Foggy

I apologize, dear reader, for being out of touch for so long, with my writing sparse and my postings irregular. I’m still here, on the Cutoff, finishing up a few projects that nestled in between a sinus infection that finally abated, only to be followed by a nasty cold – all of which have left me in a bit of foggy state.

How foggy was it? So foggy that even the Hallmark Channel didn’t interest me, nor Turner Classics. So foggy that the jumbo KitKat candy bar Tom brought home for me hasn’t been torn into. So foggy that I slept through Jennifer’s visit, whilst kind and considerate Tom made dinner.

I did, at long last, come out of the foggy bottom, with my Grecian beak just a wee bit tender, sucking on cough drops and avoiding comedies lest my nose not be the only thing dripping, to see this week’s episode of “Call the Midwife”. How I love Chummy and her constable. Poor Cynthia. How wonderfully her friends rallied, reminding me that I must be better at reaching out to friends in distress. Even though I read the book, I didn’t “see it coming” with Jimmy, and wanted to shake him while comforting Jenny for her disappointment in him.

The dear sisters at Nonnatus House are real and complicated and simple, for their mission is one of care to the women of Poplar in the East End of London. I did start to tear up when I heard the echos of  ”you are my special angel” down the long corridor. I won’t say why, for those of you who haven’t seen it, I’ll just that it all reminded me that my own fog has lifted, and isn’t that grand, though nowhere as grand as the fog that eventually lifted in this impoverished section of London in the 1950′s. My drippy nose also made me hold the often curmudgeonly Sister Evangeline, whose nose tends to drip as much as mine was, with a little more compassion as I watched her compassion come through in several scenes.

If you are a fan of the book and/or series, I would love to read your thoughts. If you are not yet, I encourage to you to read or watch – or both.

While looking for the correct spelling of Nannatus House, I came across this article about the sisters that you might find interesting, which can be found by clicking here. . . .

. . . and I do still plan to share a few photos of the germ miners that generously shared their colds with me from way up north.

Off I go. Nose to blow, work to get done, nature to contemplate here on the Cutoff.

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A Voice Never Stilled

Just as I was getting ready to sit down and write, news came that Roger Ebert had passed away.  I felt a sadness at his passing, and the ending of an era of good writing and civil discourse.

Roger Ebert was a writer, a reporter, and a film critic; the title you may know him most prominently for. Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel paired up in the 1970′s reviewing movies on television. Siskel and Ebert were quite a pair; movie critics from rival newspaper. Siskel wrote for the Chicago Tribune, while Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun Times. The two would sit in a studio balcony and critique movies, often getting into heated discussions about a movie and whether it deserved a thumbs up or thumbs down.

It was great entertainment, in part because of their lively exchanges, mostly because they discussed movies intelligently. Sets and scripts and writers and a movie’s value were all brought into play and, for a generation or two, they taught us to look for quality in films, not just fluff and box office smashes.

Roger Ebert won the Pulitzer Prize for movie critics in 1975. It was an unheard of honor then for a movie critic. He was among the first, if not the first, movie critic to draw attention to independent films. This was long before Sundance and others and his thumbs up helped propel the careers of many in the business. He was intelligent, fair, principled, witty, and loved the cinema. He also loved to read – and to write.

Roger Ebert continued the show after Gene Siskel passed away. Their rivalry was also a friendship, much, it would seem, like brothers in fierce competition to be first.

Over the past dozen or so years, Roger Ebert battled cancer of the thyroid and salivary glands. While he endured treatment, enjoyed remissions, and continued to work, cancer eventually led to the removal of his jaw and the collapse of his vocal chords. Instead of hiding, Ebert soldiered on, continuing to write, using technology, and eventually speaking mechanically. His face disfigured, his voice silenced, unable to eat, he penned some of his best work, tweeted and blogged, tackling many subjects, including movies.

I wrote about Roger Ebert, linking to a post I found particularly touching, early on in my blogging life, which can be found here. I read Ebert’s post again this evening, then read a few more, glad for he and his words, which could really never be stilled, and all that they taught us.

