I have to wonder, what kind of geek gets this song stuck in his head for an entire Sunday?
School Daze.
Earl and I made what is becoming a somewhat yearly trek to my alma mater for the annual “Alumni Banquet”. This gathering is a tradition at my high school; alumni gather for a banquet and typical assembly afterwards, where we honor the current graduates and hand out almost $10,000 in scholarships. Tonight’s banquet was the 118th. The oldest alumni in attendance had graduated in 1933.
My father is currently the president of the Alumni Association. This is his first year in the role. He’s going to do it for one more year and he hinted that I should take over the duties after he’s through. Apparently no one else wants the job.
I did take the opportunity to stand up and make an announcement about my efforts getting the Alumni Marching Band together for the parade in August. It’s coming together slowly but surely. Several people are excited about the venture, so I’m glad there’s some interest out there.
I had the opportunity to visit with one of my favorite teachers from high school. Miss Chontosh (though that’s not her name anymore) joined the faculty as an 8th grade math teacher when I was in 8th grade. Today she’s the department head for the math department. I told her about my current intermediate algebra challenges in college and she told me I’d do fine. I also snuck a peek in the gymansium for the first time since graduating in 1986. It looks the same aside from a paint job or four.
It was good to walk through the old halls and reminisce a little bit.
Double Feature.
Earl and I had such a good time at the West Rome Drive-In last week that we decided to relive the experience this week, except this time we stayed for the double feature.
Up tonight was “Evan Almighty” followed by “Ocean’s 13”.
At almost 39 years old, I have to admit that this is the first time in my life that I stayed for a double feature at any movie theatre. I was delighted to see the little intermission film in between the two movies. By the looks of it, the short film dated back to the late 1950s or so and reminded us that there were refreshments at the refreshment stand, we needed to stretch a little bit and to express our freedom of religion and go to church on Sunday.
It was a delightful piece of nostalgia.
Earl and I enjoyed “Evan Almighty” very much, once you take the movie for what it’s meant to be. “Ocean’s 13” was o.k.; it never really grabbed my interest, the boys seemed to sort of sleepwalk through their parts but at least there was plenty of eye candy.
I could see the whole double feature thing at the drive-in becoming our main source of Friday night entertainment during the summer.
Editor In Chief.
I have an editor in chief that insists on monitoring all my blog entries. He isn’t good at proofreading though.
Nuclear Flirt.
Today I had to drive up to my old stomping grounds to run some errands for my high school alumni marching band. I’m trying to find a good price on t-shirts for the band members and I had a hot lead to follow up, so I made the 150 mile round trip. It was worth it, plus I got to have lunch with my mother which was very enjoyable.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a rural part of Upstate New York, downwind from a group of nuclear power plants. I’ve always been a fan of driving along the Lake Ontario shoreline on the closest road possible, and these rides used to take me quite close to these power plants. Close, as in within hundreds of feet of the reactor buildings and cooling tower.
Since I was in the vicinity I decided to see if 9/11 had changed security measures enough to prevent me from doing this. They have. There are now big signs proclaiming the presence of security gates, requiring photo identification, on each side of the group of plants. One is no longer able to drive really close. Now you can drive only sort of close.
So I took a picture from a close as I could get to the plants. After snapping the photo a state police car came whipping by me. I have to admit this made me nervous, though I don’t know why because technically I don’t think I was doing anything wrong.
I decided to just get the heck out of there.
Pitch.
It’s been a year and a half since we welcomed my grandmother’s piano into our home. Even though the piano sits proudly in our front room, the “formal” living room, and is rightfully our piano, in my mind it shall always be my grandmother’s piano. I believe my grandfather bought it for her new back in 1949. When I sit on the bench, I can still smell the scent inherent to the instrument. I can still hear my grandmother playing her favorite song, “My Melody of Love”, made famous by Bobby Vinton.
I have played the piano on very few occasions since it’s come into our home. It didn’t survive the transport as well as I had hoped; several keys ended up in the “down” position and it hadn’t been tuned in at least two decades. But the keys that worked sounded strong and overall the piano is in otherwise great shape, so Earl and I decided it deserved a little TLC.
The kind man from Stage Music made two visits this week. On Tuesday morning he spent two hours assessing what needed to be done and he also brought the piano back to pitch (it was considerably flat). It turns out that there had been quite the family of mice living in the piano at one time, and they had snacked on the felt pads that raise the keys to their proper position. So Mr. Stage Music came back today and replaced all the felt and tweaked the pitch to perfection. To test the piano, Mr. Stage Music played a melody of lounge favorites. I noticed that he gave the piano the firm touch that it requires to make beautiful music. I’ve always been rather timid when playing this piano. This was a result of my playing the piano when I was in elementary school. I was having a loud, boisterous, joyful time with my sister, when grandpa came over and in his stern, rather bull-hornish voice proclaimed, “Do you know what refrain means?” We suspected it meant “stop and move your fingers”, as the lid to the keys was brought to a close.
We used a timid touch when we played the piano after that encounter. Thank goodness Mom and Dad babysat a piano for 20 years so that we had something to bang on.
So now my grandmother’s piano is back in her beautiful glory. I’ve never had an official piano lesson (thank god… we won’t mention the town minister that gave piano lessons only to ‘special young boys’), aside from the piano classes I didn’t finish at SUNY Fredonia. But I can plunk out a few tunes like a drunken fool from time to time, even though I can’t separate my left hand from my right hand and I don’t use the correct fingerings. See if you can identify the two songs I’m trying to play here.
[MEDIA=6]Exponential Fun.
