If it is up to me, these words of Daniel Webster from a long ago visit to Rochester will grace a plaque at the [hopefully] upcoming High Falls State Park:

“Men of Rochester, I am glad to see you, and I am glad to see your noble city. Gentlemen, I saw your Falls, which I am told are one hundred and fifty feet high. That is a very interesting fact. Gentlemen , Rome had her Cæsar, her Scipio, her Brutus, but Rome in her proudest days never had a waterfall one hundred and fifty feet high! Gentlemen, Greece had her Pericles, her Demosthenes, and her Socrates, but Greece in her palmiest days never had a waterfall one hundred and fifty feet high! Men of Rochester, go on. No people ever lost their liberties who had a water fall one hundred and fifty feet high!”  (From the book “Rochester—a City Historical,” 1894)

Truncate it a little if need be. I mean, the guy’s a bit of a windbag. But that is what orators did back then in the days before microphones. Yes, and apparently he was told wrong. The falls today are 96 feet high.

A city should always make maximum use of its river area and Rochester doesn’t. This new park of 40 acres would change that. It is a long haul ahead, though. Lands involved “have been used for generations now, primarily for utility generation and they’re contaminated. So, we have to not only acquire them, but make sure the areas are clean and safe for public use.”

(photo: New York Park, Recreation and Historic Preservation Department)

While a college student, I worked three summers for that utility, Rochester Gas and Electric. A summer job and I was happy to have it. One year I worked on the paint crew, one year in the gatehouse, and one year as a welder’s assistant. Some of the guys would mutter all day long about a certain boss known to spy from atop the Platt Street bridge with binoculars to make sure everyone was working.

Funding for the new park is murky. The governor pledges six million to kickstart it. It would be one great way to showcase the city.

Whoa! What a mess! Better defuse this one. It’s right there in our assigned Bible reading this week:

“Now on the road at the lodging place, Jehovah met [Moses] and was seeking to put him to death. Finally Zipporah took a flint and circumcised her son and caused his foreskin to touch his feet and said: ‘It is because you are a bridegroom of blood to me.’  So He let him go. At that time she said, “a bridegroom of blood,” because of the circumcision.” (Exodus 4:24-26)

What in the world is that all about? I hate to say it—maybe it betrays a weakness on my part—but I cannot rely on the brothers to clear this up. Too often, it seems to me, they go after such verses determined to ‘clean them up’—‘put a smiley face on it’—and....um...it’s really not that easy to do, is it? That’s how they—and nearly all other Bible-believers—go on and on about how Dinah was raped because she hung out with the wrong crowd, and appear not to notice the rather huge elephant in the room—her brothers slaughtered the whole tribe in retribution! Oh, I guess the fact that Jacob rebuked them counts for something, but even so....

It’s like when the she-bears come out of the woods and devour the 42 children making fun of Elijah—“Go up, you baldhead!” they shout with glee but they stop shouting it as the bears were making child-sandwiches out of them (2 Kings 2:23-24). You can—as our people have done, lecture on how those parent should have better trained their “juvenile delinquent” offspring, and then (this they have not done—but it is the kind of thing that appears sometimes) maybe will even go off on a tangent about how the Bible is accurate because it doesn’t say ‘about 40’—it says 42–and thus it reflects getting the details straight, the mark an historian, and not a fairy tale which would content itself with ‘about 40’—but—well, that doesn’t quite smooth it over for everyone, does it? As far as I concerned, about the best you can do with those verses is to assign them to a bald brother who will tap his shiny dome as though he is a protected species and suggest that you’d better not give him any grief. I did try—I really did—to put a smiley face on this one, or at least a plausible one, building off a vaguely parallel contemporary report, and I am rather pleased with the result, but let me tell you: it ain’t easy reconciling cultures thousands of years apart.

Don’t think it need be thousands of years, and don’t think it need be the Bible. “Here, I thought you might like this,” researcher B.W. Shultz tweets to me, as though he were flicking a spec of dandruff off his shoulder. It is an ebook from 1884: Rochester—A Story Historical, and it upends everything I thought I knew about my home, upstate New York! It turns out that the first settler in what became Rochester, Ebenezer Allan, was a scoundrel. He was a barbarous ne’er do well. He was a drunken lout. He’d pair up with Mary Jemison’s (the white woman on the Genesee) no-good son—the one who shoved around his mom whenever he’d consumed too much firewater, which was a frequent occurrence—and raise all manner of hell.

