My Favorite Things

There are five general categories of things that I love more than anything else in this life:

No. 1 – My kid. While she’s certainly not perfect and even drives me a little crazy sometimes, I will always be her biggest fan.  I made her, after all, baked her in my body like it was an Easy-Bake Oven and she was a tiny angel food cake.

Second only to my kid I love my family and friends, and goodness knows I’ve been fortunate to have some really special people in my life – including my sister and my niece, and my first cousins on my mother’s side:  one is a podcaster extraordinaire (check out his podcast “Meanwhile at the Podcast”, described as “a show about pop culture, fandom, and the fun stories of everyday life” [http://meanwhileatthepodcast.libsyn.com]) and the other is a dad of two kids, the younger of whom I only know from Facebook (but I already adore her) and the elder I last met when he was barely walking.  I miss my cousins.

When we were growing up, and especially when my grandparents still lived in New York, we saw them a lot, and always spent holidays together.  I remember vividly the night before my cousin George was born.  Much of my extended family had gathered in the basement of my grandmother’s house in Queens Village to celebrate the 90^th birthday of my great-grandmother, which included the whole panoply of second cousins and first cousins once removed.  My aunt hadn’t come to the festivities, however, due to the fact that she was ready to give birth, and in fact she did the following morning – on Christmas Eve of 1967.

But now my cousins live in the D.C. area and, while we follow each other on social media, we haven’t seen each other in years, which is really a shame.

Some of my closest friends, too – people I love like they’re actual family – are long-distance and visited much too infrequently.  One of the things I’m most looking forward to for my retirement is being close to one or more of them so that we can hang out on a regular basis. They are fun and fascinating to be around, and I cherish the time spent together, especially given that it’s so infrequent.

No. 2 – Music of all kinds (as long as there’s a melody). I’ve been accumulating my collection since I was four years old, although I had a devastating loss following Superstorm Sandy in 2012 when all my best LPs – hundreds of them – were warped and waterlogged and lost forever.  (I lost a lot of unreproducible cassette mix tapes, too.)  I’m still kind of old-school when it comes to my current collection, although I’m not a vinyl collector (I do have a few remaining second-tier albums and also took a box of my soon-to-be-ex-brother-in-law’s albums that he was going to just THROW OUT (the horror!), including a stash of Pink Floyd LPs that I’m very excited about).  Streaming music just doesn’t do it for me, although I certainly appreciate the variety.  I mean, I listen to the radio – WFUV, 90.7 on the terrestrial radio dial – all day, every weekday while I’m working from home, and in the car on local drives.  But I want to OWN my music, to be able to listen to it on demand, in my own flow and combinations, wherever I might be located (as long as there’s a listening device).  My classic iPod is battered and suffers glitches such as songs that end prematurely, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the greatest musical storage invention of all time, and incredibly portable.  I still buy CDs when I have Amazon gift cards, not to mention thousands of downloaded iTunes, which I then back up on recorded “mix tape” CDs with names like “The Never-Ending Collection” and “Nan’s Favorite Gift Is Always Music” (a not-so-subtle message to anyone who is thinking of buying me a present for my birthday or some other gift-giving occasion), which I catalog in a Mix CD inventory so I know exactly where to find any single song in my miscellany at any given time.  I’m kind of obsessive about it and only regret that I don’t have more time to enjoy the full variety of my music (basically only on weekends and long drives).

I also regret that I no longer have any good buddies in close proximity with whom to share my music.  Back in the day, communal music listening was a huge part of my life, but no longer.  I haven’t found any new friends who love musical exploration as much as I do.  There is a lovely couple I’ve become friendly with lately – I went to high school with the husband, who is a guitarist in a really entertaining CSNY cover band named Four Way Street, for which I’ve turned into quite the little groupie, and I also really like his wife; we all share political leanings as well as a love of music – but unfortunately they live miles away and we haven’t reached the point of socializing outside of band performances, where it’s not always so easy to communicate amidst the noise and crowds.

In any event, music for me has always been somewhat of a solitary pursuit, but one that I take a great deal of pride in sharing with like-minded, open-minded folks.

No. 3 – Animals, especially cats, and especially kittens. There is nothing cuter.

