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I went to the 12:55 pm showing of the documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, NY on the day it opened in town. There were a total of five people there, and I suspect they’re all over sixty. (In fact, I know the pair of women in line were because they ALSO took the senior discount.)

I can tell you that we were all blown away. Sad that she no longer sing (mostly) because of her Parkinson’s disease. Her last concert was in 2009. If you’ve seen the movie up to that point, you suspect that someone who was less than the perfectionist she was/is could have milked her career for another two or three years.

Naturally, because I’m like that, I then went to the early Rotten Tomatoes reviews. 85% positive from the critics, 100% positive from the fans. I’ve decided to address the negative reviews.

“She suddenly seizes control of her life’s narrative, careening herself towards a series of bizarre, baffling creative decisions that inexplicably kept succeeding.” As the film makes clear, she was tired of being on the road in arenas.

The decisions to do Pirates of Penzance was a function of the music she grew up with. Joseph Papp would have given her the gig, but she wanted to be sure she was right for the part.

Ditto her three American songbook albums. She heard those tunes in her youth and wanted to sing them, getting someone like Nelson Riddle to arrange it, only to discover the man himself was available.

Her foray into Mexican music came from growing up singing in Spanish the tunes from her father’s heritage, Germans who moved to Mexico in the 19th century.

Hagiography?

“It isn’t long into the film when the hagiographic soundbites from famous interviewees become the dominant mode.” Also, “Ronstadt speaks of herself honestly and modestly, but the talking-heads tributes in this doc are trite.”

I have seen documentaries when one could say, “Why are THEY here?” as they ramble about the subject. But we’re talking Don Henley, who was a drummer for her in an early band before he met Glenn Frey and started the Eagles. Jackson Browne was part of that scene, touring with Linda.

Emmylou Harris was befriended by Linda after Gram Parsons’ death, as explained in the film. Dolly Parton, who in the extended trailer calls Linda a PITA. The alchemy of their three voices in the Trio sessions awed them all.

I got sufficient insight into Linda from herself and the others. There were details I had totally forgotten. The original version of Different Drum by the Stone Poneys – Linda Kenny Edwards, Bobby Kimmel- was not successful. But the re-recording made it to #13 on the pop charts in 1968.

If I had any complaints is that The Sound of My Voice gave short shrift to her latter output, at least a half dozen albums, including one with Harris and another with Ann Savoy.

If you love Linda’s music, see this film. If you’re not familiar with the range of her work, see this film. Here’s the Still within the Sound of My Voice, the opening tune from the 1989 album Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind.

A tree falls in Albany

Estimated Time of Restoration – Assessing

As I’ve noted, my family had this great week in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts in mid-August, most of which I’ve noted. My daughter went to a Six Flags amusement park with her three cousins and an uncle when my wife and I saw a play.

We get home around 2 p.m. on a Friday and start putting things away, including a lot of leftover perishable food squeezed into the refrigerator.

There was a thunderstorm warning for Albany County from 4:45 to 5:45 pm, and some rain did fall, but it didn’t seem so bad. So my wife drove out to the bank. A few moments later, a deluge worthy of Louis XIV fell.

It was raining the extreme rain when the umbrella and slicker are useless. Then it rained even harder so that a couple young women walking by started screaming. I ran out to see if they were being assaulted, and they were, by the skies.

The house lights flickered three or four times, then stayed on for about 10 seconds, before going out altogether. This was roughly at 6 p.m.

Interestingly, there was a notice on my phone from our power company, National Grid. “6:15 pm We detected power outages near [address]. There are currently 229 other customers also associated with this outage. We are investigating and will provide updates around progress when we get more information.” That was 229 in OUR section of the grid; there were plenty of other outages, I later learned.

“Outage Status – New Outage; Estimated Time of Restoration – Assessing.” Now I didn’t actually SEE this information until the next day, because my phone, which had died, which it does regularly. Even my daughter, who is much more diligent about these things, had no phone eventually.

My wife finally got home – she waited out the storm, wisely, and reported a tree down on Lancaster Street, a couple blocks away, and insisted that I see it. It was impressive. A large branch on a tree between two houses, almost certainly struck by lightning, toppled across the street, taking a power line with it, but barely missing someone’s car.

We got out the flashlights and the candles. My wife got pizza from the place a couple blocks away, which had power. But it was so quiet in the house I walked to the local CVS and bought batteries so we could at least listen to the radio.

I carried a flashlight because my block was dark except for the school, which must have an emergency generator. Suddenly, I started craving the same until my wife told me the process would cost us thousands, which somewhat dampened my enthusiasm.

We played UNO by candlelight. I think not having electricity actually got my daughter to go to sleep earlier than usual. But I couldn’t sleep because it was Too Darn Hot.

In the morning, I went onto the front porch to read the newspaper. Then at 9:03 a.m., I heard our air conditioner kick on. Others in the neighborhood got power overnight. National Grid said the neighborhood power was back at 12:41 p.m.

