My wife: adjusting to retirement

theater

CarolMy wife has started adjusting to retirement. She said that on her first day off, she would turn off the alarm clock; she did, and I was pleased. And she would do her Wordle earlier in the day, which usually happens.

There’s a bit of an adjustment for both of us, especially in the morning. When she went to work or church, she’d take a shower early, and I would go downstairs to do the attestation of my blood pressure and pulse. But she tends to watch a morning news show, which is contrary to the calm I seek when taking the readings. As a compromise, we’ve recorded programs to watch 15 minutes later, which allows zapping through the commercials.

She has a different process for her day. I like to read my emails, post that day’s blog on Facebook, et al. She likes to do chores early. Left to my own devices, I’d write a blog post, or at least a draft, then have breakfast, exercise, and write some more. Emptying the dishwasher I could do after lunch. So when SHE empties the dishwasher, I feel an imbalance in The Force. This is an example of how we will eventually Figure Stuff Out.

Busy, busy!

Since our daughter graduated from high school, we’ve been busy. We’ve gone to the theater thrice on successive Wednesdays,  and are scheduled for at least twice more this summer.

The first show was A Chorus Line, a show I’ve watched the commercials for since the mid-1970s but haven’t seen since the actual production until now.  A great review in Nippertown hits on the expanded physical stage at the Mac-Hadyn Theater in Chatham, NY since we were last there in 2019.  The next show was Ain’t Misbehavin’ at the Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, MA. It was reviewed here. Then Urinetown at Mac-Haydn noted here.  

My wife and I have attended two family reunions, both sides of her family. Getting our daughter ready for college is important and occasionally tedious. Plus the usual stuff.

I said at the point I retired three years ago, I was too busy to work. My wife seems to figure this out early on in the process. I just hope she doesn’t think she has to complete all of her ever-expanding to Do list by the end of August because it just won’t happen.

Oh, it’s my wife’s birthday today!

My favorite Beatles McCartney songs

“I didn’t know what I would find there”

Paul McCartney.May27Dublin0031
from PaulMcCartney.com

I linked to my favorite post-Beatles Paul McCartney songs on his 70th birthday. So I reckon I ought to post my favorite Beatles McCartney songs on his 80th birthday. When he hits 90, I don’t know WHAT I’ll do.

The list is roughly #11 to #1. Well, except for one thing. Also, comments are based on recollection because that’s what Beatles music is for me.

Helter Skelter – white album. The Who and other bands were considered loud, and this was a response. Paul usually plays this on tour in the latter third of his shows.

Get Back– A-side of a single; Hey Jude(album (US). A joyous song, whichever rendition.

I’m Down – B-side of Help! single, which only made it to #101 on the US pop charts. Yes, it’s surely McCartney’s remake of Long Tall Sally. The ABC-TV broadcast of the live performance at Shea Stadium in 1965 hooked me.

Getting Better – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I am fascinated by the STRUCTURE of this song. It’s verse and chorus, but the chorus gets increasingly longer each time out. I thought it was incredibly clever writing.

Back in the USSR – white album. The first song on the album with fun lyrics and Beach Boys harmonies

Lady Madonna – A-side of a single; Hey Jude album (US). Initially, I wasn’t positive this last Capitol single even was the Beatles.

Revolver and Rubber Soul rule

Eleanor Rigby – Revolver. A moving McCartney story song. But even without the lyrics, it’s a beautiful song, as the Anthology version shows.

For No One – Revolver. Simple yet devastating. Vocal, then horn solo, then vocal and horn. Stunningly effective.

You Won’t See Me – Rubber Soul. It is the Mal Evans sustained chord on the Hammond organ throughout the last verse, last chorus, and outro that gives this song a special buzz. At the same time, I have related to the notion of feeling invisible. On the US version of the album, this is followed by Think for Yourself (Harrison) and The Word (Lennon), and they go well together.