My daily involvement as a volunteer with the local animal shelter / rescue organization Posh Pets and being the foster parent of over 30 creatures over the past few years is a testament to that love.  Even though the never-ending clean-up of poo and pee and vomit can be exhausting, the incessant barking gives me frequent headaches and the cost of pet food (and wee-wee pads and paper towels) is bank-breaking, I get a warm feeling inside when one of my fosters goes to a permanent home where they will be loved and doted on.  When I pet my cat Savannah, or cuddle a puppy, or a kitten makes biscuits on my belly, or on quiet afternoons when all the dogs and cats are in their respective beds enjoying a siesta, it’s the pinnacle for me of peacefulness and joy.  Companion animals are deserving of better than we give them.  They trust us; they depend on us; we are their world.

No. 4 – Hockey, especially New York Rangers hockey. Such an exciting game – there’s no greater value for your entertainment dollar, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m far from a stats wonk, and I have no interest in assembling a fantasy league team.  I just like to watch the games, and I really only follow the Rangers.  Once the Rangers get eliminated in – or prior to – the playoffs (which has sadly happened every year since the blessed year of our Messier, 1994), I just immerse myself nightly in the glorious spectacle that is playoff hockey and perhaps a favorite will emerge over the course of no less than four grueling best-of-seven series that I think is deserving of the ultimate team prize, the Stanley Cup.

I appreciate the personalities of hockey players and enjoy watching their reactions to things happening on the ice, and I’m also fascinated by what they do for fun off the ice.  (One of the best things I ever watched on TV was the HBO Series “24/7” that followed the Rangers and the Philadelphia Flyers in the days leading up to the NHL Winter Classic in 2011.  Uncensored and hysterical, it was a coveted insider look at what hockey players say and do during games and at home.)  Hockey is an incredibly human game.  Hockey players come in all sizes, from 5’6” mini-mighties like Mats Zuccarrello and Marty St. Louis, and the prototypical tiny tough guy, Theo Fleury, to giants like the 6’9” “Big Z” Zdeno Chara or the man-mountain goalie for the Dallas Stars, 6’7” Ben Bishop.  Even though, as a general matter, the players seem to be getting bigger and younger, there’s still room in the game for small and old(er).

I feel sad when the Rangers lose a lot, and I get frustrated when they don’t SHOOT THE DAMN PUCK, especially when they’re on a power play.  If I were a coach, I would preach the following:  Get the puck out of your zone, then get it deep into theirs.  Think shot first, always.  You can’t score if you don’t shoot.  I’m not as clear on defensive strategy, but that would be my simple but effective offensive game plan every time.

I spent my youth talking hockey with my dad, and my college years being a valued member of the Trinity College hockey coaching brain trust, as team statistician.  (A precursor to today’s “video coach,” I had the best overview of the action from my perch on the highest bleacher seat at center ice, and I memorialized every shot, goal and penalty in my trusty spiral-bound book, which we analyzed after every game.)  The players undoubtedly wondered about my motives for spending so many winters hours traveling with the team, but Coach John Dunham knew the real reason I was there was a pure love of the game, and he was the only one whose opinion mattered.

As a college graduate, I was certain I would have a career in the sports world (well, hockey was the dream, but I would have settled for any pro sport in those early days).  Thanks to an unfortunate life path divergence I’ll expand upon in some future post, it was a dream deferred and, ultimately, denied, because it’s way too late in life now.  In law school I seriously considered pursuing a career as an entertainment lawyer, and my Sports Law professor (who gave me an A) was a former trustee of the New York Islanders so I might have had an “in”, but it wasn’t meant to be, and I ended up as a summer associate at the firm where I’ve been ever since, dealing with aviation finance transactions rather than rinks and stats and sticks and pucks.

Even if it’s not my career, I can (and do) still love hockey from the confines of my own couch and occasionally even decent (but never great, which is always a huge disappointment ) seats at Madison Square Garden.  For a few years I even had the income to be a proud partial-season plan owner, with all the perks that came with it, such as an outing at Bowlmore Lanes in NYC with my kid, where we literally rubbed elbows with Brandon Prust (her favorite player at the time) and Rangers’ TV color man Joe Micheletti.