Now—it’s a little hard, when you are holding up your city as a shining example to the world, to come to grips with how its first settler was a dirtbag. But a certain town historian tries—she tries mightily. She seizes on the fact that he was not a lowlife in every way—he actually could work hard when he wanted to and he did run some diplomatic missions that did benefit, even if accidentally, persons other than himself. She gushes on of how he “found happiness” after taking on yet another wife, and does not mention how with a former one, he had guys paddle her on a canoe to the falls and bail out so that she would go over and not they—for is that not but a trifle in the overall tale of a man’s finding happiness? The poor woman—she swum to shore and then went to beg the jerk’s forgiveness! Our historian is determined to plaster lipstick on a rather hideous pig, and she works up to the hope that “If history colors him a little testy at times, perhaps it needs to reflect opon the primitive conditions of that era and be a little more understanding of, and charitable to, Mr. Allan.” Elsewhere, she genuflects to him as “one of the frontier's greatest romantic rogues.”

So with that established—that outrageous histories abound and the temptation to clean them up is not unique to Bible students, let’s try to clean up this mess at Exodus, knowing that the critical thinker may not be satisfied with our effort—perhaps even cynically ad-libbing “At least they gave attention to their dress and grooming”—with whatever spin the Watchtower puts on those verses. It’s hard to know where to start, but we could acknowledge that Abraham decreed circumcision for his offspring as a sign of a special relationship with God, that Moses “knew or should have known” that, and that Moses accordingly should have seen to it that his son was circumcised. Maybe it didn’t occur to him, because Issac and Jacob deliberately set out to find and marry one of their own, whereas he, Moses, had to hotfoot it out of Egypt and take whoever he could get—believer or not. “Here, you can have my daughter,” Midian says—and that’s the way marriages were commonly done—women were used to build alliances. It’s not exactly the world of today, is it? That’s how royalty might end up with hundreds of wives, and have to put them in a harem—a lonely existence for women: men gave their daughters to form alliances and otherwise get in good with the king.

“He probably didn’t circumcise him because he was a man just like you, and he was oblivious to what everyone else knew he should be doing,” says my wife, as she glances at the back lawn, the grass now as high as an elephant’s eye. She may be on to something. At any rate, you don’t mess with Jehovah. It was Zipporah who guessed what the problem might be, as Moses was thinking “Why is this angel messing with me?—I’m the good guy!” and it was she who did something about it, taking responsibility for it, though it hardly seems her fault. I won’t go so far as to say that she said, similar to Abigail, “Please, my Lord. You know how it is with Moses. He has his head in the clouds always. He’s so spiritually minded, he’s no earthly good.” No. I won’t say it. You don’t think I know what happened to Koran, Dathan, and Abiram?

Thus, all that remains is to explain away her words: “It is because you are a bridegroom of blood to me.” I’m not touching it—I’ve done enough—other than to observe that blood was something thought sacred back then—today it just sounds gory and calls to mind a Freddy Krueger movie—and in some way she is acknowledging the sacredness of bonds that we are oblivious to today. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I myself have given it on the altar for you to make atonement for yourselves, because it is the blood that makes atonement by means of the life in it,” the Torah says, as we scratch our heads at something that we know we probably should know more about but don’t.

So we can clean that one up, more or less, at least enough to carry on. But what is it doing there in the first place—the outrageous passage? Is it just there to trip us up? The question is better asked by going to a less-weird, but still not what we would expect, passage—that of Moses trying to wheedle out of an assignment:

“Moses now said to Jehovah: “Pardon me, Jehovah, but I have never been a fluent speaker, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant, for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.”  Jehovah said to him: “Who made a mouth for man, or who makes them speechless, deaf, clear-sighted, or blind? Is it not I, Jehovah?  So go now, and I will be with you as you speak, and I will teach you what you should say.”  (Exodus 4:10-12) Really? He makes them “speechless, deaf, or blind?”

Let’s see what the brothers toss our way in the Research Guide. On those verses, there is a link to the 3/15/04 Watchtower, that says: “Although Jehovah has on occasion caused blindness and muteness, he is not responsible for every case of such disabilities. (Genesis 19:11; Luke 1:20-22, 62-64) These are the result of inherited sin. (Job 14:4; Romans 5:12) Since God has allowed this situation to exist, however, he could speak of himself as ‘appointing’ the speechless, the deaf, and the blind.”