Photo of Roger Ebert and more information can be found here.

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Ann Landers

Dear Reader,

This is  a public service announcement. It is one I wish I had heeded through much of my younger years. I wish I had listened to Ann Landers.

I met her, once, as a high school senior. Staff members of our student newspaper were invited to a press conference at the Chicago Sun Times, which is where Ann Landers originally wrote for. Actor Hugh O’Brian was in town promoting the Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership program and I was among the lucky few from our school that attended.

Mr. O’Brian was the very handsome actor many of you might remember for his television role as Wyatt Earp. Do you remember that television series? The Legend of Wyatt Earp. Sigh. The girls in our group were as giddy as teenage girls can be. The boys in our group were full of machismo, for this WAS Wyatt Earp (brave, courageous, and true).

We somehow managed to get to the event on time, found seats in a press room, chatted with each other and  with students from other newspapers; then we fell silent as Hugh O’Brian came into the room. For most of us, this was a first time of seeing an actor in real life as opposed to a black and white television screen. Hugh O’Brian was as dreamy in person as he was on-screen – and he was as committed to his program for youth as anyone could be. We listened, took notes, and Janice, the editor-in-chief of our paper, raised her hand and posed a question. Somewhere, in a box, in the bowels of our basement, sits a news clipping of the event, quoting Janice’s question, with my hair showing. These things are important when one is seventeen.

As the press conference started to wind down, a side door opened and a sprightly, diminutive woman in a classy suit, high heels, and higher hair rushed in. Hugh O’Brian was “way cool”, but, this tiny woman with lots of spunk was none other than Ann Landers, the syndicated columnist who gave advice on boyfriends and marriages, mothers-in-law and nosy neighbors. She even ventured into such topics as basking in the sun. Almost everyone I knew read her columns, which were often clipped out and left on the kitchen table in case the “shoe fit” for some bit of advice.

Miss Landers has a strong voice and a stronger presence. I remember her whisking in and commanding the room as she gave us a few bites of journalistic wisdom and encouraged us to follow our dreams.

How I wished I had listened to one piece of  her advice. Ann Landers wrote early, and often, of the hazards of sitting in the sun, warning that sun would age her readers and worse. It would cause cancer.

I thought about whether or not to write about my recent bout with a pre-cancerous skin condition. I’m fine, really; a month of some nasty cream on my face, a bit of discomfort and worry, but, I’m fine. Eight years ago I had a basal cell growth removed from my nose; a little cut and paste by a plastic surgeon and no one knows it was there. Since then, religiously, I go in yearly for a full body screening. This past December my dermatologist said “ah, we have something we need to take care of”. Nothing I had noticed, but, she did, it was treated, and I am grateful.

I tell you this now not for you to worry or feel badly for me. Please don’t.  I tell you this as a reminder to use sunscreen and protection. Stay out of the sun. The problems I have experienced, and will likely continue to, are a direct result of worshipping the sun all those years ago, even after a tiny women with strong words wrote to all who would read to beware of what damage the sun could do. I ignored her. Several months after the press conference,  I went to Chicago’s Oak Street Beach with friends and managed a very bad sun burn. My mom cut out her column and left it on the table. The “shoe fit” – and still, I sat in the sun, again and again.

Do check your skin regularly. Use sunscreen and hats. Make an appointment with your doctor or dermatologist for a skin check, especially if you have ever had a bad sun burn or have a light complexion, and if you notice anything suspicious, be proactive – and listen to Ann Landers. I sure wish I had.

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Dem Bones

 

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive. Anais Nin

One never knows where “dem bones” will end up. Take, for instance, a ham bone. One leftover from a Christmas luncheon. Actually, someone did take the ham bone. Several people, in fact, did. It made perfect sense to let the ladies who offered to warm the hams have “first pick” at the bones, which they happily took home. One bone, however, was passed on to another, Pat, who froze it to share at another time. I was one of the lucky ones who got to enjoy it!

I was delighted to receive Pat’s invitation to lunch, though not sure if I would be able to make it as it was a week after my sister’s surgery. As luck would have it, I was able to attend and, as these sorts of things go, it was JUST the thing I needed.

