Ramblin' with Roger

1963: a musically liminal year

folk, doo-wop, and a Belgian nun

I’ve long thought that 1963 was a musically liminal year. The decade started slowly, then exploded in 1964 with the Beatles and the British Invasion, as well as big hits by the Supremes and other Motown artists.

1963 was the link between the sound of the 1950s, along with the decline or loss of that decade’s most prominent artists (Presley, Berry, Holly, et al.), and what was to come. Hits by Stevie Wonder and Steve Lawrence, along with songs in French and Japanese, topped the charts; an eclectic selection.

It was the year of the March on Washington and JFK’s assassination, both of which informed the vibe of the remainder of the decade.

Sugar Shack– Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, five weeks at #1, gold record

He’s So Fine – The Chiffons, four weeks at #1. Written by Ronald Mack, the evil Allen Klein got almost no compensation when George Harrison subconsciously lifted the tune for My Sweet Lord.

Dominique – The Singing Nun, four weeks at #1, which I wrote about here

Hey Paula – Paul and Paula, three weeks at #1, gold record

My Boyfriend’s Back – The Angels, three weeks at #1

Blue Velvet – Bobby Vinton, three weeks at #1

I Look Up as I Walk

Sukiyaki – Kyu Sakamoto, three weeks at #1, gold record. The song has nothing to do with food. “A Newsweek columnist compared this re-titling to issuing ‘Moon River‘ in Japan under the title ‘Beef Stew.'”

I Will Follow Him – Little Peggy March, three weeks at #1

Fingertips, Part 2 – Little Stevie Wonder, three weeks at #1

Walk Like A Man – The Four Seasons, three weeks at #1. BTW, my wife and I think Jersey Boys, about the group, is the best of the so-called jukebox musicals because it has the most substantial storyline

Go Away Little Girl – Steve Lawrence, two weeks at #1, a gold record. A Goffin/King song that went to #1 eight years later, performed by Donny Osmond.

I’m Leaving It Up To You – Dale & Grace, two weeks at #1

Surf City – Jan & Dean, two weeks at #1. When Brian Wilson gave the song to the duo, his dad Murry was irate

It’s My Party – Lesley Gore, two weeks at #1

Walk Right In – The Rooftop Singers, two weeks at #1, gold record

Easier Said Than Done – The Essex, two weeks at #1

If You Wanna Be Happy – Jimmy Soul, two weeks at #1

So Much in Love – The Tymes

Deep Purple – Nino Tempo & April Stevens. Not to be confused with a group of the same name.

Our Name Will Come – Ruby & the Romantics

My longest 4th of July

seeing the niece Rebecca Jade

In 2023, I experience my longest 4th of July. It started off with rain, not what we wanted for the Underground Railroad Education Center’s annual oration, Speaking Truth to Power. This was even more dire because the musicians Magpie, Terry Leonino and Greg Artzner, were bringing a whole bumch of their equipment (sound board, mics, et al).

When my wife got to the residence at 194 Livingston Avenue with one of two tarps, the forecast was that the rain would subside. Ultimately, it did. It’s a good thing my wife was there because she’s WAY more mechanically proficient than I.

This year, Paul and/or Mary Liz Stewart recruited me to be on the committee to work on the event for the first time. I had the fool notion of using some of the speeches from the the 1963 March on Washington, since it’s the 60th anniversary. This meant, of course, finding the addresses then whittling them down to reasonable lengths so Greg and Terry could figure out what songs to insert between them.

It wasn’t until just before the program began that I noticed that I was to introduce Magpie and their longtime collaborator Kim Harris. I also introduced about half of the speakers and gave an excerpt of Whitney Young’s speech.

Ultimately, though it ran a bit long, it was successful. (You can find the speech excerpts on this blog this coming August 28.) After having eatten 60 fewer hot dogs than Joey Chestnut, I helped Magpie break down their equipment. Now it is HOT! And humid!

I did sit in Greg and Terry’s car watching the equipment while talking to Kim Harris about her teaching theology and other topics.

By the time we got home, my wife and I were ready to take naps. It was not on the agenda.

Empire State Plaza

The plan for part two of the day was to drive down to our church, park in the church lot, then carry our lawn chairs down to the Empire State Plaza, a distance of little over two miles. My wife had purchased two new chairs and we borrowed one from the Stewarts.

We caught the swearing in ceremony of 27 new Americans from over 20 countries at 5 pm. It was pleasant, but we did worry that the participants would pass out. They were all dressed up. Our pastor, Glenn arrived just in time for that.

Did I mention that it was hot? If I didn’t, the energetic DJ let us know. As the sun started baking us, we retreated to the top of the external stairs abut the State Museum/Library.

A sibling duo named Jocelyn & Chris performed at 6pm. Our daughter arrived from work not much before we learned that my niece Rebecca Jade and the rest of Sheila E.’s entourage were leaving their hotel and heading to the plaza. Rebecca wasn’t supposed to be at the show, but one of Sheila’s singers had a family emergency.