(An aside:  My kid also counts among her favorite things in life items 2, 3 and 4 above, but not so much item 5.  Which is  . . . )

No. 5 – The written word – both to read and to write. Right now I literally have four books going, from Rachel Maddow’s Blowout to James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to read any of them to the end and will in all likelihood have to return one or more of them prematurely to the library, to be re-borrowed to finish at some future date.  I am so jealous of a recently retired friend of mine who just published on Facebook his 10 favorite books of the year.  (Obama, too, always brags about his prolific reading lists.  How does he find the time??)

As for the writing part?  Well, here I am . . . staying up past my bedtime while trying to keep up with my weekly posts for this re-boot of “Life Considered”.  I maintain my dream of a wider readership (when I actually write something worthy of wider reading, that is).  And one of these days – probably in connection with my next residential move, which will involve considerable down-sizing – I’m going to have to cull through the decades of blathering journals I’ve been hoarding to see if I can find a nugget or two or three that might be the genesis of something publishable.

You know what I’ve concluded as a consequence of this analysis of my favorite things?  I NEED TO RETIRE.  Because once I do, I can indulge more deeply in all these things I love.

                     Some adorable kittens.  (Impossible to get them all to stay still!)

Real Live Music

I have mixed feelings about live music versus studio albums.  Some live shows I’ve seen were memorable, but I could probably count those on one hand.  There was my favorite show EVER, which was at the Bitter End in NYC in 1995 to see Jeffrey Gaines with my friend Sue (who, not coincidentally, factors into many of my top music experiences, including a recent Squeeze acoustic show, where we kept getting whiffs of marijuana but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from because there didn’t seem to be any actual telltale SMOKE, and Nick Cave outdoors on a gorgeous summer evening in Prospect Park).  At the Bitter End, we had great seats, up near the stage.  I was about 8 months pregnant and, during his finale, a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”, I openly wept, whether from the perfection of his voice and guitar, or the crowd gently singing the backing vocals, or raging hormones, but probably a combination of all of the above.

The last Bowie show I saw, a few summers ago at Nikon Theater at Jones Beach, was also an unforgettable one.  This amphitheater is in a completely unique location, on the shore of Zach’s Bay (“Field 5”, for all you Long Islanders), with the broad expanse of Jones Beach and the Atlantic Ocean in the background, going on seemingly forever.  There used to be an actual MOAT separating the stage and the audience, although in recent photos I’ve seen, it now appears to be covered over.  I remember when I was very young my family went to see a production of “The Sound of Music” there, and they would actually bring in actors and props on little barges via the moat.  On this particular summer’s day, it started out sunny and hot but just before Bowie took the stage, the gray clouds started moving in on the wide ocean horizon like churning waves, flecked by lightning strikes in the distance.  Then, inevitably, came the rain.  Bowie, ever the showman, was willing to continue, but for safety reasons the show was shut down two-thirds of the way through.

I’m pretty sure I remember seeing the Talking Heads and Graham Parker and Blondie (among others) at this airplane-hangar sized venue in Hartford when I was at Trinity College from 1977 through 1981, and Sue and I also saw “young” Squeeze at the Malibu nightclub here in Long Beach back in the early ‘80s.  We were at the Squeeze show so early that we actually chatted with Glenn Tillbrook, his mop of strawberry blonde hair hanging out the window of a car being driven around the empty parking lot hours before the doors opened for the show.  But aside from the historical significance of seeing early incarnations of now-classic artists (including my awe at seeing Tina Weymouth, pioneering chick bass player, kicking major rhythm section ass, especially on “Psycho Killer”), I don’t actually remember the concerts themselves.