Subsequent to that, we had a couple more periods of large amounts of rain falling in a very short period of time, with the attendant flash flooding. My wife told my daughter to put away the candles, but the teen was understandably resistant.

What an interesting homecoming. Note: I said “A tree fell in Albany,” but there were quite a few, I believe.

Our State Fair is a great state fair

don’t miss it, don’t even be late

As a child, my family had attended the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse a few times. But it has been a LONG time since then.

I didn’t remember how enormous the state fair, founded in 1841, was. The Fairgrounds is a 375-acre exhibit and entertainment complex that offers entertainment year-round. The first day we attended, Saturday, August 31, the event broke its the highest single-day attendance record with 147,749 attendees.

Apparently, the state had made significant improvements in the past four years. Fortunately, they have trams traveling around the perimeter of the area.

Although the gates open earlier – and getting there early is a good idea – most of the buildings don’t officially open until after the Star-Spangled Banner is sung at 9:55 a.m.

We found ourselves in Indian Village, where there was an authentic longhouse. We were treated to dances by members of the Six Nations. According to the MC, the land is technically a reservation of the Iroquois people. This was as a result of a promise Franklin D. Roosevelt made to the tribes in 1928 that it would be so if he ever became President.

This explains an oddity I noticed. Everywhere else on the fairgrounds, bottled water was $2, though the price of soda varied wildly. This was a result, one vendor outside of the village, told me was set by the state of New York, for some reason. But the water in Indian Village, at least on that day, was only $1 because it was not under the state’s jurisdiction.

WEGMAN’S HOME AND ART CENTER

We spent a good deal of time in the home and art center. It had a number of vendors. My wife was taken by the kitchen appliances and bought a few.

I made a purchase from an unlikely locale, the model train room. There were maybe a dozen and a half LPs, mostly from the 1960s. Actually, I owned many of them or had most of the songs on CDs. But I was compelled to buy for $1 Vaughn Meader’s “The First Family”, a comedy parody of the Kennedys. It was an enormously successful 1962 album that was #1 on the charts for twelve weeks. The assassination of JFK in 1963 made it suddenly unfunny.

There was a room where a woman was playing an organ recital. Among other songs, she played Lover. I KNOW that song, but how? It’s not Deanna Durbin version and CERTAINLY not the frantic Peggy Lee take. Of COURSE: I recognized it from The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart, the ONLY album of mine by the trio that somehow survived the Great LP Theft of 1972.

I came across the arts and crafts section and found the three pieces by Chuck Miller, a local blogger I know. We meander around the building and find four of his photos. How many did he have accepted? I asked a woman in the section. She said, “Ah, Mr. Miller!” (What did she mean by that?) He did only have the four out of six submitted.

There were other interesting pieces of art. Naturally, one guy did a couple of famous paintings such as American Gothic with dogs.

THE ONE ANNOYANCE

My daughter bought a backpack in the Pan-African Village. We consumed maple ice cream. Though we wandered through the midway, we opted against taking any rides.

I had purchased $10 tickets only a couple weeks earlier online. Thus, I was quite perturbed to discover that, apparently at the last minute, there was a special promotion offering admission for just $1. It was suggested we buy the dollar tickets, keeping the $10 tickets for next year, despite the clear indication on the $10 tickets that we could not do so.

We had taken a hotel shuttle to the fair, and by 4 p.m., we were ready to call it a day, even though we would miss Rick Springfield at 8 p.m. Ah well.

The title, BTW, is from a movie called State Fair, which came out in 1945 and was remade in 1962, about the “Ioway” event. Here’s the theme song from the latter, composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

25th Amendment hashtag

Ford and Rockefeller

The 25th Amendment to the US Constitution, initiated by Congress in 1965 and ratified by 3/4s of the states in 1967, has four parts. I expect that the part that people are posting about online is referring to the fourth.

Briefly, the other three. Section. 1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

This is alluded to in Amendments 12 and 20 but is much clearer here. JFK’s assassination in 1963 was surely on the minds of the citizenry.

Section 2. “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.”

Gerald Ford (under Nixon) and Nelson Rockefeller (under Ford) became Veep under this provision.

Section 3. “Whenever the President transmits to [Congress] his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.”

The 25th Amendment has been used 3 times to relieve presidents deemed unfit to govern — each case involving physical health.

Section 4, as noted, is the item most discussed. As early as May 2017, the question was whether the vice president, Cabinet, and Congress would determine that the current White House resident was “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

It is not easy, but it is convoluted. “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide [let’s say the Cabinet], transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

“But when the President transmits to the [Congressional leaders] his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and [the Cabinet] transmit within four days to the {Congressional leaders] their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

Then “Congress shall decide the issue… [if by a] two-thirds vote of both Houses [determine] that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”

One can argue that the removal SHOULD happen. It won’t. I have serious doubts that, even if the House voted to impeach, the Senate would vote to convict. Ultimately, the only solution is the ballot.