Lydia Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

New Edition Way tour: Boston

Boyz II Men, Toni Braxton

When my wife and I went to Chautauqua in 2023, we saw a lot of performances. The one my daughter was sad not to see was Boyz II Men.

So when she saw that New Edition was going on tour in 2026 with Boyz II Men and Toni Braxton, she wanted to go to the show, either in Boston on February 15 or in New York City on March 14th. We opted for the earlier performance.

The logistics: I would take a Peter Pan bus from Albany to Springfield. Apparently, I hadn’t taken the bus in a very long time. The Greyhound station was all but empty; I had to go to the Trailways “station,” which consisted of a couple of trailers not too far away. But it was only five bucks.

The route involved passing by the frozen Hudson River to I-90, then taking an exit that would eventually get us to Route 20, one of the great routes in America, which runs by the New Lebanon Speedway and the Hancock Shaker Village before we got to Pittsfield. Then to the Lee Premium Outlets, where no one got off or on, then back to I-90, eventually to Springfield.

The Daughter picked me up, and she drove to Woburn, where we stayed at a hotel. In due course, she drove us to the MBTA Orange line, and we traveled to North Station and walked five minutes to the TD Garden (formerly the Boston Garden).

Stand around and wait

It was 6:30 for a 7 pm show, yet no one was allowed in. Eventually, we all got in. My daughter and I didn’t get to our seats until 7:15, but a DJ was playing music to distract us. The seats in the balcony were very narrow, with insufficient legroom. I got to check out the banners on the ceiling from the great days of the Celtics and other teams.

Finally, the show starts at 7:50 with the three acts performing a new song We Going Out Tonight. Then each artist in turn, including various iterations of New Edition. The group was particularly thrilled to be performing in the city because, in August 2025, the city honored their native sons by renaming Dearborn Street in Roxbury “New Edition Way.”

I must admit that I wasn’t very versed in New Edition, which formed as teenagers in 1978. When I heard their early hits, which they sang late in the show, and I recognized them, I had written them off as Jackson Five wannabes. Certainly, I couldn’t keep track of their various combinations, such as Bell Biv DeVoe and their solo careers, with one exception.

Roni

I own Bobby Brown’s Don’t Be Cruel album; he sang the three hits at various times. New Edition, the Boston Globe noted, “had the sort of camaraderie that comes from years spent together and apart, with Brown’s bandmates backing up on his solo smashes like ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ and everyone providing vocal and choreographic assists on other cuts.” This was the real magic of the evening.

Toni Braxton put out two albums, and I liked a couple of her songs, notably Un-Break My Heart and Breathe Again, but a lot of the other ones seem pretty generic to my ears, and maybe that’s just me. I enjoyed Boyz II Men’s pieces best, but I knew them best, and New Edition shared the stage with their proteges quite a bit.

All told, it was a satisfactory experience. The Boston Globe’s review concluded this way: “The show ended with a rafter-shaking take on ‘Poison,’ the acid-tongued debut single from Bell Biv DeVoe that’s become a new jack swing cornerstone since its release in 1990. The tune was punctuated by green and white confetti — a celebration of New Edition’s place in Boston, and the way they changed American pop music for the better.”

After the three-hour show, we got back to our hotel around midnight, having had a nice experience with the daughter.

Lydster: fixing up the house

Washington County, 2:30 a.m.

Much to our astonishment, our daughter decided to start fixing up the house. One notorious area involved the second-floor landing. There was a whole bunch of miscellaneous crap, and iterations of it have been there for years.

My wife and I decided someday we ought to do something about it. Well, our daughter decided that “someday” had arrived in January. But she wasn’t going to do it alone. While my wife was at a work training event on a Saturday, my daughter and I went through everything, item by item, and sorted, shredded, and tossed.

Within about an hour, we got it down to one big container, which turned out to be her books and other childhood items. It was so heavy that even she couldn’t carry it up the stairs – and she is quite strong. So she got three boxes, separated the items, and we carried them up to the attic.

There’s a space that was designated for her stuff. Of course, we had to rearrange the attic well enough to GET to the space. The Christmas stuff had not been put away from Christmas 2024, so we had to tackle those items first.

The landing is not empty, though. It has a basket full of reusable bags I utilize for trash, a small bookcase for my oversized books, the vacuum cleaner, and a spot for Stormy to hang out. But it’s tidy.

My office

I had started cleaning my office in September, and, actually, it was a whole lot better than it had been, but not up to her standards. We spent an extraordinary amount of time sorting things into various bins. I was exhausted by the end of it, but not only did it look a whole lot better, but I also found things that I had been missing.

Moreover, she decided to hang the pictures that had been sitting in our living room downstairs. There was a stack of framed items against the wall near the television. It was really boring to see them because they’d been there seemingly forever.

A couple items we got for our wedding 26 years ago. Back in 2012, my wife said we should paint the living room walls, then put up some pictures. The painting happened, but the pictures never got put up then.

The daughter decided to rectify this, and not just in the living room, but also in the hallways, and notably in my office. One of them was a picture I bought: Chuck Miller’s 2020 photograph, Washington County, 2:30 a.m., still in its packaging. It’s up with my Lennon photo c. 1972, and a Beach Boys photo that I received when I retired in 2019.

The painting, The Bookworm, I got from my late father-in-law’s belongings. I didn’t realize the joy of having stuff on my walls.

Lydster: home for the holidays

“That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do.”