Okay. I can roll with that. If you look at the greater picture, and those other verses, it certainly seems that it is that way. However—why not word it more precisely there in Exodus to begin with, and save everyone the trouble? Is God trying to mess with us? My guess is that he is. Recall the illustration of the secretary composing a letter for the boss. It is said to be the boss’s letter, but he didn’t actually write it—the secretary did. And it turns out that the secretary, in Exodus case, is like all humans—the treasure is carried in ‘earthen vessels.’ And God rolls with it: “Oh, wow—that ought to mess them up!” he whistles, as he surveys the work of the secretary. “Let’s see what they do with that one!”

Call it “testing” people if you like. God does it. It has a way of separating the wheat from the chaff. Nowhere is it more apparent than with Jesus telling how persons must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to be saved. (John 6:52) “This is outrageous!” all the huffy ones say. “Who can make sense out of this? My time is too important for this nonsense!” and they stomp off before they can hear God say, “Who gave you any time at all, you pompous buffoon, so that you can carry on about how important it is?” Jesus’ disciples, of course, couldn’t figure it out either, but awareness of their own spiritual need was sufficient for them to stick around and find out.

So it is with the “bridegroom of blood” passage. Leave it where it is. Let the learned ones say, “This just shows that there are many sources of ancient history competing for the final word, and that they all want to stick in their two cents, and the reason it doesn’t make any sense is that they were all fighting their own turf wars and advancing their own opinions, and it all got jumbled up together, and I know it was that way in that world back then, because it is that way in the educated world in which I hang out, and I have never seen it any other way, so it must be there is none.” Meanwhile, the regular people will say of the passage, “Huh!” make a mental note to research it someday that will probably never come, and go on to consider with benefit the meat of the chapter.

See Part 2.

The stressor that triggered a mental breakdown in “They’re coming to take me away, ha haa” was a runaway dog, not a girlfriend! The artist included the line, “They'll find you yet and when they do, they'll put you in the ASPCA, you mangy mutt" to defuse the charge that he was making fun of mentally ill persons. “And it worked!” said Jerry Samuels, the songwriter.

It didn’t work for Rochester’s WBBF, the station for kids throughout my childhood. I well remember the 1966 novelty song. It instantly soared to the top of the station’s playlist—and then it disappeared. A most unusual public service announcement (as though from God, from the perspective of a child) then stated that the song had been pulled because it made fun of the mentally ill.

Apparently, WBBF’s action was as unusual as their PSA. Wikipedia (accessed 10/15/2019) makes no mention of the song’s being unwelcome anywhere. And yet it clearly did make fun of the mentally ill—WBBF was right. “And I’ll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats, and they’re coming to take me awaayyy ha haaa! — to the ‘funny farm,’ where life is beautiful all the time”—you don’t think that’s making fun of the mentally ill? What difference does it make whether the trigger is a runaway girlfriend or a runaway dog?

In fact, I remember that line about the “mangy mutt” and I took it for just bitter words directed at the girlfriend—I’m not sure that I knew what the ASPCA was back then. Had the lyrics been, “Lollypop Farm,” it would have been a different story for anyone in Monroe County, even if meaningless for those anywhere else.

This makes me reflect on the AM radio of my youth, WBBF. Only that station, and the more avant-grade and unpredictable WSAY played the songs popular with my g-g-generation. All the rest played Perry Como. There was no FM radio at the time.

Was WBBF unusually responsible back then—a pillar among young-people stations? I am inclined to assign it that grade retroactively. I certainly know that it could be hilarious. Jack Palvino was the morning host, and he intertwined jokes that still hold up, decades later. I still remember them, and smile whenever I do.

“Friends, do you have bills to pay?” one seeming commercial began. “Well, please give it back. Bill’s head is getting cold.”

Jack ran a lot of spots like that. It must have been some subscription service for jokes—unless he just made them up, which is possible. Even the more raucous ones like the teary, “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!” and a sympathetic Jack would say, “You poor man! You can tell me—what is it you can’t stand?” to which the answer would be, “YOUR FACE!” still prompts a grin, juvenile though it is.

