May 2020 - Page 3 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

My favorite day in quarantine

lead the two of clubs

hearts game may 7 2020 Thursday, May 7 has been my favorite day in quarantine. Seriously.

6:30 a.m. Awake.

7:00 a.m. Meeting of the Thursday Bible guys on Skype. I had been going to the Tuesday BGs, and still am. But the Thursday guys use the lectionary, so it’s different from reading the Bible as published. And I had a muffin that one of the guys named Bob had dropped off at my house the day before.

8:15 a.m. Breakfast.

9:00 a.m. I make my two daily phone calls. One’s to a guy at choir and is fairly brief. But I end up speaking for more than an hour to a woman from my church I’ve known longer than almost anyone there. We shared stories of technology challenges, among other topics.

11:00 a.m. I had arranged a Zoom meeting with one of my choir buddies, but it was unsuccessful on her side.

11:30 a.m. Empty the dishwasher and tend to miscellaneous tasks.

12:30 p.m. Eat lunch with my wife.

1 p.m. Finally work on a blog post that, annoyingly, was no writing itself.

3 p.m. HEARTS! Back in the late 1980s, a coterie of us would go over to Broome’s house and play cards. There would be a game three or four nights a week with a rotating cast of players. Sometimes Broome wasn’t even there.

When he moved to the country, the games ceased. For my 60th birthday, I decided to have a card game at my house, and that became a nearly annual tradition. But as coronavirus began its spread, there were only a handful at the game the weekend before everything got shut down in New York State.

Card party

I had started playing a free online game at PlayOK with random strangers. Sometimes, there was no one to play with at all. Why not invite my old hearts buddies? So I did. Then someone suggested we should set up a Zoom meeting simultaneously so that we could actually see each other. I made it so.

As one of us noted, “I think we enjoyed it so much because in so many ways it felt NORMAL! A hearts game with the old crew.” There were some technical glitches – if you wait too long the game ends – but it was an inspired event.

4 p.m. Watch some TV with my wife, notably a segment CBS This Morning Saturday about Kent State. My bride was too young to remember it clearly.

5 p.m. Mow the lawn for the first time. It’s a nice day. I have to do this when the sun is low in the sky so that I don’t burn too easily – the vitiligo, y’know. And before the forecasted rain/snow. It DOES snow in March. Wait, it’s May! I did the back lawn but the smoking man who lives next door was standing and puffing at his usual post, so I passed on doing the front.

6 p.m. Take a shower.

6:30 p.m. Eat a lovely dinner of zoodles, plant-based sausage, and tomato sauce.

7:15 p.m. Google Hangout with my wife and her family – her mother, her two brothers and their wives, and two of the nieces.

8:30 p.m. Watch the evening news, much to the chagrin of my daughter, who had settled into watching one of her programs.

Then the evening routine, and bed. A splendid day in quarantine.

Comic actors Jerry Stiller, Fred Willard

mockumentaries

Jerry Stiller.Thom Wade — Art by Thom Wade c 2020. Used by permission.

When I read that Jerry Stiller, died at 92 recently, I didn’t first think of the 1990s. I went right away to Stiller and Meara. They were on The Ed Sullivan Show over 30 times between 1963 and 1971. I probably saw most of them.

Their schtick was that Jerry Stiller’s character was Jewish and the late Anne Meara’s character was Irish Catholic. You can see them from June 14th, 1964. Except that their characters mirrored their real-life status, though Anne converted to Judaism. In fact, they broke up the act in the early 1970s because they couldn’t always tell where their act ended and their lives began.

Yet their example was a very light-hearted way to talk about breaking down ethnic barriers. In a Theater Talk interview around 2010, Part 1 and Part 2, Jerry mentioned their biggest controversy in those days. They did a joke their son marrying one of the Supremes, a bit that didn’t go over well in certain parts of the country. Jerry told Sullivan that the couple was taking a bit of flak over the joke. Sullivan said not to worry about it, that he’d take care of it.

A couple more bits: The Carol Burnett Show and an ad for the National Safety Council.

Of course, a younger generation knew him better as George Costanza’s dad Frank in 26 episodes of Seinfeld. The character famously created A FESTIVUS for the rest of US!. I never watched The King of Queens, but here is The Best of Arthur Spooner. Stiller’s character eventually was matched up with a character played by Anne Meara.

Jerry Stiller had over 100 other credits, in comedy, dramas, game shows, and talk shows. He was 92 when he died, the father of an up-and-coming actor named Ben Stiller.

He was the Best in Show

Art by Thom Wade c 2020. Used by permission.
Fred Willard has over 300 credits in the IMBD, from guest appearances going back to 1966, to his breakthrough as Jerry Hubbard on over 100 episodes of Fernwood Tonight/America 2-Night. He’s had recurring roles on Roseanne, Mad About You, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Modern Family, as Phil Dunphy’s dad, Frank.

I best know him from that series of Christopher Guest mockumentaries, Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003). Here’s a clip from the latter.

The New York Times called him, “The king of the deadpan cameo, the guy who makes a one-shot appearance as an office manager or furniture salesman and ends up stealing the scene.” Hollywood Reporter called him the Master of Comic Cluelessness. Watch The New WKRP in Cincinnati: Nancy’s Old Man episode.

Here’s the Fred Willard Collection on Letterman, 1982-2007. I saw this bit years ago, and I’m still going to post it: The Worst Video Will. His proudest achievement and biggest regret. He was 86.

