One of my favorite bloggers is Dan Kennedy, who has worked at many different media organizations in the Boston area and is now a professor at Northeastern University.
He writes about what is happening in — and to — the media here in the USA.
My boss Diane Wortis and I created (and then produced annually for five years) a day-long conference called “Arts & The Media” which allowed us to call everyone who had anything to do with arts coverage in the Greater Boston area and invite them to participate on a panel.
This included folks from our big papers (including The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and The Boston Phoenix) — to folks at radio and TV stations, to folks who worked for smaller local papers and magazines.
Our conferences started happening as Mitt Romney’s private investment company Bain Capital was buying up a bunch of local daily and weekly newspapers in the greater Boston area and consolidating them into one company — which meant that the staff at all of these formerly independent papers was being slashed and lots of generic (non-town-specific) content was starting to be written which could be printed in many different papers within this new chain.
I bore witness firsthand to the degradation of media coverage as a result of large-scale, corporate consolidation.
And twenty five years later, that trend of media consolidation has only worsened.
All of this is to explain why I write near the end of this song — “May our press remain vital, always truth pursuing…”
Reading our local papers and nurturing relationships (via hundreds of hand-written thank you cards) with local arts writers and arts editors for over a decade helped me to understand how crucial the Fourth Estate is to a functioning democracy with healthy checks and balances.
Dan writes in his blog about what is going poorly (media consolidation continues, ad revenues drop…) and also where there are glimmers of hope via new models of local journalism.
And sometimes he weighs in on journalistic best practices.
He steered me to a speech Marty Baron gave at Brandeis University a few years ago which touched upon the fascinating topic of objectivity.
Mr. Baron used to be the editor of The Boston Globe and then became the editor of The Washington Post.
Here’s the heart of what Marty had to say:
“Objectivity is not neutrality.
It is not on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand journalism.
It is not false balance or both-sidesism.
It is not giving equal weight to opposing arguments when the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction.
It does not suggest that we as journalists should engage in meticulous, thorough research only to surrender to cowardice by failing to report the facts we’ve worked so hard to discover…
The idea is to be open-minded when we begin our research and to do that work as conscientiously as possible.
It demands a willingness to listen, an eagerness to learn — and an awareness that there is much for us to know.
We don’t start with the answers.
We go seeking them, first with the already formidable challenge of asking the right questions and finally with the arduous task of verification.”
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
Graphic by Stephen C. Fischer
May our media in the USA stop kowtowing and collapsing… and realize that they are just as vulnerable as the rest of us to arrests in the middle of the night, arrests while we are walking from campus to our apartment, arrests while we are in a courthouse following all the rules about how to become a US citizen, arrests while we are picking vegetables, arrests while we are doing our laundry in the middle of the night.
If you might be kind enough to stream it —and maybe even “like” it and add it to one of your playlists if you are so moved — that would be very helpful to feed positive data into the various algorithms which decide whose music gets played and how often…
If I needed any more reminders to “carpe diem” and seize the day, there they are!
I just learned from Wikipedia (after I went to Google and checked the correct spelling of this Latin phrase) that “carpe diem” is more accurately translated as “enjoy the day” or “pluck/harvest the day.”
I like these more accurate translations MUCH better than the traditional one.
I associate the verb “seize” with military campaigns, kidnappings and my European ancestors confiscating almost all of what is now South, Central and North America from the folks who were once living here.
“Enjoy,” “pluck,” and “harvest,” however, all feel less violent and more sustainable to me than “seize.”
And I did, in fact, pluck two allium flowers from next to our driveway — which were part of double stems from two different bulbs — to enjoy inside.
I think allium are part of the garlic/onion/leek family — so I suppose I might even be able to dig up and eat some of the bulbs if things get dire in the future…
But for now I will remain very grateful that no animals (rabbits, squirrels, rats, skunks, etc.) have dug them up for food so that I can enjoy their springtime extravagance.
For over twenty five years I camped there every summer with my sweetheart and his extended family.
And then COVID — and a new baby — entered our lives, and we all decided to rent a house together at the opposite end of the state (in Pittsfield) with a big, fenced-in backyard instead.
The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend — or a meaningful day.”
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
This song was inspired by a couple who rented a campsite at the other end of the little valley at North Of Highland campground where we had a perennial campsite.
I don’t remember exactly how we reached out and introduced ourselves, but I am pretty sure I showed them the wild blueberry bushes which were bearing fruit all around our little valley.
And they invited us over for an informal cocktail hour one evening, which was very pleasant.
