I remember when Grandma Ada sat me down at the kitchen table and told me how each and every one of our problems weighs the same exact amount – they are all just as meaningful in the grand scheme of things. Just because I was having trouble with fertility at the time, didn’t make the 4 year old Bride’s need for a She-Ra castle any less urgent. It took awhile for this to sink in, but it’s stayed with me. The Flapper would have said, “We all have a cross to bear.”
The people displaced by the Los Angeles wildfire have been in my thoughts, prayers and meditations. After my semi-nomadic childhood, living between Scranton, PA and Dover, NJ, losing my home to a natural disaster would send me reeling. I cannot imagine their pain. And so when the spine doctor told me I’d have to wear this Aspen collar another few weeks, I thought about the women who have to find/borrow/buy a pair of pants because they left their home with the clothes on their backs.
If you can find it in your heart to help, Becky and Kim are very good friends of the Rocker and Kiki, and they are in dire need:
We’re asking for your support for two incredible people, Becky Schlikerman and Kim Janssen, who lost their home in Altadena, CA in the recent Eaton fire. Becky and Kim are more than just friends and neighbors—they’re the kind of amazing people who show up when others need help.
Their home, which they cherished, was where Becky’s mom Fanny relocated from Israel due to the war. It is also where their beloved pets—Ruby, their dog, and Jefe and Max, their cats—shared daily life together.
The funds will be used to help Becky and Kim regain some sense of normalcy during the long road ahead. This is a moment when our community can come together to show Becky and Kim the same kindness and generosity they’ve shown us all. Whether it’s a donation, a share, or simply sending them love and encouragement, every bit of support makes a difference.
It was forty years ago in LA, the Olympics that is, when we were living in the Berkshires and I was about to give birth to the Rocker. We lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of a bird sanctuary. Idyllic and terrifyingly beautiful, surrounded by cardinals, chickadees and grouse, there was a dairy farm up the road. I had picked the date of his birth, a repeat C-section was scheduled; Reagan was president, I remember watching the Olympics live while nursing my newborn baby boy.
There is a picture of us at the Bris, tall gladiolus of every color stood guard while friends gathered. Two rabbis came and Grandma Ada was there. She would drive four hours from NJ, always bringing food, “Did you eat?” and a cousin or two. We loved to sit on the swing in the big screened-in porch; the bassinet was on that porch because babies need fresh air. I looked so young, so peaceful. Or maybe I was just exhausted.
“John Williams composed the theme for the Olympiad, “Los Angeles Olympic Theme” later also known as “Olympic Fanfare and Theme“. This piece won a Grammy for Williams and became one of the most well-known musical themes of the Olympic Games…”
I’ve just returned from LA, from visiting the Rocker and Aunt Kiki. My baby grew up to be a talented musician and composer. His company debuted two new trailers while I was there – one for a movie and one for an Apple series. I told them about the Woodstock themed 40th birthday party I’d planned for Bob’s big day, and we talked about my son’s generation – listening to Kurt Cobain, learning to design and create websites. Somewhere between Gen X and the Millennial Generation, the Rocker is a Xennial, a unique subset.
“You have a childhood, youth, and adolescence free of having to worry about social media posts and mobile phones. … We learned to consume media and came of age before there was Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and all these things where you still watch the evening news or read the newspaper.” https://www.bos.com/inspired/xennials-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-micro-generation/
Their California home is like a tree house, perched on a hill with lush tropical plants. We watched the Paris Olympic skateboarding finals on Peacock, a streaming platform. I thought about my son doing tricks on a skateboard, playing rollerblade hockey, moving effortlessly through my dreams. He is tall and lanky like my brothers, Po the Cat drapes herself along his legs while we critique the athletes. And we cooked and played together in the kitchen to fantastical music Kiki curated. My baby is turning 40.
“What began as an inconvenience has become a crisis.” NYTimes
The Rocker told us it takes only twenty minutes to get across town. We called him to see how things were going when we heard about the SAG action this past weekend. The Hollywood writer’s strike, at first an “inconvenience,” quickly became a crisis when actors also walked out. Our son explained the situation, putting the labor issue into exquisite focus. It seems the big studios have an infinite amount of patience and cash to pour into marketing the films that have already wrapped. In other words, we will be bombarded with blockbuster ads for films scheduled to be released in December.
