Okay...so I was cleaning my daughters' room and found this:

I'll let you know if I start wearing shades and listening to obscure recording artists before they're discovered.  Then again, if I'm cool, I won't have to tell you, you'll just know because....I'm cool.  

When I'm 64 or how about even When I'm 47

I  have a goal.  It's not impossible, but it will require work on my part.

I dream of being as spry and fired alive as Paul McCartney is at 71.  The man sang and played and conversed with the audience of 40 thousand plus for almost three hours without a real break, not more than 3-5 minutes off stage tops during the course of the whole show.  He sang, he shared, he made jokes, he told stories and played the heart out of a piano and at least 7 guitars plus a George Harrison's ukulele. He seemed to grow younger and lighter as the evening wore on, singing favorites like Hey Jude and Let it Be and Ob-la-di, Ob-la-dah, and rocking out Band on the Run and a fiery Live and Let Die.  

Honestly, I always liked Paul, but this topped my expectations of a concert experience when I'm in a upper section of a baseball park.  I've had closer encounters with performers that felt less emotionally connected and intimate.  Half way through, it struck me, this is a master playing.  This man has been performing and making music for 50 years, and his experience, his pacing, his show revealed the difference between having a hit and rocking on the energy of the crowd and knowing how to bring the audience along with you.  

Marc bought us the tickets after he played "Birthday." for my 47th on the i-pad.   I have fond memories of that song from my brother blasting it on my 24th, the year I got married, to wake me up.  

The concert was a homage to friends and ghosts, performers and friends, celebrities and family that he still wanted to hold onto, and to remind us to remember.  The family photos and footage of his earlier years were especially poignant.   This was Paul's show. 

What I didn't expect, was for his songs to trigger a memory journey for me.  "Let it Be" was the song played on the organ at the end of my Uncle Tommy's funeral.  I could immediately smell the nicotine that always accompanied my dad's oldest brother.   Ob-la-di, Ob-la-dah had multiple connections, from the show "Life Goes On," to my son Paul, to a cassette of songs my then boyfriend made for me when I went to Europe, and sitting in my parents living room with my brothers and a wooden guitar, a toy piano and a drum set made of an oatmeal carton and pots pretending to be three of the four Beatles.   Then there was Hey Jude, and that brought memories of my parents and their friends singing along in that same living room and us playing the record Jesus Christ Superstar to death one summer. 

My one complaint was occasionally the art was a bit too trippy, like when Paul did the silly "All together Now" sing-a-long.  The little figurines on the screen looked like Veggie tales on acid.  Who knows? They might have been.

Sir Paul could have called it quits after two hours, he'd played beautifully, he'd done a ton of favorites and had a show stopping finale.  However this is Paul, formerly of the Beatles.  He came out for two encores.  Regrettably, we had to leave during the second one, as our garage closed at 12 and it was 11:45.  To get home, we split up, Marc taking a cab and me the metro. He won, but I arrived at 12:06.  If Marc had not made it, the evening would have been dramatic, as the metro stops also at 12, meaning once I got off, I was stuck until morning. 

But it all worked out, and today, Paul is preparing to pack up and go onto his next stop in Indianapolis.  One last bit from the concert.  Someone in the expensive floor seats had a sign, "THIS IS THE BEST PRESENT I EVER GAVE MYSELF" and I have to say, it was a pretty awesome present simply  to receive as well. 

Thanks Marc.

Love, Sherry

What I Did This Morning Instead of Blogging, Laundry or Anything Else

I went to see Train!  That's right.  I was part of an audience of roughly 50 people eating bagels and drinking oj with the guys who sing Drops of Jupiter, Save Me San Francisco and Marry Me.

But they rocked the crowd with their newest two, and Rita was singing along with both:

and

My moment of coolness for 2012. Enjoy. 

Brave New World

When I was a teen, one of the coolest girls in the senior class drove me to school.  She always was perfectly dressed and she'd drive with her hands flexed on the steering wheel to allow her nails to dry.  With her best friend in the front seat, I got a glimpse into a more polished and avant guarde atmosphere than I would ever experience in high school as they punched the radio stations incessantly searching for the next song they'd allow to play through to completion.  They knew all the cool songs and all things artsy. I kept wondering where they found out all this stuff; like there was a secret club that only certain people were initiated into during those formative years, and that it was on a need to know basis.  I hero worshiped enough to imitate.

Being a first child, it had never occurred to me to be fickle with the radio. I'd always just waited for the next song.  Now, there were buttons to push.  I tried driving like she did with wet nails but I'd always forget and snag the polish on something such that by the time I got where I was going, my fingers were sticky goey ugly messes.  Three car accidents later, I became faithful to two stations for the rest of my teen years, but the temptation to engage in perpetual flipping from one station to another stayed.

Now as I enter the age of having a teenage daughter, a state from which I will not leave until some time in 2026, I am learning a whole new way to have ADD with music as she sat at my computer pulling up song after song from two radio stations dueling online playlists.  She was bopping along, cranking one cool tune after another of songs I knew we didn't own as she worked and I had to ask, "How do you do that?"  She indulged my ignorance and now, I will be even more distracted from life than before. But again, I'm peeking into a cooler rarer world than I normally dwell.  

It's as fun as I remember and while I know I still couldn't keep my nails dry and work the mouse at the same time if I tried such a thing, maybe with the next technological upgrade it will be possible. In the meantime, I'm hoping not to have any computer crashes as a result of my new found distraction.

You can't Watch this often enough to take everything in....

Have a great Saturday!

I Finally have a good Sound Track if not Sound Mind

Anyone who has known me in my childhood or adolescence knows I have the definitive record for the worst music collection from that era for all time. Granted, it was the 70's so there was lots of badness to cherry pick from, but my passionate devotion to poorly chosen tunes began with being exposed to the Eagles by our terribly hip babysitter. She showed me the cover of "One of These Nights" and played the music.


I got nightmares of giant flying cow skulls coming to trap me in my room. I blame her for my subsequent reactive decisions to purchase three seasons of the Kids from Fame's Greatest Hits.

Now most of us have nightmare moments, messy elements of our lives that we hope not to impose or create for our children. Human nature remaining perpetually flawed, I have discovered when we seek to employ countermeasures, we usually exacerbate matters.

Given the many different ages with the choice of music in the car, I get requests for Pokemon or the latest Kids Bop CD from McDonalds, for Disney show tunes and for simple control of the radio to find something good. To eliminate music as proof of the pecking order in our car, I opted to play "None of the above" and put on classical music.

To occasionally allow for a break from Bach, Beethoven and Saint-Sans, I brought tunes that I hoped everyone would like, music I deemed retro enough not to give points to the olders for controlling the sound, and cool enough not to sabotage my children's social future or present. Foreigner, Boston, Styx, the Eagles, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffet, Cheryl Crow and Faith Hill seemed like a decent enough mix to meet the diversity needs of my kiddos while keeping me from listening to commercials for Viagra or IVF or the political lobbying ads that permeate every hour when you live around DC.

Because toddlers spend more time in the car than the olders, they heard the songs more. My four year old daughter fell in love with the Eagles. Every time we got in the car, she'd beg for a particular song,"There's a New Kid in Town." The first time I heard her croon along with Glen Frey and Joe Walsh, I fell in love. Subsequently, I indulged her request, enjoying the small choir singing "You look in her eyes, the music begins to play..." as her sister would occasionally chime in as well.

Sometimes, she'd ask for it a second time. Again, I'd been charmed and thus saw no danger to the situation, but like peanut butter that becomes the only meal and the blue dress and red socks that become the only outfit, the song became the ONLY song. I understand the psychology behind this choice (unlike the peanut butter or the blue and red thing). Her father told her how we used to sing this one to her as a baby and to her older brother because his name was John, "Johny come lately, there's a new kid in town..."

Suddenly, the very measure I'd used to eliminate pecking order WAS indicating the alpha in the car, and it was my four year old. I tried saying "No." but when you have nine children, is this where you want to engage in battle on a daily basis? She knew I didn't have the steel to nut this one out and she was right. "Who needs it?" I told myself and on went the Eagles. She'd get tired of it... eventually.

My other children were sympathetic at first to my not wanting grief in the car, but they did try removing the CD from the car. "WHERE IS MY JOHNNY SONG? I WANT MY JOHNNY SONG?" until she crashed asleep brought the Eagles greatest hits back to the car pronto. So my oldest daughter tried craft. "This is another Eagles Song. It's a good Halloween song." She considered this for a moment and asked, "Can it be about me?"

"If you want." my daughter responded with the perfect indifference of an adolescent.

We played it. The daughter liked it. She sang along and asked for seconds. Everyone was momentarily charmed and the cycle started again, only now we had a rotation. I'm still not going to fight over the music, but this means we will have to feed this musical narcissist until she tires of it.

Next year, she goes to pre-school. I don't see any trouble for her, but I will have to explain why she croons "Witchy Woman" and glows, "It's my song."

