Nothing More To Be Said Here

Alright but I've said it before, Betty White is a living legend.

Death & The Obituary page

Larry called and said that E. Lynn Harris had died. I knew of course already because it had been all over the net. In fact the first time I read it was on someone’s Facebook page.

I was never a big fan of Mr. Harris, I remember reading his first book when he published it himself, Invisible Life, and thinking how much potential he had. Then he went to a big publishing house and I read the second one and thought that it was trite. There may have been a third book of his that I read but I can’t recall. I felt that he had sold out and I had long lost interest in his work by that time which listening to his last interview on NPR this year, he knew already.

When I was young my grandmother would scan the obituaries page in the news paper to see who had gone to glory before she had. She would see a name and recognize the person as Mrs. So & So’s hairdresser’s cousin who had lived 4 blocks up from where she did as a child and who had gone away for a few months when she was 16 and had come back with a new baby sister. Or she would see listed Mr. Such & Such who lived at the end of the street who was a drunk, or a fancy man, or both and used to make her laugh with his antics when she was young. Now granny doesn’t do that anymore. Partly because being almost 90, most of the people that she knew have passed on already and partly because even if she did know them, I’m not sure she’d recognize them. Come to think of it, I’m not sure she’d recognize me and I’m her only grandson.

Instead, I seem to have taken her place when it comes to looking for news of the dead. Of course I don’t actually do the Obits page in the news paper. In fact I don’t think I’ve read a newspaper in about 5 or 6 years now. I mean I do read the Metro that you get at the train station for free, but everybody knows that’s just a glorified excuse for advertising pamphlet. By the time you’ve read headline for each story, you’ve already read a third of whatever it is that they’ve written. What I do is search for names on the web.

This means of course that if you are a nobody like me, you’re probably still alive as far as I’m concerned since there will probably be very little news about you. But if you are a celebrity, a someone worthy of mention on CNN or *choke* Fox then I’ve got you. I‘ll be able to tell small stories about how I almost met you or how someone I knew almost met the next door neighbor of yours. I will be able to say this, that and the other about how my life was changed and how I became a better person or how I found Jesus.

From Maude to Malden, from Richardson to Jackson and from Harris to…I don’t know Cronkite, I will be able to find something to reflect on, and I guess that’s okay with me. At least then I won’t have to mourn for someone I know. I won’t have to grieve over a family member that lifted me up when I was down, or miss a friend that listened to me when no one else would. I can pretend that death happens to other people and not to those I know and love.

And that's the way it is.

Sunday with Garrison

On Sunday I saw Garrison Keillor walking down the street in Philadelphia. I didn’t recognize him at first. As we walked towards each other, I just noticed this really tall elderly white man wearing an unbuttoned rain coat on a sunny day with red sneakers and jeans that were at least 2 or 3 inches too short for him. I saw his ankles. He seemed to be trying to read a map or something and was talking as he walked to the female companion that was with him. “Tourist,” I thought and “I wonder if I should offer to help him. No, just mind your business and keep going.” But then I saw that heavy slack jaw, the drooping eyes and the forehead with the unkempt hair that reminded me of the Boris Karloff playing the Frankenstein monster and I knew it was him.


Garrison Keillor has been the radio host of a variety show called A Prairie Home Companion on NPR, or is it PRI I can never tell, for over 30 years and the star of the Robert Altman movie by the same name. Meryl Streep was also in the movie and I love me some Meryl Streep ever since I saw her in Sophie’s Choice. In this movie, even though I fell asleep twice in it, she was the only thing that stopped me from asking for my money back. Well alright, stopped me from thinking about asking for my money back because I probably never would go through with it, I’m not cut like that. But here I was, just after hearing Mr. Keillor on NPR about an hour earlier when I wasn’t sure if I was or wasn’t going to the gym and there he was in front of me, live and in the flesh. I saw my chance to ask him about the format of his show.


A Prairie Home Companion is set in the fictional town of Lake Wobegone where all the women are strong and all the men are good looking as they tell you in the opening of the show. What they don’t tell you is that all the people seem to be really really white and that no other race seems to exist there unless of course it was a group of people that died out or left the town during the fifties for a more liberal clime. I wanted to ask the host if perhaps he didn’t think that since there was no one of color or different culture on his show unless it was western European. I wanted to ask him if he thought that there might be a benign hint of racism on his show; a sort of Donna Reed Show for the New Millennium where everything is perfect and white.

Evidently, I am leaving out the fact that the lead solo singer for the show happens to be black. But since she is also female I am guessing that she is probably paid the least. I am also leaving out that they will also bring on other black artists as long as they are harmless and close to death. But like a good John McCain stump speech, you have to leave out some of the truth if you want to put your point across no matter what that point may be. So of course I will leave that out.

I wanted to ask him these questions but I figured that if I wanted to point out the short comings of his show, get a decent workout done, a little reward afterwards from a bakery and get back home in time for my show (The Amazing Race), I probably would not have time to cover it all. So his education had to go. Besides he is probably a decent enough fellow and I have never heard of him being caught at a Neo-Nazi rally in Minnesota where he has one of his homes and who am I to judge anyway? So I just kept walking and all I wanted to say was that I saw Garrison Keillor on Sunday.

Another Torch Song

Another flame has been put out.

I was watching Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight the other night, I only watch the classics, and they were doing a story on Estelle Getty’s funeral and how none of her co-stars from the Golden Girls had shown up for the services. Of course what the reporter failed to mention that even though Estelle had played the mother on the show and that she was 84 when she died and was actually the youngest member of the group, which makes the others somewhere close to 90 if not more. Now I don’t know about the reporter, but I know I wouldn’t want to have a family member over 90 flying across country on a day’s notice. And you know it was a day’s notice because Ma was Jewish and had to be buried within a certain time. Two days I think, but I’m not sure.

