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captainsblogWhat a Difference, One Week Makes, 168 hours,....
The four feet of horror from barely five days before? Almost entirely gone as of yesterday morning. I only left the house for about an hour total yesterday, to walk the dog and make one quick Tarjay for a product Wegmans no longer carries. The day before was a little more errandy: a stop at the office for two days of mail I never saw (and wasn't much); a run up the Boulevard to the Asian grocery for the humongous carrots we give Pepper as a treat; and, since said dog was in tow for all that, a stop at the freshly melted dog park.
Or not:(
We'd never heard of a Parp! closed on New Years Eve before, so with tears in our eyes, we walked off into the sunset, along the creek trailway the other side of the bridge from it. Still a pretty time-
-if a little foggy.
A landscape company has a place on the Boulevard that backs up to the Old Falls road along the creek/canal trail, and they decorated across from them with Ellicott Creek behind it:
And on the way back, a stream running into the creek-
A good way to end the year, especially how the week before went.
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The Bills are off until tonight, so the afternoon tv was a documentary about Opportunity, the Mars Rover sent in 2003 on a 90-day mission that lasted more than 15 years. It's got Spielberg and Lucas special effects in addition to the actual photos transmitted from up there, interviews with the JPL engineers who kept watch over Oppy and her sister Spirit for many years, and a range of wake-up songs that rang in 2023 for us with sweetness.
Today's now that weird Not a Holiday that follows when January 1 falls on a Sunday. I've been at the office catching up, but it's been dead and I will likely head out of here soon. A roofing consultant sent by the homeowners insurer is due this afternoon to make sure we don't need to make any major repairs before the next Thing hits; Eleanor's pretty worried about it, but that's how we roll.
And speaking of rolling, although 10,000 Maniacs have been offstage since right after we saw them in May, that hasn't kept their members entirely locked up. Bassist Steve Gustafson made this report on how he spent HIS New Year's weekend:
Some people will do anything for money (and friends) - including me. I'm driving a 12' box truck 7 hours to Manhattan today with my buddy, Scott Barton, to pick up some artifacts from Caroline's comedy club in Times Square on New Year's Day and returning said artifacts to the National Comedy Center on Monday. Into the belly of the beast. I should have taken the blue pill.
That would be the museum in his native Jamestown that I spent several hours exploring on That Weekend, which is now inheriting the legacy of a legendary Times Square comedy club that took its final bow on the penultimate night of 2022:
How do you honor the death of a comedy club? First, you kill.
Walking onstage late Friday night at the final headlining show at Carolines on Broadway, which after three decades is closing its doors, Dave Attell handled that job quickly, spraying punch lines, roasting the front row and making sure the raucous audience knew it was part of history. In one galloping tangent, Attell urged anyone not laughing to leave. “Take a table and chair with you, because we have to clear this place out,” he said.
Attell has performed at Carolines between Christmas and New Year’s for 13 years, a holiday tradition for audiences who wanted something significantly dirtier than the Rockettes. This time, he mixed in a few heartfelt, even melancholy notes into his virtuosic deadpan rhythms to eulogize the passing of a legendary comedy room. But comedians mourn differently. When a waiter walked past the stage toward the door, Attell, dressed in a characteristic black jacket and baseball cap, asked him where he was going, pausing before the joke: “Unemployment.”
Like a drama queen writing her will, New York is perpetually and loudly dying. Hardly a day goes by without teeth gnashing over a beloved part of this city calling it quits. Every closed diner is the end of an epoch. The most mundane and predictable demise, the end of a Broadway run, receives extended soul-searching and public autopsy. To me, this seems (mostly) sensible. It’s healthy to mark the end of things, and what is better than a great finale? But I’ve been covering show business in this dynamic city too long to get too sentimental. We shouldn’t overly fetishize institutions. One of the legacies of “Stomp,” which closes next month after a 29-year run, is all the shows that did not get produced in its theater. Change is good.
I'd never been to that club, but I remember wandering by it on my way to Les Paul's equally legendary jazz club Iridium that's practically next door to it, when seeing a high school friend fronting a ska band back in 2019. Freddie's back in the city in two nights. Other friends from back then are going. I am not, but I will try to pick up his newest music just as I hope to see the Caroline's cache when it reaches the 716 later this year.