Several of us sat around Pat’s table on an icy Friday morn in February, enjoying a most delicious ham, bean and kale soup accompanied by spoon corn bread, a spicy carrot salad, and stimulating conversation with just the right pinches of laughter and encouragement. Dear reader, please know this hearty lunch with one of “dem bones” was a balm for my soul, allowing me to regroup, repair, and rejoice!

Ah, dem bones! As I wended my way home, I started humming the spiritual “Dem Bones”, then recalled a performance on the famed show of years ago, the Lawrence Welk Show. I guess I was still picking at ‘dem bones”. This version was performed on a Halloween show. I hope you will enjoy “dem bones” – and maybe have a big bowl of hearty soup, shared with friends, perhaps, someday soon.

 

 

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Doin’ the Pigeon

Did you know that the names Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street were rumored to be plucked from the iconic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”? Do you remember Bert and Ernie, the policeman and the taxi driver of fictional Bedford Falls? Do you know the famous Muppets, Bert and Ernie? I adore both sets of buddies; partners in adventures and friendship and it really matters not if one set inspired the other. They make me grin and feel good and are a reminder of friends sticking together, no matter what, like setting up a honeymoon for George and Mary or involving a rubber ducky on Sesame Street.

The Sesame Street Bert came to mind yesterday as I headed home from the library, listening to our local public radio station, WBEZ, where a discussion aired on Rick Kogan’s program about a news segment exposing the deportation of some seventy (70) pigeons from a Chicago neighborhood. In short, a Chicago alderman had arranged for an Indiana farmer to net and remove pigeons from his ward, stirring up questions of whether or not this was legal, what would happen to the pigeons, who paid for the pigeon transport, the crossing state lines, etc.

Pigeons can be problematic. If one lives or works or visits Chicago, or any metropolis, he or she is a target for random pigeon poop; a plop on the shoulder or, horrors, one’s hair, is a risk one takes walking in the Big City. A short sit upon a park bench is enough to attract a flash mob of  pigeons, cooing in unison, bobbing about for morsels of bread, popcorn, or whatever crumbs may congregate in a coat pocket or purse corner. There are even monetary fines in some places for feeding pigeons on street corners, by golly by gee, but a posse herding pigeons like a Wild West show seems a bit drastic from my dove cote here on the Cutoff.

The radio segment finished as I tossed my mail into the drive-up box. As I headed home,  I found myself humming “Doin’ the Pigeon”, thinking about Bert and Ernie, and Bert and Ernie, how pigeons stick together, and of how, when our girls were little, Jennifer, Katy and I would bob our heads and pump our knees and dance around the living room, doing the Pigeon.

C’mon, folks. How about clicking on the video above, sit through the pigeon clip, and do the Pigeon with Bert. C’mon. You can do it!

Bert and Ernie, from It’s a Wonderful Life. Image courtesy of Wikepedia

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Ms. Chiquita Banana

Mid-century. That’s what it is being called; that warp in time so many of us, now of a certain age, grew up in. It was as magical and idyllic as it was frightening and confusing and many of us, we baby boomers, had a playmate of sorts that we grew up with. The television. Big cabinets with little screens, three or four channels in shades of gray that went off the air at midnight, when the pictures would start to fill with snow and the national anthem would play, signing off for the night. When I was old enough to stay up that late, I always stood, in my pajamas, at sign off time.

We of the mid-century club watched Romper Room and Howdy Doody, Bonanza and Dr. Kildare, along with those commercials with jingles that still linger, like the one I started singing the other day as I cut up a banana for Kezzie.

I’m Chiquita Banana and I’m here to say

Put some rubber in your blubber

And you’ll bounce away!

 “Mom” cried Katy, “I always thought that was the song until friends said it wasn’t”.

Well, it really wasn’t the jingle, but, we all sang it that way and it became real to us. We would put our hands in the air or on our hips and belt it out like Carmen Miranda as we walked across the narrow bridge over the Eisenhower Expressway, giggling at the thought of all that blubber bouncing on the trucks speeding below us on the Ike.

