Ramblin' with Roger

For Good

Because I knew you

All of life’s riddles are answered in musical theater*. In this case, For Good, from Wicked.

Recently, I was talking with a friend of mine. They wanted to get in touch with an old friend of theirs. The two had been really close for a time, but then the friend inexplicably pulled away. I knew that other person less well, but I, too, recognized the unexplained pulling away.

So I’ve been there. Haven’t you? For several reasons, one old friend is at the top of my mind, which has generated an oppressive degree of melancholy in me. When I heard this Tiny Desk concert of four songs from the show performed by Alyssa Fox and McKenzie Kurtz, it was the last song that struck me. It’s because Stephen Schwartz, who was at the piano, told the process of writing the song (at 17:26), which involved him asking his daughter what she would say to her best friend if she knew she would never see her again. Then he wrote it down.

I’ve heard For Good several times. My wife and I saw Wicked at Proctors Theatre in November 2012. Yet I HEARD the song differently this time, probably because of Schwartz’s story.

Elphaba and Glinda

I am recommending this to my friend, and myself.

I’ve heard it said
That people come into our lives
For a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most to grow
If we let them
And we help them in return
Well, I don’t know if I believe that’s true
But I know I’m who I am today
Because I knew you…

It well may be
That we will never meet again
In this lifetime
So let me say before we part
So much of me
Is made of what I learned from you
You’ll be with me
Like a handprint on my heart
And now whatever way our stories end
I know you have re-written mine
By being my friend

*The actual quote is, “All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” It’s from the 1991 film Grand Canyon and is spoken by the character played by Steve Martin.

RIP, Trina Robbins (1938-2024)

The Way We Wore

According to my diary, I met Trina Robbins, Steve Leialoha, and Scott Shaw! at the San Digo Comic Con on August 6, 1987. I didn’t write anything about the encounter except that it was “nice.”

But maybe I was a bit starstruck because I had enjoyed her work for so long, going back to Wimmen’s Comix from Last Gasp in the mid-1970s.

She also produced a four-page story called The Way We Wore for Gates of Eden, published by FantaCo in 1982 . In a previous life, she was a clothing designer.

While she did work for Marvel and DC, notably Wonder Woman, she was better known for working with “independent” publishers. Her body of work is vast.

But it’s not just the breadth of her work. As Mark Evanier wrote: “Beautiful…talented…important…I don’t know which quality of Trina I should start with. I’ll start with important. Trina Robbins was one of those cartoonists who did things that mattered. No one did more to elevate the awareness of and the opportunities for females in the realm of cartooning and comic art. And along the way she did not neglect the males; did not neglect anyone or anything worthy of attention.”

As the Forbes article noted: “Her unapologetically feminist take on politics and pop culture stood out among peers like Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, and the experience left her a lifelong critic of the ‘boys club’ misogyny she perceived in such work.”

Documenting women

A 2018 piece in Vulture called her “the Controversial Feminist Who Revolutionized Comic Books.”

She and Cat Yronwode created the legendary 1985 tome Women And The Comics, the “first attempt to document the careers of the hundreds of women who have created and worked in the field of comic strips, comic books and cartooning. The Women whose work is showcased in this book have been long overlooked or ignored by most other histories of comics.”

From the New York Times: “She also wrote more than a dozen prose books, including Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896-2013 (2013) and Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age (2020). ‘Trina didn’t just support women,’ Shary Flenniken, who created the ‘Trots and Bonnie’ strip for National Lampoon, said in an interview, ‘she unearthed the history of all these women cartoonists who had never been talked about.'”

The most recent comics-related item I purchased was the crowdfunded Won’t Back Down. “Comics legend Trina Robbins is fighting the rogue Supreme Court with over 30 storytellers from all around the world to publish a pro-choice anthology. Proceeds will be donated to Planned Parenthood.”

I read a lot of the many comments about Trina on Facebook. Many shared the sentiment, “I thought she’d be here forever.