Who the hell invented exponents? I think the purpose of their creation is to make my Intermediate Algebra class extremely frustrating. I can make polynomials dance with binomials in a sweet tango like nobody’s business. I can divide the friggin’ things, even if I have to shove them hard to make them come out even. But this dividing exponents thing is for the birds. They’re evil. They like to move from the numerator to the denominator position without nary a reason all because the negative sign decided to show up. I have added, subtracted, pleaded and begged for them to move to their right place but all I have to show for my work is a burned up calculator and skid marks on my eraser.
My last foray into the one question that I can’t do on my homework resulted in me determining that there’s six hectares in an airplane seat on a Boeing 747, all because the exponents wouldn’t behave as they were suppose to and get in line. They don’t obey.
I don’t like that.
Thunder and Lightning.
One of the things that I love about living in Upstate New York is the severe thunderstorms we get this time of year. While not nearly as plentiful as the midwest, we do get our share of severe storms from time to time, such as the one that is currently passing through right now.
I feel kind of daring typing on my computer while there’s a thunderstorm passing through.
The current storm is promising 60 MPH winds and nickel sized hail. I have secured the lawn furniture and closed the windows, Tom has assumed his storm position under our bed.
Mother Nature can be so awesome and beautiful. Perhaps typing a blog entry during this storm isn’t a good idea. I should just sit quietly and listen and enjoy the beauty of this storm.
Nervous.
It’s never good to see “You have one voicemail” on the cell phone after math class. Those who would call me know that I’m in school and would usually call me after school, plus I don’t think there’s that many people that would call me anyway, so seeing that I received a voicemail while I was sitting in class gave me an eerie feeling.
It was Earl. He fell asleep while driving on the Thruway today, with the cruise control on, and was awakened by the sound of his car sideswiping a guardrail at 72 MPH.
He’s not hurt and the car has an interesting pattern scraped down the entire length of it but it’s perfectly driveable. It just looks a little ghetto or white trashy right now.
My partner never gets enough sleep and he didn’t eat breakfast this morning. Instead of scolding him, well, maybe I scolded him just a little bit once I knew he was o.k., I told him that I’ll be joining him for a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of juice every morning.
I’ll even be chipper when I do it. Anything to avoid voicemail messages like that.
“True Colors”.
Earl and I were good little concert goers last night and heeded to the request printed on our ticket: “No photographs, recording equipment or outside beverage.” Hence, there are no pictures to share.
That being said, I must say that last night’s show was absolutely fantastic! I think it’s the first show that I’ve ever been to that started on time. At 6:00 p.m. on the nose, there was Margaret Cho, last night’s emcee, out there doing a little stand-up and introducing the first act.
Can I just say that I love Margaret Cho. While her routine is definitely PG-13 and more likely “R”, I really enjoy the fact that she says it like she sees it and she doesn’t hold anything back.
First up was a group called “The Gossip”. With three members, they are two-thirds gay with the third member GBA (gay by association). Lead singer Beth Ditto has a mighty fine set of chops on her. While I’m not a huge fan of the indy rock scene, I really enjoyed the performance.
Up next we had the Dresden Dolls. Completely unfamiliar with their style and messing up their name on the car ride video from yesterday, the Dresden Dolls are fun to listen to. They have this cabaret-punky thing going on that I was like diggin’ man. What I appreciated about the Dresden Dolls is that they were musical, in that they used music theory in creative ways in their music and I really appreciated that.
After the Dresden Dolls, Earl and I jumped up from our seats and went in search of beer and food. We secured a couple of reasonably priced Bud Lights and Chicken Fingers baskets when I saw a familiar face coming through the crowd. I walked up to my one of my best friends from high school, whom I have not seen in 20 years, and said “Hi Scott.” He replied with a “hi”, quite uncertain of who I was. I coaxed him with a “It’s John” and he still didn’t recognize me (which I was finding a little surprising) and then reminded him who I was in which he gave me a big hug and kiss after realizing that this bald, bearded guy was the flaming red-head from his high school days.
Scott and his partner Mark, along with Scott’s nephew Steve and his wife Michelle(oh gosh I hope that’s right) and Earl and I caught up on old times during the next act, Rufus Wainwright. While Rufus played in the background, we made plans with Scott and Mark to get together and reignite our friendship by going camping at Hillside together this summer. I’m really looking forward to that.
Rufus was good too.
Next up was Debbie Harry, probably most famous as the lead singer of Blondie. Back in my radio days I had the opportunity to meet and hang out with Debbie backstage at a Fly 92 concert before her performance. She mentioned then that she wasn’t big on performing her Blondie stuff, and apparently she still feels the same way because she didn’t perform any Blondie hits at all, opting for stuff from her next album as well as “French Kissin’ in the USA”. Her new stuff is fun and I enjoyed her performance, but some others around us were looking to hear “Heart of Glass” or “Call Me”.
By now it was fully dark and the lights were dancing around the pavilion. Up next came Erasure. Fantabulous! Absolutely wonderful. Earl and I were on our feet the entire time. I love how tonight’s performers had at least one band member performing with a keyboard and a Macbook Pro. We were both out of breath singing “A Little Respect” and jumping up and down to “Chains of Love”.
To bring the show to a close, Cyndi Lauper performed for nearly an hour. The one that brought this show together, she is amazing. I really like the arrangement she did of “She Bop”, turning it into a rock-based track. Her final number was a beautiful arrangement of “True Colors”.
Earl and I are now proudly wearing our purple wrist bands, a gift from Cyndi to all last night. They say “Erase Hate” (see the link in the sidebar on my or Earl’s blog).
For more information on the True Colors Tour, take a look at this short Wikipedia entry.