And don’t get me going about Chickenman, a spoof on Superman! Chickenman offered his services to the city as crimefighter, and they would have just as soon that he dropped dead. A horrible klutz with a secret identity like Superman—he woke the police commissioner’s secretary, Miss Helpinger, out of a sound sleep, disguising his voice (which she instantly saw through) to report that he had been kidnapped. Somehow he managed to set his wings on fire with his utility laser light and as the approaching fire truck sirens could be heard in the background, the exasperated secretary advised him to flap his wings, for this would serve to put out the fire—or perhaps it would serve to spread it, which may have been her real aim.

As young teens, Jack Palvino inspired us to try our hand doing the same. My best chum, a few houses down, was a hobbyist with electronics. He built a radio station. We named it WNOR. It’s antenna stretched from his bedroom window to a weeping-willow tree 100 yards away. WNOR station had a radius of about a mile—we walked around the block to check—and we would spend much time after school spinning our limited number of records during on-air sessions. The “Evil One” in our mind, at the time, was the FCC, which supposedly raided and shut down stations such as ours—this reputedly was the fate of one such pirate station (I loved the term—pirates!) several miles to the south of us.

We copied Jack Palvino’s techniques, inventing the series of short snippets, “Golf tips—-(cue a golf swing by the mike)—with Jack Bogey”—Jack Nicklaus was all the rage back then. A listener would ask Jack if he preferred his woods, and Jack would say that he did not because he lost too many balls there. We were kids, you must remember.

The creative phase even carried through when I later attended Potsdam State and volunteered for the student radio station—I forget what the call letters there were. Another chum and I took the morning slot—just like Jack had done in my childhood. A few minutes after the sports report, read off the AP wire, we wrote alternating “special” sports reports, with mine running down his team (Syracuse) and his running down mine.

Jack Palvino made his life career in radio, though he was only behind the microphone during my youth. From time to time, his name would pop up in local news, as would that of Nick Nickson, another WBBF mainstay. I wonder where they are today—and even if they are yet alive. I will look it up after finishing this post.

And—coming back to the topic of mental illness—if you had a mental breakdown in Rochester, they would take you to the R-wing of Strong Hospital. Throughout my adult life this has been so. It still is. It has never occurred to me to ask, “Where does the R come from?” Nevertheless, I discovered the answer to the question I had never asked during a recent visit to the Jello Museum in nearly Leroy, NY. Heir to the Jello fortune, Helen Rivas gave $2.1 million to the hospital for the purpose of a facility to treat those suffering mental illness, and the R stands for Rivas.

“Rochester, I think we’ve got this,” said Eli Paperboy Reed, venturing opinion at the onset of rain that would drench his listeners while he stayed dry. As though to show him that the city had more to offer than rain, his mike went dead. But he didn’t miss a beat, belting his soul out as the sound tech fixed it. He is a must-see artist who deserved more than the handful of weather-proof diehards that he got. One of them hollered that he must come back, for the weather is not always like this. What had he been smoking?

Actually, it was not like this last year. The ten-day Lilac Festival was picture-perfect almost every day. What are the chances of that happening two years in a row? I had heard Rochestarians grumbling all way from god-awful 90 degrees muggy Florida the prior week, and I had said “No worries. It will all clear out in time for the festival.” What had I been smoking?

I was there, all right, for I had come prepared with blue raincoat to slip over a warm grey jacket, which also wasn’t needed when I arrived after 4. When he waved everyone in close for the final number or two, I was close enough to get a decent photo or two, even with the crummy phone camera. Mrs. Harley doesn’t come to the Lilac Festival when the weather looks surly, so I was on my own.

It took him the entire set—I mean, he really must work on timely delivery—but at show’s end, the sun did indeed begin to pierce the gloom. A half hour later, it was full sunshine for the next group, who probably didn’t even thank him. I’d never heard of they or Eli, but that is only because I don’t keep up. The devoted fan next to me was aghast at my ignorance.

Garnering attention over the last decade, Eli was named Breakthough Artist of the Year by the MOJO awards people in 2009. Anyone who savors R & B must not miss this fellow when he comes to town, enhanced by a phenomenal backup band. How can you go wrong with someone who starts his set with ‘Go Tell That Long Tongued Liar’?

http://www.elipaperboyreed.com

At the Genesee Brew House, all waitresses and restaurant staff are full employees of the High Falls Brewing Company and enjoy equal benefits.
This puts their work a cut above many waitressing jobs. Is there internal transfer to and from the adjacent brewery? I asked. No, it doesn’t often happen, our waitress said. She knew of no examples. She characterized those in the Brewery itself as lifers.

