The Early Bird...

Before she became the brilliant and glamorous college student, majoring in history at Franciscan University....

"Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,Guess I'll go eat worms,

Long, thin, slimy ones; Short, fat, juicy ones,Itsy, bitsy, fuzzy wuzzy worms.

Down goes the first one, down goes the second one,Oh how they wiggle and squirm.

Up comes the first one, up comes the second one,Oh how they wiggle and squirm. "

Guess who is on the left and who is on the right!


A clue: They are cousins who bear more than a passing resemblance.


Final picture is from the past. Aunt Cindy and Aunt Theresa got into an argument one day when they were young...

Ask For A Ride In Malone

This is what I would expect if I was in Bangor and needed a ride to the Malone Airport:

There are people like that up here, you know...

Anne-Sophie Mutter

Last night, Kathleen and I went to Montreal and saw the MSO with Anne-Sophie Mutter. Two days before that, Ms. Mutter played the same violin concerto, (Mendehlsonn's), in New York with the New York Phil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0sDAdyMtnk shows Ms. Mutter playing the same piece and wearing the SAME GOWN!!!! Ms. Mutter is known for her gowns. She is also known for her skill and she has a lot of that.

One thing that Kathleen and Ms. Mutter have in common is that they both were born in 1963 and they both married older men. In Ms. Mutter's case, she married Andre Previn, a great conductor-pianist. He is slightly older than me, just celebrating his 80th birthday this month.

Ms. Mutter Mutter was born in Rheinfelden, Germany. She began playing the piano when she was five years old and shortly after that began playing the violin. She had 2 children with her first husband, who died of cancer. In 2002 she married Mr. Previn, and they divorced two years ago.

When she was 13 years old, Ms. Mutter had her professional premier with one of the scariest yet greatest conductor, Herbert von Karijan. What were you doing when you were 13? Kathleen was in the eighth grade, and so were you when you were 13. This is what Anne-Sophie did:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L49-c3LEdtI

Ask Not What You Can Do For Your State, But Ask What Your State Can Do For You.

Last week the New Yorker ran a story about the abandoned and screwed up "race" for the vacant Senate seat, (vacated by Hil on her way to celebritizing foreign policy), conducted by Caroline Kennedy. All in all it was an engaging article. But, the following quote sent my mind spinning:

"Caroline Kennedy’s friends are always saying how normal she is, and it appears that they are right. Normal people do not run for the Senate. Normal people with lots of money and families that they like tend to want to enjoy the money and the families. They do not spend their winters on the phone grovelling for support, or their summers at obscure state fairs ingesting disagreeable and fattening local food. Caroline Kennedy is normal. Until recently, she wasn’t even sure how much she wanted to work at all.
It was, evidently, Jacqueline Kennedy’s intention to raise children who were as unaffected as possible by the extraordinary circumstances of their lives, and it seems that she succeeded: Caroline Kennedy’s life has in many ways been indistinguishable from that of any other smart and reasonably diligent child raised on Fifth Avenue in the nineteen-sixties. She went to Sacred Heart School in New York in the lower grades, and then to Brearley. She was close to her brother; she resented her stepfather. In tenth grade, she went to boarding school at Concord Academy, where she smoked, like everybody else, and wore clogs, like everybody else. She put on weight and was hounded by her mother about it. (At her fiftieth-birthday party, according to one guest, many of the family toasts were about her obsession with being thin.) She had moments of greatness: according to the biographer C. David Heymann, when the police discovered pot plants that her cousin David was growing in her back yard in Hyannis Port, she took the blame.
After high school, she spent a year in London taking an art course at Sotheby’s. She went to night clubs and had a love affair. She went to Radcliffe. She majored in fine arts. She did the usual college things. The summer after her freshman year, contacts of her mother’s helped her obtain an internship at the News, and after college she went to work in the educational-film department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While there, she met a designer of museum installations named Edwin Schlossberg, and married him when she was twenty-eight.
After a few years at the Met, she decided to go to law school at Columbia. She interned for a summer at her mother’s lawyer’s firm, but then decided she didn’t want to practice. “I think that, like a lot of people who go to law school, she wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted to do with her law degree,” Ellen Alderman, a friend from law school, says. “We were taking it more as we went along.” It seems as though Caroline did not, at the time, have a sense of what she wanted to do with her life or a measure of her own ambition. “I would say it was very much like her mom’s,” a friend says. “Her mom wanted to get smart things done, and she wanted to have some fun, and I think that’s probably what Caroline thought. She thought, I’m going to stay in New York, on the Upper East Side, I’ll marry this smart guy, that’s good, I’ll hang out with my three good friends from school, and we won’t do anything crazy. I’m stabilizing things up here—John can move downtown. Jackie was like, Relax, let’s have lunch, let’s go for a swim, have you read this book?”

Though Ms. MacFarquhar, the author of the article quoted above, opines on the normalcy of Caroline Kennedy, she goes on to deliver a portrait of a young life of being raised by the President and First Lady; not liking her step-father, (Aristotle Onasis, the Greek shipping magnate), going to boarding schools, London, then Radcliffe, worked at the Met, and, at one point "...she smoked, like everybody else, and wore clogs, like everybody else." Whether her use of tobacco and fashionably ill-advised footwear is her link to normalcy, Caroline Kennedy is far from "normal." If she is the poster-girl for "normal", I can only hope that my own children continue to be blessed with their abnormal lives!

Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, known as the Tallis Fantasia, a/k/a the Tallis Fantasia, is one of the most beautiful, peaceful, gorgeous, (other good words...), piece of music I have ever heard. Notice, I said "one of". This morning, before I came to work, I heard it on the radio program "Performance Today". If you have 18 minutes to kill, listen to the above rendition. This was composed by Ralph Vaughn Williams, an English composer who, had he lived, would have been 101 years old. He composed it in 1910 and it was one of his first successes. The work takes its name from the original composer of the melody, Thomas Tallis, who lived from 1540 to 1623. Go ahead and listen to it while you read the paper or do something else online. Better yet, turn your computer speakers up a bit and just relax.

If you have another 8 minutes or so, you can hear the tune that Tallis wrote that inspired the Fantasia. Tallis wrote it for the first Archbishop of Cantebury for voices. It was written in in 1567. The words: "Why fum'th in fight the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout?
Why tak'th in hand the people fond, vain things to bring about?The Kings arise, the Lords devise, in counsels met thereto,against the Lord with false accord, against His Christ they go." It is from the second Psalm.

One English composer who deserves to better known is Thomas Tallis who in his lifetime was a reknowned composer of sacred choral music. Tallis remained a Catholic at time of considerable religious upheaval in the British Isles, and the fact that he was able to continue to write for both the Catholic and Anglican churches illustrates the esteem in which he was held. Aside from his association with Vaughan Williams across time, Tallis is probably best known today as the composer of Spem In Alium, an astonishingly beautiful motet for 40 voices. But that is for another post. Here is the theme that inspired Ralph Vaughn Williams:

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. ~G.K. Chesterton

When I was just an eeeedy beeedy boy, I watched this Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith. Little did I know that I would become this man. Years ago, Kathleen and I and Maureen and Claire saw this on television and they all stared at me -- and said, "That's you!"

I had not seen any reference to this episode until recently:

My Last Word on Miss South Carolina

This is not an exaggeration:

Nor is this: