birthday Archives - Page 3 of 50 - Ramblin' with Roger

Musician Joe Jackson is 70 (11 Aug)

“You gotta have no illusions.”

Musician Joe Jackson was considered one of those “angry young men” in the pop scene that straddled the 1970s and 1980s. I first heard his music on WQBK-FM, Q 104 in the Albany area, a station I listened to constantly for about a decade.

I bought several of his earlier albums on vinyl and a few of the latter ones on CD. Here are some of his songs.

Down To London, from Blaze Of Glory, 1989. My friend Rocco and I saw him perform at the Palace Theatre in Albany in 1989. After sharing maybe one or two earlier songs, he announced that he would play the album’s first six songs. He threw in a few familiar songs and then launched into the last six songs of the album. Much of the audience just walked out of the auditorium. They didn’t leave the building but went to the concession stand or whatnot. Many didn’t return until he started playing songs they recognized. It’s a good album, which I purchased, but the performance ticked off the audience unnecessarily.

Captain Of Industry (Overture), from the Tucker soundtrack, 1988

A Slow Song, originally from Night and Day, 1982 – I had a buddy named Mary Margaret who loved this song. She particularly liked the live version from the 1980/86 album, which came out in 1988.

I’m The Man, from I’m The Man, 1979 – a frenetic song about a guy willing to sell you anything. I love the way he sings “yo-yo.”

One More Time, from Look Sharp!, 1979, has a running bass line that I love.

Sunday Papers, from Look Sharp! , 1979 speaks to the sensationalist media, which needs to get the story first, even if it’s wrong. I like that reggae beat.

Nineteen Forever, from Blaze Of Glory, 1989

A couple of title songs

Look Sharp, from Look Sharp!, 1979- “You gotta have no illusions. Just keep going your way, looking over your shoulder.”

Beat Crazy, from Beat Crazy, 1980 – I love the contrast between the Graham Maby melodic line and Jackson’s harder response.

Jumpin’ Jive, from Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, 1981 – “on the Jersey side.” This is a Cab Calloway song. I loved this album and bought a copy for my mother for her birthday or Christmas one year, thinking she would enjoy it, with songs by Louis Jordan and others. She did not. It was one of those”fail” presents.

Stepping Out, from Night and Day, 1982 – a wonderful anticipatory song

Is She Really Going Out With Him, from Look Sharp!, 1979. This song appears thrice on his 1988 album Live 1980/86. One version was an a cappella dop wop.

Cancer, from Night and Day, 1982. Such a cheerful, danceable song

You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want), from Body and Soul, 1984 – a Latin feel and a great slap bass

Fools In Love, from Look Sharp!, 1979. “Are there any creatures more pathetic?” I definitely could relate!

Joe Jackson turns 70 on August 11.

My wife’s best anniversary present

Working hard for the money

Our 25th wedding anniversary was two months ago, this very day. Here’s my wife’s best anniversary present to me.

I asked her when she wanted to go out to dinner at Yono’s that week. We hadn’t gone out to that elegant four-star restaurant in about 15 years, probably on or around our 10th wedding anniversary. We knew it was time to try it again.

So I asked my wife when she wanted to go out. Wednesday, which was our actual anniversary? No, she couldn’t because she had a work meeting. Tuesday? No, she had another meeting. Thursday, not only did I have choir rehearsal, but she also had yet another meeting.

OK, I guess we could go on the weekend, although I hate going out when everybody else is likely doing the same. Then she said, “Well, you know what? We could go out on Wednesday because it’s our anniversary!” I thought this was extraordinary, given the busyness of her life. So she DIDN’T go to a work meeting, which was astonishing.

We had a lovely time. There was great, attentive service and excellent food. Our conversation with one of the service, newly in Albany, was quite interesting.

“Retirement” job

My wife’s “retirement” job is obviously very time-consuming. The other thing that my wife did, presumably for herself, is that she took off eight weeks during the summer. It is so she can catch up on various tasks, including household chores, gardening, and whatnot.

We also have to do exciting things like talk to our TIAA-CREF agent because our old one got kicked upstairs and we need to meet the new one. They’re probably a nice person, but this is real My Eyes Glaze Over kind of stuff, though probably necessary.

I will tell you the truth: her taking time off from work is also a vacation for me. When she was working I often got volunteered, or, to be fair, volunteered myself to help her with her tabling at various events or to set up for event such as the end-of-year volunteers’ dinner.

Also, we’re going to go away a couple of times during the summer, which we can do because our lovely daughter is home taking care of the feline. That’s a good thing.