I told her my beer joke and she laughed. She didn’t guffaw like a donkey, and she didn’t collapse rolling on the floor in convulsions.  But it was a good solid laugh, not one of those “I’d better laugh at this old duffer’s lame joke so that he does not take it out on his tip, the way he looks like he might do.” No. it was an honest laugh. (Nor am I a bad tipper.)

My wife and I held out for a window seat, with a view of the High Falls. After lunch, we walked the unshoveled pathway by the farther fence.
During summer, one does well to sit on the balcony just outside and afterwards walk the Platt Street bridge over the Genesee River that bisects Rochester. Looking out another window, we spied yet another of the horses on parade that found a permanent home when the parade exhibit was through and the creatures were auctioned off for charity. Well over one hundred are scattered throughout the area, each fiberglass and each with painting. This one, just across the street, may be closest to its home, because the idea originated with High Falls Brewing, the makers of Twelve Horse Ale.

The restaurant itself is on the second floor of the 1904 building, which was first a bottling plant for Standard Brewing Company, then a succession of other businesses, ending up for 30 years a plumbing supply house, before being purchased by the Genesee Brewing Company in 1982 and converted to a restaurant 30 years after that. On the first floor is both a gift shop and museum of local beer history, with some emphasis on dodging the authorities during the days of prohibition.
One poster recounts how “the city’s brewing industry also benefited from [German] migration [of the mid-eighteen hundreds] and from the growing theory that beer was healthy. (It was sometimes referred to as “liquid bread”.) This frustrated temperance advocates.”

A poster on the wall from bygone days advises buying Jenny by the case, and that is just what some visiting friends of ours from Rhode Island did, only they bought a case of Genny Cream Ale, which comes in a green box, not red. (for a friend, they said, as they plunked it down in our breezeway while they stayed with us.)
As sometimes happens with local attractions, they had stumbled upon the restaurant before we did, and it was on their visiting itinerary.

And the joke? Its setting is from many decades ago. A night worker, all alone on graveyard shift, had only to circle the huge tanks of brewing beer to ensure that all ingredients were mixing properly. Dead tired and thoroughly bored, sometime after 3 AM, he fell in and drowned. The commotion was huge the next day, with police and reporters all gathered around, when one of the latter ventured that his death must have been a horrible way to die. “No, I don’t think so,” said the supervisor, looking very thoughtful, “because he climbed out four times to go to the bathroom.”

The Bills went down 47-3 and @AdamChodak said ‘Opening day jitters.’ Next game they also went down, looking mighty sloppy, and he just shook his head. Next week they trounced a supposedly much better team and he said ‘We’re going to the Super Bowl.’ He said this because he remembers, as do all Western New Yorkers who are old enough, when the Bills actually did go to the Super Bowl four times in a row (and got beat each time). On one of those drives to the Bowl, they overcame something like a 30 point deficit at half time to win.

Someone from the Bills (a dumbbill) had tweeted a map captioned ‘We’ve arrived in Minnesota’ only the arrow pointed to Wisconsin.’ ‘Um, we play in the other Minnesota’ the Vikings replied. ‘Good thing we found the right Minnesota’ the Bills said after trouncing them. It was all a Clever Deception, like in the Galaxy Quest movie. During that game Adam tweeted: 'I bet no one is going to quit during his half time.' He said this because somebody did from the previous game. He just walked off the field and said 'That's it. I've retired. I don't mean to disrespect anybody, but I'm outta here.' It has never happened before.

That same Bills-over-Vikings day Tiger Woods won his first tournament in five years. Everybody loves a story of redemption, and crowds swarmed around him like the messiah on the eighteenth. Adam tweeted that he imagined people did that toward their televisions whenever he was about to come on for the 11 PM news. He promised to devote a large part of the upcoming show to the Bills' improbable victory. 'In that case you may get your Tiger Woods onrush,' I tweeted back. he liked that one, as he does others from time to time. I don't know which Bills' character is more fun to watch: Allen, Milano, McDermott, or Chodak.

They asked some Bill how his team could rebound from a 55 point deficit over two games to stomp the Minnesota team into the ground. 'Funny how those things happen,' he said. The new quarterback (he's only 22) looked awfully good. He didn't sulk when he was passed over on opening day. He has a charisma about him. He managed to persuade all that nobody was especially put off over the last two drubbings. 'We're a tight team and we're trusting what coach McDermott is doing for us and doing with us, so that's it. We're trusting the process that's been put in front of us and we're working hard and just trying to improve everyday,' he said.