However, actors will not be promoting those films, so don’t expect to see them on TV or YouTube chatting with Kelly Clarkson or Jimmy Fallon. And of course writing rooms will remain empty, so do expect lots of reruns of your favorite shows. The last strike in Hollywood happened in 1980, before the Rocker was born. It’s crazy to think that strike was about residuals; something most of us had never heard of, but there are plenty of actors doing bit parts and still making a living. Why? Because of residuals!
This strike is about so much more. It’s an existential crisis for most actors.
Think about it, Meryl Streep is the exception. Roughly 70-80% of working actors are just getting by – playing a person at a cafe, or a corpse on a cop show, or a doctor in the background of a drama. Extra extra, they fade into the background. They might get lucky and have a few lines, or a pilot may get picked up and their ancillary character may come back for a series like Julianna Margulies in ER. Her performance as a nurse was so remarkable that fans clamored for more and she was signed immediately. I wouldn’t mind being George Clooney’s love interest. Margulies went on to play The Good Wife. Now she is streaming on The Morning Show with our Nashville sensation, Reese Witherspoon. But that is Kismet, most actors find work one audition at a time.
Artificial Intelligence is the reason this time is different. Imagine that young “exotic” looking Margulies is cast for the pilot of ER. She’s been turned down for so many parts because they are looking for a more “traditional” (ie blonde WASPy looking) actor, so she’s elated to play a nurse. And her contract states that the studio, or production company, can put electrodes all over her face and scan it for a digital image. She gets paid for working in the pilot of ER of course, not knowing if the network will pick it up for a season. But now the studio can use her image IN PERPETUITY!!!
In other words, she would never get another paycheck for the life of ER from that studio. Her face would belong to them, and if that doesn’t scare you, it should. I recommend watching the “Joan is Awful” episode on Black Mirror. You can find it on Netflix – with Selma Hayek and Annie Murphy. https://collider.com/black-mirror-episode-sag-aftra-strike/
Of course the writers are in a similar pickle. They may get paid for adapting a novel, or writing a screenplay but that would be it. Any changes or course corrections, any pilot that becomes a series, will be filled in with with ChatAI. But does a computer know what love and loss actually feel like? Can human emotions be deduced from an algorithm?
As for the Rocker, it seems that composers are not currently unionized.
“Worse still, some streamers, most notably Netflix, are defaulting to work agreements that cut out royalties entirely. Such agreements are known as buyouts—work-for-hire deals that offer a lump payment and no back end—and they deprive the composer of any share in the ongoing success of a hit series or movie… There’s rising disenchantment with a system in which paying dues has come to resemble abasement, with aspiring composers working on the cheap without benefits, security, or the leverage of a composer’s union—if only one existed. (Once upon a time it did. The Composers and Lyricists Guild of America, founded in the 1950s, disbanded after a 1971 strike.)”
We’ve been celebrating our anniversary this past weekend.
It’s hard to believe Bob and I have been married 44 years, yet here we are. Celebrating under a strawberry moon, last night we returned to the Schermerhorn Symphony Center to hear Mozart’s “Requiem;” and there was not a mask in sight. We managed to arrive early, so we could catch the conductor, Giancarlo Guerrero’s lecture beforehand on Amadeus Mozart. When the Bride was a newborn, she had an elevated bilirubin count. So I would lay her on a blanket in the streaming, morning sunlight of the living room and massage her tiny body to Mozart piano concertos. He has always been my favorite classical composer.
We all know that Mozart died at only 35 years of age, and was buried in a pauper’s grave. He was working on “Requiem” when he passed, leaving it unfinished. But what I didn’t know is that he had been a bit of an arrogant intellectual who had been in debt most of his life. He was commissioned to compose “Requiem” by a duke who was mourning the death of his 20 year old wife – the only catch was that Mozart could not take credit for his own masterpiece. The duke would claim he composed the funereal music himself! And since he needed the money, Mozart agreed.
