Ramblin' with Roger

The songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein

Richard and Oscar

2023 is the 80th anniversary of the first musical of Rodgers and Hammerstein to reach Broadway. The original Broadway production of Oklahoma! opened on March 31, 1943.

I was reminded of this fact by Dave Kibbe, when he did a presentation of From Oklahoma to the Austrian Alps: The Music of Rodgers and Hammerstein at the Albany Public Library on June 20.

Kibbe briefly touched on the music of Jerome Kern and Hammerstein, most notably Showboat (1927) and Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. The latter collaboration generated several shows, most of which I never hear of, save for Pal Joey. But I initially heard many of the songs of the duo because of the album The Supremes Sing Rodgers & Hart, which I still own on vinyl.

Oklahoma! (1943)

I first saw the 1955 film starring Gordon MacRae (husband of Sheila, father of Meredith) and Shirley Jones (mother of Shaun Cassidy, stepmom of David Cassidy) probably in the 1980s. Subsequently, I’ve watched a stage version.

Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’ – Gordon MacRae. I thought this could have been anywhere in the Midwest; corn that tall was probably in Nebraska or Iowa. But whatever.

Kansas City – My wife and I have often cited the chorus. “They’ve gone as fur as they can go.” (I’m also inclined to say about some minor flaw, “It’s a scandal! It’s a outrage.”)

Oklahoma

Redux cast

Carousel (1945)

My mother had the soundtrack of the 1956 movie, again starring MacRae and Jones, which I have never seen, but I so remember the album cover. Only in the past decade have I watched a stage presentation.

If I Loved You– Robert Goulet. Kibbe pointed out that Hammerstein often used the indirect approach to love, going back to his period with Kern. It occurred to me that the Beatles also used this device (If I Fell, If I Needed Someone).

Soliloquy– Frank Sinatra. This is the first version I ever heard.

You’ll Never Walk Alone. I heard this covered a lot on variety shows.-

State Fair (1945 film)

This was a remake of a 1933 non-musical film. The musical was remade in 1962, and not well-received. I saw that version in the cinema around that time. The show finally reached Broadway in 1996.

Our State Fair, which I remember from the ’62 film

It Might As Well Be Spring– Julie Andrews. Kibbe used this, even as he mused why it appears on Andrews’ “Greatest Christmas Songs.”

Allegro (1947)

I’m not familiar with this.

Based on the book by Michener

South Pacific (1949)

I saw the 1958 movie version likely in the 1970s. In 2010, it was performed at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady; we were way up in the balcony, suboptimal for my enjoyment; here’s a newspaper review.

Some Enchanted Evening– Brian Stokes Mitchell (2013). IDK who Sam and Janet Evening are.

I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair– Kelli O’Hara (2008 New Broadway Cast Recording). Used in a series of Clairol commercials as “Wash That Gray Right Outta of My Hair”

You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught – James Taylor (2020). I always thought some of the versions of this song were too damn cheerful.

The King and I (1951)

As is often the case, I saw the movie, which came out in 1956, at some undetermined time as an adult. The musical I saw at Proctors in May 2018, and I remember liking it very much. Here’s a review.

Me and Juliet (1953)

I don’t know this show.

No Other Love – Perry Como, a #1 song the year I was born

Pipe Dream (1955)

Another show I don’t know.

Fairy tale

Cinderella (1957 television)

My introduction to this story was the 1965 TV version starring Lesley Ann Warren, which I loved, though Kibbe wasn’t a fan.

It wasn’t until far later that I even knew that there was an earlier iteration, this one starring Julie Andrews. Given the vagueries of counting television viewers in those days, it MAY have had more viewers than the final episode of MASH. We have since gotten it on DVD.

I also watched the 1997 TV version starring Brandy. The show finally made it to Broadway in 2013.

The Prince Is Giving A Ball – Robert Penn and ensemble (1957)

In My Own Little Corner -Lesley Ann Warren

Impossible/It’s Possible – Whitney Houston and Brandy

Flower Drum Song (1958)

I’d heard the title, but I’ve never seen the musical or the 1961 film.

Sound of Music (1959)

My mother owned the soundtrack to the 1965 movie, which I loved. Yet I never saw the film until the 2010s with my wife and daughter.

Morning Hymn/Alleluia – the nuns. I LOVE Morning Hymn

The Sound of Music – Julie Andrews. What an opening shot!

Climb Every Mountain – Audra McDonald at the Kennedy Center n January 2019. She performed it during the 2013 live television event.