Adam Chodak is the TV8 newsman who was raised in the area and intertwines himself into local doings. He secures interviews with the newsmakers. Following those first two losses, he tweeted his gratitude that there is an end zone to stop drives of the offense. ‘Were it not for that, they would be stomping through your studio about now,’ I replied. He liked that one, too.

He is the one who presents the Golden Apple Award weekly to some teacher the kids have recommended. Someday, I tweeted, he is going to act upon faulty intelligence (hmm - maybe that can be my next project) and he will enter the classroom with cameras 'a blazing only to encounter some dragon who will tell him to sit down, shut up, pay attention, and raise his hand if he has anything to say.

The fellow on the left (stage right) is the driving force of It’s My Party, a recreation of the all-girl groups of the 60’s. Some of the performers (it is an 8 or 9-piece backup band) are high school students, as I’m pretty sure the girl in the middle is. She stood by as I spoke with the one on the right, a college student from out-of-state. Even while working both hands, the drummer beams at the audience for long takes, as though he is P.T. Barnum, so pleased that the audience is enjoying his greatest show on earth. And they did enjoy it. By the end of the show, during which the girls had changed into new outfits (closely resembling a certain sister at the Kingdom Hall), they convincingly transported geezers in the crowd to ‘back in the day.’

The group is thirty years old, and the female performers have been allowed to ‘age out’ several times so as to preserve authenticity. It is a temporary gig, and everyone knows it going in. Hopefully, those who are students get credit for it somewhere, and I said to my wife that they must be drama or music students, but when I spoke to the oldest singer it turned out that she was an economics student. Some of the performers have gone on to professional recognition. They have toured the country, which somehow came as a surprise to me given its local founder and the age of its participants.

Toward the end of the first set, the girls sashay down and invite persons of the audience to dance through a tune with them. Of course, all the guys in the audience remain firmly ensconced in their lawn chairs, for fear of their wives, as did I, but finally one old duffer whose wife had probably died took them up on it. This prompted a few children to join in also, along with their mom.

Later still, the audience was invited onto the dance stage for another number. It was an unusually docile group of bumpkins present. No one responded, save for one awkward couple who essentially leaned on each other for support so that the two-party pile would not collapse in a heap. Therefore, with plenty of space available, I led the lovely Mrs. Harley (don’t kid yourself – the woman’s a looker) up front to do the slow number and then the performers tricked us into remaining by saying they had another one. The other one was much bouncier and that is what we did – bounce. Seldom, in fact probably never, have we had such floor space to show off our moves, and the girls commended us later, I don’t think patronizingly, but you never know.

When they finished the first set and disappeared I predicted that they would emerge with new outfits. My wife took this as a no-brainer. “Oh yeah. Freshen up. Take a potty break. Have a drink. (Atypically for her: “Smoke a joint. I mean, get real.”) But it is hard to think that these girls would know how to smoke a joint if they wanted to, unlike those at the Grateful Dead tribute band that played on another occasion, where it was hard to believe that they would do anything else. Afterwards, I observed to Sienna, the economics student, that it must be strange for them to transport themselves into a much different age. I mean, these are not exactly feminist songs they are rolling out for the crowds. But she said that the music they were performing was from ‘a better time.’ Maybe she was just placating the duffers and the three collapse on each other in laughter afterwards, but it seemed reasonable to suppose that she was sincere in saying it. Even the duffers in the audience rolled their eyes at some of the corn, for they are not immune to contemporary times, even if they have not fully been molded by them.

This is the third time I have heard the group. The first time, with a different set of singers, was entirely by accident, back when I was working at the group home, and I wrote about it here:

After the meal, we drive over to the Fairport commons area - Liftbridge Park - to hang out a bit. We're in luck. Lots is happening - a classic car show and a live band. I wheel Doug near the band, an all-girl group called It's My Party, who perform songs from the early 60's, and perform them very well. They have matching outfits, just like in the 60's, synchronized gestures, and ... um...some campy 60's dialog between songs. The drummer is their producer, and their website says they have performed for 20 years. How can that be, since the singers themselves are yet high-schoolers? Ah, the producer has been around that long, and maybe some of the backup musicians, of which there are 8 or 9 - are some of them high-schoolers, too? The girl singers have been replaced once or twice.

