Mom, the Flag & Apple Pie, ed of Esquire and others, particularly Gore Vidal, Gordon Parks, Marshall Brady, Andy Warhol, Jean Stafford, R. A. Arthur
Murder and Madness, D.T. Lunde
This book turned out to be a frequent re-read when I was writing mysteries some years later
The World of Jimmy Breslin, Jimmy Breslin
Didn’t finish this.
How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything, Barbara Walters & friend
Would that it were that easy.
October 22 to 27, 2006, I didn't read any books at all.
I'm overhauling my web page--at long last. When I started talking to my web diva, Sue Trowbridge, about this, she pointed out that I do have a chatty little note in my bio along the lines of, "As I write this in 1998…" Eeek! The cute little tuxedo kitten sucking on my neck as I wrote that, has now grown up to be a compact adult cat, who…well, he's grown up enough to only drool a little and we've worked out a deal where he confines the claw-kneading/drooling to a towel around my neck. Unfortunately, every time I pick up a towel…
Anyway, I've been looking around to see how web pages are done in this millennium…
So I spent way too long trolling through the shallows of the net, looking for what I know not. They say that Truman Capote's last years were spent reading magazines when he coulda, shoulda been writing that unfinished book that offended so many people. I get the impression that alcohol involved in that case.
In this case, no alcohol--just the insidious lure of information. Wandering on the net, you can snare things you never expected, even as large segments of your life slip down a black hole never to be seen again.
I blame the New York Times online or maybe YouTube for the last episode. The NYT story on Weird Al Yankovich provided a link to YouTube's where Yankovich's parody of Star Wars was performed to the tune of American Pie.
As a totally word-obsessed sixties survivor I fixate on song lyrics the way more visual people fixate on album cover art. Weird Al's parody ensured that I woke up the next morning pondering, "Do you recall what was revealed the day the music died?"
Um, no, I don't recall it, because I never figured those lyrics out at all.
The folks at Don McLean's web page didn't seem to have figured them out totally either, but the effort to do so has evidently become a cottage industry, which is probably even better. On his web page I saw a link with something else I hadn't realized. As it says: "Don McLean is immortalized as the subject of the Roberta Flack/The Fugees No. 1 hit, Killing Me Softly With His Song." The link on that page takes us to a page explaining that this song was originally written for Lori Lieberman, inspired by a poem she wrote after watching Don McLean perform. Who knew?
"Who is Lori Lieberman?" you may ask--even as a sixties survivor. I asked. So I searched out her web page and found that she's been living the good life in LA and writing songs all this time, presumably having come to terms with the past
Lieberman has a new CD out and it was endorsed by Christine Lavin, another person I never heard of, but who sounded interesting when I looked her web page. I also loved the wonderful (free download) Stop Your Sobbing wherein the friends of a jilted person do the Happy Dance that she/he has gotten rid of the jerk they have hated for lo these many years. Certainly this song should be provided at a judicious moment to heartbroken people everywhere
song
And furthermore, Lavin has collaborated with many other artists on a CD (with cookbook!) of food songs entitled One Meatball…which just so happens to be the name my father gave my pet alligator, whom I remember fondly in a recent essay. (My father named the alligator that after the Andrews' Sisters hit song by that title, although most folksingers reference the Dave van Ronk version.)
album
This brings me back full circle, so here's where I had to stop.
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