Category: birthday

Irwin Corey is 95


“If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going.” – Professor Irwin Corey
Irwin Corey – I’m related to him! (Well not really, but sorta. Pay attention: the quiz is brutal.)

My maternal grandmother (Gertrude Yates Williams) had a brother, Ernest Yates.
Ernie married Charlotte Berman.
Charlotte’s sister was Frances Berman.
Frances was married to Irwin.
So Irwin is my great aunt’s brother-in-law.

I need to explain that Aunt Charlotte was one of my closest relatives, not biologically but in terms of the effect she had on my life. My mom, who was an only child, really didn’t know the relatives on her father’s side until after her mother died in the 1980s.

Gertrude had three surviving siblings (one died as a child). Deana had no children, Ed had children much later in life. So it was Ernie’s four kids, Raymond, Fran, Donald and Robert, who were my mother’s first cousins, her closest relatives. And until the mid 1950s, when Ernest died, they all lived near Binghamton. So Aunt Charlotte was a pivotal character in my mother’s life, and the lives of my sisters and me, as we (with my father) would go down to their large house in Queens at least a couple times a year. Since my father was ALSO an only child, my sisters and I have no first cousins, and it was Charlotte’s grandchildren who were the closest thing to contemporary cousins, even though they were 2nd cousins once removed (I think).

For reasons that I can no longer remember, I was at Irwin Corey’s house on the Island (that’s Long Island to you) when I was a kid. Irwin and Fran weren’t there. While we thought Charlotte’s house in St. Albans was large, I recall that Irwin’s house was huge, at least to my mind.

We always made a point of watching Professor Irwin Corey, The World’s Foremost Authority, when he appeared on various TV variety shows. I wasn’t sure that it was a shtick; Irwin really DID seem to know an great deal, and would explain things in convoluted ways. I’d run into Irwin at various family functions of the Berman tribe, such as weddings and funerals.

The last two times I saw Irwin was at Charlotte’s 80th and 88th birthday parties, in 1994 and 2002, respectively. He could be funny, but also coarse, vulgar and a bit obtuse. He gave a toast at the 80th birthday party and rambled on about Richard Nixon (not favorably), among other things, and no one could really stop him. When we met for Charlotte’s 88th birthday – Charlotte died few years ago, before reaching her 89th – Irwin started pontificating again, but this time, a couple of the relatives cut him off with a “Thank you, Irwin”; he must have lost a step.

Irwin and Charlotte both were part of that 1930s Socialist tradition and never truly strayed from it.

Here’s some Irwin monologue and a 2008 New York times article. This is a great picture; note especially the hat. Have a listen to Irwin.
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The Wife’s Birthday

My wife has had a very busy year, and that busyness was contagious.

Last year, she had just returned from a grueling two-week-plus stint at a college working on her advanced certification in teaching administration. Before she even arrived, she had books to read and papers to write. The first week in particular included 12-and 13-hour days in classrooms and workshops; the subsequent time was was shorter only because the students needed more time to research and write MORE papers.

When she got back, four weeks of relative calm before she had her excruciating jaw (breaking) surgery, and had her jaw wired shut for the first four weeks of the semester, hardly optimal for a teacher, ESPECIALLY a teacher of English as a Second Language. Just making food was often a literal strain.

This meant she got started late on the 600 hours of internship she had to complete, sometimes trying to discern her assignments. Among other things, weeknights meant meetings and weekends were usually dedicated to to various projects. Then a less than perfect end-of-fall-semester evaluation spurred her on to a stellar evaluation at the conclusion of the spring semester, but through even MORE effort on her part (and greater cooperation, watching the child, e.g., on mine). But she did achieve her goal. She is FAR more disciplined in that way than I am.

In fact, her current schedule, reading books and writing papers for THIS summer’s classes, still forthcoming, has made it virtually impossible for me to even buy her birthday present, though I know what she wants, and I’ve had to enlist the assistance of a purchasing ally to pull it off. (I won’t mention it here, on the off-off-OFF chance she happens to read this.)

This summer will also mean I’ll be doing the single parent thing for a couple weeks. I left her with her grandparents for a week last year but she got all clingy and melancholy – crying on the phone almost every night. The daughter missing one parent is tough, but two was too hard (for me too) for more than a few days, especially not on her own turf. But we’ll metaphorically will leave the light on.

Anyway, happy birthday, Carol! Hope you have SOME fun on your day in the midst of all the school work and helping to feed the folks working on our church this week.
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MOVIE REVIEW: Up

On Sunday, July 5, I realized that I hadn’t seen a movie since late April, So I looked at the listings for the Spectrum, my favorite theater and discovered that Up, the new Pixar flick, was in its final week. Reluctantly, the wife and I agreed to the split movie date, which involves one of us going, then later that day or soon thereafter, the other one attending. The first cannot reveal anything other than a generic thumbs up or thumbs down. The flaw with this, besides the inability to share the moments in real time, is that on at least three different occasion, the first person went, but then the second couldn’t for some reason; I know I got sick once and never saw a film Carol saw and liked.

