My favorite version of White Christmas
I also wanted to share with you my favorite Christmas song of all time, but I can’t seem to get it working right… I’ll have to consult with Joe to figure out what I’m doing wrong.
Anyway, hope you all had a lovely holiday!
Edited: for some reason, it was an mp4 instead of an mp3?
Anyway, here it is:
The best version of the Little Drummer Boy you will ever hear.
Does anyone other than me hear the song “Calendar Girl” by Neil Sedaka and only think “Calendar Cat… chow chow chow chow chow”????
I planned on spending the weekend cleaning the house and getting Christmas-y stuff out, since the family is coming for the big Turkey dinner next week (well, turkey or some other festive bird). But then I decided we should go see Good Night and Good Luck yesterday. We went all the way out to Doylestown to do that, since we always wanted to go to the County Theater, and it was still showing there. I would say it was a good solid film, but that it seemed to be lacking a real sense of drama, which is actually probably a GOOD thing, but since we are so conditioned for there to be DRAMA in EVERYTHING, it seemed a little lacking. Before the movie, we tried to get sandwiches at a fancy sandwich shop, but they screwed up my order. They fixed it, and I ate my sammie in the theater… shhh!
By the time we got home, I had an awful headache and I’ve been up and down emotionally, so I just did nothing last night.
So this morning, even though I still had the headache, I got started on laundry. And guess what? I am STILL doing laundry!! It’s nice not having to lug the laundry to the laundromat, but geez, with this tiny tiny washer and drier, it takes FOREVER!
We hauled out the Xmas stuff, and I put up my tree. My tree is about 1.5 feet high and made of aluminum. It was purchased in the 1960s to be the decoration in my sister’s bedroom. I think you can see my tree in the picture if the link works… that’s our old house, and my dear Saint Bono. I also pulled out my Christmas sheet music, and our three stockings. I guess next year we will have 4 stockings! I hung a string of lights up the banister– Joe thinks it looks like too much wire is showing, but eh, I’m not redoing it. And then Joe pulled out all my Holiday CDs, so I started listening to them. We don’t have an outlet outside, so we can’t put lights out front! :-/
In the middle of this, Joe made his awesome salmon dish, and I made baked potatoes. That was a yummy meal. And then, I finally broke down and took my LAST TWO tylenol, and guess what? My headache went away! I sent Joe to the drugstore to get some more, just in case it comes back.
I have Oldies 98 on tonight because it is supposed to be Hy Lit’s last show. I guess that starts in 10 minutes. Now they will never play 1950s oldies again. But right now, they are playing the John Lennon Christmas song, which freaking kills me. I don’t recommend listening to John Lennon while hormonally emotional. Joe checked out these 3 CDs that are part of a John Lennon box set, and we listened to it in the car yesterday, and I made him turn it off, because I was freaking bawling. Songs about how life begins at 40, and then all these cute clips of him talking to little Sean. Ugh! The other day, we heard In My Life on the radio, and Joe was wondering who played the keyboard part, so I googled it, and found out that that fucker Paul McCartney claims that he wrote In My Life!!! WTF!! So, I emailed my brother, who I consider to be an expert in these things, and he says he would assume it was John unless proven otherwise. Then, last night, I finally looked up how the heck Michael Jackson got the rights to the Beatles songs. Interesting.
Okay, well, now Joe’s making a big old pot of spaghetti sauce, or as they apparently say in South Philly… “Gravy.”
I hope it doesn’t give me heartburn.
I hope to post a picture of my lovely Xmas display when Joe takes one for me. I am contemplating doing Xmas cards. I have a whole bunch of Valentine’s day stamps… since the price is probably going up in the new year, is it okay for me to use those stamps? I am so bad at sending Xmas cards, but I love getting them. Maybe I’ll work on them some night this week. We’ll see if I feel up to it… the Little Bagel has to have an Echo Cardiogram on Wednesday, so doing the cards before that could be a nice distraction. Of course, I have a chiropractor appointment tomorrow night, Tree Tenders on Tuesday, Bradley Class on Wednesday night… and then I have to make sure the house is still clean for the weekend! So, I guess I already have enough to keep me distracted!
As I’m scanning away at work, I’m going through emails looking for recipes folks have emailed me. I found this email that has nothing to do with recipes. It is in response to an email my brother sent me last year, asking me to talk about my mom and her love of music. I think he was working on a book about his life and music, I’m not sure what’s become of that. He asked certain questions, like “What was her favorite place?” so some of my comments are direct answers to his questions. I thought I’d post it since I can find it easier here.
I don’t think she had a favorite place. Our house was small. She probably felt most comfortable in the kitchen (which was also our eating/dining room), talking on the phone to Grammom, something she did every single day. The living room may have been comfortable for her, and the bedroom, but not while Dad was there. I don’t think she had a favorite place at her parent’s house. Obviously, one of those rooms was hers growing up, but I never saw her get nostalgic for that house.