Edelweiss (reprise)- Christopher Plummer, Julie Andrews, et al. “The great popularity of the song has led many of its audience to believe that it is an Austrian folk song… This was the final song of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical collaboration as well as the last song written by Oscar Hammerstein II, who died in August 1960.”VERY affecting.

My brain, ears, skin, innards

The Wordle word for Sunday, August 6, 2023 was POLYP

I was going to write a comprehensive report on my health. But it became complicated and lengthy, so I’ll break it up. Today, I’ll concentrate on my brain, ears, skin, and another part.

BRAIN: When I attended a Juneteenth event, one of the tabling organizations was doing research into the brain. Specifically, they were checking people for mental acuity and cognitive decline.

I went to their office a few weeks later and took paper and pencil tests. Also, they swabbed the inside of my cheeks. Two weeks later, I got the results. The apolipoprotein E (APOE) genes from my parents are 3,3. This means I have an average chance of developing Alzheimer’s. APOE 2,2 is the best, which only 8% of people have, and people with 4,4 are most at risk.

It’s too hard to explain, so read this article about tau. For me, this is fascinating stuff.

EARS: My wife complained that I did not hear well. I found this odd because I would be in a room during conversations and pick up information she missed.

Still, I went to the ENT place. I had wax buildup. I did not know some information: you shouldn’t use Q-Tips or the like in your ears, not so much because they’ll hurt the eardrum as much as they’ll help the wax to become impacted.

About an hour later, I had a hearing test. I am missing higher-pitched sounds in my left ear. I blame Pete Townshend! At some point, I’ll get some treatment.

Vitiligo

SKIN: Back in January, my dermatologist gave me a prescription for Ruxolitinib (Opzelura™), which is “the only medication approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to restore lost skin color in people who have vitiligo.”

Unfortunately, when I took it to the CVS, I was told it would cost me several hundred dollars. I’m still trying to negotiate this issue months later. It’s not just vanity. I’m more prone to skin cancer now than I was in the past.

Inside look

COLON: Both my wife and I had colonoscopies in the past two weeks. The last time I even MENTIONED having one, I was told it was TMI. I disagreed then and now. I’m a fan of regular testing with colon cancer on the rise, particularly among those under 50.

Initially, she was going to have hers eight days before mine, but for reasons, I ended up having mine five days before hers.

This time, the prep wasn’t a big deal for me. Pro tip: JELL-O and other gelatin products are considered liquid. On that day before the procedure, when you can’t eat anything, JELL-O is a superb approximation.

Another thing: when you mix seven capfuls of Miralax into 28 oz. of Gatorade, you will need a larger container for the mixture.

After my procedure, my wife said I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t smiling. She asked if I could make it up the stairs. Her questions made me grumpier. This passed.

But my right nostril itched, probably from the oxygen tube in there. As a result, I sneezed uncontrollably for three days. That was new.

I got a document from my doctor’s portal, which was incomprehensible. Then a day later, I received something in English. “The biopsies from the ulcer in your colon did not show any sign of cancer or malignancy, which is good news.” I need to make a follow-up appointment, but happy, happy, joy, joy.

I’ll do another report reasonably soon.

Unanswerable questions to my dad

flights of fancy

Les Green.tree sweater I want to ask my dad, Les Green, some things. Of course, they are unanswerable questions since he died 23 years ago today.

I want to know if he knew the name of his biological father, Raymond Cone? What, if anything, did he know about him? And how was it growing up without a father? He WAS living in the abode of his grandfather, Samuel Walker.

What was his relationship with McKinley Green, the person I knew pretty early on – from my mother, not my father – was not my biological grandfather? Mac, or Pop, married Agatha Walker in 1931, but they were estranged by 1936. Yet Mac adopted Dad in 1944, three weeks before Les turned 18.

Where did my father serve in the military at the end of World War II? I know he was in the European Theater of Operations, but I don’t know specifically where. Does his picture appear in the October 1946 issue of Ebony magazine, and if so, which pic? Is there any truth to those apocryphal tales of living in Belgium for a time?

Why was he seemingly at arm’s length from the Walker family, most of whom lived in Binghamton blocks from our house? I saw my mother’s cousins and aunt Charlotte, who lived in Queens, NYC more often than most of his local cousins, aunts, and uncles. Specifically, why did he have a poorly veiled disdain for Aunt Jessie, his mother’s sister?

Could we have asked?

There was a point in the few years before his death that my sister Leslie thought to ask him some of these questions, though other parts we learned well after he died.

