Consortium of Seven: Year 2

Consortium of Seven is now (informally) Consortium of Seven at a Time. Rather than have a single person write on Wednesdays, we've got some folks popping in to visit and share what they write.  One of these people is Lee Lynch, a long-time advocate for lesbians, for the environment, and for other important causes. She has a rich history of writing, and is the author of numerous award-winning novels and she has a devoted readership which includes, of course, me.  We'll be featuring articles from Lee's long-running column "The Amazon Trail" here.  To start with, I thought I'd link to a thoughtful piece Lee did on figuring out that she needed hearing aids and then figured out how to pay for them. I thought many of my friends might be able to relate.  IHere's the link, which I'll also post directly to Facebook, both on my own FB Timeline and on the Consortium of Seven FB Page:  Lee Lynch: "What?"

Rudy Vallee began his career in the 1920s, when American was college-crazy,  as we sell in the movies and music of that time. Rudy was famous for his megaphone, which he used to sing into microphones while recording and also in live venues, to make himself heard while people were dancing. Megaphones are also a tool for cheerleaders, and in Rudy's day, male cheerleaders, aka "yell leaders," holsted large wooden megaphones to reach the fans in the top row of the stadium bleachers. So what began as a symbol of a band singer also stood for a guy who was a Big Man on Campus.  You can see from this still from the musical short "Betty Co-Ed" that Rudy fit the bill for the BMOC look. There's a large N.Y.U. pennant behind him, and a smaller one for Yale. Now check out the pennants in the cartoon portion of "Bedy Co-Ed." Okay, first, you're thinking "That's Betty Boop???"  The character had several looks in the cartoon, and you can see that...

 by whiteray In 1969, as the folk-rock duo of Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley were travelling to gigs all over the American Midwest, they’d tune in late at night to the legendary underground radio program Beaker Street on KAAY from Little Rock, Arkansas. And it was on Beaker Street , according to the official Brewer & Shipley website, that the duo first heard the song “Witchi Tai To.”  Among the members of the band Everything Is Everything was Jim Pepper, a saxophonist of Kaw and Creek heritage. As the Brewer & Shipley website puts it: “Pepper adapted the song ‘Witchi Tai To’ from an ancient peyote chant that he learned from his Native American grandfather. . . . The group’s producers encouraged Pepper to express his Native American heritage in his music, and helped him work out the arrangement and English translation.”  The single, notes the Brewer & Shipley website on its page about the song, is “the only hit in the history of the Billboard pop charts (r...

 Nearly April, and it's heating up in Southwest Florida. Time flying quickly. Evening walks with Sandy have included excellent fish watching because the creek is so low. That's all I've got this week, fish watching and bird listening. Looking forward to regaining a slower pace, when it's not just time spent at work or studying, or stolen moments (too many of THOSE) on social media.  ~Dorothy Dolores

During lockdown my partner & I have said it many times.  “Thank GOD we get on! Thank god we like each other. Thank god we’ve got stuff in common. Can you imagine how bad this would be without you?”      We say “thank god” but we mean “well done us.” That we’ve maintained our relationship, taken care of it & looked after each other for well over twenty years; we’ve not taken the other for granted & we don’t row. We know not everyone is in the same position. It got me wondering about artists of the past & how they might have coped cooped up with their partners for over a year. Which remained in the shadows of their partner’s talents, who sacrificed their careers for the other?  Egon Schiele, Portrait of Edith (the artist’s wife) , 1915 Sadly we know exactly how Egon & Edith fared, both having been taken by the influenza pandemic that swept through Europe in 1918. They died within days of each other. In happier times, Egon painted this strikingl...

      Wotta week!       Busy, then a retroactive COVID exposure knocked one of my techs out into quarantine protocols and so threw my schedule into disarray, and that wasn't a paragon of order to start with. I'm on two lists for my vaccine, but nothing's been scheduled as yet. Here in Pennsylvania it seems that all of the people I know who've managed to be vaccinated so far did so because of a family connection or someone with a lot of free time jockeying, jockeying, jockeying for an open spot using a pharmacy link. I'll get mine as soon as someone else decides I can.       Anyway , a briefer post this week, and both juvenile and narrow of interest, but that's life.       Arriving on Amazon Prime today are the first three, hour-long episodes* of their latest comics-to-screen adaptation: Invincible . This is based on the comic by Robert Kirkman, most widely known as the creator of The Walking Dead .  ...

 Hello everyone!  How ya doing?  Week treating you OK?  It seems like here in the US we're getting better at vaccine distribution and a lot more people are starting to get their first or only shot (I got the Pfizer on Sunday, and not to get political it's obvious we should have had the National Guard and FEAM running this from the start; they could not have been both nicer and more organized).  But less talk about obtaining vaccines and more talk about what I obtained at the thrift stores! _________________________ I think I've talked about my love for Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man  and I also love The Maltese Falcon , but this is one that I simply have never read, despite it being considered somewhat of a basis for Kurosawa's Yojimbo  (which in turn inspired A Fistful of Dollars  and Last Man Standing ; it's a long tail for Hammett and movies based on and inspired by his works).  I absolutely adore Yojimbo , which I think might have Toshir...

                        Esperanza (the yellow flower) means hope Hard times, dear ones, hard times. When the conversation moves past small talk these days, and past complaints about the weather, the neighbors’ dogs, the state of the world, then it moves deeper and often reveals the underlying despair. Many of us are in its grip these days. We watch and wait for the next disaster, international or personal. The requests for prayers for healing of suspicious tumors, viral illnesses gone on far too long, complications after routine surgeries, mental illnesses worsening, come to me several times a day now, faster than ever. I am fortunate; I can sit quietly for lengths of time to pray, send healing, listen, attend.  Over a lot of years, I’ve gathered these notions of how to cope. Yes, I know, one more list of what to do for self care. But the wise ones who shared these with me would want to share them with you, too. ...

  "Screen Songs" was a 1930s film-short series put out by Fleischer Studios which often combined film actors and characters in a new way. Fifty years later, the effect was mimicked by the comedy "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"  Oh, and also in that movie with Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny in it. . . Max Fleischer (whose brother Dave was also a cartoonist) was a contemporary of Walt Disney. Disney's studio had Mickey Mouse and Jiminy Cricket, while Fleischer had Popeye the Sailor and Betty Boop. Both studios did a version of "Cinderella." More on that later.  It was Max Fleischer who invented the "follow the bouncing ball" animation techniques used in singalongs, both here in the States and in the UK, where they were also very popular.  A side note: If you were born in the 50s, you remember the television program "Sing Along with Mitch," and you probably remember it wrong. Due to "the Mandela Effect" (google it) early everyone b...

 by whiteray I was less than a month old when my grandfather went out to buy a record of nursery rhymes for my sister, who was turning three in 1953. I’m not sure where Grandpa went to buy the record – that detail has been lost in the family mythology. But he found a 45 rpm record that had “Little Red Riding Hood” on one side and “Three Little Pigs” on the other, read by Al “Jazzbo” Collins. Satisfied, he paid – I suppose – something less than fifty cents and took it back to the apartment where we lived.  Sometime during my sister’s birthday celebration, I imagine, Grandpa produced the record, and my dad plopped it in the record player – one in a black plastic case that played 45s only, the same one on which my sister and I would play our first Beatles record ten-and-a-half years later. There came a riff of jazz piano . . . and then:  Well now, little ones . . . Once upon a time in the land of Ooh-Blah-Dee there lived a fine chick named Red Riding Hood. One day, Red’s...