And then we discovered that the guy was a swimmer who, like me, loved to do laps along the ocean shoreline — although this was becoming more and more risky because the increasingly abundant population of seals in North Truro had been attracting more and more great white sharks…
So we hit it off with these two friendly people and became well-acquainted over the course of a few days.
Then, to my surprise (because I had assumed incorrectly that they had a week-long rental) they packed up their tent and — with warm goodbyes — drove away.
I have been very aware of — and sensitive to — the realities of love and loss ever since I was young.
In fact, I have been told that my parents used to sing “Good Night Irene” to me when I was a very small child just to see me well up with tears.
Deep sigh…
I have written in previous blog posts about the challenges of working professionally as a child and teenager. One of an actor’s most important skills is developing a sense of connectedness — first with the receptionist who checked you in at each audition, then with the casting agents, with the clients, and with any actors who were part of the initial audition and subsequent callbacks.
And if I got a job — whether for an hour doing a voiceover, for a day on the set of a TV commercial, for a couple of weeks filming a TV pilot, for a few months doing a movie, or for a year doing a musical — I needed to nurture ongoing, positive working relationships with my fellow cast and crew members.
I needed to show up on time.
I needed to know my lines.
I needed not to complain about anything.
I needed to behave as if I was a small, manipulable adult.
When a job was done, I remember how awkward and sad I felt as all of the camaraderie, friendship, affection and even love which had developed among members of the crew and cast would evaporate and disappear.
That was very confusing.
Was any of the camaraderie, friendship, affection and love I had experienced real?
Or was everyone just acting?
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
On a vaguely related note, our planet’s relentlessly-marketed fossil fuels — along with the cars, trains, busses, ocean liners, planes, motorcycles, etc. which need them to run — have allowed most of us human beings to become much more mobile and much less rooted in one neighborhood, one town, one city, one state, one country.
The postal service and the internet have also given us extraordinary options for meeting and becoming acquainted with other humans.
How do we make sense of — and peace with — all of the beings who come and go in our lives?
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I tried to make a little bit of sense out of the ebb and flow of relationships by strumming a ukulele in my tent and then jotting lyric and chord ideas in one of my songs-in-process notebooks.
Eventually “The Crazy Touch And Go Of Our Lives” emerged.
I performed it by myself — playing a ukulele — at some open mics.
Then a few years ago my friend Molly Ruggles (who sings, plays piano and writes songs herself) created a lovely harmony part for her and our friend Carole Bundy to sing.
The three of us performed it at a bunch of porchfests and then recorded it with Molly playing piano last summer at Doug Hammer’s studio north of Boston.
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
As I write this blog post, I am reminded of the Dalai Lama’s words about making each day — and, each friend — meaningful.
That is certainly what has happened with me and Carole and Molly.
We first collaborated when I was invited to sing during a service at the UU church in Medford where they were both members and where Molly was also the music director.
And this musical collaboration has deepened and widened over many years — and many delicious dinners — to become meaningful friendships.
We sing and harmonize and rehearse and perform and bear witness to the twists and turns of each other’s lives.
Deep breath of gratitude in.
Deep breath of gratitude out.
I will end this post with my customary thank yous plus a bunch of beautiful images from Pixabay that somehow reminded me of this song.
Thank you to all of the folks who have kept North of Highland campground going for many decades. I miss being there each summer!!!
Thank you to the couple who camped for a few days across the little valley from us at North of Highland campground.
Thank you to the Dalai Lama for his wisdom.
Thank you to my sweetheart and his — now our — family for letting me sit in my tent at the campground all day long, working on new songs.
Thank you to my dear ukuleles, to my “tent of creativity,” and to the various pencils, pens, notebooks, rhyming dictionaries, and laptops which help me to write songs.
Thank you to Molly and Carole for our years of interactions.
Thank you to the UU church in Medford for bringing me and Carole and Molly together as a musical unit and as friends.
Thank you to Doug Hammer for engineering and then mixing/mastering our recordings with us.
Thank you to the grasses and bushes and seaweeds and crabs and sea birds and seals and sharks and fish who make the Head Of The Meadow beach — a short and beautiful walk from the North Of Highland campground — so interesting to visit.
Thank you to the ocean and the sun and the moon and the tides which sweep the beach clean twice a day.
Thank you to everyone who has been listening to my songs via Pandora, YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and any/all of the other streaming platforms.
Each stream, each like, and each addition to a playlist is noted by that streaming service’s algorithms — and encourages it to share the song with other listeners.
As regular readers of my blog may remember, I have been away from home — and spending a minimum amount of time on my computer — during July and August.