With chewing gum and duct tape

bad address

chewing gum and duct tape One of the challenges of my wife working/teaching from home is that technology can be a PITA. This all happened on 5 May.

She had an appropriate story to share with one of her students from some website. So she set up a meeting with ME to make sure the technology worked. It did not. I could hear her, but not the item she wanted to share. The next day, the same problem; the YouTube video she selected her students could SEE but not HEAR.

Later that day, she found a bunch of links with worksheets she wanted me to print. But almost every link wanted her password; too onerous. I tried to print from her computer on the old printer I lugged into her office. The computer said it was compatible with the printer. Yet no paper products were expelled.

In the end, I copied the files from her computer to her thumb drive. Then I copied them from her thumb drive to an email “she” wrote to “me.” Then I printed the documents. My friend O. says that this chewing gum and duct tape method of doing things is how things work in her house.

Later, my wife talked to a tech support guy at work. He said that getting a YouTube video to show on these platforms is tricky because they weren’t designed for that secondary viewing.

I’ll pick that up

Because she’s doing her teaching at home, we’re getting a lot more phone calls. Most of them are from her classes or the parents of her younger students. When I first answered, the kids were stunned into silence, and would just hang up. But now that I recognize some of their phone numbers and they recognize my voice, it’s much easier.

At the beginning of March, if the landline rang, and I did not know who it was, I’d let it go to the answering machine. But it’s often school employees who have those unidentified numbers, and I’ve ended just picking up the phone. Rarely is it a spammy call, fortunately.

Marcia, the youngest, maybe the bravest

no nonsense

Roger Leslie Marcia.5 Gaines There was a point when this became my favorite picture of my “baby sister” Marcia. She’s the one in the foreground, in front of my sister Leslie and me, in our driveway at 5 Gaines Street in Binghamton back in the mid-1960s.

My appreciation for the photo certainly developed after March 12, 1995. That was the day of my parents’ 45th anniversary. There was a family blowup. I remember the details amazingly well.

The part relevant to this piece involved a discussion the three of us had in the parking lot of a Montgomery Wards. Leslie and I were telling Marcia how awesome she was.

Specifically, our maternal grandmother, Gert Williams, would fill our heads with stories of boogeymen and other creatures designed to quiet and tame us. Roger bought into it. So did Leslie. Marcia never bought into grandma Williams’ nonsense.

She would also stand up to our father in a manner Leslie and I would never have DARED to have done. One of us said back in ’95, “we thought he was going to KILL you!” I think we were speaking figuratively.

So I suspect that the photo bugged me a bit when I was a kid as lacking order and symmetry. Now I appreciate it as an act of individualism.

Home

As the youngest, Marcia was the only one of us to permanently move to Charlotte, NC in 1974 with our parents, though both Leslie and I stayed there for brief periods. Ultimately, That has meant that she is the one who is the keeper of the family photos. I own virtually no photos from my childhood, save for a few duplicates I’ve managed to find on visits to North Carolina.

The photo here I found on her Facebook page, which is a treasure trove. Some of my cousins who are working on genealogy totally agree. Unfortunately, my grandmother never bothered to label the older ones.

I should continue to note that Marcia I the person most likely to send a card, not just birthdays and anniversaries, but for Easter and Thanksgiving. I didn’t send her a birthday card this year, or probably last year; this post will have to do.

Vote for Albany (NY) library, school board candidates by mail

ACSD Board of Education adopted a $261.6 million budget proposal.

vote Albany voters will have a safe way to vote for Albany Public Library trustees, the Albany City School District board, and the ACSD budget. It is being conducted entirely by absentee ballot.

Ballots will be mailed on May 26 to qualified voters and are due by June 9 at 5 p.m. This is NOT a postmark deadline. At that time, the district will begin the process of counting the votes to determine the results.

Since the APL trustees did not request an increase in the library budget for 2020-2021, no vote is required. There are eight candidates on the ballot for two open APL trustee seats in the election. There are two seats, both carrying full five-year terms, open.

The candidates were placed on the ballot in alphabetical order:

(1) Jessica Balarin of Partridge St.

(2) Kewsi Burgess of Catherine St.

(3) Donna Dixon of Fleetwood Ave.

(4) Jeffrey Keller of Walter St.

(5) Thomas McCarthy Jr. of Stueben St.

(6) Katharine McNamara of Cardinal Ave.

(7) James Munro of Glendale Ave.

(8) Brigette Pryor of Myrtle Ave.

The library will publish candidate biographical information on its website by May 26. APL will be hosting a virtual meet-the-candidate forum on Tuesday, May 26 at 6 pm. It will be live-streamed on YouTube and recorded for later viewing.

School budget

Per the ACSD website: “The ballot also will include Proposition #2, a proposal to purchase a piece of property adjacent to Delaware Community School for $13,300 using funds from the capital reserve. The property would be used for additional recreational space for students. Proposition #2 would have no impact on taxes.

“In addition to the school budget and proposition votes, three candidates are running for one open board seat: Victor Cain, Hassan Elminyawi, and Edith Leet. The board appointed Elminyawi last summer to serve the remainder of a vacant position; that term expires June 30.

See if you’re registered to vote for the library and school board candidates, and the school budget HERE. If you do not receive a ballot by the end of May, contact the school board clerk – Tanya Bowie (518 475-6015, tbowie@albany.k12.ny.us) – who will verify your registration status.

Note: The Presidential, State and Local Primaries will take place on June 23, 2020. Contact the Albany County Board of Elections for more details.