When bananas, just being introduced into our midwestern stores, were in season, it was a rare treat to have one, carefully peeling so as not to bruise. That first bite, each time, so rare and delicious, was like visiting a foreign land . . . and then someone would start blubbering and we’d try not to bounce.

I don’t really remember if I saw this commercial on television or at the movie theater, where the jingle aired and whose purpose was to teach us all how to eat a banana. My sister and cousins would pile into Aunt Christina’s black and white Plymouth. The car always reminded me of saddle shoes. We would spend a hot summer day or Saturday afternoon watching double features at the Lido Theater.

As Kezzie ate her banana, Ezra cuddled in his mommy’s arms, and Yia Yia washed some berries. Suddenly, mid-century music escaped out of that little device we call a cell phone, which is not only a phone but a typewriter and a tape recorder and a camera and the repository of all YouTube has to offer. There was Ms. Chiquita Banana, teaching us how to eat a banana.

Do you remember this jingle? Are there others you remember from your childhood? Did you or your friends do your own interpretations of commercials?

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In the garden of your mind

Thank you, PBS.

As summer slowly fades, children board school buses again, and the leaves start to turn, a robot named Curiosity roams about a planet known in my own childhood through science fiction and encyclopedias.

I was thinking about Curiosity, wondering who named it, curious myself about life and all its wonders. As I thought about my little life here on the Cutoff, with its herd of deer, soaring hawk, trotting horses that disappear into the forest –  and Midnight, the cat –  Fred Rogers appeared on my television screen.

Go ahead. Click on.

Snap your fingers.

Be curious.

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Telstar

As I was driving along the by-ways of the Chicago ‘burbs on Monday, Gertie, our trusted GPS system, was ordering me to hee instead of haw, while my cell phone signaled that a message was pending. I wondered to myself if our internet service was still interrupted at home and what I could warm up in the microwave for supper. As I drove along, our local public radio station began broadcasting NPR’s  All Things Considered. Host Robert Siegel began with this opening line:

“Fifty years ago on this date, space became TV-friendly. It was one small moment for an orbiting satellite called Telstar 1, one big leap for couch potatoes everywhere.”

Fifty years ago . . .

. . . I was a young girl, on the cusp of becoming a teenager, with my head usually buried in a book, dreaming of knights in shining armor defending the castle gates or a chance encounter with George Chakiris, snapping his fingers and dancing westward along the Eisenhower Expressway toward me. My world still felt idyllic then. I felt safe in the bosom of my family. The brutal assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King had not yet occurred, nor the civil unrest that would come as the decade wore on. I was too young to understand Viet Nam, and there were but three national television stations to choose from, ABC, CBS, and NBC – and they went off the air every night to the tune of our national anthem.

As I listened to NPR yesterday, the music of the Tornadoes’ playing Telstar filled my head. I  thought of Walter Cronkite’s broadcast, live, across the United States with Chet Huntley, his competitor, in San Francisco and across the Atlantic Ocean to the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby. There was even a cheer from the crowd at a Cubs baseball game in Chicago’s Wrigley Field. How exciting it felt back then; this idea of instant communication across continents and oceans and outer space. I had little idea of what it truly meant or what phenomenal changes it would mean for all of us these fifty years later, but, looking back, the changes have been nothing short of mind-boggling. I think I am more in awe now when I think of all that small satellite in outer spaced, birthed by Ma Bell and raised by the enterprising minds of those who dared to think outside of that little box that sat in our homes all across this globe.

I could wax on about all that the Telstar broadcast shepherded into our lives. Instead, I think I’ll just let it speak on its own as you ponder how instantaneous communications now is and how we take it for granted. The link above is about 10 minutes in length, narrated by Walter Cronkite. I think you will find it interesting if you are so inclined and have the time to listen to him as he talks about this moment in time and how they were all  ”creating an event to serve technology” when many of us were young girls and boys, and many of us were not even born yet.

You might also enjoy hearing The Tornadoes and their hit song, Telstar.