But now it is September, and I am home and getting back into the swing of A) leading Music Together classes, B) doing gigs at retirement communities, and C) donating time + money to various political races + Get-Out-The-Vote undertakings.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I am writing this post in the middle of the night while drinking eight ounces of a somewhat vile-tasting liquid every fifteen minutes in preparation for a colonoscopy later this morning.
Yesterday I drank liquids (water, veggie broth and chicken broth) all day long — ending with the first round of vile-tasting-liquid drinking before bed.
The three days before that I ate the opposite of a healthy diet — including lots of refined white flour products (although I WAS allowed to potatoes and sweet potatoes as long as their skins were removed…)
It’s kind of funny that one is NOT supposed to ingest fiber before a colonoscopy when ingesting lots of dietary fiber is one of the best ways to promote colon health.
THANK YOU to everyone who has continued to visit my blog during the past two months.
It is very heartening to check my stats and find that 5-15 people have been dropping by on a daily basis even though I have shared no new content since the middle of June.
I first featured this song — written by Harold Arlen (music) and Yip Harburg (words) for Ethel Waters to sing in the MGM version of a musical called CABIN IN THE SKY — in a blog post on November 8, 2020. You can click here to skim it if you are curious.
The Biden-Harris ticket had recently won the presidential election, lots of people were dying due to COVID, and I was learning what it’s like to surrender to Western medicine as I began chemotherapy to treat a rare medical condition which first appeared to be multiple myeloma but was eventually diagnosed as PGNMID.
Almost four years later I am still very much alive and was even able to take a break from my two somewhat experimental drugs over the summer because they had worked so well during the preceding months.
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
I will end this blog post by quoting Simon Rosenberg, a political strategist who has been offering a sense of hope and possibility to many of us in recent months.
“When the dust settles, and the Russian-backed MAGA movement fades, America will come to understand how lucky we were that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election.
His Day 1 as President was among the most challenging in our history — pre-vaccine COVID, economic collapse, (the former president’s) disastrous management of the pandemic, an insurrection, the first time America failed to have a peaceful transfer of power… just unbelievable levels of chaos as far as the eye could see.
And today, almost four years later, America’s economy is ‘the envy of the world.’
Growth here has been far above the growth in other advanced economies. We’ve had the best job market in 60 years. The lowest uninsured rate in history. Record levels of new business formation. Wage growth has outpaced inflation. The stock market is setting records.
Joe Biden has made historic investments in our economy and workers that will be creating jobs and opportunity for the American people for decades to come.
We’ve dramatically accelerated the energy transition necessary to keep the planet from warming.
We’ve beaten inflation – a global phenomenon – and interest rate cuts are coming now.
We are more energy independent today than we’ve been in decades.
Crimes rates which had gone up under Donald Trump have come down under Joe Biden.
The deficit which skyrocketed under Donald Trump has come down under Joe Biden.
Despite reckless Republican obstruction, flows to the border are lower today than they were under Donald Trump.
Joe Biden passed the first major gun safety legislation in 30 years, retired hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt, reinvigorated the Western alliance and has now landed a serious and long overdue blow against Russian influence operations here in the United States.”
And — behaving in the exact opposite manner from a dictator — he has chosen to pass the political baton to Vice President Harris, whose candidacy has catalyzed a new wave of enthusiasm and political engagement here in the USA.
Thank you, President Biden, for your decades of leadership, public service and compassion!
Thank you to Doug Hammer for his grounded, creative piano playing and sublime engineering/producing chops.
Thank you to all of the pollinators who work tirelessly to help our ecosystems function AND to all the folks who are working like busy bees to help elect the candidates of their choice.
And thank YOU for reading another one of my blog posts.
Thank you to everyone who continues to read my blog posts — old and new!
Today is a rainy and windy day in the greater Boston area.
Now that it’s December, part of me wishes that it were snow falling insead of rain.
The sentimental part of me, that is.
The practical part of me — who would be helping to shovel it from our sidewalk, porches, and driveway — is OK with rain.
I was very grateful to read recently that Massachusetts has mostly recovered from last summer’s drought due to the rain which has fallen in recent months.
But as most of us know, the rest of the world is not as fortunate — with water levels falling to unprecedented levels in the western and southwestern parts of the USA, for example.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I wrote a blog post in January 2020 which featured an older version of today’s song.
You can click here to check it out if you are curious. I went wild with lots of water imagery from Pixabay…
However, in keeping with my current resolve to share shorter blog posts, I will include fewer photos today.
I’ve been getting acupuncture on a regular basis for 30+ years.
My practitioners have been part of the five-element school of acupuncture, which is an extremely wise and beautiful branch of acupuncture.