Mom hated driving. There were long periods of time when she had double vision, and would drive around with one eye closed, singing the Foreigner song. Even though she hated driving, my biggest memories of
her (besides the bedridden dying memories at the end), are of her driving. She hated driving, but she liked roadtrips. We would go out for Sunday drives, rambling around Berks County. She would get frustrated when other motorists tailgated or drove aggressively, and she would always exclaim, “What ever happened to Sunday Drivers?!”
Sometimes we drove much farther… I remember ending up in Wilmington, Delaware one night, and possibly that very same night we drove to New York, crossed the Tappan Zee bridge and came home. Because my memories are from the car, I do have a soundtrack in my head to go along with it. Some are my own– listening to New Order or XTC on my little boom box. Some are from the radio.
You say that she liked the lighter side of the British Invasion, but after I was born, and she discovered AOR and classic rock, she certainly did like the Kinks and the Who. I think it was Mom who taped Tommy off the radio…
One time, I was away from home for a few hours– maybe I slept over at Melissa’s, or maybe I was just there for the day. I called Mom, and she was listening to some music. I asked what it was, and she wouldn’t tell me– she played the @#$% guessing game. I had no clue what it was. I told her it sounded like COUNTRY (which at that time was the biggest insult I could hurl). It turned out that it was Hayfever from The Kinks’ Misfits LP.
There was a SNL phony ad for an album of songs from commercials, featuring “that nike song” (revolution) and they also made up some songs… “We gotta get outta this place… and take a trip to the Poconos”… that was a Mom favorite. I can see her singing it in the car at the Muhlenberg Shopping Plaza. She sang it a lot. Just that one line.
Dad loved music as well. Dad knows all the oldies. Turn on the oldies station, and he’ll start singing along… Return to Sender, Two Faces have I, Volare. But Dad’s love of music swung more towards Goofy Greats… I’m looking over my dead dog rover… He also loved ABBA, and when we saw Mamma Mia the other week, I realized he knew all the songs.
Dad passed that goofy great love to Maria. We all have it, but Maria has it the most with her Filking friends. I am sure she’s the one who taught me little bunny foofoo.
Yes, we had a lot of XMAS albums. I still have them. They were probably 1/4 of the collection. When you were growing up, maybe it was closer to half of the collection. I grew up in the Queen era.
Mom was obsessive. She was also a hopeless romantic. She developed terrible crushes on people– from Freddie Mercury, to her Psychology teacher, to Bono, to that kid who played on the Temple A’s.
Don’t forget that she indulged a 6 year olds music obsession– she took me to see Rod Stewart’s Blondes Have More Fun tour.
The washer dryer didn’t break as much later on. We got a new one in 1982 or 83. She still liked to yell at the dishes. She also liked to listen to whatever crap I had on the TV– a lot of Brady Bunch. The kitchen table was the desk for all of us. We didn’t have any room in our rooms. I think I remember Maria doing her College Applications there. I wrote my Chekhov paper there, and mom helped me win all those science fairs there.
Who did the Englebert Humperdinck records belong to??? And she had all those Elvis 45s– the country songs. I am fairly sure she went to see Tom jones with Carla P, but that was before I was born?? Carla
also made us go see Marty Robbins in Lancaster or somewhere. Right before he died. Mom went to see Ricky Nelson with Beaver too. Oh, When did Party Doll come out? I think when mom was in high school, she
had a little bit of a bad girl streak that she mentioned to me– she liked some bad boy, and I think that song was involved. She also told me about some guy… do you remember the story about the guy going nuts
and swinging a machete around? I don’t remember what that was about, but he was her friend at some point, and he thought she had nerdy friends, but he came over to her house, or a friends house, and one of moms friends– maybe Morris B, probably not Ellis, played “Who put the bop in the bopshbopshbop” on piano, and he thought he was cool… I don’t know what the hell you can do with that story….
Mom is the one who turned me on to Howard Stern. I was still listening to the Morning Zoo, and she was listening to Howard on her way home from work in the car. He was always interviewing 60s music icons..
Moody Blues, the Kinks, etc.
When we got MTV, John Waite had that big hit. Mom would look at him, and say, “Oh, he’s from the Babies”– WTF? who were the babies?? She had some weird musical knowledge from somewhere– must have been the Circus mags. I feel like she also was very familiar with early Elvis Costello… How could that
be?? from you?? Was Oliver’s Army a hit?
I remember she thought the Housemartins “People who grinned themselves to death” was REALLY good. She liked U2 of course. I think she enjoyed INXS when I liked them so much… She did not enjoy the fact that I played “Shivers” by the Boys Next door (Nick cave) over and over… “I’ve been contemplating suicide… but it really doesn’t suit my style.”
When she was dying in the hospital bed in the apartment, the U2 song “One” was a huge MTV hit. She mumbled about how the whining was driving her nuts… she didn’t realize it was U2 or Bono.
Nobody ever thought she had anything benign. They couldn’t do her bronchoscopy in 1984, and then, in the fall of 1986, right after Dad moved out, they sent her for a biopsy. It was within weeks of him moving out. The biopsy was never “benign”– it didn’t look like cancer, but it was definitely something, so they called it sarcoidosis.
