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Mavis Staples is 72

“I loved Bobby enough to marry him, but I just was not ready to get married.”


One of the great voices in music is Mavis Staples. First as the lead singer of the Staples Singers, with hits such as Respect Yourself and I’ll Take You There, and currently, with her blues/gospel fusion, she’s still performing.

This segment from CBS Sunday Morning in April 2011 noted that she STILL doesn’t know what keys she sings in, even after 60 years of performing. The story also revealed this:

Mavis Staples has a lot of stories to tell, but here’s one you probably didn’t see coming: Bob Dylan asked to marry her.
“That’s true. It’s true. I may as well tell it now,” she said.
Yes, love was apparently in the air for the teenage singers. They “courted” (as Mavis puts it) for 3 years or so. But finally, Mavis says, she called it off.
“I didn’t think I wanted to get married right then,” she said, “And then another thing, you know, I would wonder about what would Dr. King think about me marrying a white guy?
“And so I told Pops about that, and Pops said, ‘Mavis, didn’t you see all them white people marching with us?’ All white people weren’t bad back then. I loved Bobby enough to marry him, but I just was not ready to get married.”

Some songs by Mavis Staples:
99 and 1/2
Eyes on the Prize
You Are Not Alone, acoustic version with Jeff Tweedy

Does the Casey Anthony Trial Matter?

Do Americans not understand the difference between “innocent” and “not guilty” in US jurisprudence?

For those of you who were very fortunate enough to miss it, there was a trial of a young mother in Florida named Casey Anthony, accused of the murder of her two-year-old daughter three years ago. It was a lurid affair, with the defendant accusing her father and brother, in open court, of sexually abusing her, which somehow was the explanation why it took a month before little Caylee was reported missing.

Considering the fact that I was blissfully oblivious to the case before the trial, I know a great deal (more than I want to) about it. Literally, fights broke out in the lines among the spectators wanting to see the event.

Then lo and behold, Casey Anthony was found “not guilty” of the most serious accusations against her. And people, including virtually all of the media, were SHOCKED by the outcome. ABC News did a prime time hour on the SHOCKING results.

#SHOCKING was the hashtag on Twitter the day of the verdict. One of the morning news shows (The Today Show on NBC?) had mothers explaining why Caylee Anthony’s failure to receive “justice” was an affront to motherhood or something; I saw the tease and changed the channel. And people outside the courthouse looked ready to lynch Casey Anthony. Her parents have received death threats, not just from social media.

So does any of this matter, other than to the little victim? I contend it does, for these reasons:

One needs to ask how do some legal cases become national news, while others do not. There have been other incidents of children murdered, killed by their parent, even by their mother, which didn’t warrant more than a mention on the AP wire, if that. What role did the victim’s age, race, gender play in this story, and other situations of abductions and murders, becoming international news?

What part did the news media play in creating the expectation that this woman would be found guilty? This was a death-penalty case, and without getting too complicated, there were two paths, it was heavily reported, by which she could be executed. Surely, this left the impression that the jury would SURELY choose one or the other.

Did the news organizations pay for access to the participants? ABC News, for one, had family photos and videos, “licensed” for use. And guess what? The family members were available for “exclusive interviews”, which reeks of checkbook journalism. They also used HLN’s Nancy Grace as an “analyst” on Good Morning America, a person so buffoonish that she had been caricatured on the former ABC drama Boston Legal years ago.

Finally, the jury felt there was “reasonable doubt”, that she was “not guilty”, not necessarily “innocent”. Do Americans not understand the difference in US jurisprudence? Didn’t they watch Law & Order or LA Law or Perry Mason or countless other law fictions? (Although MAD magazine had a humorous take on this.) I believe there is something called “guilt not proven” in other countries. Maybe we need something like that here.

What are your thoughts?

MOVIE REVIEW: Bridesmaids

Annie’s mom was played by the late Jill Clayburgh, and that made me a little sad as well.

The Wife and I have been to but one film since February, that being Made in Dagenham in April. It wasn’t for lack of movies we’ve wanted to see, but rather a lack of people to watch the child.

So when we had the chance to finally go on our (not-quite-) monthly date Saturday afternoon, July 2, we decided to go to the movies. I was surprised to discover that my demure bride chose Bridesmaids, which was on my list, especially since it’d been around for a while.

After dropping off the Daughter at a friend’s house, we went to the 12:35 pm showing at the Spectrum in Albany. The Spectrum is more an art-house theater but it shows mass-market films too, to balance the bottom line.

I should note that of the three movies in preview, the one I’d most like to see is Buck, which is a true story of a horse whisperer.

As for Bridesmaids, it was not really what I expected. It was a Judd Apatow film, so I anticipated it to be gross, but it wasn’t as raucous as I assumed. Or maybe I’ve gotten inured to it. The most tasteless sequence actually made some sense in the context of the movie.