Many in the audience are older folk - revisiting their youth, one suspects - and after the show, a woman remarks on the lankiest singer's long limbs. "Yeah, it's hard to get clothes," the performer replies. Actually, I thought she said it's hard to get close. That would fit too, for the trio accentuate their songs with 60's cheerleading gestures, arms flailing like windmills.

Doug is captivated by all this. You want to leave? I ask after a few songs. Slight but emphatic shake of the head no. You want to stay? Slight but emphatic shake of the head yes. You want one of their CDs? Yes. So we wait in the lineup, which really isn't wheelchair accessible, and they sign his copy with hugs and kisses - xxooxxoo. Of course, Doug solicits actual hugs and gets them from the girl or two closest to him. Backing out, he keeps it up and gets several more hugs from other girls....you know...girls in the audience, girl friends of the singers, and so forth!

Back at the home I write up a report - they like to keep track of social progress and "if it's not documented, it didn't happen." I tell about all the hugs and conclude with the question: "How does he do that?" I mean, it's not as though anyone offered to hug me. You don’t think I need hugs, too?

Though you cannot see him at all, positioned behind the middle singer as he is, the male guitarist had the most clear voice and playing for covering tunes such ‘Our Last Kiss’ whilst the girl singers wailed accompaniment. Garrison Keillor called such songs ‘teen-age self-pity songs’ and it is not hard to see why:

“The squealing tires, the busting glass, the painful screams that I heard last…

Well, when I woke up the rain was pouring down,

There were people standing all around.

Something warm running in my eyes,

But I found my baby somehow that night.

….She said ‘Hold me darling for a little while,’

I held her tight, I kissed her our last kiss,

I found the love I knew I would miss..”   and so forth.

Keillor responded with his own ‘dad self-pity song’ in which ‘the car slid through the mud, they heard a sickening thud. “Oh, Daryl,” Janie cried, “Is it bad?” “Yes,” he choked back tears, “it is my mom and dad.”

Daryl cradles his dying daddy’s head to hear this last words….and it is the same drivel that the old man said when he was healthy, matters pertaining to going to college and getting a good education, but also matters more mundane, like changing the oil every 3-4000 miles, and ‘when you go into the fridge to pour yourself some milk, don’t open a new container. Pour from the one already opened.’

******  The bookstore

Summer is concert time in the city, and two days after the Skycoasters event by the shore, I went to one at the Public Market Friday eve. The public market gains in visibility each year; the city has lately poured some money into it, and starting mid-July through August, there is a series of free concerts (bring your own chair, and you can only bring in a bottle of water before resorting to the venders) called 'Bands on the Bricks.'

I got my timing mixed up and arrived when the AC/DC tribute band, Bonfire, was playing, so I had to sit though them. Don't misunderstand; it is not that they were bad - they were very good. It is just not my g-g-generation. The Led Zeppelin tribute band, Kashmir, is what I'd come to see. My wife had stayed home. Zeppelin is not her thing.

Isn't AC/DC an example of the "heavy metal" that Witnesses used to carry on about, along with rap? (so it was clear no one was playing racial favorites) They petered off on that per se, perhaps because, as my son told me, those genres mutated into other names and they still were saying 'heavy metal' and 'rap,' dating themselves with the kids and thereby making themselves look a little silly. Nowadays they just say 'inappropriate' entertainment. They never named any specific groups. They probably never knew any by name.

I dutifully scowled throughout the heavy metal AC/DC session, until the Led Zeppelin tribute band appeared, which was only slightly less heavy. In fact, THEY probably represented the greater slide into decadence, and AC/DC was just one more step. I didn't really frown for either one. A 30-year-old was holding his toddler son aloft, bouncing him to the music, and I said, "Yeah, train that boy right!" What are you going to do?

For that matter, it was thought to be the Beatles by my folks, who raised an uproar when I started to grow my hair long like theirs. My 'long hair' was laughably short by today's standards (though it later grew longer still), but Pop was raised on a farm and was familiar with the concept of shearing animals. As a young dad, he purchased a set of clippers and sheared his kids the same way, though they were barnyard animals, leaving just an upright tuft of hair front and center, like a hood ornament. Deviating even a little from that pattern was giving in to the decadant Beatle influence.

Or maybe it was Elvis. After all, HE was 'Elvis the pelvis,' not any of the Beatles.

