Sunday mornings are great days to sit around, watch the "CBS Sunday Morning" show (the last 2 minutes of nature scenes are my favorite), drink coffee, watch the clouds roll by and share some alone time with my Honey.
Since I'm a multi-tasker, I'm also enjoying youtube. So today I'm going to share with you some fun. Fun for me is often seeing other people have fun. I also adore dancing. Put the two together and it's a win-win.
The Wedding Dancers ..... this guy is good!
You know this isn't easy in a wedding dress .....
And here it is, my all-time favorite. Good thing for my Honey I didn't see this prior to OUR wedding, eh?
Blessings, y'all. Hope you're enjoying your Sunday morning, also.
Now there's an old movie starring Michael Jackson, where he also portrays someone who looks precisely like the DA who prosecuted him for child molestation. Naturally, since there's money in it, someone's about to put it on TV.
There are reports that his nose was a prosthesis, and he had a velvet lined tray full of them in his home.
Someone claiming to be his "love child" has come out of the closet. Evidently he was at MJ's funeral, sitting with the family?
They're making a movie out of his last rehearsal shots.
No, this is no surprise. Anywhere there might be money made, there will be someone trying to do it.
Geez. Leave the guy alone. He's dead. I don't know what all his demons were, but maybe he's finally at peace. Too bad the vultures, including his own father, don't fade peacefully into the sunset.
One thing I did find interesting which was pointed out to me after MJ's death was this video. Inspiration or pattern?
I'm watching "Face the Nation" this morning. On the first segment we have Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) discussing the ongoing struggle with health care in this country.
At least twice, as the camera cuts back to Orrin Hatch following Charlie Rangel's comments, Senator Hatch's first sentence is, "Let's be honest."
How offensive. Is he suggesting that Congressman Rangel is not being honest? Is he suggesting, perhaps, that he's the only one who can be "honest" on this subject matter?
Have you noticed how often, when someone says, "let's be honest", what it really means is "now listen to me, even though I have nothing substantive to say because I want to discredit what the other person just said by being evasive". It seldom has little to do with being honest. In this case, when Orrin Hatch continues to suggest that any change in health care will put small businesses out of business via health care penalties, it has NOTHING to do with honesty. It's an outright lie.
Reminds me of the old Indian quote: "How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right."
So, Senator Hatch, how about an HONEST conversation regarding health care in this country. How about BEING honest. How about letting us hear a suggestion from a Republican rather than solely criticism? Come up with an idea! You didn't do it with a stimulus plan and you're not doing it with health care. Where is your plan? Status quo? The old Republican mantra: "Status quo status quo status quo"?
Nina Simone has been one of my favorite singers for years. This morning something reminded me of this tune, also one of my favorites. It's been sung by Ms. Simone, Judy Collins and even Neil Diamond. "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" was written by Randy Newman in 1968.
And my all time favorite, "I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl" (1967):
Excerpt from Nina Simone's bio:
Nina Simone pianist, singer
Dates: February 21, 1933 (*) - April 21, 2003
Also known as: "Priestess of Soul"; birth name: Eunice Kathleen Waymon, Eunice Wayman
Known for:
* Composed over 500 songs, recorded almost 60 albums * First woman to win the Jazz Cultural Award * "Woman of the Year" 1966, Jazz at Home Club * Female Jazz Singer of the Year, 1967, National Association of Television and Radio Announcers
In 1993, Don Shewey wrote of Nina Simone in the Village Voice, "She's not a pop singer, she's a diva, a hopeless eccentric ... who has so thoroughly co-mingled her odd talent and brooding temperament that she has turned herself into a force of nature, an exotic creature spied so infrequently that every appearance is legendary."