Estelle’s claim to fame was of course from TV, but she had also played another mother to acclaim in the play Torch Song Trilogy, a play or movie that I have never seen. The title had always intrigued me. I had known what a trilogy was. It meant that the play had 3 separate stories in it and there would be something to link all 3, but I had never known what was meant by a torch song. But it wasn’t that big a deal for me, so I must have put it in the back of head figuring that it would be something that I would look up as soon as I got the time or more importantly the interest.

Last year however, I was listening to NPR’s podcast on This American Life, I just love that show, better than cable some weeks, and they were talking a girl who’s boyfriend had left her on New Years Day and she had been so devastated that she wanted a write a song about it and how when the ex had heard it, he would realize his mistake and go running back to her. Somehow or other after she had written it, she had been able to get in touch with Phil Collins and record a phone conversation with him. He listened to her song and gave a certain amount of false praise then he told her of how he had written a torch song, Against All Odds when his wife had left him and it had actually kicked started his solo career.

Torch Song, Against All Odds …?

“So take a look at me now, who has just an empty space
And there's nothing left here to remind me,
just the memory of your face…”

Suddenly it clicked. All of those songs that I had grown up with or had heard 10 years after they had been written and that I sung to myself privately under my breath, the ones that I was in love with since my days of late pubescence, were torch songs.

Touch me in the morning and then just walk away."

Or

"If you see me walking down the street
and I start to cry each time we meet."

Or even

"I try to say goodbye and I choke
Try to walk away and I stumble
Though I try to hide it, it's clear
My world crumbles when you are not near"

And I’m not even talking about the old standards like My Funny Valentine, The Man I love or Someone to Watch over Me.

They were all torch songs. Songs that spoke of love or lack of love or trying to get love back. Songs that made me feel a certain way or an uncertain longing for something just outside my reach, a sense of loneliness. A sense that someone else could write about but I could never express.

Last year was when I realized that I was living with a sense of despondency, I was living a torch song and it was no longer pretty. So I said to the dancer that I had thought that we could have become friends but now I saw it was a silly idea on my part and that I didn’t think that we would ever see each other again. He protested asking me how could determine the future and I told him that there would always be a feeling for him and I said “you’ll always be a part of me.” And with that I burst into laughter and collapsed to the floor. I couldn’t even break up a supposed friendship without breaking into Dionne Warwick. Of course he didn’t understand since I didn’t explain. Probably still thinks of me as evil and wicked, but that’s life or as I’ve heard Curtis say, it is what it is.



A torch song.

The Plan

Now I’m not one who is a believer in great conspiracies. Even though I wasn’t there, I don’t think there was a paid CIA trigger man on the grassy knoll in Dallas in ’63. I don’t believe that Princess Diana is being kept on life support in the cellars of Buckingham Palace. In fact, even though there is a whole bunch of shit that doesn’t add up, I don’t believe G. Dubya or the Jewish Defense League or anyone else not associated with the hijackers of 911 were responsible for the destruction of the Twin Towers. But I was listening to a podcast of This American Life on NPR this week and they were doing stories on an episode called Human Resources. One of the stories in the show was called The Plan.

I have heard about The Plan since the late 70’s early 80’s. It is usually referred to as a white conspiracy that started around 1967-68, the period MLK was shot and the riots started in many of the major cities like Baltimore, Trenton, DC, Detroit and Newark.

The idea was for white families who had sold their properties and fled the cities to the suburbs to eventually come back into the cities and buy back land that had dropped in value due to neglect. The result would be to force black families out and usher in white families who would have made a nice neat profit; selling high and buying back low.

I would hear this theory and just laugh at the absurdity of people denigrating gentrification just because of some silly fear they had about displacement. Who would be able to organize such a diabolical arrangement? No one could tell me. “This was a story right out of George Orwell,” I would think to myself. Nowadays, I would even attribute it to an Oliver Stone movie with a meaty role for Kevin Costner that could jumpstart his career. That is I would, but I don’t.

I haven’t been to Harlem since President Clinton took up rooms there, but I get the impression that the neighborhood has changed. Rates and rents are slightly more expensive than they used to be. Some small businesses have been forced to move further away from 125th St. and replaced by larger ones that were usually seen in mid-town New York. The GAP and Starbucks now occupy the spaces that used to be held by the local barbershop and family owned eateries. There are parts of West Philadelphia that are now being called University City as many homes are being bought and taken over by the University of Pennsylvania. In New Orleans, I remember seeing on the news many of the residents of the Lower 9th Ward who had lost their homes from Hurricane Katrina, will no longer be able to afford the replacement homes that are being built there now.


In many cities across the nation, young white couples are now being seen walking the dog or strolling down the streets with their children, whereas before the only whites that had been seen before were those who worked for the city or came to collect the rent. And now I wonder.

I have witnessed the 30 years of benign neglect that has been allowed to occur in certain urban areas. I witness the change that has turned many of the slum dwellings of the poor into million dollar homes for the more fortunate. I have seen or heard of the many people, mainly minorities, who have lost their homes because of the subprime mortgage fiasco and I wonder.

Has all of this urban renewal and fictional wealth for the poor just been one vast scheme by the “man” as another way to take advantage of black people? I don’t know. It’s been a question that I have lived with my entire adult life and then some. But I'm afraid, just like the destruction of the Hindenburg and the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, the existance of The Plan maybe one of those questions that will never be answered.

It's Yesterday Once More

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.