Each patient, for example, is viewed as a garden to be tended to by the practitioner in order that all five elements/phases of our body/mind/spirit — water, wood, fire, earth, and metal —remain harmonious and in balance.
The water element corresponds — among many other things — with the season of winter, with the feeling of fear (and/or the lack of fear), with the taste of salt, with the sound of groaning, with slowing down/resting/sleeping, with meditating, and with the experience of not-knowing.
You can click here for a linkto an acupuncturist’s webpage which describes more about the water element if you are curious.
Most of us are a blend of all five elements/phases.
I, for example, was diagnosed by J. R. Worsley as a Wood type — with Earth and Water within (ie: Mud as I like jokingly to say).
He recommended, among other things, that I do more swimming — and in the years since my diagnostic visit with him I have spent many hours in pools, lakes, ponds and oceans.
Recently, however, I have become less excited about swimming in the crowded chlorinated pool — which also hosts swimming classes for children of all ages — nearest my home.
So nowadays I swim in lakes and ponds (and occasionally the ocean) during the warmer months of the year — although a friend and I did have share a brisk, final swim in Walden Pond this past October.
It is very easy for many of us to take fundamental blessings such as daily access to clean water for granted.
I continue to be a fan of counting one’s blessings as an antidote to the onslaught of news and commercial messages with which most of us are bombarded every day via social media, television, radio, ads on the sides of busses, etc.
May we all be mindful of ways that we can conserve and honor and re-use the water flowing through our faucets, our showers, our baths, our washing machines, our dishwashers, our veins, our arteries, our lymphatic vessels, our skin, our tear ducts, our plants, our forests, our systems of agriculture, etc.
I will end with a few more delightful images from Pixabay of different forms of water.
Thank you to all of the photographers who share their work there.
Thank you to Doug Hammer for contributing his artistry to my song as a pianist and as an engineer.
You are always welcome to visit my website — where you can find many songs and learn more about my musical life here on planet earth if you are curious.
Thank you to everyone who has continued to visit my blog even though I have written no fresh posts in the past three months.
After this fallow period of non-blogging, today I am happy to be writing a new post.
As faithful readers may remember, for the past year and a half I’ve been focused on recording, fixing, mixing, and releasing decent versions of songs with significant amounts of input, collaboration and expertise from pianist/engineer Doug Hammer.
“My Sweet Honeydew” — featured in the player at the top of this post — is part of a new crop of original songs I’ll be sharing in 2022.
Some of these songs attempt to make sense out of the tipping point which human civilization — along with the rest of the extraordinary web of life here on planet earth — is now experiencing due to our overconsumption of fossil fuels during the past 150 years or so.
“My Sweet Honeydew” highlights the gratitude I attempt to practice every day despite horrible news such as the accelerating extinction of plant and animal species; the increasing frequency and severity of fires, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes; and the political unrest/discord which these events stir up!
I am very grateful to live in the United States of America and specifically in Massachusetts, which is currently led by a rare Republican governor who believes in science and who continues to respect the ever-evolving recommendations of public health experts during our ongoing Covid-19 crisis.
Because of these two geographical blessings, I have so far been spared most of the anguish and shortages and panic and destruction that so many other beings on planet earth are already experiencing.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
But I am aware that this could change — and possibly much faster than most of us who currently have access to food and clean water and shelter and electricity and computers and the internet would like to think is possible…
That’s because I’ve been reading a book called DEEP ADAPTATION with a small group of friends.
So far it’s been a very sobering experience — as you may know if you have already read it.
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
I’ll probably write more about DEEP ADAPTATION in future blog posts.
Please let me know in the comments section if you have already read it — and what YOU make of it…
One is to continue to decrease the impact of my life on all of the ecosystems which support our lives here on planet earth.
Another is to write shorter blog posts.
And a third is to remain curious — if that is possible — rather than terrified or furious or disheartened or disgusted about everything that continues to unfold here in these not-very-United-States.
One more deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
You are always welcome to visit my website — where you can find many songs (and learn more about my musical life here on planet earth if you are curious).
You can also find me singing — with Doug Hammer playing his Schimmel grand piano — on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Musicand other digital music platforms.
I am often happy — and sometimes even overjoyed — to be part of our WordPress writing community.
It is thrilling to check my statistics and find that folks have been reading and listening from different countries around the planet.
THANK YOU to everyone who has read and/or listened to one of my blog posts during the past eight years!
And a special thank you to the folks who have taken the time to leave a comment.
Reading and responding to these comments — and also writing comments after reading other people’s blog posts — is how the WordPress community comes to life!