Happy birthday to my dear wife.

Watching people work

Fargo?

Here’s another day in the life post: Tuesday, March 26. For some reason, many of these are on Tuesdays. Reflecting on it, I spent a lot of time watching people work. The ones I watched for the longest time were the half-dozen people taking down that tree across the street from my house, especially looking out my middle bay window. It was better than television.

The process involved a guy in the cherry picker trimming the branches of two trees and tethering the damaged section with rope so it would not fall too quickly. The guys below were putting the small branches in the wood chipper – wood chippers always remind me of the movie Fargo. The chips flew into the back of a truck like the one pictured. A guy was running a tractor-like vehicle that carried logs to the chipper. One fellow was carefully controlling passing traffic in both directions.

It fascinated me because I would have had no idea how to take down the tree without potentially damaging a house or car. And the tree is gone; there aren’t even signs of the roots. I love Men At Work.

Library

I helped facilitate the interview of author Ian Ross Singleton by educator Geri Walsh concerning his book The Two Differences, which is a lot about Detroit but especially Odessa, Ukraine.

They had invited the Ukraine Solidarity Capital District to table at the event. The group stands for the country’s “independence and territorial integrity.”

Kudos to reference librarian Susan, the new liaison with the FFAPL for Tuesday book reviews and author talks. Oddly, we went to library school simultaneously but only realized this a few months ago.

I saw the interim branch manager, Deanna, at the circulation desk. Librarians do it all.

Indian food

I agreed to order takeout from our nearby Indian restaurant. I usually order takeout to pick up around 5:30, and it’s relatively efficient. Because of my wife’s work schedule, I arranged for a slightly later slot. I called at 6 p.m. and was told it would take about 25 minutes.

When I arrived at the restaurant at 6:25, I was asked to sit at a table. People arriving after I got there were told the same thing. There was some confusion; the guy at the register was not a native speaker, I gathered, and it became incumbent for me to explain to them that we were all in the same situation.

However, an increasingly impatient couple was there before I was. He said repeatedly, “How long will this take?” with an increasing edge in his voice. She counted up: “It’s been 35 minutes!” “It’s been 40 minutes!”

When the next order came out, the guy at the register asked them, “Is this your order? Aloo gobi, chicken tikka masala, and lamb saag?” Er, no, that was mine, which made them more disgusted. I wondered, in retrospect, if they were walk-ins. I understood their frustration, but their attitude made me uncomfortable.

Still, the usual manager or owner might have diffused the situation with free mango lassis or another strategy.

And finally

Our daughter complained online that her parents hadn’t gotten her anything for her birthday. “I didn’t know what you wanted.” “I made a list online on Saturday!” That would have been useful to have known.

So, some mail-order workers will get some items to our daughter soon.

Lydster: something substantial

clarinet

My daughter has commanded that I write something substantial about her for her significant birthday. But it’s TWO hard! How can I encapsulate her TWO decades in one post? I know – I’ll write TWO posts over TWO months! My blog, my rules.

Let’s start before the beginning. My wife had asked, more than once, if I was ready to have a child. My response, of course, was: how the heck do I know? I had said I was amenable to trying, but when you’re five decades old, you don’t know if it would happen.

Then it did. My wife and I remember when we first knew she was pregnant, but no one else, save for folks in the doctor’s office, did. We were returning from a small party when we saw our friend Fred. He was out with his one-week-old named Carol. Indeed, Fred has mentioned this encounter in the past year, so it was significant to him, too, especially after he heard about our secret.

We developed a birth plan, and when we realized the ob/gyn was not on board, my wife changed doctors at eight months pregnant, which I thought was great. Scary, but bold.

Eureka!

The child was born. She didn’t sleep well for a few days, so neither did we. But things got better eventually. Someone had told us that the way one gets a child to sleep is to drive them around. This was SO not the case for her! On trips to see her maternal grandparents in Oneonta, NY, she’d cry -OK, wail – for ten minutes before falling asleep for an hour. She’d wake up and start wailing again UNLESS her father got into the back seat with her and sang to her constantly: e.g., OldMcDonaldHadAFarmEIEIOAndOnThatFarm… This generally worked.

My workmates had gotten us a red carriage, and I loved to ride her around the neighborhood. The school district has razed the 99-year-old School 19 and then built Pine Hills Elementary School on the same site. I appreciated that they built a new structure just for my daughter, or so I chose to believe.