Seeing the first niece

Soon, as Glenn watched our chairs, and Chuck Miller was setting up his cameras, my wife, my daughter, and I got to visit Rebecca backstage. We were introduced to some bandmates, the sound guy, and others. Sheila, who we had met in 2019, waved as she walked by.

Shortly afterward, there was an announcement from the stage that there was great threat of thunderstorms, and specifically lightning, coming. Everyone, including Glenn, my BIL Dan, and one of his daughters, joined the hundreds who went into the concourse beneath where we had been seated.

For a time, it was rather interesting to see people hanging out unexpectedly. Eventually, we got word that the Sheila E. show was not merely postponed but canceled and the fireworks wouldn’t take place until the next evening. Yet we weren’t supposed to leave because of the lightning threat.

Sudeenly, about a dozen teenaged girl got into a fracas. It took at least five state troopers to break it up. Rebecca had made it back to the restaurant at her hotel.

Rescue mission

My daughter and I decided to get the chairs, believing, erroneously, that the lightning had ended. The cops were trying to quell the sudden proliferation of firecrackers going off. As my daughter ran up the stairs, one officer asked if she were going up there to set off fireworks. “No! She getting our chairs that we left up there!”

But as she was going up the stairs, someone was carrying our chairs down via another path. My daughter yelled to the person. Finally, we discovered it was pastor Glenn, carrying FOUR chairs. He’s stronger than he looks.

By this time, the state troopers decided that their priority was to get all of those people OUT of the concourse. We walked back to the church parking lot, then in our two cars, drove down to the hotel where Rebecca was staying.

By this time, the restaurant was closed. But we went upstairs to a conference area and told tales for well over an hour about everything from her musical journey to genealogy. Rebecca had a 3:45 a.m. wakeup call so she can take a 5:30 flight back to California.

We got home shortly before midnight having done over 15,000 steps, which may not be much for you but, on a hot day, it was a LOT for me.

I did my Wordle (VENOM, in 4), then fell asleep in my chair, waking up at about 2:45 a.m, before going to bed. On July 5, I took two naps.

The front page of the local Times Union showed two event photos, at the plaza, and the Underground Railroad Education Center event. My wife and I were at both. BTW, she took a nap too.

Technical difficulties

RESULT_CODE_HUNG

For about two weeks, I was having severe technical difficulties with my laptop computer. I’d open my browser, usually Google Chrome, but it would inexplicably and unexpectly close. The same thing would happen on Microsoft Edge.

I either deleted or moved downloads from my hard drive. It did little good. I reinstalled Chrome; ditto. Alternatively, I could open one tab but it would spin until it indicated it couldn’t open the page.

Finally, I noticed the error message RESULT_CODE_HUNG. I searched and found this article.

Fix 1: Reload the Webpage – well, duh, tried that straight away.

Fix 2: Update your Browser. As it turns out, it is up to date, to my minor surprise. It’s probably one of those automatic things I once set up.

Fix 3: Clear Cache and Browsing Data. This I did. I probably don’t do so often enough. It didn’t help.

Fix 4: Disable Extensions. Say what? “The error code: RESULT_CODE_HUNG probably shows up because of a corrupted extension installed in your browser. On this occasion, you’d better disable all the extensions in your browser and then enable them one by one to find out the problematic extension. It may take a long time.” It didn’t, actually, because I did not have that many.

“First of all, you need to disable all the extension in your browser. After disabling all your browser extensions, restart your browser to see if the error has been removed. If you can open webpages normally, it indicates that the extensions caused the error. Now, you should enable one extension at a time and check if the RESULT_CODE_HUNG error appears again.”

I did this and it appeared to be rectified… for about three days. But the problem soon reemerged.

Correction 5 of 5

“However, if the error still exists after you disable all the extensions, you should go to the next solution.

Fix 5: Reset the Browser

“When there is something wrong with your browser, the error code: RESULT_CODE_HUNG may get into the way and prevent you from browsing web pages. To fix it, you can try to reset your browser settings to default.

“To reset your Google Chrome settings to default, you can follow this tutorial: How to Reset Google Chrome Browser Settings to Default.”

This made me anxious. But not using my laptop was making me more so. It worked!

However, it mucked up some, but not all of my passwords. And my Quordle, for which I played over 400 games, no longer knows who I am, and I have to start over.

For a time, I thought it had ALSO been the case with my Wordle after I had gotten 475 of 477 correct. However, once my computer knew I had a subscription to the New York Times, it “knew” me again. Oddly, I had started Wordle on the laptop before I got the NYT subscription.

Anyway, all of this technical changes backed me up. So if I’m behind in responding to your email, Facebook post, et al, that’s why.

And speaking of Facebook. I can access Messenger on my phone, which was synced to my laptop. While I can still use the phone, I can’t acess the same person on the laptop. Wait, if I go DIRECTLY to Messenger then go to a person’s bio, I can use the laptop too. Did I mention I both need and hate technology?