This recording is from a rehearsal at pianist Doug Hammer‘s studio north of Boston, MA, which was attended by a journalist, Joel Brown, who ended up writing a lovely feature story in the Boston Globe to help spread the word before my performance at Scullers Jazz Club.
This recording also features a wonderful musician, Mike Callahan, playing clarinet.
Photo from MSU Website
I met Mike when he was an undergraduate at Harvard.
He arranged a bunch of songs for me to sing with the Harvard Pops Orchestra — and then later with the Timberlane Pops. You can click here to see him and me in action if you are curious.
He can play just about any instrument (which is very useful when one is arranging a song for an entire orchestra) and is also a delightful human being.
Mike went from Harvard to the Eastman School Of Music, where he earned an MA and a PhD and is now a professor at Michigan State.
If you click here, you can read his bio to learn more details about his outstanding musical life.
Finding strong takes from previously recorded rehearsals and then polishing them with Doug via Zoom has also been a process which has given me much joy during the past year.
And — well-masked — we’ve even started recording a new batch of my original songs in the past month (I take off my mask when I am in the vocal recording booth…)
Hopefully a few of them will turn out well enough for me to share them in future blog posts.
Watching things grow in the planters on my back porch this past summer has also been a quietly joyful pastime.
Photo by Carole Bundy
I started with kale, basil, tomatoes and marigolds.
The tomatoes yielded a small but sublime harvest of vegetable gems.
Mine were yellow, and I did not document them with a photograph because they were so tasty I had to eat them as soon as they became ripe.
But my friend Carole Bundy sent me this lovely photo of HER first two tomatoes.
I’ve also been eating one brilliant green leaf of kale every week or so…
When the tomatoes were done, I replaced them with cut up chunks of a potato which my mother brought to family gathering earlier this summer.
It was one of a batch which she described as being the most delicious potatoes she had eaten in a long time.
I wasn’t sure if the cut up chunks would grow, but they did have many “eyes” on them…
Now I am overjoyed that one of them has sprouted, grown tall, and even flowered!
I was very surprised by the flowers, which are quite pretty and fragrant.
Photo by me
They have also lasted a long time.
Now the soil under the flowering plant is starting to bulge a bit.
I think I may need to pile more dirt on top of what may be one or more baby potatoes growing down below…
The cat in this photo lives with our neighbors upstairs.
I may write about her in a future blog post.
Trixie did something on 9/11/21 which was heart-wrenching (not to her but to me and maybe also to her owner).
But that is a story for another day and another blog post.
Thank you to the plants which have been so patient and cooperative with my humble attempts at gardening — as well as generous with their fruits and leaves and roots!
I am overjoyed that you breath out what I breath in and vice-versa.
I know I thanked my readers earlier in this blog post, but I will now thank you again!
THANK YOU.
It is a pleasure and an honor to be part of this WordPress community.
I am using some of my recent favorites to illustrate this blog post.
I feel the postal service is one of the things that still connects all of us — and that we all continue to use on a regular basis — regardless of political ideology, religious affiliation, racial ancestry, and socio-economic status (although the rates going up and up and up certainly make it more expensive to use…)
I also like our postal carrier, Rob.
He has been assigned to our neighborhood for the past decade (at least), and his familiar face — and warm personality — weave all of us in this section of East Arlington together on a daily basis.
Mostly what I receive in the mail are bills, credit card statements, requests for money from organizations to which I may have given a tiny amount of money in the past (or from new organizations to whom someone has given or sold my name and address) and advertisements.
On very rare occasions, I get a handwritten — and sometimes even a handcrafted! — card.
And I savor it…
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I am not sure exactly what makes a hand-written card/note/letter different from an email/text message.
There is the pleasure of seeing a person’s individual, idiosyncratic, and — in a few cases — beautiful handwriting.
I also like knowing that the person who wrote it has touched the same paper and the envelope and the stamp that I am now touching as I rip it open and read it.
And I like seeing what stamp they have selected.
But there is also — for me at least — an element of respect that is somehow implied by the fact that they found the time to find a card (or piece of paper), write something on it, put it into an envelope, address it, stamp it, and get it into the mail.
And then, somewhat magically, it finds its way to me!
I have had jobs which included dropping off mail at both a local office and at a huge regional mail sorting center.
I have seen the people and conveyor belts and sorting machines and wheeled carts and trucks that are responsible for a card or letter or package getting from point A to point B.
It is quite a feat of logistics which most of us take for granted.
And I have never had a card or letter or bill payment (that I know of…) get lost.
On rare occasions I have received something which got a little chewed up en route.
But it was still legible.
In particular I love to send “thank you” cards.