Anyway, I opted for the noon showing of the movie, in 2-D. First up, the previews. I really would like to see the new Hayao Miyazaki film, Ponyo; great voice lineup in the English translation, including Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin, and Betty White. And surprisingly, I think I’d like to see the new Harry Potter film; I suppose, having seen only the first one, I should catch the subsequent ones beforehand.

The short is Partly Cloud. It was pretty much a one-joke bit, with lots of old Warner Brothers cartoon violence. I enjoyed it less than some of their previous efforts, though at least I learned about procreation.

Then the main event. I must say that I got caught up (i.e., became a little verklempt) in the whole backstory of Carl and Ellie; as others have noted, she looks quite a bit like Elastigirl from The Incredibles. Indeed, there was also a documentary style that also borrowed from that earlier Pixar film.

Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) finds a reason and the means to uproot himself, and his home along with it. But he is not alone. Will Carl get to South America, as he promised Ellie they would?

The rest I don’t know how to describe without spoiling it except there is a character who looks a lot like Kirk Douglas but is voiced by Christopher Plummer who has a major role. Also dogs; lots and lots of canines, not all of the friendly kind.

I previewed this in part to see if this would be the first movie Lydia, the five-year-old daughter, will see in the movies; it will not. If we see it on video later, the pause and fast-forward buttons will be used at least a couple times. Now other kids may react differently, but I know my child.

This was a good Pixar film. It had more depth in the characters than I would have imagined. And the house is definitely one of the characters. Yet part of the problem, I realized, had to do with little things – continuity problems regarding some important plot details – that distracted me. But it was most definitely worth seeing, and I’d give it an A- or B+.

Did I mention that I was the ONLY person in the theater? One might think I would have appreciated the private screening, but I like to hear where others laugh and gasp and cry; but for the size of the screen, I might as well have been home.
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Little girl’s last wish: to see ‘Up’. Tip o’ hat to Jaquandor.
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I check Rotten Tomatoes now and then, because I love seeing, for instance. The Hangover (78%) rate better than the more prestigious Public Enemies (65%). Up, BTW, got a 97%
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Today, Ringo Starr turns 69. Please don’t send him anything to sign; he’s too busy.

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Ray Davies Is 65 – tomorrow

I think I may have heard the Kinks’ All Day and All of the Night as an in-store play in a Binghamton, NY department store called Philadelphia Sales. It seemed to be the loudest, most unrelenting piece of music I ever heard; I loved it.

The Kinks seemed to go in and out of fashion. There was the early success, then a second wave in the early 1970s (Victoria, Lola, Apeman) to some spotty success in the late 1970s (Superman) and somewhat greater acclaim in the early 1980s (Come Dancing, Don’t Forget to Dance).

I’ve been listening to a lot of Kinks music this month. One is the The Ultimate Collection, a 2002 greatest hits compilation. It’s a great grouping of songs, though it does not include the minor hit Destroyer [YouTube video], which cops the main riff from All Day and All of the Night, and the storyline is a continuation of the Lola saga. Fortunately, that song and Give The People What They want both show up on a live Kinks album I own.

Nor does the collection contain anything from my favorite Kinks album, the 1971 release Muswell Hillbillies. It was their debut album on RCA Records after their previous contract had expired. “The album is named after the Muswell Hill area of London, where band leader Ray Davies and guitarist Dave Davies grew up and where the band formed in the early 1960s.” The album bombed horribly, especially in contrast to the hits, but I enjoyed it greatly. It has elements of Dixieland jazz, dance hall tunes, and country. While Alcohol is probably my favorite song, I recall going around at the time saying, in the manner of Complicated Life, “Why is life soooo COM-plicated?”

I’m pleased to note that Ray Davies’ Other People’s Lives was one of my favorite albums in 2006. I noted at the time: “Given its long gestation period, an amazingly coherent album.”

So Ray Davies has had a positive musical effect on me for over four decades. Happy early birthday, Ray.

Old friend of mine with Ray late in 2005 or early in 2006.
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Barry Manilow Turns 65 66

And I thought I’d acknowledge that; now I have.

Actually, there is one song Manilow wrote and performed that I rather like. Call it a guilty pleasure. And no, it’s not “I Write The Songs”, which was actually written by sometime Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, the guy who wrote ‘Disney Girls (1957)’. Bruce, BTW, turns 65 on June 27.

The Manilow song I like is Could It Be Magic. I love how the intro morphs into the main theme and then morphs back into the outro piano bit. Here is how Barry himself describes it: “I thought I had come up with the coolest batch of chords in my composing experience. And then I realized that before I had that glass of wine, I had been playing my Chopin preludes. And I wrote the song around Chopin’s ‘Prelude in C Minor.'”

This has brought me a whole lot of sympathy for at least some of the musicians who have cribbed parts of other songs. I always believed George Harrison when he copped ‘He’s So Fine’ for ‘My Sweet Lord’. Paul McCartney was so worried that he had inadvertently stolen the tune for ‘Yesterday’ that he ran around asking people if they’d heard the song before. The difference between Harrison and Manilow is that Manilow’s subconscious had the wisdom to swipe from a dead guy whose work is in the public domain, while Harrison pilfered from a more recent composition.

Manilow
Chopin
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