Category: All (-ish)

45RPM: 59th St. Bridge Song

Where I match a song to a specific memory

Sometimes I fall in love with a song, associate that song with a person and then because that song is imprinted on the person, I have a special place in my heart for that person.  I think the first time this happened with with Simon and Garfunkel’s “59th St. Bridge Song”, also known as “Feeling Groovy”

I had never heard it until a talent show in fifth or sixth grade.  But B., a boy who was (and is) a really good singer, wanted to sing it for the show and he recruited four or five other girls to sing it with him.  I was not one of them, though I wanted to be.  I loved a lot about this song, the nonsense melody ending in “feelin’ Groovy”, I loved how simple it was, and sweet.  The group even did some choreography to fit the singing and it looked great.  When I hear this song today, or sing it myself, I can still picture some of the choreography.

B. has grown up to be an outstanding guy.  And I will always remember him as a 12-year-old boy singing, “slow down, you move too fast.”

Snow in November. Or: How I learned that film people are annoying.

Across the street from my school, prop cars were parked in the lot and by the end of the day it looked as if snow had drifted all around.  It was pretty cool.  At recess that day, a guy with an earpiece came over and asked when the children would be outside and we told him the schedule.  “Okay,” he said, “We’ll try to work around that, but we really need to make this movie.”  Maureen and I shrugged.  It didn’t make a difference to us whether or not the movie got made.

The next morning the cars and the snow were still there.  But now they were intermittently making it snow.
 

I caught several pictures of the massive amount of standing around that is movie making.
 
Though it’s pretty cool to see the snow.
 
The trouble started at morning movement, when the phone rang and some guy from the production company explained that they were making a movie and could the children not have recess today.
Nope.
What about if we give a donation?
That would have been something to talk about before today.  Today is happening.  Schedules are set.
Can’t you just push back the recess?
Nope.
 
A man appeared at the door.
What if we donated $500.00 to the school?
At this point, I turned it over to my boss, who ran around to see if people would be okay with that.
Nope.  One teacher was hugely insulted by the offer.  And one class wasn’t there to say, either way.
So 4/5 recess was indoors, but 2/3 and K/1 gleefully ran about, while people with earpieces held their index finger over their lips and looked vaguely disgruntled.
 
The thing I find hard to believe is that they could plan ahead to take down the Absolute Vodka advertisements that are usually in the windows of the bar across the street, but missed the fact that a school and a playground were 20 feet away from their location. It’s not like this is the first time we’ve had the industry within a stone’s throw of our school.  Television films down here all the time and, aside from poaching all the parking spaces, they aren’t much trouble.

So if you see the movie Wild and come across a scene where Reese Witherspoon is shoveling “snow,” know that it was a lovely November day, where not 20 feet away children were having recess.

Postcard from Russia


This is from Elena in the city of Novosibirsk.  She sent me this quote “Let it be as it will be, because somehow, be done.  Indeed, there was never so that there was no way.”

She also writes “I am a student at the Institute of the lawyer.  Engaged in playing tennis and I love to create beautiful things with his hands.”

I love Postcrossing.

End of City Center 12?

When looking up movies I was given the message that “no data exists.”  Does that mean they are closing?  Lately, I’ve been wondering how much longer they can go on, as they never seem to have a crowd there.  But is this the end?
Update from the future.  No!  On 11/15, you will check and they will have movies listed.  The City Center Stadium 12 lives on!  Phew!

Postcards from Austria and Germany


This is from Tanja in Austria.  She has the most beautiful handwriting I’ve seen on a postcard and reports that her favorite book is The Hearing Trumpet by Lenora Carrington.

Here is a beautiful postcard from Germany, sent on the day after my birthday, which Hans was kind to note.  Hans worked on a ship and has visited many parts of the US.

I was curious to see how many postcards I have received from Germany because it seems like a lot, so I checked my stats.  Yep.  A lot of postcards from Germany. Double the next two highest numbers.

(This chart is from the future, generated on 11/15)

  • Postcards by country

  •   Country  Received▲ Avg travel (Received) 
    1 Australia 1 40 days
    2 Austria 1 23 days
    3 Brazil 1 38 days
    4 Bulgaria 1 11 days
    5 Finland 1 18 days
    6 Hong Kong 1 21 days
    7 Japan 1 10 days
    8 Latvia 1 7 days
    9 Poland 1 10 days
    10 Portugal 1 12 days
    11 Romania 1 8 days
    12 Singapore 1 25 days
    13 Spain 1 7 days
    14 Sweden 1 11 days
    15 Ukraine 1 17 days
    16 Czech Republic 2 8 days
    17 Belarus 3 30 days
    18 Taiwan 3 21 days
    19 Netherlands 4 9 days
    20 Russia 5 28 days
    21 U.S.A. 5 6 days
    22 Germany 10 10 days

45RPM: Runaway Train, Soul Asylum

Where I match a song to a specific memory.

My brother is two years younger than me and we inhabited different worlds for most of our growing up.  I was books, he was sports.  I was rules he was push.  I was lonely, he was surrounded.  I was nerdy, he was popular.  I was struggle, he was ease.  By the time we had both settled into attending the same high school (he a sophomore, I a senior) we had our routines down and our orbits really only crossed at the dinner table and on vacations as well as a random day now and then when we did something together.

Except for a few standouts, most of his friends have melded into one friend amalgam.  They were of the same time, the kind of hippy, kind of athletic popular kids, who did much more socially than I ever did in high school.  Our age difference seemed vast at that time, and I always felt a combination of bemused at their childish/grownup antics and kind of inferior to their social status.  I mostly left them alone, though we weren’t unfriendly to each other.

Some of them sought me out, for whatever reason.  I found a journal entry that described a party my brother hosted while my parents were out of town (the exact kind of party, in fact, that kept my parents from leaving town for nearly all of my high school experience) where two of his friends found me in my room and chatted me up.  I even printed out and saved what they wrote when they were messing around on my word processor.  They cracked me up, even twenty years later.

I have a clear memory of one friend–name lost to time–encountering me on the stairs as I was leaving for work.  He gripped the Soul Asylum album Grave Dancer’s Union in his hand and was giddy with delight over something.  “Look!” he said to me, pointing to the CD cover.

“Butt.” he indicated the naked girl on the right.

“Butt” he indicated the naked girl on the left.

“No butt.” all that was left was the girl in the middle.

I smiled and nodded and continued on my way, confused as always by my brother’s friends.  And I think of that encounter every time I think of this song.