Movie review: It Ain’t Over

New York Yankees

I am recommending to you the documentary movie It Ain’t Over. It’s about the baseball catcher Lawrence Peter Berra, commonly known as Yogi Berra (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015). Interesting, it was my wife, not really a baseball fan who recommended us seeing it after viewing the trailer.

Early in the film, we see the announcement at the 2015 All-Star Game of the four “greatest living ballplayers”: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax, and Willie Mays. Watching it, Yogi’s granddaughter Lindsay asked Yogi if he were still alive. Yogi affirmed that he was.

The narrative was about a player who didn’t really “look” like a model athlete. He was short (5’7″) and stocky (185 lbs) and not at all conventionally good-looking. Some said, after he reached the majors, that he didn’t “look like a Yankee,” whatever that meant.

But he could hit. And after some intense tutoring, he became a good catcher. Most of all, he could win, ten World Series rings, more than Aaron, Bench, Koufax, and Mays combined.

As he was treated as a bit of the buffoon, he leaned into the image. It helped that he had those Yogisms. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up some place else.” It was only upon reflection that his sayings contained real truth. Also, he became an endearing pitchman for a variety of products.

Unfair

Still, he took baseball seriously. I remember well that after he managed the Yankees to the 1964 American League pennant before losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games, he was fired, and replaced by the Cards manager, Johnny Keane. I was 11, but I was outraged by this ill treatment. So I was happy when he won the National League pennant as manager of the crosstown Mets in 1973.

His firing by George Steinbrenner, only 16 games into his second of a two-year contract with the Yankees in 1985, and the fact that George sent an underling to do it kept Yogi out of his beloved Yankee Stadium for 14 years. When he came back, even though I KNEW what happened, it left tears in my eyes and my wife’s as well.

There were many great quotes by Yankee players from Al Downing to Mariano Rivera, big Yankee fan and friend Billy Crystal, sportswriter Roger Angell, broadcaster Bob Costas, the late baseball announcer Vin Scully, and Yogi’s neighbor growing up in the Italian section of St. Louis, the late Joe Garagiola.

But Yogi was much more than a beloved ballplayer. He was an unrecognized war hero. His loving marriage to Carmen Short lasted from 1949 until her death in 2014. They had three sons, including Dale, a Major Leaguer himself, and 11 grandchildren.

He became the inspiration for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Yogi Bear. Indeed, when Berra died, the AP accidentally reported the death of the animated ursine.

We saw the very positively reviewed It Ain’t Over at the Spectrum Theatre, on a Wednesday night in mid-June.

‘History has its eyes on us’

The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman

I was excited to hear Amanda Gorman deliver her inaugural poem‘The Hill We Climb’ on January 20, 2021. “History has its eyes on us,” indeed. You can read and hear it here.

How did she come to give this address? From the Library of Congress site on that notable day: She had performed an original poem, “In This Place (An American Lyric),” at U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith‘s 2017 inaugural ceremony… “It was this very performance that led First Lady Dr. Jill Biden to select Gorman as inaugural poet.

“Dr. Biden ‘stumbled upon’ a video of Amanda’s performance, which ultimately led to a Zoom call between Dr. Biden and Gorman in which the latter was asked to serve as inaugural poet. During the meeting, Dr. Biden complimented the yellow dress Gorman wore at Smith’s inaugural ceremony, which inspired her to wear a yellow dress at President Biden’s inauguration…”

“Educators have also been quick to seize on a unique opportunity to introduce poetry in a relatable way to their students. Lesson plans for ‘The Hill We Climb’ are already available through PBS and The New York Times.”

When a Florida school barred its use for younger children, it disappointed me, but Amanda Gorman felt “gutted.”

The poem “was challenged by the parent of two students at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes, along with several books.”

The poet wrote: “’Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.’

“Gorman, who at 17 became the country’s National Youth Poet Laureate, said she wrote the poem… so ‘all young people could see themselves in a historical moment,’ and that she’s received countless letters and videos from children who were inspired to write their own poems.”

What’s the issue?

I don’t know what parts of the poem were considered too sophisticated for younger kids. We Are Teachers made several points. The complaint “shows at best a concerning level of reading comprehension, at worst an acceptance of casual racism.” Oprah Winfrey wrote the foreward, not the book.

Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed

a nation that isn’t broken

but simply unfinished

Kids are a lot smarter than some grownups understand. Maybe it’s:

We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,

we must first put our differences aside

We lay down our arms

so we can reach out our arms

to one another

How bad can the words be to a generation of kids growing up with active-shooter drills in school?

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs

of such a terrifying hour

but within it we found the power

to author a new chapter

To offer hope and laughter to ourselves

So while once we asked,

how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?

Now we assert

How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was

but move to what shall be

A country that is bruised but whole,

benevolent but bold,

fierce and free

We will not be turned around

or interrupted by intimidation

because we know our inaction and inertia

will be the inheritance of the next generation

Our blunders become their burdens

But one thing is certain:

If we merge mercy with might,

and might with right,

then love becomes our legacy

Love is what we need