EQ

Among the most interesting was from Wendy Pini, co-creator of the comic book Elfquest. “Were Trina and I friends? That’s hard to say. Not once in all the years we knew each other did we really understand each other. We didn’t ‘get’ or even really like each others’ artwork and writing. We didn’t inspire each other…. I was not her kind of feminist or activist, not a ‘joiner’ in most of the causes she cherished. Our life experiences and world views were, for the most part, very different.

“That said, when it came to today’s politics and speaking out on LGBTQ+ rights, Trina and I were very much on the same page. Her activism thrilled me and I sent applause when I could. She would pop up in my political FB posts from time to time – I was always delighted to have her chime in. Her voice carried weight. With her vast energy and drive, she was willing to get down in the trenches and get up close and personal with pro-woman movers and shakers… Trina could do that. She was a mover and shaker herself and an inspiration to many.

“I’m so glad Trina knew that I thought she was adorable. I honestly have no idea what she thought of me… Though we weren’t close, I loved her and I loved running into her, through the years, at San Diego Cons. She represented something powerful: a pioneer and a survivor. Outspoken, controversial, at times even rude… I loved her for all of that. She was funny. Just knowing she was keeping on keeping on was a kind of comfort, something to count on.”

Condolences to Trina’s longtime partner Steve Leialoha and their family.

The cleaning was the hardest part

A goes to B, and B goes to C

The cleaning was the hardest part when I was preparing to hold my near-annual hearts card game on Saturday, March 2. My wife talked about vacuuming the living and dining room floors. But from my point of view, I needed to take another tactic first.

The first point of attack was to figure out what were in the four bins that took root on the second-floor landing. Two were my wife’s stuff so that I could ignore them. The third contained miscellany from theater programs to the bulletins from funerals, plus pens, coins, and newspapers too old to bother to read, among other things.

The next bin contained clothes I could not fit into when I put them there. But since I lost a bit of weight in 2022, most of them now fit! But where would I put them?

Sans closet

Here’s the saga of my ever-shrinking closet space. When we first bought the house in 2000, my clothes were in a closet in the smaller spare bedroom. But a few years later, that room was renovated to become our daughter’s room. My wife acquired an armoire for me; it was never adequate, especially when the clothing racks in the attic collapsed. Since 2019, that room has become my wife’s office, as my daughter had moved into the guest room.

So, where will I put all those new old clothes? I asked my wife if she would remove her clothes from the armoire side panel. She said that they were my apparel, and she was correct. But there were boxes of eye care medicine that WERE my wife’s, all from 2021 and thus expired. There were also her jewelry boxes. With these gone, I was able to squeeze some clothes in.

But this was not enough. I needed to deal with – oh, the horror – my JUNK DRAWER! Specifically, the top drawer of my dresser. I found enough loose change to take someone out for dinner. Sample-sized toiletries are now on a box atop the armoire. I also had expired meds and enough other crap I could dispose of that I could put my socks and underwear in that section, making room for more T-shirts below. I have a LOT of T-shirts.

(In case you were worried about it, we’re not throwing away the expired meds but rather taking them to a pharmacy with a bin designated for disposal.)

Downstairs!

Now, I can go down to the first floor and tackle those boxes in the dining room. I found our 2022 tax filing and a bunch of mail, some unread, from about a year ago. Some family friend of my wife’s had given us some coins; I don’t know if they are of any value, but they don’t need to be clogging that floor. By the end of the tedious process, everything was off the floor, some in the trash or recycling, the rest upstairs.

The bay windows still have a bunch of stuff in front of them. That was intentional. The cats had mauled the window treatments so badly that the boxes looked much better.

This process took about twelve hours, and frankly, it was exhausting. Thank goodness for lots of music. I cannot clean without music. My wife can listen to people talking on NPR, but I cannot. I need Tom Petty or Johnny Cash or George Harrison or movie soundtracks…

Our garbage gets picked up early Friday morning. By early Saturday morning, the large recycling bin, emptied 24 hours earlier, was full again.

