Annemarie & Earl | johnozed

Well I just came back from a walk to the Post Office and I find an email telling me I won the Rufus Wainwright: Prima Donna contest. I win 2 autographed posters, a playbill from the opening night in Manchester, England and a Sundance Channel tote bag!

They won’t ship these out until after the holidays so any re-gifting will have to wait until next year. Thems the breaks I suppose. It’s not the Mega Millions.

Someone won the whole $160 million. One person. Not me. But the Sundance channel tote bag is nothing to sneeze at though it might be good to wipe your nose with after the sneeze.

What? Too soon?

Last night I watched the Miracle Worker which I had never seen before. I did read the play ages ago in either Annemarie’s or Brian’s Literature book from Lodi High School. They had to read it, I read it for fun.

I enjoyed it, great performances from Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. There were some scenes where Annie Sullivan who had terrible vision squints into the distance when Helen Keller goes off in the distance with her mother.

The squinting, accompanied by the wringing of hands makes it look like Annie Sullivan is scheming. It is also ripe for satire and I wonder if SCTV ever did a sketch based on it.

It would seem to be a perfect match. There’s probably so many episodes of SCTV that it has to be in there, along with Ben Him and the story of Natalie Ringneck, the girl who was raised by geese.

Right at the buildup for the climactic finale, Harpy called. ‘What is it with Tyler Perry’ ‘What is it with hat hair?’ ‘What is it with…’ blah blah blah. Oh Harpy was in his ivory tower playing the snob. If he didn’t get it, if he was who it was aimed for, he deemed it inferior as are the people who enjoy such things.

He also had a ton of advice for me and this blog and what I should do about it. He did mention one thing and it struck a chord/ Basically this blog is like one of Harpy’s favorite books, The Andy Warhol Diaries.

And it’s true, that’s just one of the influences on this here blog. Andy was an influence on me and how I look at things, and I did get the Diaries when they first came out, and even have the Spy Magazine unofficial index yucked away inside. I just missed being included in page 689 of the hardcover, arriving after the incident happened and the books being sold out. I don’t write about it again so, I wrote about it here:

Here She Comes Now

Harpy droned on and whatever momentum I had gained while watching the movie soon petered out. I did watch some of the Paul McCartney: Good Evening New York City, a DVD and CD and book of Macca’s shows at Citifield back over the past summer.

It was a wonderful gift from Annemarie, Rex and Earl. As sweet as the cookies and brownies she sent. I offered to get a copy burned for her but she already got her own. I only watched the first 10 songs and want to watch the rest with Bill sometime soon.

2 pairs of eyes will come in handy trying to find Annemarie & Earl, Julio & Stine and Bill & myself in the stands.

What? It could happen.

Apparently they handed out flip cameras to people in the audience for the recording and you never know, maybe somebody was walking by and caught the six of us doing whatever it was we were doing that night. I honestly don’t remember.

I heard from Casey Chasm, calling with holiday greetings and an update on his life. He seems to be going ahead and joining the army. For the insurance, for he and the missus and the baby. To me it seems drastic, but it’s not my life. I’d rather he didn’t need to enlist, but I support his decision. So good luck to him, Pvt. Chasm.

Well I just got back from a fun visit with Harpy to the American Museum of Natural History. It’s a great place to visit, to see your relatives. Always busy and always crowded though.

The first time I had ever gone to the museum was on a class trip with St Francis de Sales in 4th or 5th grade. Somehow they had gotten it together and got a bus or two full of students into the city which was not as kid friendly as it is now.

Eventually, we were herded together into the museum and the Hayden Planetarium. It must have been 5th grade because word was Jimmy Murray had copped a feel on a girl during the planetarium show in the dark.

He said he did, whether or not that was true remains unknown. She was a girl that I recently re-friended on Facebook and if we ever meet again I’ll have to ask her.

I do remember the big blue whale in a great hall. Not as darkly lit as it was today. Creating an environment that looked as natural as possible wasn’t a concern then.

The other thing I mainly remember was most of the boys fleeing from the class mother, Mrs. Munafo and running wild up and down the stairwells in the museum creating a ruckus.

The second time was probably 15 years ago with Meghan Taylor, the funniest girl alive. Meghan and I took Meghan’s daughter Lily to the museum. I believe it may have been an early spring day, with Meghan and myself pushing Lily in her stroller.

Meghan and I enjoyed ourselves as did Lily. The main thing I remember from that is that the three of us with our Irish faces looked like a family which cause a few other people to comment on what a lovely family we were. We didn’t discourage them.

That is when Lily became my ersatz daughter basically. We decided to run with that and we are still running to this day. The other time was when I took Perry Brody for a trip to the museum.

Perry lived around the block from me in Weehawken, the son of Cheryl Welch and the late Don Brody. Cheryl thought I would make for a good male role model in Perry’s life at that time and a trip to the city sounded like a fun idea.

Perry must have been around 6 or 7 at the time. We rode in on the bus and took a subway. I chose the first car of the train and Perry and I stood looking out the door window next to the engineer. It had a roller coaster effect that we both enjoyed.

Perry, of course loved the museum but we had to hurry through the dinosaur skeletons since they were a bit overpowering and scary for his young mind. Basically I picked him up and hustled him from one end of the hall to the other which his face buried in my shoulder.

After that was a trip to a playground in Central Park where Perry fell and nicked his knee. He cried a bit so I made it looked like I had hurt myself too and I wasn’t crying, so why should he?

It seemed to have worked but that was the last time I ever went anywhere with Perry. I did babysit a few times for him and his sister Molly though where I was declared to be cooler than Coolio.

I went once again after going with Perry, this time with Annemarie and Earl when he was a kid. Another good time with Anne and Earl but the main thing I remember was running around in the summertime heat in the Diana Ross playground, getting wet in the sprinklers.

So today was a visit with Harpy and it was a lot of fun. But by the end after schlepping around the museum, dodging strollers and restraining ourselves from braking the mini-mega phones that a few kids had going on and on, we were exhausted.

We parted ways, Harpy and I. He getting on the C train heading uptown and me trekking south to get a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya. Most of the pictures were posted on Facebook but there are some posted here as well.