Ramblin' with Roger

Adult Contemporary #1 hits for 1984

The Honeydrippers

About half of the Adult Contemporary #1 hits for 1984 were very familiar to me. Incidentally, starting with the October 20 charts, Billboard changed the name to Hot Adult Contemporary.

Two songs appeared on the pop, AC, and Black Singles that year. Hello by Lionel Richie (2 weeks pop, 6 weeks AC, 3 weeks RB) did not connect with Arthur.

I Just Called To Say I Love You by Stevie Wonder (3 weeks each on all three charts) wasn’t my favorite Stevie song.

Additionally, Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper was #1 for 2 weeks pop and 3 weeks AC.

Stuck On You – Lionel Richie, 5 weeks at #1

Think Of Laura – Christopher Cross, 4 weeks at #1

Got A Hold On Me – Christine McVie, 4 weeks at #1

If Ever You’re In My Arms Again – Peabo Bryson, 4 weeks at #1

Penny Lover – Lionel Richie, 4 weeks at #1. Four of the last five songs, all except the McVie track, I’m not recalling. It’s not that I never heard them, but rather that they just didn’t stick to the brain.

Drive – The Cars, 3 weeks at #1. This track, conversely, I recall and have heard in the past few weeks.

Do What You Do – Jermaine Jackson, 3 weeks at #1. I remember this. What a strange video.

The Longest Time – Billy Joel, 2 weeks at #1. All three of the Joel songs are from the Innocent Man album, which I own. It was the follow-up to the more ambitious The Nylon Curtain album, so he went retro.

Leave A Tender Moment Alone – Billy Joel, 2 weeks at #1

What About Me – Kenny Rogers with Kim Carnes & James Ingram. I barely remember this.

Single week at #1 AC

An Innocent Man – Billy Joel

Believe In Me – Dan Fogelberg

Almost Paradise… Love Theme from Footloose – Mike Reno & Ann Wilson. This song is so generic that I barely remember it, even though I listened to the Footloose soundtrack earlier this year.

Sea Of Love – The Honeydrippers. I love this song and have The Honeydrippers’ EP on cassette, for some reason. The group consisted of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, Nile Rodgers from Chic, and Jeff Beck, like Page, a former Yardbirds guitarist.

Museums: African Art, Hirschhorn

Botanic Gardens

About a week after my wife and I returned from Chautauqua in early August, we, plus our daughter, took the trains down to Washington, DC, to visit museums and do the tourist thing.

The trains went from Albany/Rensselaer to NYC/Penn Station and then from Penn to Alexandria, VA. Alexandria is only one stop from DC’s Union Station, and there’s a layover there, so it was a toss-up whether we should have stopped in DC and then caught the DC Metro. But that would have necessitated schlepping our luggage. We arrived on a Sunday.

We stayed at my MIL’s timeshare, a Wyndham property in Old Town Alexandria. It was pretty decent, and it was convenient to catch both the Amtrak and the DC metro to Washington, specifically the Smithsonian stop on the Blue Line.

We took the Metro to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art on Monday, August 5. Our daughter wanted to go there, but I knew almost nothing about it. It was a very interesting place. The recently installed Benin Bronzes have an exciting history. I particularly liked Before Nollywood… The Ideal Photo Studio. It is about photography in Nigeria before the movie boom of the 1990s.

Above is a picture I took in the elevator of some of the things shown at the museum. Below is a piece called Dwellers in the Space of the Unknown, which intrigued me.

I heard music in the gift shop, which I liked. It was Kids African Party. I find most music for children insipid and boring, but this was entertaining enough for me to purchase.

Museum #2

After a meal at a nearby restaurant, we went to the Hirschhorn Museum. A couple of pieces struck my fancy: a comparison between a 19th-century white artist and a more contemporary black artist.

In this case, it’s two oil on canvas pieces. Mrs. Kate A. Moore (1884), painted by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), is hung next to Cobalt Blue Dress (2020) by Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo (b. 1984).

I conversed with one of the young staff members about why one would redo an existing painting. We talked about contextualization. I might compare it with the idea of watching Hamilton and revisiting American history.

I also saw this particular egg tempera on fiberboard item, a piece I did not know. But it reminded me so much of the musical/movie Cabaret that I assumed it was created in the 1930s. It is George C. Tilyou’s Steeplechase Park (1936) by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954).

The most fascinating room is Four Talks, designed by musician and artist Laurie Anderson. I don’t recall the raven, parrot, or canoe, but the room is still oddly disorienting but fascinating.

Greenery

Then we walked on a hot day in DC, probably in the 90s (32+C). We went past the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial to the United States Botanic Garden. Two things: I had gone there in 1998 when I tried out for Jeopardy in DC, and I always thought it was the Botanical Garden.

Across the street from each other are two different gardens and a building with various kinds of plants, some climate-controlled. The place had a powerful environmental message; it was where I dropped off my recyclable but not returnable water bottle.

At one display, patrons were asked about food, specifically what food reminded them of home. Mine were pork chops, mashed potatoes, and peas from growing up.

Lydster: Ten Candles

our 25th anniversary present

This past spring semester, the daughter’s final project for her sculpture, mold-making, and casting class involved ten candles. Although the project had to include making molds and casting, it was otherwise open-ended, so one could use whatever material they wanted. It didn’t have to have a theme, but it should be a cohesive project, not random.

She decided on the topic for this project: her parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. In each piece was a bit of wax from our wedding candle. the project took about 30 hours.

Candle #1: a wedding cake to represent the marriage in 1999. The scent was vanilla, sugar cane, and almond.

