The Lydster, Part 68: the North Pole


If you are one of those people who just cannot STAND hearing Christmas music before Thanksgiving, or December 1, or the first day of winter, then I highly recommend that you NOT visit Santa’s Workshop in North Pole, NY in mid-September, as our family did. Notice the Merry Christmas on the water mill.

Not only Christmas carols but parts of Messiah by Handel – “For Unto Us Is Born”, e.g. – as well. As the website says, it was “founded in 1949 and designed by Arto Monaco. We are known as the forerunner of present day theme parks in the United States.” And it most definitely felt like that, a pre-Disneyland theme park.

I must say that it was initially disappointing. It was not inexpensive ($17-$19 each) and many of the rides Lydia, at over four feet, was too tall to ride in. Of the two rides she could be on, she tried the (little) roller coaster (with me), and decided that she did not particularly enjoy it.Worse, a train that we ALL could have ridden through the park was closed for repairs.

Ultimately, what made it worthwhile for Lydia were the friendly clowns and animals and snowmen who performed musical bits periodically. It was a little schlocky – OK, it was a LOT schlocky – but it was earnest. There weren’t that many attendees to these mini-shows and the clowns, e.g., would always go to the performances of their costume-clad colleagues.

Ultimately, it was a successful visit because we had a nice getaway from our usual Saturday routine of cleaning and shopping and laundry.

And Lydia got to go to the North Pole! The pole is not some painted stick; it is actually made of ice. This was actually a thrill for my wife, who went to the North Pole when SHE was a child and feared the frozen pole had been turned into a plastic replica. No way!

I should tell you about this production of the Christmas story, told on the loudspeakers, with clearly young actors performing the roles of Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the Wise Men. Even from the distance – they were up the hill from the little amphitheater we were sitting in – you can tell that at least some of them were cracking up, though they tried to hide it.

But the high point in the trip for the child was Lydia playing on swings, playground equipment and this container of plastic balls she could wade in, things she could do on the local playground or the local McDonald’s. She had a good time, so we had a good time too.

ROG

ROG

Thanksgiving QUESTIONS


1. What has been your Thanksgiving tradition? Do you travel? Do people travel to see you? approximately how many people are present?
2. How do you feel about Thanksgiving? Stressed about cleaning or the “perfect” turkey?
3. Do you think having a holiday denoting thanks is a good idea, or are you of the school that we should be thankful ALL the time?
4. what are you most thankful for right now?

For the past decade Thanksgiving has usually meant going to my parents-in-law’s house 75 minutes away. It’s them, us, a couple cousins, and sometimes a neighbor or two. Interesting how it has evolved since I first went to my not yet in-law’s house in 1994, when all four of the adult children always came home to see Mom & Dad. One is now deceased and the others are married with children with one having far distance to travel.

Thanksgiving used to be the most stressful time of the year. Between 1974 and 1993, I probably was at at least 17 different venues. Thanksgiving tended to magnify the unsettledness of my life.

Of course we should always be thankful. And of course we ae not. A day designed to do that doesn’t seem like a terrible idea.

I’m most grateful that I no longer have a gypsy existence on the fourth Thursday in November. Oh yeah, and my wife and my child and my friends and my family and my job…

Pictures from Life.com:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower carving the Thanksgiving turkey while Mamie, John & the rest of the family are cheerfully looking on.
Date taken: November 1953
Photographer: George Skadding

FDR At Thanksgiving
Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt w. his wife Eleanor, serving Thanksgiving turkey to polio patients who drew lots to see who would sit at the Pres.’s table in Georgia Hall at Warm Springs Foundation.
Location: Warm Springs, GA, US
Date taken: November 1938
Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White

Danny Kaye
Thanksgiving Parade
Photographer: Yale Joel

Children eating Thanksgiving dinner at the Great Britain headquarters.
Location: United Kingdom
Date taken: 1942
Photographer: David E. Scherman

ROG

ROG

Thanksgiving: turkey

The wife and I got a Thanksgiving e-card last week, one of those Jacquie Lawson things in which the pumpkin’s scooped out to make a pumpkin pie; it gets baked, and a slice with whipped cream is available. And on the top a message saying, “Happy thanksgiving!

Well, you can’t really read much of the enclosed message, only three lines at a time. This one says:

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Both because we’ll be busy over the next few weeks,
and because i am not sure how frequently everyone
on the list checks their email, I am sending this out
early.