Leaving a little before the crowds, I encountered a busker playing away on his guitar with his dog laying at his feet. I told him he had put his greatest fan to sleep and bid him a good night. I had only walked twenty feet, when I doubled back and dropped a buck in his hat. You have to support the musicians, you just have to; they play their hearts out. "Yeah, we can use it," he said, and I continued on.

Boys night out at the Led Zeppelin tribute concert.

Sometimes, for lesser volume, you hang out off to the side, behind the food guys.

After the umpteenth costume change into garbs alternately goofy and gaudy, my wife paid the Skycoasters band singer the ultimate compliment. "I have to go home and watch Dr. Who, because this guy reminds me of him." At the time he was wearing LED lit lapels, as were flanking band members in lights of different colors, having just lost his sharkhead hat. There was pentup demand for the Wegman's concert by the shore. Two weeks ago it was cancelled due to rain, one week ago due to obscene heat. Wegman's mans the food tent and passes on the instinct to make profit. Hog dogs are two bucks, and other items are reasonable. I like Wegmans. Most here do.

It is the brilliant name that seals the place of Skycoasters as Rochester's premiere party band. They might win the crown in any event, but the name clinches the deal. It recalls the L-shaped wood roller coaster of Roseland Park on the shore of Canandaigua Lake, a park that existed long ago, and is now townhouses. You used to have to drive through the darkened country to get there. Today, all is one great suburb in between.

The band has been playing 50 years. They were hawking a CD of their songs, apparently with one from their first ever concert at Brighton high school in 1968. No, I was not there. I was at a different high school. They also sent someone through the audience with a hat, announcing that not all expenses were covered, and asking persons not to be stingy. This is something I have not seen before at a sponsored concert. However, it was sort of like Jehovah's Witnesses (who nonetheless do not pass hats or plates): people look around themselves, feel they obviously are getting much value for very little money (in the case of the concert, none at all), and are mostly willing to chip in something. After all, it is a nine-piece band with a significant support team and seemingly endless props.

I am practically the only Jehovahs Witnesses who has attended the Theocratic Ministry School AND the meetings of Toastmasters, since the two are essentially similar. But I was a little bit grumbling over some things at the time, and when the Toastmasters events came up my wife and I would skip the meeting at the Kingdom Hall. After my first Toastmasters talk, the moderator said: "Either you are a born natural or you have done this before." In the local chapter was the Skycoasters public relations person (I think that's what he was) brushing up on his public speaking skills. It is a curious side effect of theocracy that most of Jehovah's Witnesses can speak publicly with minimal fuss, whereas the prospect of public speaking terrifies the average person.

A co-worker of the time kept inviting me and other employees to the Toastmaster meeting. He was almost evangelical about it, as though one could be saved there. In a sense, he counted himself saved. He was painfully shy and he credited Toastmasters with making him less so. Several co-workers attended once or twice. My wife and I stayed for the longest interval, but when we finally drifted, this fellow was a bit put out, almost as though we were going apostate.

Rochester’s youngest reporter, a 14-year old from the gritty city, was robbed! He tweeted the bad news @GSLShow. They lifted his camera from his bike while he was in the Family Dollar! It was worth $1000. But he promptly started a gofundme page and had it all back within 24 hours. It’s impossible not to love this kid. The cops in Rochester certainly do and have adopted him as one of their own. When he started getting bullied (for hanging out with cops) he marched into City Hall and asked what they were going to do about it! CBS This Morning ran a very nice story about him. Alas, some editorial idiot bannered it: ‘Local Youngster Follows His Dreams!’ He’s probably just having fun, the goal of all youngsters. I hope he doesn’t get too big for his pants, but the media people will encourage that outcome with all their might.   (From: 'No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash')

Two years later the young man is still at it. He covered the Rochester Jazz Fest and landed an interview with the executive director. He is to be found at crime scenes. He has done guest spots on radio. He has thanked local business Rowe Photo for their support, calling them 'family.' He tweets that he has passed all his classes, and "10th grade here I come." His Twitter feed says he wants to make a difference in the community. He is probably being mentored by some. I hope so.

"Whipping out your phone doesn't make you a journalist. You need to ask questions do interviews and gain trust from your community. it's not easy being a journalist, especially being the youngest journalist, so before you say 'I'm a journalist,' for whipping out your phone, you're not," he tweets.

His very latest tweet, just two hours prior to this post, is alarming: "I have now declared a journalist down just about a few moments ago. @GeofferyRogers [himself] was shot by a BB gun with a leg injury."