Nina Simone was born as Eunice Kathleen Waymon in 1933(*) in Tryon, North Carolina, daughter of John D. Waylon and Mary Kate Waymon, an ordained Methodist minister. The house was filled with music, Nina Simone later recalled, and she learned to play piano early. When her mother took a job as a maid for extra money, the family saw that young Eunice had special musical talent and sponsored classical piano lessons for her. She studied with a Mrs. Miller and then with Muriel Massinovitch.
For her last year of high school, Nina Simone attended Juilliard School of Music, as part of her plan to prepare to attend the Curtis Institute of Music. She took the entrance exam for the Curtis Institute's classical piano program, but was not accepted. Nina Simone believed that she was good enough for the program, but that she was rejected because she was black.
Her family by that time had moved to Philadelphia, and she began to give piano lessons. When she discovered that one of her students was playing in a bar in Atlantic City -- and being paid more than she was from her piano teaching -- she decided to try this route herself. Armed with music from many genres -- classical, jazz, popular -- she began playing piano in 1954 at the Midtown Bar and Grill in Atlantic City. She adopted the name of Nina Simone to avoid her mother's religious disapproval of playing in a bar. The bar owner demanded soon that she add vocals to her piano playing, and Nina Simone began to draw large audiences of younger people who were fascinated by her eclectic musical repertoire and style. Soon she was playing in better nightclubs, and moved into the Greenwich Village scene.
By 1957, Nina Simone had found an agent, and the next year issued her first album, "Little Girl Blue." Her first single, "I Loves You Porgy," was a George Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess that had been a popular number for Billie Holiday. It sold well, and her recording career was launched. Unfortunately, the contract she signed gave away her rights, a mistake she came to bitterly regret. For her next album she signed with Colpix and released "The Amazing Nina Simone." With this album came more critical interest.
Nina Simone briefly married Don Ross in 1958, and divorced him the next year. She married Andy Stroud in 1960 -- a former police detective who became her recording agent -- and they had a daughter, Lisa Celeste, in 1961. This daughter, separated from her mother for long periods in her childhood, eventually launched her own career with the stage name of, simply, Simone. Nina Simone and Andy Stroud drifted apart with her career and political interests, and their marriage ended in divorce in 1970.
In the 1960s, Nina Simone was part of the civil rights movement and later the black power movement. Her songs are considered by some as anthems of those movements, and their evolution shows the growing hopelessness that American racial problems would be solved.
Nina Simone wrote "Mississippi Goddam" after the bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama killed four children and after Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississipppi. This song, often sung in civil rights contexts, was not often played on radio. She introduced this song in performances as a show tune for a show that hadn't yet been written.
Other Nina Simone songs adopted by the civil rights movement as anthems included "Backlash Blues," "Old Jim Crow," "Four Women" and "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." The latter was composed in honor of her friend Lorraine Hansberry and became an anthem for the growing black power movement with its line, "Say it clear, say it loud, I am black and I am proud!"
With the growing women's movement, "Four Women" and her cover of Sinatra's "My Way" became feminist anthems as well.
But just a few years later, Nina Simone's friends Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes were dead. Black heroes Martin Luther King, jr., and Malcolm X, were assassinated. In the late 1970s, a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service found Nina Simone accused of tax evasion; she lost her home to the IRS.
Nina Simone's growing bitterness over America's racism, her disputes with the record companies she called "pirates," her troubles with the IRS all led to her decision to leave the United States. She first moved to Barbados, and then, with the encouragement of Miriam Makeba and others, moved to Liberia.
A later move to Switzerland for the sake of her daughter's education was followed by a comeback attempt in London which failed when she put her faith in a sponsor who turned out to be a con man who robbed and beat her and abandoned her. She tried to commit suicide, but when that failed, found her faith in the future renewed. She built her career slowly, moving to Paris in 1978, having small successes.
In 1985, Nina Simone returned to the United States to record and perform, choosing to pursue fame in her native land. She focused on what would be popular, de-emphasizing her political views, and won growing acclaim. Her career soared when a British commercial for Chanel used her 1958 recording of "My Baby Just Cares for Me," which then became a hit in Europe.