It became a habit when I was given a promotion from part-time events coordinator to full-time PR director (who still coordinated a lot of events) at the Cambridge Center For Adult Education over twenty years ago.
Email was just becoming a regular thing — and hand-written cards were becoming more of a rarity.
Any time a media person included one of our classes or events in a calendar listing, or mentioned us in an article, or interviewed one of our teachers, or mentioned us on the radio, or covered us in any way — I sent them a hand-written “thank you” card.
I wanted to thank them, AND I also wanted to jumpstart (and then nurture) a relationship with them so that when they were next on a deadline and needed some expert to interview for a story, they might be more inclined to think of us as a potential resource.
Or when they had to choose an event to feature in their weekly calendar, they might be a little more likely to select one of our offerings.
Or they might even come and take one of our classes — or attend one of our poetry readings or concerts or workshops.
I was happily surprised (and a little bit embarrassed) to learn, when I attended an annual conference of local black journalists one year, that I had even become slightly infamous when an editor from The Boston Globe referred to me as “the guy who sends all of those ‘thank you’ notes.”
I continue to send “thank you” cards after every one of my gigs to the person who booked us — and sometimes also to the person who welcomed us and made sure we were all set up, too.
And I send “thank you” notes for gifts I receive, to family or friends who feed me dinner or host me on trips, and to local media folks who write about me and my musical life here on planet earth.
I love the cards at Trader Joe’s (only a buck each) and have learned that if I see something I like, I need to buy a bunch of them because I may never see them again for sale.
And every six months or so I go to a local discount department store, TJ Maxx, in a strip mall located a 12-minute bike ride from home.
If I am lucky, they have a bunch of simple, elegant “thank you” cards (in boxes of 12 or 15 or even 20!) at a half or a third of their regular price.
This translates to anywhere from 25 to 50 cents per card.
Then I buy 5-10 boxes of whatever is nicest (because I’ll probably never see any of THEM for sale either) and ride home feeling very rich in ‘thank you” cards.
Same thing for stamps.
If I see some I like, I buy many sheets (or rolls) of that particular design because there is no telling when they will sell out at my local post office — located a four-minute walk from my home.
I guess I could order them online, but I love going to an actual post office and talking with an actual postal employee.
I don’t love putting on two face masks — a medical one and a fabric one — before I go inside, but the more infectious Delta mutation is on the rise even here in relatively well-vaccinated Massachusetts.
So I am using face masks again when I am inside a public space like a post office or grocery store.
Last week when I bought a bunch of stamps, I was the only customer in the post office — which made my visit short and sweet.
I purchased $800 worth of postcard stamps — with a selection of beautiful barns on them — to go along with the 10,000 postcards I ordered earlier this year.
Actually I only ordered 5,000 postcards, but the printer did not understand the four-card template I sent to them and misprinted the first 5,000 (with four small messages rather than one big message on each card).
Then they very generously reprinted them correctly at no extra cost; so I ended up with 10,000 cards total — half of which say “The future belongs to those who vote,” and half of which say the same thing but four times and in much small type.
I mail them — along with a recommended hand-written message — to potential voters all over the USA who have a local election coming up (which they may or may not be aware of…)
It is one of the ways I attempt to ward off my profound disappointment — verging at times on terror — with how political events have been unfolding recently in these not-very-United States.
But this blog post is not intended to be a downer.
The recording I’ve included is a fun take of “Please Mr. Postman” written by Georgia Dobbins, William Garrett, Freddie Gorman, Brian Holland, and Robert Bateman.
Wikipedia reminded me that it was the debut single by a Motown/Tamla group called The Marvelettes — originally released sixty years ago in August 1961.
Apparently the songwriter credits have varied over time — but the current copyright, I am happy to see, includes Georgia Dobbins, who was the original lead singer for The Marvelettes.
She helped create the first version of the song (which she and her bandmates sang when they auditioned for Motown/Tamla) by adapting a blues written by her friend William Garrett.
Her version was then re-worked by several Motown/Tamla songwriter/producers, including Freddie Gorman — who was also an actual Detroit postman.
I am particularly glad that she is included as a co-songwriter, because Wikipedia reports that Ms. Dobbins left the group soon after they were signed by Berry Gordy and before they recorded “Please Mr. Postman.”
There must be more to THAT story…
The song she helped to write became a hit — crossing the Atlantic to the UK where The Beatles quickly added it into their repertoire and eventually recorded it two years later in 1963.
Another thing I learned is that Marvin Gaye played drums on The Marvelettes’ version!
The Carpenters made it a hit yet again in 1975, and their version was sampled and used in another song called “Oh Yes” by the rapper Juelz Santana in 2006.
