew how to wash the wound, dry it, apply the ointment on the bandage, and then the bandage to the wound, which stayed in place.

On April 11, my wife tried to squeeze in breakfast with her college friend at a diner before heading to work. Somehow, she gashed her right hand on a picture frame. There was a fair amount of blood for a deep but not too long cut. Yes, she’s had a tetanus shot relatively recently.

She called me to the bathroom. I got the antibacterial soap, she washed the wound, and I dried it. She applied two pads she had left over from her leg injury a year and a half ago. I taped the gauze tightly in two directions.

Will urgent care see her urgently?

She asked me to check the WellNow urgent care website to see if appointments were available at the Western Avenue center outside Albany. The first time listed as available was at 1:20 p.m., about four hours out, but we went anyway.

The protocol was that patients were supposed to scan the QR code inside the entryway. The screen suggested a four-hour wait, but it was less than an hour., a fact I explained to a few other patients when the receptionists were away from the desk. Of course, once my wife was called to see the physician assistant, it was another half-hour.

Still, the verdict is that my wife did not need stitches. The treatment that she had primarily administered herself had done the trick.

I don’t expect my wife to decide to prepare for medical school suddenly, but she could, and she probably would be good at it.

The Juice

get it out of my head

It was oddly unsettling. When I was traveling across New York State, anticipating the April 8 eclipse with my best friend from college, the subject of O J Simpson, The Juice, came up.

I could not remember why, but MAK noted that he had seen a boxy white vehicle that perhaps reminded him of a Ford Bronco involved in the slow-speed highway chase after Simpson was supposed to surrender to police.

So he asked if Simpson was out of jail. I was fairly sure that he was, which proved to be accurate. He was “released from prison in 2017 after serving about nine years of a 33-year sentence for a kidnapping and armed robbery in Las Vegas.”

As I noted, in 2016, I watched O.J.: Made in America, “a sprawling five-part documentary on the cable sports network ESPN,” which I still recommend. It’s still on ESPN and available on other platforms as well.

After I watched the series, I wrote: ” I concluded that 1) O.J. likely did the murders but that 2) the prosecution did not make its case due to the tremendous efforts of the defense team and some of the rulings of Judge Lance Ito.” The most angry I ever saw a mild-manned work colleague was when the not guilty verdict, watched by an estimated 95 million people, was announced.

So it was weird that a person whom I hadn’t even thought about in over six years until that trip died four days later of prostate cancer, the same disease that killed my father and which basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is currently fighting.

Who are we?

On the trip, I said that the murder trial told a lot about America in terms of race, celebrity, media, and the justice system. Interestingly, Med Page Today touched on some of those in its story: “The public was mesmerized by his ‘trial of the century’ on live TV. His case sparked debates on race, gender, domestic abuse, celebrity justice, and police misconduct.”

Of course, there were countless comments after Simpson’s death. Caitlyn Jenner, “who married Kris Jenner shortly after the Kardashian matriarch’s divorce from Robert Kardashian, who was Simpson’s defense attorney during the murder trial, was among the first to react on social media. ‘Good Riddance #OJSimpson,’ she tweeted.”

I was more interested in the response by Ron Goldman’s family. They called Simpson’s death “a mixed bag of complicated emotions” tied to the civil case Nicole Brown Simpson and Goldman’s families filed in part to direct the proceeds of Simpson’s sort of confessional, If I Did It. They did not receive all they were due in the judgment. And the executor of Simpson’s willl says he’ll ‘do everything’ to ensure Goldman family gets ‘zero’ from the estate.

I’ve now purged the topic from my head. Probably.