Ah the lying, the twists and turns of 18th Century Vienna.
I’m reminded of this 21st Century of misinformation, a time when promises made are not being kept; a time of cloak and dagger with a Supreme Court we cannot trust. Or as Nikki Haley said last night, and I’m paraphrasing, a small minority of people are telling the rest of us what to do! She was referencing trans women in sports, and I’m referring to gun violence; be that as it may, human rights are being stripped away from our country’s most vulnerable, bit by incremental bit – including a whole generation of young women who had never before questioned their own bodily autonomy.
If Mozart were alive today, he would still be composing operas, piano and clarinet concertos, and serenades for flutes; a mere streptococcal bacterial infection doesn’t usually end in a death sentence. The development of antibiotics in the 1930s saved the day. And the duke’s wife? She most likely died in childbirth of “puerperal sepsis,” which was strep too. A fever would start days later, and by one week post-partum the mother would be dead.
“Bearing a child is still one of the most dangerous things a woman can do. It’s the sixth most common cause of death among women age 20 to 34 in the United States. If you look at the black-box warning on a packet of birth control pills, you’ll notice that at most ages the risk of death from taking the pills is less than if you don’t take them—that’s because they’re so good at preventing pregnancy, and pregnancy kills. The risk flips only after age 35 because birth control pills increase the risk of stroke. (Psst, guys, you know what makes an excellent 35th birthday present for your partner? Getting a vasectomy.)”
Menopause has its perks ladies! A bit of good news this week for my beloved drag queens. A Federal court has blocked the Tennessee ban on public drag shows, so the show MUST go on and on! Wave your rainbow flags and catch my hair stylist, the lovely Britney Banks, who is coordinating a show at the PRIDE Festival taking place in our old neighborhood, at the Bicentennial Mall, later this month. I promised not to tell you the theme, and I keep my promises.
Before my first cup of coffee, Bob said, “Have you seen your texts?”
California is at risk of floating away from a series of heavy storms, so my first thought was, “Are the kids evacuating?” Most of the rain is in Northern California but you never know.
Bob assured me everything was alright, while I looked at him incredulously. After an early morning series of text messages with the Bride, he couldn’t wait for me to read the news. While scrolling through the New York Times it seems the Bride came upon a familiar face – her brother! Yes, the very one who lives above a canyon in LA! We had failed to tell her he’d been interviewed during the summer about his work, but in fairness he wasn’t sure when the article, or even IF the article would be published.
I always thought the Rocker’s face would be on the cover of Rolling Stone someday, but for an old-fashioned news reporter, landing in the Grey Lady is the epitome of greatness! I sipped my coffee as I read the essay about the latest trend in trailer music and my son’s specific contributions.
While we were in Malibu I knew something had changed. One day I heard the Rocker laughing with his sister while the Groom was looking at his phone. My adult children know that TikTok is a bridge too far for me to cross, so they did their best to explain what had happened with my son’s latest trailer for the new Black Panther: Wakanda Forever movie. Someone on TikTok connected the dots back to his company, Totem, and was giddy over the musical re-mix.
“The way it goes from No Woman No Cry into Alright and then how the music just goes into another gear at that 1:45 mark…,” another fan on Twitter said. And right before our eyes, Totem was blowing up on YouTube. I think that’s the right terminology.
When the Rocker was in high school, along with playing guitar in his band, he would always write his own music and play around with the oldies that our generation loved. His Fender Strat never left his hands. Since we had wonderful neighbors in the land between two rivers, the drum set stayed in our garage. Playing at the iconic Stone Pony in Asbury Park was just one highpoint of years and years of practice.
But to be honest, it wasn’t an easy trajectory. He left college to tour the world with The Parlor Mob; sleeping in vans and getting signed by one major record label only to be dropped and picked up by another. Some booking agents were better than others and of course they had to sell merchandise. He never complained. The accommodations improved, and the bar food was getting tastier as they worked their way up the ranks, but the entire music industry was changing around the boys in the band. Making a cohesive album of songs turned into 99 cent singles on your cell, or hearing your anthem play at an NHL arena.