But Mom, This Makes Me Look CooL...Really

In getting ready to write a regular column, I revisited some of my old blog entries that never saw daylight. Now I take my writing seriously and try very hard to make sure the things I put on the blog are at least moderately edited and above all things, worth reading. However, once posted or published or sent off into the email wonderland for consideration, I don’t go back to peruse them. Because I’d “Fire and forget” carpet bomb editors with columns, I never looked back to reread any of my stuff…until now.

Going back into the blog postings of the past year is like revisiting one’s high school yearbook. It’s awkward and irritating because I know when I was in that moment, that I believed with all my heart, leg warmers and unicorns were cool and Xanadu worth watching.

Twice.

My mother did counsel against the second viewing of Olivia Newton John’s musical with Gene Kelly, but I couldn’t get past the glow of the music. She also suggested the “I Brake for Unicorns” bumper sticker for the car might be a poor choice.

Currently on my laptop, I have a file with 200 plus unicorns.

They were once sparkling and beautiful and glorious magical things that popped off the page with their dazzling brilliance. Sure they needed minor trimming, but these were inventive thoughts that deserved to be circulated amongst a broad circle of people. Now, I’m looking at these ungainly unnatural creations of mine and many seem far more monstrous than first imagined. “Why didn’t someone stop me?” I wonder.

Looking at my junior yearbook drama club picture, I'm the one with a pink bathrobe sash tied around my forehead like a headband. Maybe the fact that no one wanted to stand next to me should have been a clue.

Yeah. I know. Mom tried to stop that one too.

Now, as I trim run-on sentences and find misspelled words I have to wonder...when I send these pieces off, am I sending real unicorns or bathrobe sashes that I thought people would mistake for headbands because they were pink?

Maybe, I should call my Mom.

College Post Modernist Thinking Students declare Disagreement only the result of Ignorance on the part of Others

It happened at the University the other day, when a group of very hip modernists who understood that no truth is knowable but were smart enough to declare anyone who pointed out that such a statement could be perceived as a statement of a universal truth were just being clever, decided that debate itself indicates ignorance, misunderstanding and stupidity on the part of anyone who advocates any “traditional” position about knowledge. (Truth being identifiable, knowable, and even transferable via such an unwieldy tool as language).

When asked if they weren’t simply adopting a Berkley stance, being is perception, they scoffed at such a simplistic understanding of the universe. “No, what we understand is that all information is biased and therefore innately untrustworthy as accurate or even valid. No actual reality can be verified as actual, as 100 people seeing the same accident will each see the accident differently and no one person saw the whole accident.”

Additionally, another young slim woman sipping Starbucks offered, “The consensus of a large group of people in one proximity or even across a nation or over time, is not a validation of a reality, only the result of collective norms, societal pressures and the clumsiness of our own English Language to provide sufficient levels of nuance to everyday observations.”

“But,” offered one hapless professor, attempting to provide a touch of guidance based on his own study, something the students considered inadequate to substantiate his authority on things over theirs, regardless of the extent of his research, “If I hold up an apple, you know it is an apple, and 100 or 1000 people looking at it would know that it is an apple.”

“Hah!” up jumped one of the more gothic looking youths with multiple piercings, his appearance and quick action made the professor startle, something which gave the clever young bohemians present a great bit of glee, “But an alien arriving here would not know it is an apple unless you told them, and a Frenchman would not call it an apple, but a pomme, and someone who never before seen an apple would not know what that object in your hand was. Further, a blind man would not know appleness from your hand holding it, and a color blind man would not know the red quality of that apple, and therefore see an apple as meaning something different than you. You cannot claim the apple would be known to all, because it would not be perceived by all or comprehended by all. We believe all perception is all we can know and that all perception is deceptive in nature.”

“But then you believe nothing is knowable.”
“Yes.”

“How do you know nothing is knowable?”
“We can’t know, that would be proving it and that would go against our central thesis.”

“So you can’t even know if anything is knowable? Why learn anything then?”


“Exactly!” the slim girl smiled. The other students nodded their heads in demur affirmation of the professor's sudden enlightenment.

And the professor smiled as his goth student teacher praised how he had finally come to comprehend the ignorance of his own ignorance, the prejudice that prevented him from understanding how to deconstruct everything into meaninglessness. “Now you’re getting it man. Have a Starbucks.” and handed him a Venti Mocha Latte.



For thinking that is even more post modern than the most post modern deconstructionist theories of deconstruction, and humor that allows us to cope with such nonsense, try http://www.humor-blogs.com/!