This goes under the rubric of counter-intuitive.
Robin, One Hot…
We are all products of time, place and the Darwinian lottery that selects our parents. Robin is no different. Robin’s parents were not any different.
Robin spent much of youth practicing the piano. She loves music, but she has talked about how she sometimes longed to be outside with other kids. Robin has natural athletic ability, but in the 50s and 60s in the St. Louis enclave of Olivette young ladies were not encouraged in this arena. While her brothers were encouraged to participate in sports she was forgotten.
Robin is short, but very strong physically. She helped me move a while back, and it was all I could do to keep up with her. Continue reading “Robin, One Hot…”
Our Muffins Are Not Crack
I’m traveling back to St. Louis for the weekend. I need gas and a bathroom break so I pull into one of the many Pilot truck stop/gas stations on I-55. I gas up my car and when I am done the receipt pops out of the pump. I notice on the bottom is a coupon for a $1 coffee, tea, some other drink and I vaguely notice the word muffin.
I had planned on getting coffee anyway so after my bathroom break I get one. The coupon is going to save me about 40 cents. As old Ben said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Continue reading “Our Muffins Are Not Crack”
Shrek the Musical
Alright I have a couple confessions up front. First, I would not have gone to this had not my girlfriend had season tickets to the Broadway performances at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis. She actually tried to sell these particular tickets, and could find no buyers. She tells me that normally when she sells tickets to these performances they are snapped up. 
My second confession is that I only vaguely knew the story line. I have seen maybe half of the first Shrek movie. So if I sound a little redundant on the story line, please forgive an old man.
Now I have another confession, I really enjoyed this Broadway musical performance of Shrek the Musical. If I really enjoyed it, my girlfriend’s level of pleasure of this show was in another dimension.
The Broadway production is first and foremost a first class musical. It is next a tried and true love story. It starts out as Beauty and the Beast and ends up as Beast and the Beast. It is also a tale about accepting Continue reading “Shrek the Musical”
Motivational Poster?
It’s the Journey, Not the Destination
I don’t totally agree with this blog posting from the New York Times, but parts of it make a lot of sense. Or at least give you something to think about.
I know that I am not athletic. I know that I am not musical. I do know that I can improve my sports performance in some areas by practice. I doubt I could ever improve enough to be in even the minor leagues of any sport. I can just about guarantee you that if I had practiced everyday from childhood to now; I would not be wowing anyone with my musical ability.
I do know that I have gotten much better at writing computer programs and solving the related problems. Continue reading “It’s the Journey, Not the Destination”
A Wino’s Wisdom
I stayed in my 3rd floor castle for several months. Then Tom, an old high school running mate, convinced me that I needed to move into an apartment with him and two other guys. Well that rock along nicely, for a while. My running mate left early in the lease, and the other two guys failed to tell me that they were not renewing the lease until the last minute. 
This left me without a place to stay. I spent 2 or 3 nights sleeping in my car before I managed to locate and rent an apartment. I needed one that I could afford by myself. Now remember this is 1971. I was making a whopping $2.60 an hour which was a dollar more than minimum wage, and I took all the overtime I could get. I really did not have the resources to rent a penthouse abode. Continue reading “A Wino’s Wisdom”
Red Dirt Music Defined
I finally came across a good definition of this music style. The style orginated in Oklahoma, orginally from the Stillwater area.
Red Dirt music: An indigenous (read that as Oklahoman) mix of folk, bluegrass, and honky-tonk.
Every Time I Went to Kiss Her
When I was a young teenager my father had a hi-fi stereo, state of the art. We boys were not supposed to touch it, but of course we occasionally did. In my father’s LP collection was a comedy record that we had been explicitly charged with not listening to…under any circumstances. That ranks right up there with waving the old proverbial red handkerchief at “el Toro”, with telling Brett Favre he should retire, or Mt. Everest beaconing Sir Edmund Hillary. It became a challenge. I had to hear that comedy record. Continue reading “Every Time I Went to Kiss Her”
Open Season on The Young Rev. Joe
Outsized would have described my Uncle Sam, my Aunt Irene’s husband. He had an outsized personality, and he was prone to tell outsized tales of questionable veracity. He was physically a big man. I do not know what his height was, but he always seemed taller than my 187 centimeters. He was a man who loved to eat, and his weight showed it. He was just a big man.
Although I never thought about them, he had one physical characteristic that apparently bothered him. It was his ears. They did not quite stick out 90 degrees from his head, but they were definitely more of an obtuse angle than the usual acute.
My cousin Perry inherited his ears. When Perry was 12, he had plastic surgery to go from obtuse to angular in the pinna department. Shortly after the operation he and his mother, my aunt, were visiting at our Grandmother’s house.