He started off as a young boy listening to vinyl LPs in our living room, went straight into the teenage mixed cassette tape era crammed into his car’s windshield visor, and wound up with streaming music everywhere. Now he’s in the NYTimes! This is Eric Ducker’s intro:
“He’s played a crucial role in some of pop culture’s biggest recent moments. But few people outside of the space where the entertainment and marketing industries overlap know his name. As a composer, Rosen is at the forefront of the trailerization movement: He’s in demand for his ability to rework existing songs to maximize their impact in trailers for films and TV shows.He married vocals and motifs from Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” to a thunderous version of the “Stranger Things” theme in the lead-up to the second volume of the show’s fourth season. He intertwined the Nigerian singer Tems’s cover of “No Woman No Cry” with Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” in the teaser for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” symbolizing the meeting of the franchise’s future and its legacy.”
Granted Ducker’s essay included other trailer houses, but it led with Totem and a close-up of my son’s face. What I love, besides that punim, is how the Rocker took a song from the 80s, and introduced it to a new generation. Kate Bush, who recorded Running Up That Hill when the Rocker was a newborn, has now made over 2 Million dollars in royalties since its debut in Stranger Things. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2022/07/08/kate-bush-stranger-things-how-much-did-she-earn/
That’s a nice retirement package!
What I really really love about the Rocker is his humble heart. His wife Kiki, or his sister have to tell me when he’s received an award or is working with a famous director. He would never brag about his accomplishments and would always be the first to offer a friend a couch to sleep on. He’s even helped other East Coast artists adapt to the West Coast vibe. When he needed children to sing a lullaby, he turned to our little California cousins. And most importantly, the Rocker never stopped hugging me in public, even in Middle School.
While 90% of California is currently on flood watch due to atmospheric rivers of rain, we’ve been interviewing contractors about our HVAC system. It can barely keep up with the swing in Nashville temperatures. And I can barely keep up with technology. But the wind has always been at my son’s back.
We sat just six rows back from the orchestra at the Schermerhorn, and waved at the Pumpkin’s classmate in a box seat nearby. He asked if there would be sound when we saw the gigantic movie screen, if we would hear the actors? I said no, it would probably just be the music of Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back. He seemed to take that in stride, then a whole family in Star Wars costumes sat down in front of us and the theatre darkened. https://www.nashvillesymphony.org/4386
Bob and I bought tickets ages ago, not knowing if another variant might strike, or immunizations for children would be approved. There had been no Nutcracker for two years, no pictures of points in time, like the yearly Big Apple Circus pictures and posters that once littered our home. First from the Berkshires, where I was standing with the Bride at a concession stand holding a pink cloud of cotton candy, just moments away from giving birth to her brother. And later from Lincoln Center, surrounded by friends and family.
Yesterday we stopped for lunch at Fifth and Broad. As we walked past the honky-tonks to the symphony center the Rocker looked up at me… no, wait, it wasn’t the Rocker it was my L’il Pumpkin.
“I know why they call this The Music City,” he said without a bit of irony.
It was only a two block walk, but we had to swerve onto Broadway just to avoid a crooner who was leaning out of a bar window, serenading a bride-to-be in white hot pants, boots and veil. Then we hopped back onto the sidewalk to avoid a pedal tavern full of tourists drinking and singing. I wondered what an alien might think of our civilization if he/she/it managed to land in our town.
Science fiction holds a special place in our family history. Bob and I first started dating in high school, and Star Trek was the weekly highlight in our developing saga. The Bride’s first real movie, in factwas Star Wars: the Empire StrikesBack in 1980. She was six months old and slept through the whole thing on my lap.
But the Rocker’s obsession with Star Wars started even earlier. He cut his baby teeth on the Lucas Film space opera. He created stop-action films in our garage of its characters. Little did we know that later, after years of touring in his rock band, he would move to California and start composing Star Wars music for the trailer industry; that he would develop a company to archive cinematic sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQmIi6D38Rg
When we visited Disneyland this year, I wasn’t so sure who was more excited – my son or my grandson?