After my wife returned to work, she dropped our daughter off at a private daycare for the first year. It was during that time that I SHOULD have been recording all of her milestones: when she started to crawl then walk – the former was earlier than the norm, the latter, slightly later. She crawled up the stairs, much to the horror of her mother.

As a result of NOT tracking her progress in the book, I’ve been writing about her EVERY month on the 26th since May 2005. I might have written about her on other days, but this is at least the 227th piece. Now, I could wade through this blog and pick out highlights in her life. But, with few exceptions, I will wing it instead.

Daycare

Around that time, I took her to Mercy Cares for Kids, right on the bus line. We were happy about the diverse population of the children. I loved dropping her off, and it was our little time together. Then I’d take another bus to work.

Only one time that she got there but refused to stay, and it was a morning that, for some reason, we got there about a half hour late. She did NOT like to go in when all of the other kids were already there. So I brought her home and took off the day from work. Even then, she had rules.

When she started school, she attended Watervliet Elementary for kindergarten since her mother taught there. Then, she went to Pine Hills Elementary for grades 1-6. She met her bestie, Kay, there.

Her sense of fashion was evident early on. After she outgrew the hand-me-downs my wife’s friend Alison gave us, my daughter largely specified her wardrobe. Early on, it was pink and purple, but she quickly developed her own style. She also started taking care of her hair, in part because her parents were fairly hapless. Eventually, she also got into makeup. Her process is tied to her sense of art, which is very strong.

Popular culture

We watched a lot of television together, such as Little Bear and Franklin. Wonder Pets was a favorite; her mom was Linny, the guinea pig, I was Turtle Tuck, and she was Ming-Ming Duckling. Later, she watched some Disney shows, some of which were not awful.

The first compact disc I bought her was the Beatles #1s. When we saw Paul McCartney in 2014, she knew most of the band’s songs but was less versed in solo Macca and Wings. I also tried to let her know about 1960s and 1970s Motown. Ultimately, she found her taste, listening to Pentatonix, then BTS, but ultimately 1990’s soul, especially Blaque. She owns a 3-LP set of

My daughter was involved in various ballet, soccer, and other activities. It’s all a learning process, and we never prodded her to continue. She WAS pretty good at the clarinet, though, and we still have the instrument in case she ever wants to return to it.

That’s enough for this month, except to wish her a wonderful birthday!

Ron Howard Is 70

From Mayberry To The Moon

I have been watching Ron Howard since I was seven when he played Opie Taylor (1960-1968) on The Andy Griffith Show. Sheriff Andy Taylor seemed like a pretty cool dad. Andy’s show was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show, and Opie appeared in that backdoor pilot.

Maybe I saw him earlier than that. Ron had a small part in the Walking Distance episode of The Twilight Zone (1959) inspired by Recreation Park in Binghamton, NY.

He appeared as a guest star in various programs I watched, including Dr. Kildare, I Spy, and The Fugitive. You likely do not remember The Smith Family (1971-1972) series, even though it starred Henry Fonda. Ron Howard was in 39 episodes of that, and I watched.

In 1973, Ron starred in the movie American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas, the springboard for several actors. I still recall his appearance in MASH the same year, which was a strong performance.

Of course, he starred in Happy Days (1974-1984). I watched it until shortly after Fonzie jumped the shark.

One performance I missed until I saw it on television in the 21st century was in his role of Winthrop Paroo, the younger brother of Marion (Shirley Jones), in the 1962 movie The Music Man. Here’s the Wells Fargo Wagon.

Director

In the late 1970s, he started stepping away from in front of the camera. These are movies he’s directed that I’ve seen, all in the cinema: Night Shift (1982), Splash (1983), Cocoon (1985), and Apollo 13 (1995). I’ve greatly admired Apollo 13, for which one feels real tension, even though one knows how the real story ended.

Ron also directed and produced these films I saw: Parenthood (1989), Cinderella Man (2005), Frost/Nixon (2008), and A Beautiful Mind (2001), for which he won two Academy Awards.

He was the executive producer of TV shows such as Sports Night (1998-2000), Parenthood (1990-1991, 2010-2015), and Arrested Development (2003-2019), serving as the announcer for the latter.

Ron has been married to Cheryl Allen since 1975. They have four children, including actor Bryce Dallas Howard. Ron has a brother, Clint Howard, who I’ve also seen perform since his debut on The Andy Griffith Show at age 2.

Beverly Gray wrote a 2003 bio, Ron Howard: From Mayberry to the Moon…and Beyond, which I have not read, but it’s a great title. It feels as though Ronny Howard, or Ron Howard, has been in my life forever on television and movie screens.