Drive My Car – Rubber Soul (UK), Yesterday and Today (US). Extraordinary chord structure. I’ve noted before that it was John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful, saying in a magazine that this was on Rubber Soul, which eventually led me to realize that the UK and US albums were not alike, even when they had the same name.

Got To Get You Into My Life – Revolver. When I was home alone, as the song got to the final chorus, I started slowly increasing the volume. The horns were so resplendent to my ears and down my spinal column that Ie practically wept for joy. Then it led into Tomorrow Never Knows, possibly my favorite pairing on any album.

One more thing, though. There are some great songs in the medley on Abbey Road. I’m particularly fond of Golden Slumbers. Happy 80th, Macca.

Coverville 1404: Paul McCartney Cover Story IV

Judy Garland would have been 100

“Forget your troubles, c’mon get happy”

Since Judy Garland was about to turn 100, I decided to see The Wizard Of Oz at Albany’s Spectrum Theatre in early April, and my wife accompanied me. We had never seen the film in a cinema before. There were only the two Tuesday showings, at 4 and 7 pm, so I figured it would be packed; there were less than ten of us there at the latter.

My wife said more than once afterward, “She could really act,” and I concurred. Her performance was vivid on the big screen. Of course, I had seen the movie on CBS-TV annually for several years in the 1960s, though only the last two times on a color TV. I had missed the “horse of a different color” joke.

My, those ruby slippers really sparkled when she ran. I did not know that one of the iconic dresses was missing until 2021. Nor was I aware that there was a black and white dress for the Kansas scenes and a blue and white dress for Oz. Movie magic. 

It was strange, though. In the same timeframe that I’m watching the teenage Judy, I’d also see her on her eponymous show (1963-1964) or guesting on Ed Sullivan or another program. Also, I’m sure I watched the television special Judy and Liza at the Palladium (1964). Liza, of course, was her daughter Liza Minelli, about 18 at the time. (Liza’s 1972 movie Cabaret was shown at the Spectrum the week after The Wizard of Oz.)

Only two score and seven

I never paid much attention to the tabloids at the time, so I was very surprised when Judy Garland died in 1969 at the age of 47. I’ve viewed documentaries about her life since, though I never saw Judy, the 2019 biopic with Renée Zellweger.

One last thought. When I was in the play Boys In The Band in 1975, there was a specific cue for the lead character Michael to be playing the Judy Garland track Get Happy. So that song has had a soft spot in my heart ever since.

Here’s a clip of early films from when Frances Gumm was seven until Judy Garland turned 17.
Waltz With A Swing/ Americana -Every Sunday, 1936
Zing! Went The Strings Of My Heart  -Listen, Darling,  1938

Somewhere Over the Rainbow – The Wizard of Oz,  1939; plus a discussion of the isolated vocal 
Our Love Affair,  with Mickey Rooney
The Trolley Song – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944
Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas – Meet Me In St. Louis, 1944

Get Happy – Summer Stock,  1950
Happy Days Are Here Again/Get Happy , with Barbra Streisand, 1963?
The Judy Garland Show with Peggy Lee and Jack Carter (November 1963)
By Myself, 1964

She was accidentally slapped at the 1954 Oscars

Judy Garland would have been 100 today.

Marcia is in North Carolina

first song, third side of the white album

Front to back: Marcia, Leslie, Roger

There’s something fundamental that changes in the family dynamic when the parents have both died. So even though I’m in upstate New York, Leslie is in California, and Marcia is in North Carolina, we have managed to keep in touch over the past 11 years, possibly better than before the parents passed.

Leslie, I have seen her a few times, mostly because she’s traveled to upstate New York, for her high school reunion, for one. Then I went to San Diego when she had her bicycle accident in 2018.

Marcia, I haven’t seen her since my mother died in February 2011. Well, that is not ENTIRELY true. I have seen her on ZOOM probably 100 times since the pandemic began. Indeed, as I’m sure I mentioned before, she was really trying to get our sister and me to hold a regular meeting on Skype. But I found the platform wonky and unreliable and non-instinctive when we tried it seven or eight years ago.