Annie (Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote the screenplay, along with Annie(!) Mumolo) is a young woman with a failed business, weird roommates, a dead-end job she got because of her mother, and an unsatisfactory relationship (an uncredited Jon Hamm). But her BFF Lillian (Saturday Night Live alum Maya Rudolph) has gotten engaged, and Annie’s the maid of honor. She soon gets into a competition with Lillian’s much newer friend Helen (Rose Byrne), from which much of the comedy ensues.

The real revelation here is Melissa McCarthy. My wife and I watched seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, where she played the sweet friend Sookie, but my wife did not recognize her here as the take-no-prisoners sister of the groom, Megan. She was probably the best part of the picture. Not incidentally, the guy she sits with within the plane sequence, one of the funnier parts of the film, is played by Ben Falcone, Melissa’s real-life husband.

Mostly though, I thought that Annie was sad, and she was having a nearly movie-long pity party. Not that I didn’t think she was “real”, only that she wasn’t that much fun to be around. Or maybe it was me. Somewhere near the end, a couple of women behind us were laughing hysterically over something in the film, to which I said, as Annie might have, “Really?”

Also, Annie’s mom was played by the late Jill Clayburgh, and that made me a little sad as well.

Still, I “cared” about many of the characters, and I liked the ending. I’m glad I saw it, though I think my wife liked it better than I did.

Ringo Starr is 71

What do I do for Ringo’s birthday? I play Beatles cover albums.

I decided, for reasons not entirely known even to me, to mark the birthdays of both of the surviving Beatles each year.

In the case of Ringo Starr, he took a bit of heat for apparently dissing his hometown of Liverpool, England, a comment he said was just a joke. “I love Liverpool,” said the drummer on a recent UK TV interview. He and Liverpool have kissed and made up.

Ringo, who Paul McCartney believes should be knighted, is my daughter’s favorite Beatle, and the one Beatle she constantly identifies correctly in photos.

Did I ever mention how I play my Beatles music through the year?

In October, around John Lennon’s birthday, I play the canon, the British albums, as the group intended them, plus the Past Masters (mostly singles). For George’s birthday in February, I listen to my American albums; George was the first Beatle to come to the US, visiting his sister. June is Paul McCartney’s birthday, and I play that post-canon stuff, such as the BBC, the Anthologies, LOVE, and the like.

So what do I do for Ringo’s birthday? I play Beatles cover albums. There are a lot of them, and I have more than my share. Some are your standard compilations, but some have a single artist doing all Beatles tunes. Several take a particular album and recreate it, using several artists; usually put together by a magazine such as MOJO.

But sometimes, it’s just one artist covering an album. I have both Big Daddy and Cheap Trick doing Sgt. Pepper, and The Smithereens doing the first Capitol album, Meet the Beatles. I also have George Benson doing songs from Abbey Road, but he doesn’t cover the whole album.
***
Listen to some Beatles covers.

One of my favorite Beatles covers, ever: You’ve got to hide your love away – Joe Cocker

Getting the Schmuck Out of “West Side Story”

Sondheim wanted “F@#$ YOU”; interesting how the F-word rhymes with the SCHM-word, and means about the same.

One Yiddish word I liked to use quite a bit when I was in my twenties was schmuck, meaning “an obnoxious, contemptible person; one who is stupid, foolish, or detestable.” I did not know until recently that, in some Jewish homes, the word had been “regarded as so vulgar as to be taboo”. The non-religious Jews I knew certainly used it often enough. The word’s derivation comes from the word representing that which beleaguered Congressman Anthony Weiner tweeted recently.

In his book Finishing the Hat, lyricist Stephen Sondheim talks about the evolution of the words to the song GEE, OFFICER KRUPKE from West Side Story.

Initially, they were:

Dear kindly social worker,
They say go earn a buck.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means like be a schumck.

But the producer of the Broadway cast album told him that the word schmuck would have to be changed. “I confessed that I had no idea the word was obscene. I thought it was simply a vulgarity…, not an obscenity that could prevent the recording from being distributed.”

An hour later, he came up with:

Dear kindly social worker,
They say go make some dough.
Like be a soda jerker,
Which means I’ll be a schmo!

Now, schmo is derived from the same root as schmuck but evidently not as charged.

For the movie, he changed it again:

Dear kindly social worker
They tell me get a job
Like be a soda jerker
Which means I’d be a slob

Another lyric change involved the last two words of the song. Sondheim wanted “F@#$ YOU”; interesting how the F-word rhymes with the SCHM-word, and apparently mean about the same. But for the same commercial reasons, this as scrapped in favor of the Leonard Bernstein suggestion of “KRUP YOU!” It conveyed the same message without actually saying it, and Sondheim believes that it “may be the best lyric line in the show.”

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