It is fascinating to see how songs, like viruses, move from one human host to another and creatively mutate over time…
The version at the beginning of this blog post is from a rehearsal I did a few years ago with the wonderful pianist Doug Hammerand a wonderful singer named Lynn Fischer.
In addition to being a life-long performer, Lynn is also the the executive director and co-artistic director of the Mass Transit Theater company in New York City.
I love the playful and spontaneous spirit of this recording, which I think was take number three during our rehearsal for the opening of an art exhibit called ART/Word which my sweetheart produces each year with a different theme.
The artistic theme that year was “Letters.”
I will end by thanking Lynn Fischer for joining me in our fun rendition of this song.
And thanking Doug Hammer for his gifts as a pianist AND engineer/producer.
And thanking the US postal service for continuing to exist and function!
And thanking the artists who create such an extraordinary variety of artwork for our stamps.
And thanking YOU for reading and listening to yet another one of my blog posts.
Do you still send hand-written cards and letters to anyone?
And you are always welcome to visit my website — or you can find me singing (with Doug Hammer playing his Schimmel grand piano) on Spotify, Pandora, Apple Musicand other digital music platforms.
Let’s continue to find new ways to reduce our carbon footprint on this precious planet each and every day!
There are far too many forest fires and floods and mudslides happening these days…
Today’s song is actually a two-song medley from the musical Sweet Charity.
I included it because the first song, “I’m A Brass Band,” mentions the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, which is coming up soon…
I learned online that this year there will be very little marching.
Most of the performances and activity will unfold where the parade usually ends: Herald Square — which is the intersection of Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and 34th street in Manhattan.
Some segments will be pre-recorded and some will be live.
And there will be performances by the casts of many Broadway shows — all of which have been on hiatus for months due to Covid-19.
John McMartin and Gwen Verdon
Sweet Charity was a big hit on Broadway in 1966 starring Gwen Verdon and John McMartin.
Bob Fosse and his wife/muse Gwen Verdon had seen a Fellini movie, The Nights Of Cabiria, and Fosse soon began writing a treatment about how it could become a musical.
Lyricist Dorothy Fields and composer Cy Coleman joined the creative team — and after they had written a few songs, Bob convinced his old friend Neil Simon to work on the script.
She had an extraordinary career as a lyricist, co-writing hit songs from the late 1920s through the early 1970s.
I’m not sure why she is not a household name similar to Cole Porter or Irving Berlin — both of whom, incidentally, she worked with as a librettist (script writer).
Maybe because she was a woman?
Maybe because she didn’t hire publicists to keep her name in the papers?
When many of her friends and contemporaries like Ira Gershwin, Harold Arlen, and Richard Rodgers had become frustrated by the arrival of rock & roll on the cultural landscape, Fields teamed up with a composer almost half her age — Coleman, who was 37 years old — and experienced one of the biggest hits of her entire career when she was 61!
Dorothy Fields and Cy Coleman
Her lyrics for the songs in Sweet Charity are witty and hip in a pre-summer-of-love-kinda-way.
And I love the verse for “I’m A Brass Band.”
“Somebody loves me — my heart is beating so fast. All kinds of music is pouring out of me — somebody loves me at last…”
I feel very loved — or perhaps a more understated word would be appreciated — by the WordPress community.
I am not sure why, but the average number of people visiting my site has doubled in recent weeks.
And so far in November I have already had more people visit the site than in any previous month!
The WordPress community continues to feel like a blessed parallel universe — where respect for others is still a norm.
I love reading other people’s blog posts, and I love reading the comments that each post inspires.
And I love seeing increasingly familiar names turn up in the comments section of an ever-widening variety of blog posts.
I also love when people take the time not only to read and listen to one of my blog posts but also to leave a comment.
Thank you!!!
Last Sunday I was listening to a sermon via Zoom while addressing postcards to potential voters in Georgia — encouraging them to register to vote in the upcoming senate elections.
The theme of the sermon was gratitude — and how powerful a practice it can be in our lives.
As soon as one slows down and starts looking around, most of us can find a seemingly endless stream of things to be grateful for.
And Thanksgiving IS a traditional time to count one’s blessings.
So let’s begin…
I am grateful for music and for great songwriters like Dorothy Fields and Cy Coleman.
I am grateful for pianist/engineer Doug Hammer, with whom I have recorded (and mixed and mastered) many fun versions of songs over the past 20+ years — some of which I share on this blog and some of which I am starting to share via Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Pandora, etc.
I am grateful for marching bands — who do not need any electricity at all to generate a soul-stirring amount of sound and excitement.