Nina Simone moved back to Europe -- first to the Netherlands then to the South of France in 1991. She published her biography, I Put a Spell on You, and continued to record and perform.
There were several run-ins with the law in the 90s in France, as Nina Simone shot a rifle at rowdy neighbors and left the scene of an accident in which two motorcyclists were injured. She paid fines and was put on probation, and was required to seek psychological counseling.
In 1995, she won ownership of 52 of her master recordings in a San Francisco court, and in 94-95 she had what she described as "a very intense love affair" -- "it was like a volcano." In her last years, Nina Simone was sometimes seen in a wheelchair between performances. She died April 21, 2003, in her adopted homeland, France.
In a 1969 interview with Phyl Garland, Nina Simone said:
There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be.
Nina Simone is often classified as a jazz singer, but this is what she had to say in 1997 (in an interview with Brantley Bardin):
To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt and that's not what I play. I play black classical music. That's why I don't like the term "jazz," and Duke Ellington didn't like it either -- it's a term that's simply used to identify black people."
Judy Collins' version of "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" was one I listened to repeatedly in the late 1960s (the old long blonde, guitar strumming college days).
Ok, so I listened to Neil Diamond a lot in the 70s and 80s. I admit it.
Here's the face of the woman, Audra Shay, thought to become the head of the Young Republicans tomorrow:
Here are the words posted to her Facebook account (post now deleted due to someone's pointing this out):
“Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist… Muslim is on there side [sic]… need to take this country back from all of these mad coons… and illegals,”
Here is her response to this post: “You tell em Eric! lol.”
Someone tell me how this should be the attitude of the NEW Young Republicans.
So I fixed myself a nice, big Gibson (Tanqueray with onions in a black, skull embossed martini glass and oh, ya, I have the black skull martini shaker, too) and turned on a prerecorded version of "The Cleaner."
Now, I've never seen "The Cleaner" before. Came across it the other day and it had two things going for it: dark and dark. I adore anything dark in nature, and I adore dark men. Benjamin Bratt. Need I say more? Tall, intelligent, mysterious, gorgeous, enigmatic, dark hair, dark eyes. Next to Superman, my perfection in a guy.
So here I am, sipping an absolutely gorgeous Gibson, watching an absolutely gorgeous man. Made me wonder why I need to do this at 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon.
Because I HATE 4:00 O'Clock. Hate it. Just plain despise it. So this is how I get past it.
Why, you may wonder? So do I. No doubt has something to do with childhood. Don't most things? Whatever it is, I don't remember it. I just know I despise sunny afternoons, especially 4:00 in the afternoon.
Add to that it's an hour before you leave work when you hate your job (had a lot of those when I was supporting my kids by myself, that's for dang sure), it's the hottest part of the afternoon (I hate HOT), and it's the lead-in to a lonesome evening. Yes, I had many of those in my past. Evenings when I was home alone with my wee kids, husband out doing whatever he was doing (a lifetime ago). Evenings when I so wanted to go out and be young, but I had two babies at home. Plenty of those.
Those were times when I suffered as a child suffers, without accepting the consequences of my decisions and consciously deciding to change them. Those were the times when people around me also suffered the consequences of my poor decision making ability.
So you might say, "Well, that was then ..... this is now." So do I. All the time. I'm much older, much wiser, and yet still tied to my past. What is this hold the past has on us which not only disallows a path towards BETTER, but the emotional patterns reach out with their nostalgic claws to keep us in our past's methodology?
I see it in my Mother, now 95 years old, who seemingly has never changed in all her years. I see it in others who think they've gotten past their patterns via therapy, yet still they repeat, repeat, repeat, whether it's marriages, jobs, or just their everyday despairing behavior.
Is this the human condition? Or is the human condition, along with these ties to our pasts, the tools with which to grow to our own state of Nirvana?