The Pumpkin’s eyes were transfixed, his energy barely contained by the seat. The Nashville Symphony musicians had tuned their instruments and were about to begin – “In a galaxy far far away” scrolled up the screen. We could hear the actors’ dialogue amidst a swelling wave of John Williams’ music. We leaned back in our seats ready for action and adventure.
I thought about bringing the toddler Rocker to his first Broadway show in NYC. We were in the front row, on top of the orchestra pit. I wasn’t so sure my little boy, my perpetual motion machine, would last through the whole play of Into the Woods. But he too was mesmerized, standing and looking at the musicians, almost willing them to engage him.
Later, in middle school, we’d won the warm-up dance contest on stage before another NYC show. We came with Grandma Ada to see Lucy Lawless, the actor who played Zena, Princess Warrior, in her Broadway debut of Grease. I was exhilarated and he was only slightly embarrassed. We both won tee shirts! He was starting his first band back then, they would play at his Bar Mitzvah.
While we Ubered home to our shared neighborhood, I asked the Grands what instrument they would love to learn to play. Their piano lessons had been on hold since the pandemic started. The Love Bug immediately said she’d like to learn how to play the guitar; thank you Taylor Swift. And the Pumpkin thought for a full minute, and then said the drums. Lucky for him, the Groom’s band keeps a set of drums in the garage apartment!
Maybe my daughter and son-in-law will host a teenage band in their garage someday too.
You’ve heard of the expression, “Hurry up and wait?”
Well, our old house renovation had been at a standstill for awhile. We were waiting for the electrician, waiting for the custom island, waiting for our sinks to be shipped… Then, just when we landed in the Golden State, everything started up at once – the painters were stepping all over the plumber installing the tankless water heater, and naturally a piece was missing from our custom island.
Well, it’s not actually missing. Turns out, they sent us the wrong piece.
There we were, standing in another line at Disneyland, when Bob’s phone would ring with another construction problem or question. But this wasn’t like our 1980s Disney anymore! Everything is online. If you want to make a droid at the Star Wars exhibit, you’d better make a reservation. And thankfully, Uncle Dave and Aunt Kiki purchased Lightning Lane passes, so time spent waiting for rides was minimal.
It was the trip of a lifetime! To see the pure joy on our Pumpkin’s face was reason enough to go to LA, but seeing how much his Uncle enjoyed exploring “Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge” with him was the icing on the cake of our California adventure.
I remember the Rocker filming stop-action videos with tiny Star Wars characters in our garage when he was about the same age. He could barely balance the huge Camcorder on his shoulder. And now, my son’s company is composing music for Disney trailers. It’s Kismet.
Last night, we returned to a chilly, rainy Nashville. No more hummingbirds, no more heated pool and jasmine-lined cabana. Booking a patio table for eight is a fond memory; all eight of us together was magical, plus we spent a delightful day visiting with California cousins!
Today it’s back to reality and renovation, just the two of us, and our old dog, Bean. I’ve yet to get caught up on the news, but I’ll always fight with the Resistance.
While Bob was gone fetching the Grands, my ears picked up a new word. Yesterday was Day Three of Grandparenting while my daughter works in her ER that is once again filled with Covid. Her shifts coincide with the Groom’s stretch of 24/7 Medical ICU coverage. Our system is that one of us drives to their house at daybreak, and returns mid-morning with the children and a certain puppy. Then the fun begins. We are committed to not making plans, and eating as much chocolate as we like.
But first, over coffee and the CBS Sunday Morning show, I heard a piece about the John Denver song, “Country Road.” The man who wrote the song was actually from Massachusetts, but he thought West Virginia fit the lyrics better. It starts out “Almost Heaven” and is universally loved because it’s about a longing for home, a kind of homesickness that is tinged with sadness – aka the Welsh word Hiraeth.
“One attempt to describe hiraeth in English says that it is “a longing to be where your spirit lives.” This description makes some sense out of the combination of words that describe this feeling. The place where your spirit feels most at home may be a physical location that you can return to at any time, or it may be more nostalgic of a home, not attached to a place, but a time from the past that you can only return to by revisiting old memories. Maybe your spirits home could even be neither of the above, one from which you are not only separated by space.”