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How now brown cow

 It was the root beer, on tap,  that had me as wide-eyed and eager as an eight year old girl at a backyard graduation party recently. With a grin on his face and a foamy cup in his hand,  my Tom endeared himself anew as he handed me the best fresh drawn root beer I’ve had in decades.

I closed my eyes, smelled the distinct essence of licorice, and slowly drank in my childhood.

Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago mid-century, we didn’t have extra money for many vacations. Dinah Shore’s blowing of a kiss after singing “see the USA in your Chevrolet” was usually our only entrée to cross-country family adventures.

Our own backyard was our summertime retreat, especially on weekends when relatives and friends would come by for conversation and laughter, circling the driveway in dance as the record player sat in the open window of the kitchen, blaring the songs of the Old Country . . .

. . . and food. Always food. Pastries and cookies, coffeecakes and bowls laden with fruit of the season. Sometimes, there would be bricks of ice cream from Walgreens; squares of New York Cherry or Neapolitan, lined up like boats on a sea of plates, the spoons for oars.

The best treat of all would come home in gallon jugs from a screened in porch attached to a service garage on Maywood’s 5th Avenue. Strutzels root beer stand made the most heavenly root beer there ever was. My anticipation would begin when Ma pulled out the huge glass containers from under the kitchen sink. More often than not, we children would climb into our own Chevy, Penny and Dottie and Teddy and sometimes Louie, and ride along with Daddy to that orange screened in porch of root beer renown.

There was always a line at Strutzels; high school kids gathering on date night, a baseball team after the game, folks from the neighborhood. One could buy a glass of foamy root beer for five cents. There was also a schooner for just a bit more. A few tables were set up inside and out, but it was mostly lingering on the sidewalk along the street. Our jugs would be filled and I’d watch the foam rise to the top, licking my lips, wishing for hurry.

Off we would go, the glass jars with their handles safely positioned in PenDot’s interior; homeward bound as dusk thought of settling in.

Out came the ice cream scoop, the napkins, the spoons, the straws and the glasses. Slowly the scoop, dipped in water first, would carve out a mound of ice cream and be placed in a glass. Slowly the root beer would flow and then fizz and then foam as the ice cream floated about in the best volcanic eruption of summer. Layers of ice cream and foam and root beer. Layers of summertime all in a glass.

Brown cow, black cow, root beer float; whatever you call it, I call it heaven on a hot summer’s eve.

Image of Elsie, the Borden mascot, from texasarchive.org.

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Just the facts, ma’am.

Sitting inside the police station, waiting to be fingerprinted, my feet dangling on a chair that was just a bit too high, “wanted” posters and Rules of the Road pamphlets decorating the sitting area, I thought about how much the world has changed.

The strains of the long running television series Dragnet, kept running through my head.

Dum, da, dum. Dum, da, dum, dum, DUM!

Just the facts, ma’am.

Joe Friday didn’t really say it like that, but, legend has him uttering those words, much like the line that wasn’t from Casablanca.

Play it again, Sam.

Ma’am and Sam – and me, swinging my legs on a chair, waiting to be fingerprinted.

 I wasn’t being “booked” for a heinous crime, or any other crime. I just wanted to be a good citizen and serve on my city’s beautification committee. In order to be sworn in as a committee member, a background check is required.

An officer came out, asked me politely to follow him, and I was led into the fingerprinting room. He asked why I needed to have my prints recorded and I said to be on the beautification committee.

“Are you a tree hugger, ma’am?”

“Yes, officer, I am, and my fingernails have dirt underneath them because I’ve been pulling weeds.”

“Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.”

Another officer would be taking my fingerprints and, are you ready?, I wouldn’t need to get my fingers dirty.

I stepped up to an interesting machine. A computer, of course. This is 2012, after all. My thumbs were put on a touch screen, and there they were. My opposing thumbprints. The picture wasn’t clear enough, though. Some sort of cream and a wipe of my hands and we tried again. Then the rest of my fingers. All ten digits and not one clear picture.

I wonder if they’ll still let me be on the committee?

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