As we approach Thanksgiving we realize that we are
very thankful that some of the ancesters of all of
our Jewish friends had refused to acknowledge and
accept that Jesus Christ was, is and always will be
the Messiah – our Lord and Savior. By their denial,
we gentiles were invited ‘in’.What incredible mercy
and grace to know that we will now not perish
whenever the world as we know it ends, but that as
long as we have admitted we are sinners, asked for
forgiveness; repented and continue to be believe on the
Lord Jesus Christ, that we will be saved from the
firey lake…when the judgment day comes. We are
thankful to them – and to Him.
Much Love to all,
The ZZZZZZZ

(The spelling is in the original.)

I was floored. Not only was it amazingly, and almost gleefully, anti-Semitic, it was also theologically daft. In the Bible I read, Jesus came, was crucified and was resurrected so that everyone, Jew and Gentile, could follow. Whether or not Jews 1900 years ago accepted or didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah is utterly irrelevant.

This would be less problematic if it didn’t come from people we need to deal with on a regular basis. Oy.
***
I went food shopping for Thanksgiving on Saturday with the daughter. There were only a couple little wrinkles:
1. I lost the shopping list. Must have set it down when I put on my hat, as I found it as soon as I got home. So I forgot about a third of the items on the list, by count but not by cost.
2. I forgot the discount card from the store. This is not insignificant, as it cut the cost of the turkey in half. So I kept on shopping and counted on the kindness of strangers, in particular, one stranger in front of me in line, to use HIS card, and that worked.
And the third problem, this one not entirely of my making.
3. I had one of those personal metal shopping carts to wield the food home. Unfortunately, one of the wheels came off in the parking lot. This had happened before and was fixed, but evidently, not adequately. Thus I’m holding up the cart where the wheel should be, and three days later, my back is STILL aching from the trip. I should note that the daughter had another cart, and she was very helpful.

ROG

ROG

Meme of Solace

I’m sure the title refers to a James Bond film; I’m swiping this from SamauraiFrog.

List 10 musical artists (or bands) you like, in no specific order (do this before reading the questions below). Really, don’t read the questions below until you pick your ten artists!!!

There is something to be said for following the instructions in this case.

1. The Beatles
2. The Beach Boys
3. David Bowie
4. The Rascals
5. The Rolling Stones
6. Linda Ronstadt
7. The Supremes
8. The Temptations
9. Talking Heads
10. The Police

What was the first song you ever heard by 6?

Something early, probably “Different Drum”.

What is your favorite song of 8?

“I Can’t Get Next To You”. From the rowdy opening to the Sly Stone-inspired shared vocals.

What kind of impact has 1 left on your life?

Massive. I have a ton of their albums, both as a group and as solo artists. I know arcane things about their album releases. People say to me, “What album is X song on?” and far more often than not, I’ll say “American or British album?” And then peg both of them. There’s a picture of Lennon in my office and a photo of the Imagine imagine from NYC in my house.

What is your favorite lyric of 5?

Probably the chorus of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. “But if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.” From Let It Bleed, probably my favorite Stones album. The organ noodling of this song during the early funeral sequence of The Big Chill cracked me up, while others in the audience wondered why.

How many times have you seen 4 live?

Never, though I’ve seen them live on TV once or twice.

What is your favorite song by 7?

“Love Is Like An Itchin’ In My Heart”. What an insistent bass line. there’s a version that’s about 30 seconds longer than the single I particularly enjoy.

Is there any song by 3 that makes you sad?

Ashes to Ashes
Time and again I tell myself
I’ll stay clean tonight
But the little green wheels are following me
Oh no, not again

What is your favorite song by 9?

“Making Flippy Floppy”, probably because I saw the Talking Heads during the Speaking in Tongues tour in 1983 or 1984 at SPAC in Saratoga.

When did you first get into 2?

It’s really odd, actually. I had a compilation album with I Get Around and Don’t Worry Baby in 1965, and the Pet Sounds album in 1966, both of which I liked. But I never considered myself a real Beach Boys fan until I got Surf’s Up, which was a mainstay of my freshman year in college, 1971-72. THEN I went back and got into the earlier music, and bought the retrospective albums that came out in the mid-1970s.

How did you get into 3?

I was in my dorm room in my freshman year and somehow won Hunky Dory from my college radio station, WNPC on a radio call-in contest. I liked almost all of it; my roommate Ron only liked Changes.

What is your favorite song by 4?

“It’s Love”, the last song on the Groovin’ album, featuring flute by Hubert Laws, plus a great bass line. When I got a new turntable in 1987, the track ran so close to the label that the album would reject before the song would end; drove me nuts. Actually bought the CD five years ago largely for this one song.

