Big Boy Pants Can Wait

Try as I might, it's hard not to constantly be reminded of my advanced age.

Just yesterday, as I was in the middle of deep thought concerning how much better the Central Wildcat football team of 1953 (My High School) would have been if only Bobby Burris hadn't broken his arm during  a practice drill just before our season opener...when my day dream was interrupted by a caller on the radio bragging about how he was so old that he remembered watching SUPER BOWL number 32 "way back when."

Hell, I remember Super Bowl ONE!  Although I sometimes confuse it with the one in which Joe Namath  boldly guaranteed a Jets' victory over  Don Shula's NFL Baltimore Colts and then making good on his prediction with a 16-7 win for the Jets.

That was Super Bowl III in 1969.

Other than the two Super Bowls the Redskins were in, I've pretty much ignored them, much as I've always tried to avoid most  forms of "group think."  But that's just me. Unlike an article I read today by  Jared Taylor, writing in The American Thinker, I'm not against others doing what they enjoy.

"Nothing is so colossally, magnificently unimportant as professional sports. Unless you have money on the game, whether the Bumble Bees beat the Polar Bears has real-world consequences that can be measured to a value of precisely, exactly, irrefutably zero. Win or lose, nothing changes. No one has been fed or clothed, nothing has been produced, no problem solved -- it’s a gigantic waste of time. And yet the happiness of millions hangs in the balance. There are fully grown adults who seem to care more about a game than the results of a biopsy.
 
 
 Sports are a great way to fill an empty mind. People who can’t name the last 10 presidents can proudly tell you who won the last 10 Super Bowls. And sports make boobs into experts; people with no discernible opinion on anything else can tell you why it was a mistake to trade away the second-string quarterback. The more a man knows about professional sports the more I wonder about his judgment. -Jared Taylor"



Interesting, but we do lots of things that one could call a gigantic waste of time. It's called living.  Anything can be taken too far, and too seriously.

And are there more than our share of "boobs" running around loose?

You bet!

As the great philosopher, my Mom, used to say,  "This country is Ball Crazy!"

Meanwhile, have fun tomorrow; stuff yourself, drink plenty (of fluids), Cheer, Laugh, belch, and enjoy the Super Bowl!

-Ed

The good news is that you aren't
as important as you thought you were.
Relax. The weight of the world
is not on your shoulders.
Take a day off.
Go for a long silent walk in the woods.
The world will still be there tomorrow -
as good and as bad as ever.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie 

You Should be on the stage...

...there''s one leaving tonight.

that may be the oldest one liner ever uttered on a vaudeville stage.  If not, it's certainly a close second to:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have an announcement to make:  Miss Helen Hunt has found an envelope that someone dropped in the lobby containing five 100 Dollar bills...and there's no name on the envelope.  If you happened to have lost it.....go to Helen Hunt for it.

Vaudeville had died a natural death in the early 30's just before we came along.  Nevertheless, there was no shortage of  outstanding live entertainment which was ours for the taking. 

I think my love of Plays, Stage Shows, Concerts, and live performances (we didn't have a cute name like Vaudeville for shows like that) began in Junior High School with plays and musicals that we produced....and continued at Central....which I think to this day were pretty darn good!

My parents took me to the Broadway Theatre a couple of times to see my favorite band, The

Briarhoppers, perform. I doesn't get any better than that.

Whoops, I take that back. Once my Mom took me to a matinee performance at the Broadway, and didn't realize that the Briarhoppers only performed on the evening show.  The afternoon show turned out to be a Hootchi Kootchi show.

My Mom pulled me out of there pretty quickly, but not before I had developed a fondness for a new kind of.........live music.

Over the years, I've been fortunate to see several of my favorite musicians perform on stage: a few were true all time Greats, like Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, The Mills Brothers, and Peggy Lee.
Their music is not played much anymore, and after we're gone there will be very few people who have any idea who those people were, much less care to listen to their music.

I thought of those great performances the other day as I was in a line of traffic that had come to a stop to allow a huge tractor trailer back into a small commercial garage in downtown McLean VA. The driver of the truck, using only his mirrors backed that enormous rig into an unbelievably tight space (only inches to spare on either side of the trailer) on his first try, holding up my line of traffic for no more than 60 seconds!

I wanted to jump out of my car and applaud....and shout "BRAVO!"

I didn't because the citizens around here think I'm kinda strange anyway. They tend to dismiss "old people" like me, as those whose only talent is having existed for a long time.  They seldom realize that, as the song says:

From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe
Wherever the four winds blow, 

I've been in some big towns an' heard me some big talk
And there is one thing I know

...great performances when I see them!

-Ed