THEN I vacuumed the floors, and we had a lovely time playing hearts, eating O’s lasagna, and solving the world’s problems.

I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky

The Strong Museum of Play

Rumor has it that a total solar eclipse would be visible in 15 US states, Mexico, Canada, and elsewhere on April 8. People would make up eclipse playlists. I thought of Paint It, Black by the Rolling Stones, with the lyric, “I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky.”

As we traveled well together in Las Vegas, I conned my OLD friend MAK into a road trip to the Rochester area, where totality was projected. He picked me up c. 2 pm on Sunday. Immediately, he noted that a friend of his suggested we take Route 40 or Route 20. It couldn’t have been 40.

“You want us to take Route 20? Okay.” I directed him to go one block south and make a right turn. We’re on Route 20.” As I described a decade ago, it is lovely. More importantly, it wasn’t likely to be as crowded as the New York State Thruway, I-90. Once we got past the turn to Schenectady, it was indeed as charming as I remembered.

Bonus: When we turned onto NY-414 north, it was only a few miles to The Lux Hotel in Waterloo. It is 47 miles or 76 km, less than an hour from Rochester. We had a decent dinner there.

As is usually the case, I got up early. When MAK woke up, we went to the complimentary breakfast around 8:45. We got the last two pieces of sausage and ate pancakes.

Toys and games

We traveled to Rochester, avoiding the interstates (90 and 490) for a while. Our first destination was the Strong Museum of Play. It’s part history, part Toy Hall of Fame (sand finally made the cut in 2021), and a lot of interactive experience. MAK destroyed me in an oversized game of Battleship. I got the high score in Ms. Pac-Man (about 35,000; I used to be SO much better). Recommended.

Then we went to the house in Webster where MAK spent some of his high school years, a yuppie cul de sac neighborhood he mostly hated.

It was really overcast. I theorized that it might be less cloudy away from large bodies of water. So we headed back to Waterloo, with the GPS managing to avoid the interstates altogether.

The Western NY experience

We found ourselves in the Walmart parking lot next to the Lux Hotel at 2:53 pm. I wasn’t even sure where the sun was. About a dozen Walmart of young employees were allowed to try to watch the event. But it seemed it would be a bust. Then it wasn’t, as it got a powerful darkness in the western sky. I can’t explain it. But Kelly, in the equally overcast Buffalo area, tried.

“Those four minutes or so of darkness…? They were amazing. Truly, astonishingly amazing. For every cynic out there who has been saying things like ‘It’s just like at night, what’s the big deal,’ I can’t say it any other way than to simply say, ‘It’s not just like night.’ There was something qualitatively different about those four minutes…in how quickly they plunged over us… in how everything in my circadian-rhythm loving body was screaming, ‘This isn’t right.’ I can see how eclipses were terrifying moments for humans, for millennia, before we learned what they are and how to predict them and thus rendered them a thing of wonder.”

I didn’t take a picture. Someone on A Way with Words engaged in conversation about focusing on taking pictures “of significant events or situations (e.g., weddings, eclipses). Taking the picture becomes the focus, minimizing the event to the point that the event is missed.” Of the irritating “If there isn’t a photo, it didn’t happen,” I say BAH!

As MAK and I departed, he engaged in a conversation with a woman who had a car the same make and model of his previous car. She brought up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. I remember that scene.

We returned east. A lot of people were departing from The Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, so the police directed traffic. We started on Route 20 but ended up on Route 5, which was not so scenic. When we got to Syracuse, we missed a turn and needed our GPS, theoretically, to get back to Route 5, but we ended up on the Thruway, which was running smoothly for the most part.

People look north

I’m glad that Chuck Miller got his picture in Newport, VT. Here is the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Through the Eyes of NASA (Official Broadcast), three hours from various locations in Mexico heading northeast.