This past year, I particularly enjoyed the Daughter being home for the holiday. I attribute this to two primary factors. One was that she was away for an extended period last year, from early February to mid-June, while studying at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

The other is that, in part because she had gone abroad, she had a different perspective. For instance, we were having a conversation about genericization, as one does. She noted that in South Africa, when one refers to toothpaste, they usually say Colgate. It’s like Americans say “Kleenex” for tissue paper, “Band-Aid” for bandages, or “Xerox” for a copier.

Famous quote

For some reason, my daughter said, “That’ll do, Pig. That’ll do.” I assumed she was referring to the 1995 movie Babe, spoken by taciturn farmer Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) after the title porcine does what it does.

But no! She was referring to dialogue in the animated series Gravity Falls (2012-2016) by Dipper (Jason Ritter) after the pig Waddles saves him from embarrassment.

Television/video

The Daughter has been a big fan of Crash Course, a YouTube series hosted by Hank and John Green. I recall she used several videos about the French Revolution when she was in high school. But she also checked out videos about geology.

She turned me onto Big History, which is “the history of everything. We’re going to start with the Big Bang, take you right through all of history (recorded and otherwise).”

On her own, she tends to watch some television which she knows I think are trash. And she doesn’t disagree, but she finds them sociologically interesting.

This fall, I was watching long enough that she asked me to guess the title. “TikTok Moms?” Based on the show’s history, it was not a bad guess. It was actually the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. This got my wife to watch it briefly because two of the Wives were on Dancing With The Stars this season, which she watches devotedly.

Cooking

There is a lot more food in our refrigerator when the Daughter is home. Part of it has to do with her being a pescatarian, which means she makes her own meals a lot.

The other is that she likes to bake, usually with her good friend Kay. She wasn’t always great at cleaning up, as the cutting board above shows.

It was nice to have her home.

Lydster: unsent photo

Ho, ho, ho!

Here’s the story of the unsent photo.

I’ve stated many times that one of the primary reasons I started blogging was because I was terrible at keeping track of my daughter’s first couple of years in that baby book that almost every parent is gifted, including us. You know, the date of the first step, the first tooth. I do recall that she began cruising before she reached eight months; that was a term I had never heard before becoming a parent.

My wife and I were also awful at sending out Christmas cards. But we figured: Hey, we have a new baby! Surely, this will be the opportunity to send out cards with the information about our addition to the family.

Moreover, they were taking pictures at my house of worship for the church directory. This was the perfect time to take advantage of this confluence.

Seasonal failure

And yet… and yet, somehow we never really sent this photo and card, probably taken in October or November of her first year, out for Christmas, even though the cards were printed in plenty of time. So basically, we sucked at sending out Christmas cards even when we should have been highly motivated. A few family members MAY have gotten the picture, although I am not at all certain.

In fact, we sent out Christmas cards in either 2022 or 2023, quite possibly for the first time as a family, and our daughter was already an adult by that point.

So consider this an extremely belated Merry Christmas from us, new parents, and our little child, who’s not so little anymore.

The 24 Dec main meal

Christmas eve pancakes 2025

Finally, here’s our Christmas Eve linner or dunch or sunch or lupper, or whatever you eat at c 3:45 pm when you have to be at church at 6 p.m. The daughter designed pancakes with blueberry eyes and a raspberry nose. The bacon antlers were skipped on her meal.

The candy cane was alternating banana and strawberry slices.

Lydster: peanuts!

immunotherapy?

Peanuts! As I noted, our daughter developed a tree nut and peanut allergy. We discovered this when she was about 2 1/2 and had a cookie served by someone else.

1440 had a helpful summary. According to a study published in Pediatrics, “new food allergies in the US have dropped 36% in 10 years. The drop follows a 2015 landmark trial on peanuts and shifting national guidance on early introduction to food allergens.” Ah, if it had only been available a decade or sooner.

Wow. “About 60,000 children have avoided developing peanut allergies after guidance first issued in 2015 upended medical practice by recommending introducing the allergen to infants starting as early as 4 months.” I’ve seen stories on the evening news, but without sufficient detail. This is REALLY interesting to me.

My wife, daughter, and I have asked restaurant servers about their processes. Some places provide more diligence than others; you can immediately sense it.

“Researchers analyzed electronic health records for roughly 125,000 children from 48 pediatric practices across the US. They looked at cohorts of children ages 0-3 before and after a 2015 trial found that feeding peanut products to babies cut their allergy risk by over 80%.” This is great news.

“Guidance was updated to encourage early introduction of peanuts to high-risk children; today, parents are encouraged to introduce peanuts and eight other common allergens to children, regardless of risk level.” High risk includes kids with severe eczema.

“By 2020, an estimated 57,000 fewer children developed food allergies alongside the evolving recommendations. Read the complete study here.”

I can’t help but wonder how that would have worked out if we knew then what we know now.

Treatment

There is also a Peanut Allergy Treatment. “In recent years, peanut immunotherapy has emerged as a treatment option. It is for adults and most children.

“Peanut allergy immunotherapy is a treatment that focuses on building tolerance to peanuts. It desensitizes the body to the allergen.

“The treatment starts with a tiny amount of peanut protein, then gradually increases to larger amounts until a target dose is reached. Building up peanut exposure desensitizes the patient to higher doses of peanut protein.

“Peanut allergy immunotherapy is a treatment, not a cure. It is designed to reduce the frequency and severity of allergic reactions. This includes life-threatening anaphylaxis.”

We haven’t talked about this. However, she had a couple of scares in South Africa, where the labeling was not as robust as in the United States. If she wanted to start treatment, I would hope it would be while she’s still on my insurance for the next few years.