I was never comfortable telling him that his wife and, occasionally, his mother-in-law were telling his children stories about him that he himself never managed to share with us.

Thus, the frustration. Maybe he had some papers we haven’t encountered in nearly a half-century. I’m not holding my breath.

I believe that our work on genealogy has partially been the thing that has rekindled these musings. Did he know what his grandfather Walker did for a living? Did he know Samuel Walker’s parents’ names? Might they have been enslaved people?

What was his relationship with his grandmother Walker, Mary Eugenia, who died in 1944, long before I was born?

I suppose the musing is an idle exercise. But on the 23rd anniversary of Les Green’s death, I’m allowing myself a bit of permission to indulge in these flights of fancy.

Lost items in the house

shoes

I find the fact that we have lost several items in the house, and despite serious effort, annoyingly weird.

Back in March during her college spring break, our daughter slept in my wife’s office for reasons described on May 26.

I took out the landline phone, including the base, from the office so that it would not disturb my daughter’s sleep. As I realized later, I didn’t really need to move the base; the receiver would do the trick. Still, I figure I’d keep them together in a pile at the top of the stairs. Later when I wanted to put the phone back, I found the receiver but not the base until late July; it was in my wife’s office, on the floor, under a table.

Incidentally, one of the reasons we still have a landline is so that I can find my phone in the house about twice a month, not counting when it falls between the sofa sections, which is always the first place to look.

We have a coffee tin, filled with brown sugar because we don’t drink coffee. The lid has been MIA for months, and the canister is and is now covered by a piece of aluminum foil.

Most mysterious, though, is a box of shoes that we can’t find. In anticipation of my annual hearts party in early March, I gathered all of the extra shoes and put them in box -or a bag? – and stored them… somewhere.

Stop looking

Not that it’s been a fruitless search. My high school yearbook, which my sister wanted to borrow before her October 2022 high school reunion, was on a shelf in my office that I hadn’t looked at before.

Also, I came across some things I wasn’t even looking for. A couple of rarely used credit cards that had fallen down below the computer reemerged.

The reason I’m writing this, though, is strategic. I’ve discovered that when I have stopped looking for things is the very time they inexplicably show up. My working theory is that if I write about it, I can let them go. Somehow, they’ll just show up. We’ll see if the plan works.

Movie review: Asteroid City

Wes Anderson

I liked the premise of the movie Asteroid City. The narrator (Bryan Cranston) tells the story, in black-and-white, of the world-famous fictional play. It’s partly about a grieving father (Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck) taking his tech-obsessed teenage son (Jake Ryan as Woodrow) to a science competition in the middle of nowhere. Woodrow’s three curious (in every sense of the word) younger sisters are also there.

Then Something Happens to upend everyone’s worldview.

The look of Asteroid City’s bland pastel color desert setting was very effective. But the film left me confounded. I understand that it evokes Area 51 paranoia, Sputnik fear, and the meta-stress of actors forgetting their lines.

Yet I didn’t care enough. Rex Reed wrote: “Like all Wes Anderson movies, it is enigmatic, artificial, infuriatingly self-indulgent, and irrevocably pointless.” Rex Reed is wrong.

I’ve been a big fan of the works of the writer/director. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), Moonrise Kingdom (2012), and Isle of Dogs (2018), even 2/3s of The French Dispatch (2021) I enjoyed.

Adam Graham of the Detroit News suggested: “It’s all very cute but not much else, as the story remains locked inside Anderson’s dollhouse and is inaccessible to all but his most ardent fans.” That’s possibly true.

Too much

The review that nailed it for me was by Prabhjot Bains of the Hollywood Handle. He wrote: “It feels like two different movies forcefully amalgamated into one incongruous whole, rendering its existential meditation on grief emotionally inert and hollow… It’s very much Anderson’s weakest entry to date.” That’s probably it.

There are a lot of concepts stuffed into the film, with scads of performers, many of whom have been in previous Anderson films, plus Tom Hanks, as the cranky grandfather, who I’d not seen in an Anderson film before.

Even the positive review by Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle notes: “Anderson’s lone indulgence is to cast famous faces in extremely minor roles… Jeff Goldblum has one line… Matt Dillon has a single small scene and spends the rest of the movie standing around. This is distracting, and Anderson certainly does it as another distancing device, reminding audiences that this is all artifice, that it’s only a movie. But… it’s hard not to see their casting as the director’s ego trip, his showing off how many big-name actors are willing to take any role in one of his movies.”

I so wanted to like this film, but alas, alas, it was more effort than enlightenment.