I am grateful for friends and family.
I am grateful for food, clothing and shelter.
I am grateful for photosynthesis — which creates oxygen for all of us animals to breathe and transforms energy from a nearby star (our sun) into something we can eat and use to fuel our own lives.
I am grateful for all the folks who grow and harvest and package and deliver food for us city-dwellers to eat.
I am grateful for the two twenty-somethings who recently gave my bike a complete tune-up at a store they help to run not far from where I live.
I am grateful for electricity, my laptop computer, and the internet — which allow me to write blog posts, record songs, and share them with anyone else in the rest of the world who also has access to electricity, a computer and the internet.
I am grateful for my Music Together families — with whom I hop and clap and kick and spin and dance and sing each week (in a local park wearing lots of masks and also via Zoom).
I am grateful for the men installing new, more efficient windows in our basement today.
I am grateful to my friend, the jazz pianist and composer Steve Sweeting, who gave me the sheet music for “I’m A Brass Band” many years ago because he thought I might like to perform it some day…
I am grateful for all the folks around the world and in the USA who are actively engaged in the challenging, ever-evolving work of living in a democracy.
I am grateful to Pixabay and ye olde internet for the images in this blog post.
A happy and healthy Thanksgiving to you and yours…
And, of course, I am grateful to YOU for reading and listening to another one of my blog posts.
I recorded the song “That’ll Do” when I was part of a vocal quartet called At The Movies many years ago with fellow singers Nina Vansuch and Michael Ricca plus singer/pianist/arranger Brian Patton.
All the songs we performed were related in some way to the film industry.
If you are curious, you can click here for a link to the CD we made together called Reel One.
“That’ll Do” appeared in a movie called Babe: Pig In The City — which was a sequel to the movie Babe.
Both of them featured extraordinarily well-trained animal actors plus a few human actors who illuminate heart-breaking lessons about ostracism and community, betrayal and faith, love and loss.
“That’ll Do” was written by Randy Newman — who has crafted songs and soundtracks for a bunch of movies including the Pixar Toy Story series.
And it was originally sung by Peter Gabriel — who is also a great songwriter as well as a globally-engaged rock musician.
I love the wisdom of this song.
It feels like an antidote to many of the forces wreaking havoc on our cultural, political, and environmental landscapes these days.
How easy it can be to overlook the gentle power of kindness…
And perseverance!
In an age of instant gratification, how reassuring to be reminded of the value of perseverance.
And steadiness!
And balance…
My mind immediately connects the concepts of steadiness and balance with boats — canoes, kayaks, row boats, and sail boats.
One doesn’t want to tip too far to the right OR to the left — unless one wants to capsize.
And one has to communicate and cooperate with any other beings (human, dog, cat — yes, our family even took our cats sailing with us on occasion) on the vessel, or else everyone aboard runs the risk of capsizing.
Space exploration notwithstanding, for the foreseeable future planet earth is our shared vessel, our shared home, our shared ark.
And some of us (almost all HUMAN beings) are making choices each and every day that are tipping ALL of us closer and closer to some epic/epoch capsizings.
What choices could each of us make differently which might lead us back in the direction of balance?
How might we live more simply?
How might we consume fewer shared resources?
“That’ll Do” reminds me somehow of social justice, too — of folks who are brave enough to show up and engage in non-violent social protests.
I am pretty sure steadiness is a hallmark of non-violent protest.
As is kindness.
I also appreciate that “That’ll Do” doesn’t espouse perfection as a goal.
The next blog post I write, or music class I lead, or song I create doesn’t have to be perfect.
I do not need to be cowed into inactivity by the powerful illusion of perfection.
Finally, “That’ll Do” reminds me of the humble — yet powerful — concepts of “enough” and “gratitude.”
I am grateful for the extraordinary blessings of today — such as the hundreds of people who work to bring food to my table, water to my faucets, power to my electrical devices, and peace to my neighborhood.
What I have right now is more than enough!
I am grateful to Michael Ricca, Nina Vansuch and Brian Patton for the hundreds of hours we spent rehearsing, performing, and eating home-cooked dinners together.
I am grateful to Randy Newman for writing so many terrific songs, and to Peter Gabriel for putting his heart into the original recording of this song, and to the extraordinary cast and crew of the Babe movies.
I am also grateful to Pixabay for most of the images in this blog post.
And I am grateful to you for reading and listening to another blog post.
Let’s show up with a kind and steady heart… and see what happens.
All the songs we performed were related in some way to the film industry.
I also appreciate that “That’ll Do” doesn’t espouse perfection as a goal.
amusicalifeonplanetearth 