We witnessed a ton of musical performances in the East Village circa 1990, because I was a bartender in a club, Downtown Beirut II on East Houston Street, that featured live music and was good friends with the guy who booked the gigs, Gene Perone.  Gene was the drummer in a band called Bad Tuna Experience that also featured our favorite green-haired bartender Caroline on lead vocals.  [An aside:  Gene was/is also a “personality” and comedian known as Buddy Flip, who I understand still tours and performs [http://www.buddyflip.com].  I did not know about his alter-ego when I, with my 3-year old daughter and future ex-husband, moved back to my mother’s house in Seaford, NY, from North Carolina in 1998.  One night I was watching TV and on came a commercial for a fun place to take the family out in Suffolk County, on Long Island, called White Post Farms.  It was an actual working farm, where you could pet and feed baby animals and go on hay rides, especially around Halloween.  The spokeperson on the commercial had a certain catchy patter, like, “Hey, kids, it’s your old pal Buddy Flip!”, and was wearing a cowboy hat and overalls, talking about all the fun you could have at White Post Farms.  I sensed something familiar about his voice, so I took a good look at the guy and shouted aloud, “THAT’S GENE!”  So of course I grabbed the closest 3-year-old and went to White Post Farms and there he was, standing on a stage getting ready to lead kids on a pumpkin hunt or some such activity.  We had a friendly little reunion, quickly realizing that we were already nearly ten years removed from our East Village heyday.  I’m glad to see he’s still doing his comedy thing.  I always found him to be a very entertaining and talented guy.]

CBGBs was experiencing the beginning of the end in those years, but as it was right around the corner from my basement apartment on East 1^st Street, we went often and saw a wide range of musical acts, including my ex’s ragtag band, the Diabolix (not a particularly gifted bunch but I still think it was a pretty damn good band name) and my personal favorite band of the day, the Press, featuring Andre Schlesinger as the semi-dictatorial, semi-genius singer-songwriter.  Like Gene/Buddy, Andre is still following his muse as headman of ManinBlack [http://maninblack.org], producing typically dark and sardonic but also really clever and witty music.  I must say, though, one of my great disappointments is that we missed the prime creative years in the East Village.  During the time we lived there, the East Village and the Lower East Side were undergoing a gentrifying transition, and unfortunately there were no more Patti Smiths or David Johansens or even Ramones being discovered; out of all the bands we used to see during that time, no one ever made it big.  The music “scene” by then was shifting to the Pacific Northwest, where Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains and their grungy ilk would dominate the musical airwaves for the next decade.  We were, unfortunately, all gone by the time bands like the Strokes and Interpol and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs made their appearances in the same LES vicinity later in the 1990s.

The East Village years could (and probably will) comprise an entire separate blog post, but my musical experiences there played a key role in my love/hate relationship with live music.  I was often able to get extremely up close and personal with the performers in those days in those hole-in-the-wall clubs, so now I’m ruined for huge crowds in large venues.  I just don’t see the appeal.  Of course tickets are obscenely expensive so my seats are usually not very good, and I’m short so there are always too many heads blocking my view.  The sound systems are also hit-or-miss:  They can be pristine (like at the Nick Cave show in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park that I heard but did not see thanks to the aforementioned heads) but more often than not they’re too loud and fuzzy and muddy.  (One time, back when I was in college, I went to a Ramones show and actually squeezed myself INTO the speaker, absorbing the sound – and Johnny Ramones’ sweat – like a sponge, after which I couldn’t hear for three days.)

Live concerts can certainly create a unique aural and visual atmosphere but, with very few exceptions, I rarely (if ever) listen to live albums.  I prefer a studio version of a song every time.  Although I can appreciate that there are emotional moments and vocal and instrumental nuances that create one-of-a-kind experiences at live shows, by definition, once that moment has been captured on video or audio, doesn’t it no longer qualify as one-of-a-kind?

But I’m such a music lover that there is nothing that gives me a thrill like being up close to musicians, hearing them sing without the use of the microphone and watching every pluck of the strings and bang on the drums (I confess, I’ve always had a thing for drummers).  So that is why I really enjoyed a performance last weekend of Four Way Street, a new CSNY cover band featuring a high school classmate of mine, Chris Cangeleri.  Chris also plays in a Bruce Springsteen cover band called Badlands, but I prefer CSNY to Springsteen so I saw Four Way Street first.  I may go to see Badlands next weekend, if I can manage to convince someone to come with me this time.  On this particular evening, I went to the Four-Way Street show alone, which didn’t bother me when the band was playing and I was actually able to stake out a prime viewing spot for myself.  But I felt a little awkward just standing around on my own when the band took a break after their first set, so I left early and missed their second set, during which I am sure they played my favorite song of theirs, “Wasted on the Way”.  But as evidenced in the photo below (I’m the little face in the glasses near the pillar to the left of the stage), a good, live musical performance can bring me great joy, even when I think no one is watching.