There is no other word for Hiraeth in any language except ancient Cornish and Breton. It seems the Celts have a deep understanding of loss, one that transcends time. My immediate thought was that I’d like to be able to hug people again, to shake hands and maybe even give and get a peck on the cheek. I’d like to not wonder if I’ll need to wear a mask before I walk out the door. I’d like to return to a place where a virus wasn’t ruining running my life!
But just then the kids arrived. Could they check out the snack drawer? Who wants to play Mancala? And I swiftly returned to the present holiday/nana/camp routine. After all, we’d collected some fairy bark, moss and feathers and had to start building a fairy house. We even found a gold shell casing from a gun on our Christmas hike. I smiled when the Pumpkin turned it into a vase for some tiny flowers. He was enthralled with Bob’s Dremel tool as they carved notches into sticks.
The Bride’s hospital had so many nurses call out sick, with Covid, they had to merge the fast track into the main ER. The Groom’s ICU is expected to open another unit soon. When will the waves of illness and death stop? What will the next variant bring? I know which neighbor’s child is not vaccinated. We shake our heads and tell the Grands that some people just don’t believe in science. So we have to hang tight, to stay within our pod, again.
Today is Day Four. I don’t know how our “little doctors” (Ada’s term) do this, putting on their N95s and doing battle with a disease of the mind and body. Every day, without glory this time. No pans are banging on rooftops, no dinners are being delivered, not even on Christmas. Still, I believe we will return home someday and the secret route isn’t in memory. Hiraeth is a harmony of the soul and the spirit. Despite all the construction on our street, I can envision myself in our new/old house. We’ve already picked out the plumbing!
It’s been a quiet, cold weekend and I’ve been noticing that Ms Bean doesn’t like to leave my side.
My rescue dog is almost 14 and doesn’t see or hear very well anymore. Besides fireworks and the usual bombs demolition going off in the neighborhood, she will only react when I sneeze. For some reason, sneezing makes her get up slowly, and walk into another room. The Vet tells us she’s doing fine for her age, but going up the stairs is an effort and her daily walks are getting shorter – like the days.
Still, when I have a little “song and dance” party by myself, Bean will rally. We were watching the CBS Adele concert last night, and she was hopping along with me to the music. The only other time she hops is just before I set down her dinner.
I loved the interruptions of the Oprah interview with Adele throughout the concert at the Griffith. Watching the sunset over Hollywood, then switching to the green and white setting in Oprah’s California rose garden was magical. It felt intimate, just two divas catching up. I had some idea Adele had been married, but no idea she was now divorced with a son. Losing 100 pounds by training and lifting weights? Not really, pretty sure I just thought she looked great. Her album “30” is like every other album title – it’s her age when she wrote the songs.
“It was exhausting, trying to keep going with it. You know, the process, the process of a divorce, the process of being a single parent, the process of not seeing your child every single day wasn’t really a plan that I had when I became a mum. The process of arriving for yourself every single day, turning up for yourself every single day, and still running a business… I felt like not doing it anymore.”
We’ve all felt like this at times in our lives. You start to wonder about your purpose, you look around at your life and you wonder how in the heck you got here. This was not THE plan you had, like Adele not planning to disrupt her child’s life with a divorce. Because her father had been an abusive, absent alcoholic, her plan was to keep a nice, cozy nuclear family humming along. But that effort was killing the British Grammy winner, and she needed to break free.
Let’s take our American Songstress Nashville version of superstardom, Taylor Swift, who also released an album this week.
Tay Tay is 32, only one year younger than Adele. Of course, I still think of Swift as a twenty-something in cowgirl boots. The Love Bug is positively in love with her! Her trajectory from country starlet to pop sensation was rather bumpy. But I remember when the news hit, about losing all her master recordings to some private equity firm – they sold for 300 Million last November.
Having raised a musician who weathered the sea change at the same time in the music business, I could empathize with Swift’s loss. It wasn’t just the money, it was about control. It was about mastering your own life, like Adele who thought that a marriage would bring her happiness. Both singers write deeply personal, emotional lyrics. Only Swift was bullied and shortchanged not by a husband, but by Scooter Braun, a music tycoon who bought her previous label and sold the rights to her last six albums.