They never called it anything else, until the autopsy. Can you believe she lived for 8 years (or more) with untreated cancer? Holy shit! That cancer wasn’t meant to kill her if they had treated it right in the first place! (but that’s my story… you can have the music, I get the medical/environmental story).
I haven’t updated with much substance lately!
I’m still waiting to see if I start “full-time” at my job on Monday– we should find out tomorrow, when I work the last 4 hours of my original 250.
I had my second Tree Tender class last night. I’m enjoying it, even though it makes for a very long day. The most important thing I have learned is that most of the trees in my neighborhood that I thought were Sycamores are really London Planes… which are related to Sycamores, but different.
I’ve actually learned a bunch– I know how to pick out a good street tree, and I have the gist of how to plant one. There’s only one more class, and then I get a T-shirt and a card that shows I am a Tree Tender. Then, I should get involved with the East Falls Tree Tenders doing something.
Last Saturday, Joe and I had a date! The King of Rock and Soul, Mr. Solomon Burke was in town! Earlier in the summer, I saw that he was scheduled to appear at the Kimmel, and was going to buy tickets when they went on sale, but by the time they went on sale, I couldn’t justify spending $$$ on it. I held out the hope that there would be a “Philly Fun Saver” offered, and there was! PFS is an email with half-price offers for events coming up that weekend, so Joe went down and got the tickets on Friday. We had great seats in the first level of the balcony, right in the middle.
MFSB opened up. No, that does not stand for Mother F*ing Solomon Burke. That’s Mother Father Sister Brother– the studio musicians for Gamble and Huff. They are most famous for TSOP, that’s The Sound of Philadelphia for those that don’t know… and you DO know the song, even if you don’t think you do. They had 3 singers– 2 were original G&H session singers, one was a young guy who did a Michael Jackson impersonation (but not as good as that kid who quit American Idol). It was a very entertaining show– they sang a lot of Philadelphia International Hits as well as some Motown hits (the 2 original G&H singers had been working with the Funk Brothers recently).
There was a brief intermission and we waited for King Burke. There was a throne prepared for the King in the middle of the stage. The lights went down. We saw a group of folks on stage in shadowy silhouette. You could tell that they were bringing the King out in a wheelchair! The brass section surrounded the front of the throne, and the lights went up. The brass moved, and there was King Solomon Burke, all 300-400 pounds of him, dressed in a purple suit and a red hat, sitting in his throne.
Now, I would not imagine a show in which the singer sits in a throne for an hour singing songs would be exciting or energetic. But, I had never seen Solomon Burke! Oh boy, he gives his all, moving around in his chair, throwing gifts to the audience (the red hat was first to go), singing his heart out. His back-up singers were all family, and a son and a grandson attended to his every need (mainly wiping sweat off his big old bald head). He sang a lot of his classics, as well as songs from his latest two albums. He also sang a lot of classics that were not “his”, but they might as well have been.
My brother is the one who introduced me to Solomon. He told me about this author, Peter Guralnick (who wrote a trilogy about Elvis), who wrote books about American music, also a trilogy. He dedicates the book Sweet Soul Music to Solomon Burke, and starts the book off with a chapter about him. As a fan of Philadelphia music and soul music, I wondered why I never heard of him before. I did realize that Oldies 98 would play ONE Solomon Burke song– “Cry to Me” but not much else. I bought a classic Solomon Burke CD and fell in love. His voice is amazing– he can sound like Otis, or he can sound like a country singer. But he always sounds like himself. He’s so original. I loved this song called Stupidity, and one night, I fell asleep listening to a Phillies game on 1210 WPHT the BIg Talker, and woke up to Rollye James playing that song (Rollye James is this libertarian radio talk show host who loves music, and usually has a show a week dedicated to old music, but I don’t listen to her because of her politics). So, she comes on the air and says it’s a contest– if anyone knows who sang that song, call up and win some stuff. I was groggy, but I got the phone, and called up. They made me go on the air, but I refused to talk except to say that I knew Solomon Burke sang Stupidity. A few weeks later, I got a bunch of 45s in the mail, most of them on the Lost Nite label, but they were really bad 70s doo wop, sort of like Sha Na Na.
Anyways, a few years later, Solomon had his “comeback” with “Don’t Give up on me”, and I bought that record– which I like, but it’s a little too produced for me, and adult sounding. Does that make any sense? Anyway, it’s a great record, but seeing him sing some of those songs live was even better. He performed a song that I hadn’t heard before–it’s on the latest record and it’s written by Van Morrison– “At the Crossroads”– I think that was the best song of the night. Amazing– he even stood up for a good 30 seconds during that one! I also learned that Solomon Burke wrote the Blues Brothers song, “Everybody Needs Somebody to love”. That’s what he ended the show with– the lights went down, and his family brought out the chair and he continued singing as they wheeled him offstage.