My friend Dan, who’s not prone to oversentimentality, wrote about his experience in Plattsburgh, NY. “When the totality began, most everybody in the park started howling like dogs, which in itself was awesome. It got dark for three and a half minutes, and the streetlights came on. Everyone was on their feet.

“You could look at it with the naked eye and… also see the planet Venus nearby. It was indeed a black hole in the sky with a fiery corona around it. You could also see red spots at the bottom of the disk, which were probably solar flares but may also have been the habitations of the very warm extraterrestrials that live on the sun.

“When the first tiny sliver of the sun peeked out from the moon, and we all had to stop staring and put on our glasses again, there was applause and cheering. Just before and after, the light around all of us spectators in the park in the middle of town was… weird. When the light returned, it honestly felt like some kind of transformation took place here on Earth.

“And that was one more awesome thing. How often do crowds of people gather to watch a celestial event?”

So I got really cranky when I turned on the TV that night to catch the UConn/Purdue basketball Final Four. It was halftime, and commentator Charles Barkley opined about the millions of “dummies” watching the cosmic event. I turned off the set.

For me, it was an adventure—or, to use a highly technical term, a cool experience.

Actor Dennis Quaid is 70

Thing Called Love

Dennis Quaid was born in Houston, TX. He has appeared in several movies I’ve seen, all in the cinema except for The Parent Trap, but none of them I’ve viewed since the initial viewing. Most of them I liked.

Breaking Away (1977) -This is a sports movie about bicycling, which I really enjoyed. It was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and won for Best Original Screenplay.

The Right Stuff (1983) – It won four Oscars, including Best Picture, and deservedly so. It was… what the title said.

The Big Easy (1986). Per IMDb, “Both Ellen Barkin and Dennis Quaid consider this the favorite of all the films they’ve made.” I saw it with a friend, and we both thought the crime drama had plot holes that one could drive a police cruiser through. But the soundtrack is marvelous. Someone posted most of it on YouTube, some with variations from the album. Notably, it leaves off what AllMusic called “a respectable track,” Dennis Quaid singing Closer To You, which he wrote. I can’t find the studio version, but here’s a live take with Bonnie Raitt and the Neville Brothers.

Dennis shows up on the video for Bonnie’s Thing Called Love (1989) from her Grammy-winning comeback album, Nick Of Time. It’s a sexy video, even though they were just friends.

Postcards from the Edge (1990) – the somewhat autobiographical account of the lives of Debbie Reynolds and author/screenwriter Carrie Fisher, played by Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep, respectively. Quaid plays the Streep character’s sometimes boyfriend. I related to the family drama.

The Parent Trap (1998) – Quaid and Natasha Richardson play the divorced parents of the twins played by Lindsay Lohan (X2). Having watched the Hayley Mills original film, I think the remake was better, which I imagine is sacrilege. I saw this on video with my daughter.

Traffic (2000) – A fine film, though Quaid, as one of the bad guys, gets about fifth billing.

21st Century

The Rookie (2001)—Based on a true story, it’s the tale of a high school chemistry teacher who coaches the school’s baseball team. Once a pitching prospect before an injury, he agrees to go to a professional tryout if his team wins the championship. (No spoiler: they do, so he does.) I immensely enjoyed it.

Far From Heaven (2002) – A seemingly perfect 1950s suburban couple, played by Quaid and Oscar-nominated for Best Actress Julianne Moore, is jeopardized. The Moore character consoles herself with the friendship of their gardener (Dennis Haysbert). A fine work by the actors and writer/director Todd Haynes. My favorite Quaid movie.

I might have caught other films. The TV movie Dinner With Friends is about two close couples who are confounded when one couple decides to split up. And I’m sure I caught some guest appearances on SpongeBob or Inside Amy Schumer.

Dennis is the younger brother of actor Randy Quaid. According to reports, “the two have not communicated in over 20 years due to a bad real estate deal in Montecito, California.”

Happy birthday to Dennis Quaid.