“Swift is a calculating business owner who already recorded two albums during the lockdown simply because it was funand she didn’t have to spend two years in Lover album promotion cycle. Why wouldn’t Swift take time to re-record her material? Imagine a private equity firm not doing enough due diligence on one of the world’s most surveilled super stars to think Swift wouldn’t take advantage of the time inside to maintain her artistic integrity. The woman once wrote a song about Katy Perry poaching employees!
One hedge fund manager who was approached to buy the catalog told FT: “To extract maximum value from music assets you absolutely need, if not co-operation from the artist, you at least need them to not be actively angry.”
The artist must not be actively angry so you can commodify them. But anger can be a very good thing. Taylor took time during the lockdown to produce RED (Taylor’s Version), and I may have to run out to Target to buy a CD, if there are any left! This album is breaking Spotify records, as Braun’s hedge fund is declining. Good on you girl.
Adele is an outlier. She signed a 90 Million Euro (130M dollars) deal with Sony/Columbia a few years back and she can write her own ticket. Almost seven years ago, she waited to release her “25” album on streaming services until as many CDs as possible could be sold. This time her album “30” was simultaneously released on vinyl, CD and streaming. Despite not owning her masters, Adele has skyrocketed to super stardom. She took a more traditional musical route, and transformed it into her own.
I still remember the first time the Bride played “Rolling in the Deep” for me. “We could have had it all.” Her voice is simply devastatingly beautiful. Adele appeals to almost every age, she is a more mature Taylor. We are all learning to “process” a new normal these days; as Grandma Ada would say, we are all in transition.
Daddy Jim could play the spoons. We’d be standing in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner, and he’d break out in a big smile while jockeying spoons like a pro! I’m not sure if anyone does that anymore, but most dads have some entertaining trick up their sleeve. Bob can pick up a guitar, start playing Puff the Magic Dragon, and even today the Bride will tear up.
But today’s dad has to compete with screens for a child’s attention. I always knew the Groom had a wicked sense of humor, I didn’t know it could be inherited. So far, he and the L’il Pumpkin like this one:
“What does the janitor say when he jumps out of the closet?”
“SUPPLIES!”
Along with helping to steer Vandy’s Covid ICU response this past year, the Groom also commandeered his whole family outside to ride bikes, he makes up silly songs with the kiddos and plays them on the piano or his guitar, and he is solely responsible for the newest member of their family of pets, a small lizard named Fred has joined forces with three canines!
In fact, the Groom is an expert fly catcher, almost Obama level, when it comes to delivering fresh food to Fred.
But what makes a dad star quality?
Time: Taking the time to listen to a child, to play, to just talk without criticism or distractions.
Creativity: Helping a child develop their artistic sense – gardening/cooking/building and painting together.
Humor: Buffering life’s ups and downs with a positively funny outlook – sometimes known as
THE DAD JOKE!
“But if there’s one feature that can immediately categorize a joke as a “dad joke,” it’s wordplay, especially of the unsophisticated variety. Examples: “Hey, do you know what time my dentist appointment is? Tooth-hurty.” “You know why they always build fences around cemeteries? Because people are dying to get in.” The purposeful confusion of “smart feller” and “fart smeller.” This famous exchange: “I’m hungry.” “Hi, Hungry. I’m Dad.”
“Most jokes rely on some semantic ambiguity or grammatical ambiguity,” Dubinsky says. “The things people call ‘dad jokes’ are the ones where the ambiguity is crushingly obvious.”
I mean, we all manage to embarrass our children, but who doesn’t love getting an eye-roll from a pre-teen. Dads like to remind their children that in fact they were once young too, and suffered from “… a combination of exhaustion and your kids laughing at anything when they’re very young, which creates a perverse incentive system and endows you with false confidence….Then you spend the rest of your life doubling down on dad jokes.”
So in effect, dads pass down their particular sense of humor in a funny, feedback-loop. Their children learn resilience, it’s hard to worry about things when your dad says, “Someday we’ll laugh at this…”
Like when the Love Bug told me her stuffed manatee’s name is “Hugh.” Get it?!
MountainMornings 