I’m not sure that Zoom is more instinctive, but I’ve used it SO often that I’ve become mildly competent with its use. Zoom is more reliable now than Skype was then, which, of course, is not a fair comparison.

Still, I haven’t gone south, and she currently cannot travel much at all. So one of these days, I’ll have to sojourn down there. If I travel alone, that would probably mean the train, because I so loathe flying. To be clear, I’m not AFRAID of flying. I just hate the feeling of being in an airborne bus. The last time I went to Charlotte, it was by train.

Since my wife is retiring, maybe we could drive down, assuming we can find a suitable cat sitter for our flaky felines

Natal day

Oh, yeah, I should mention that today is Marcia’s birthday. She’s HOW old? Well, she’s younger than I, younger than Leslie. I’m trying, but failing, not to refer to her as my baby sister. She hasn’t been a baby in.. a while.

It’s weird not seeing people that you’ve known for years that you haven’t interacted with in person. One gets a little of that at high school reunions. Heck, COVID restrictions had that effect to some degree.

It’s different, though, with a sibling. They are, statistically speaking, the people one is likely to know for the longest continual amount of time. So sometime before her NEXT birthday, I’ll have to see Marcia face to face again.

Christine Baranski of Buffalo turns 70

Diane Lockhart

Christine Baranski
From IMBD.com

I’ve enjoyed the performances of Christine Baranski for many years. She was the best thing in the sitcom Cybill (1995-1998) as the sophisticated Maryann Thorpe. But I, and most people, know her as the smart and calculating Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife and its successor series, The Good Fight.

In a CBS Sunday Morning interview from January 2022, “Correspondent Mo Rocca asked Baranski, ‘Why do you think so often you’ve been cast as intellectual, sophisticated, high-status characters?’

“‘Because I’m sophisticated and intellectual!’ she laughed. ‘I don’t know! It makes me laugh, because when… people really look up… Buffalo and the Buffalo Bills, and where I come from?’

“Yes, Baranski is a proud Buffalonian, the daughter of Virginia and Lucien Baranski, who grew up steeped in her family’s Polish culture.”

That’s it. Even when she’s the snarky friend in Mamma Mia or the haughty reporter in Chicago – “Understandable! Understandable!” – she has that upstate New York rootedness. Her father died when she was eight. She attended Catholic school for 12 years, including an all-girls high school.

Mame

In Town and Country, she described sharing a room with her grandmother, “who had been an actress in the Polish theater. ‘I grew up with an Auntie Mame kind of personality. She was vivacious,’” and she passed on a love of the stage to her granddaughter…

“‘By the time I was 17 or 18, I was acting in not only plays in high school, but I got into this workshop and was doing street theater and performing with kids from all over the city. I was from a very insular kind of life. And suddenly, I was performing with Black kids and Jewish kids and it blew my world wide open.’

“Around that time, she read about the Juilliard School, and pinned the article to her wall, thinking: ‘This is where I want to go.'” But as she noted in the New Yorker, she was initially waitlisted. “I had my teeth capped and would do a series of syllable and ‘S’ exercises. Then I returned to New York for an audition and did nothing but pages of ‘S’ words, and they let me in. So I would say I got in by the skin of my teeth.”

More upper-crust

Nathan Lane spoke of his “the Birdcage” co-star, “She is a consummate actress and professional and a great deal of fun.” He only regrets that they didn’t have more scenes together in their new project The Gilded Age. Christine once again plays that upper-crust role, the moneyed Agnes Van Rhijn.

I think she is quite centered, not just because of her background. Probably it’s because she was a working stage performer before her television career started in her forties. Though she had been encouraged early on to change her name to something less ethnic, she never did.

Christine Baranski turns 70 on May 2.

Ramblin' with Roger
Social media & sharing icons powered by UltimatelySocial