How many times have you seen 9 live?

Once, but it was one of the two greatest shows of my life, along with the Temptations in 1980 or 1981.

What is a good memory concerning 2?

A mixed memory actually. I had this friend named Donna George, and I bought her the Beach Boys box set. Before she died of brain cancer a few years ago, she assigned another friend of hers and me to divvy up her music. I took the Beach Boys box, and I always remember her when I play it.

Is there a song by 8 that makes you sad?

The Temptations with a Lot o’ Soul is full of melancholy songs, but I’ll pick No More Water in the Well.

What is your favorite song of 1?

A truly impossible question. Seriously. It’s dependent on mood, what I’ve listened to recently. I’ll say Got to Get You Into My Life, but reserve the right to change that.

How did you become a fan of 10?

Almost certainly listening to WQBK-FM, Q-104 in Albany, NY, a truly great station that also turned me onto the Talking Heads, the Clash and a lot of other music of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
ROG

ROG

MOVIE REVIEW: My One and Only

Hmm. It appears that the movie My One and Only is now available on DVD at least at Target and from Blockbuster. Odd, since I just saw it on Veterans Day at the Spectrum Theatre and in fact it is STILL playing there once a day.
The movie is about Anne Deveraux (Renée Zellweger) who, discovering her philandering husband, Dan (Kevin Bacon) in the act, decides to take her two sons, George (Logan Lerman) and Robbie (Mark Rendall) on an adventure which largely consists of traveling from city to city trying to find a husband for herself. In their “adventure” from their home in New York to Boston to Pittsburgh to St. Louis and eventually Hollywood, she finds guys (played by, among others, Steven Weber and Chris Noth), who seem promising at first.

This is a pleasant enough film. The problem is that, at least until they get to St. Louis, I always thought I was watching Renée rather than Anne. Also the situations had a certain sameness – Robbie gets in the school play, Robbie leaves before the production can be mounted. The other problem is that I thought the travelogue of 1950s-style postcards, which happens in the very beginning of the film – my reveal was hardly a spoiler – both tells too much and seems to be trying too hard to prove the movie is authentic to the period.

Still, the latter part of the film is the most satisfying. You may know that this is the largely true story about a noted actor. I had heard this before I watched it but I had forgotten; it was more satisfying not knowing. This is one of those two and a half stars out of four flicks. Oh, and if you do see it, avoid the trailer – it’s on the movie’s website – which, as these things do, reveals WAY too much.
***
I’ve had a particularly busy stretch. Saturday, November 14, we had the dress rehearsal of the Faure requiem, after four Sunday night rehearsals. Then Saturday night, our friends couldn’t go to to the Albany Symphony and gave us their tickets. So we arranged for a babysitter and went to the Palace Theatre in Albany. On the way in, we happened to see the conductor scurrying to the locale from a pre-concert talk.

The first piece is almost always new, sometimes avant garde, and occasionally just peculiar. Stacy Garrop’s Becoming Medusa, a tone poem, was not only listenable, she actually described the piece competently; too often, I’ve heard composers offer an incoherent rambling. She is the Mellon-supported Composer-Educator Partner.

But the star of the evening was George Li, the pianist on Saint Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 2. He showed energy, passion and lyricism in his play. Did I mention he was only 14, and looked about 11? We saw him on our way out of the theater.

Everyone in the audience was offered a glass of wine during intermission, after which, Brahms Symphony No. 2 was performed, which, according to the program “features one of the greatest of all cello melodies in its second movement.”
***
Sunday afternoon, the Faure, which went well.
***
Sunday night, Lydia got sick. She coughed all night, and I could not sleep all night; there IS a correlation. So I stayed home with her Monday all day and half of Tuesday. Played Uno to 1000 (she won) – do you know how long it can take to play Uno to 1000? and also Sorry and Candyland; she’s well enough to need to be occupied. Took her to the doctor on Monday; he recommended a cough syrup I had previously tried, to no great effect, but I tried it again Monday night. She, almost immediately, threw up. Then a few minutes later, threw up again, which was actually, from a medical POV, productive, as she FINALLY stopped coughing.

But I felt obliged to tell the in-laws who were going to watch Lydia Tuesday night, and they opted out.
***
So we had tickets to see The 39 Steps at Proctors Tuesday night, but no babysitter. Carol tried to find friends to go with her to the show, but was ultimately unsuccessful. So I asked my friend the Hoffinator at 4:15 pm if she wanted to go, and she said yes. Had a great time; the review of the show is here.

ROG

ROG
Ramblin' with Roger
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