Candle #2 represents my wife’s and my honeymoon in Barbados in 1999. The scent was rum cake. Why? Because our daughter asked us to give her specifics. Rum cake was one of the most tangible objects we remember from that period; it was delicious, and we brought some back home.

Candle #3 is a standard house because we bought our home together in 2000. (My wife had purchased a house earlier, and we lived there for a year, but it wasn’t OURS.) The scent was coconut, citrus, and amber.

Candle #4 is the steeple from our current church, which we started attending in 2000. The scent is golden apple and Honey Drizzle.

Candle #5 is three candles tied together, representing the three of us. The candles are three different shades of green in honor of our surname. The scent is vanilla, buttercream, and marshmallow, which she feels smells like a newborn.

Candle #6 is an adenoid. The daughter had an adenoidectomy at the age of two and a half, which was very traumatic for her parents. That candle is unscented because the procedure involved her nose.

Felines

Candle #7 is the cat Midnight, who we got in 2013. The scent was sandalwood and clove, which smelled like fresh kitty litter. At this point in his life, Midnight was always covered in kitty litter, so she thought it was very fitting for him.

Candle #8 is the cat Stormy, who we got later in 2013. The scent is called Warm and Welcome. Both cat candles use the same mold by casting them with different colored crayon waxes. Neither of them came out exactly how she envisioned. Midnight was too gray, and Stormy needed stripes, so she painted them, giving each more texture.

Candle #9 is the daughter graduating from high school and attending college. The scent is warm spring sunshine. The wick from our wedding candle was used as the tassel.

Candle #10 commemorates my wife and my 25th-anniversary trip to Chautauqua Institution. This is the CHQ tower; she made it before we went. The scent is sparkling sugared berries.

Unfortunately, the box of candles was lost when she moved back home at the end of the semester. Nevertheless, it was a wonderfully inventive effort. I LOVE these SO much.

Dad’s cousin Ruth

tracking Walkers

Here’s my dad’s cousin Ruth (R) with two of her children. My sister Leslie and I saw her in October 2022 at the church we all grew up in, Trinity AME Zion in Binghamton, NY. She pointed out a room that used to be a Sunday school classroom where my paternal grandmother Agatha Green used to teach Sunday school to me and a bunch of other kids. It is now a room of noted members of the Trinity family, and she asked us for large photos of our parents for the wall, which we still need to get for her.

The most recent time I saw her was in August 2024, in Horseheads, NY, at the Elmira Jazz Festival. She and her two daughters went to see my niece Leslie’s daughter Rebecca Jade in concert.

She told the story, which I had heard before, about how, after I was born, my father was at her house. He was furiously scribbling on a piece of paper, but she had no idea what the heck he was doing. He was trying to figure out my name, and he wanted to get it to spell out something with my initials and name. Hence, ROG = Roger Owen Green. So she witnessed my naming.

Walker clan

In July 2024, sister Leslie was in Binghamton for her high school reunion. She went to see Cousin Ruth. Ruth gave her a whole bunch of information about the genealogy of the Walker clan. Ruth’s father was Earl; Earl was my paternal grandmother’s brother, so Ruth was my father’s first cousin. She was over a dozen years younger than him, so she didn’t know all the early stories about my father, but she knew him like a big brother.

She has kept track of the Walker genealogy, knowing all of Earl and Agatha’s siblings’ birth/death dates and those of some of their descendants. This will be very useful once I get a chance to work on it. She is my oldest living relative, so I’ve known her even longer than I’ve known Leslie.

I want to thank Ruth for the opportunity to delve into my father’s history. Had he been alive, my father would have been 98 tomorrow. He died in 2000, yet he remains a mystery in various strange and subtle ways.

Ask Roger Anything sans pumpkin pie

Dickinson cultivar

From Snopes: “On 23 September 2016, Facebook users began sharing an article which claimed that the pumpkin typically used in pumpkin pie is in fact a multi-squash blend containing little to no pumpkin.” I remember reading about it at some point and shrugging.

As it turns out, the truth is a bit more nuanced. “According to botanists, however, asserting a clear distinction between ‘pumpkin’ and ‘squash’ is difficult because there is no strict botanical definition for pumpkins. Semantically, pumpkins are a type of squash, and the Dickinson cultivar is listed as a pumpkin.”

The pumpkin can you get from a can from Libby’s and other manufacturers is a blend of squash and pumpkin. It’s not the pretty pumpkins you expect to see on porches at Halloween, but they’re arguably more edible.

The topic is no big deal to me because I’m not a big fan of pumpkin, specifically pumpkin pies, pumpkin cookies, pumpkin muffins, and the like. In the 1990s, I baked two or three pumpkin pies for some fundraising events at the cajoling of my late friend Darby. But my favorite pies to eat tend to be apple pie or maybe a blueberry pie.

General Mills

Since I don’t drink coffee, I don’t drink a pumpkin spice latte. I don’t eat Pumpkin Spice Cheerios, available only for a limited time; I don’t need dessert for breakfast. I like regular Cheerios, and I have eaten Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, which negates my point about dessert for breakfast.

What I really like, though, is when you Ask Roger Anything. You may ask Roger about his taste in pies, cakes, music, movies, or politics; it doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t involve pumpkin spice.

I would love you to ask in the next few days, and I will be sure to reply in the next three or four weeks. As always, I promise to be as honest as I can be. It’s fun to hear what you want me to talk about. When you come up with very clever questions, a change of perspective is always helpful.

As usual, you may leave your questions in the blog’s comments section or my Facebook page (Roger Owen Green); look for the duck.