Ins and Outs

More or less chronological from the past two days:

* Going out in style and then All-Out

Friday had no travel, no court, no appointments- but the ends of three efforts, ranging from 30 days to over 40 years. From morning to night:

Over summers or other visits during my Bright College Days, I'd primarily listen to a radio station at the forefront of the kind of music I was coming to love at the time. Licensed to Garden City, Long Island but studioed in a dull office building on Fulton Avenue in Hempstead, they at first served up fairly regular prog-rock fare like Bruce and Browne, but around the time of my law school era visits, they Dared to Be Different. Riskier choices like Joan Jett, New Order and Depeche Mode became the mainstays of the format. On-air voices included Donna Donna (not a typo), Denis McNamara, Ben Manilla, and a slightly wacky morning guy from Queens named John DeBella. The "Morning Travesty" ran from 6 to 10, always with Idi Amin doing a time-check at 8:30 leading into the syndicated News Blimp of other recent memories of mine, and always ending with the audio of a car crash as the "Travesty comes to its timely halt," John then exhorting us to  Be good, stay out of trouble, buy bonds, save chicken fat, join the WACS, don't take any wooden rhetoric, all those things disk jockeys say before they get off the radio, leading into the on-the-hour ID and the handoff to Denis with the music 'til 2.  It was fun and memorable until either he or I just wasn't around anymore, and with no Internet back then or longrange FM signals, that was that....

Until a few summers later on a visit to my college roommates then living in Bryn Mawr PA, there he was again on legacy Philly classic rock station WMMR. John had moved there, and with it pretty much his whole format. Idi still on the job at 8:30, the car crash now bringing the "Morning Zoo" to a timely halt, and the handoff now to someone named Pierre. That would turn out to be lifetime WMMR voice Pierre Robert pronounced the French way, who lasted longer at that station than John did. After his ratings got killed by Howard Stern's syndicated arrival, DeBella left the air but at some point returned to WMGK, first a competitor to but eventually a sister station of MMR. Some random memory of a time check or of "chicken fat" got me Googling sometime last year, and there he was, streamable online, only now the show ended, at 9 rather than 10, with a daily dose of Eric Idle's slightly sanitized "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." John closed the show now, after the "big string thing" at the end of the song, with a voice-overed "group participation blow"- congratulations on anniversaries, graduations, whatever ya texted in. He no longer did the Be good, stay out of trouble riff after the car crash and the handoff to, now, a guy named Matt, but I texted it all into him after rediscovering him and he read it on the air during a 2022 fadeout of "Bright Side."

He also announced retirements, including, eventually, his own. Friday's show was his final morning on the mike after 41 years in three stations in two tri-state areas. I tuned in for several of those shows and especially those final minutes, as mostly current and former colleagues, including Pierre from down the hall, wished him well and thanked him for not only "daring to be different" but MAKING a difference. He lent his name and time to annual events for pets and vets that raised millions for those causes over the years. Now, with a final tearful runoff of thanks and playing himself out to a Billy Joel song I somehow can't even name, he's off to the "shore," as they say down in the Debellaware Valley, for a much needed retirement. Will he return for some annual events or pick up an hour-long Sunday special? I may never know, but I thanked him for all the contributions to many memories, including my own.

Closer in time and closer to home was another on-air retirement that same day. Julia Figueras was a fixture at Rochester's classical music FM station for over a quarter century. I met her just over five years ago when she became my last-minute seatmate at the Hamilton performance there after Eleanor realized she would never make the drive or the steps to the Auditorium Theatre's balcony. Julia was a co-worker of several friends of mine at WXXI and they fixed her up with my empty chair.  That music really isn't my thing beyond basic appreciation, but every time I did listen to her in the car, I learned something about the pieces or performers she was playing. Around the time of John's announcement of June 30 retirement, Julia announced her own would be on the same day. I listened to virtually her whole noon to 3 final show from my desk on Friday, beginning with "Racing with the Clock" from Pajama Game, a little Liszt, some Keith Jarrett, a Yo-Yo Ma waltz with Mark O'Connor and Edgar Meyer (which Eleanor just acquired on CD within the past few weeks), two of the Big B's of Beethoven and Ahhhhh, Bach!, before finally coming to her tearful end.  She teased us with going out with Southside Johnny's famed live cover of Sam Cooke's "Having a Party," but that probably would have killed the blue-haired old biddies listening down at the Chatterbox Club wondering where their Shostakovich went. So instead she played it out safe-



-but there was probably plenty of rocking out at her after-party at the Jazz Festival I was not, alas, able to attend....

Because Friday at 4:15 ended a gym effort that had gone all month. There's seemingly always something being promoted over there to give members a goal beyond "just getting through the class," itself often a challenge. Some are single-day events, others spread from a week to a month or more. I did not do one big six-week challenge earlier in the year that everyone got really into, so when I saw they were doing a 15-class-in-30-days challenge, not even for a signup fee or a promise of swag, I decided to go for it. 

About a third in, I noticed something in the app that tracks these classes: I'd done the first five with five different coaches.  Hmmmmm.... I'd done something at-first-accidentally similar when I needed to burn through 10 classes in 15 days after taking half of March off for Eleanor's initial recovery: not only did those 10 wind up under 10 different trainers, I got the streak all the way up to 15 before finally running into the same guy a second time.  The first of those 15 on March 31st was with one of the oldest-school of the coaches dating almost back to when I started with this gym. Nicole's a great person and a motivated trainer, but I rarely saw her because she usually taught the "vampire classes" at 5 and 6:15 a.m. She went out on maternity leave at the end of March, and I resolved to pick my sorry ass out of bed to make it to her last class before the break, my first time in 700 classes at the time I'd ever made it in there that early.....

and so, this latest effort ended this past Friday at 4:15, with that same Nicole, now back as happy mommy to baby Victor, filling in after her usual coffin hours, and putting me through a very tough effort to end the day, week, and month of 15 classes with, yes, 15 different coaches.  And did it on the 8th anniversary of my first time in the door of that gym in 2015. As I commented on a group for this bunch:

June 30, 2015. I’d been doing small group weight classes, but scheduling was limited and I was hitting a wall. Then I heard about this New Thing. Not soon enough for a founders rate, but it became a part of my life.

Since then: 8 years in the books,, 20 pounds off the bod, 735 classes with close to 50 coaches in six different studios, including one a mile from my high school that likely caused the gym to cave in. Just this month: 15 Push classes.

Could I hit 15 different trainers? Bryam, Justen, Ash, Mike, Bri, Paige, Linda, Jory, Bailey (now it's getting difficult), Kendra, Steph, Branden, Amanda, Jamie, and finally the OG Nicole to end my quest to do this with 15 different coaches. AND today? 30 splat points and over 2 miles trod.

It took some doing, because each location has, at most, five different trainers on staff in any given month. But I travel- to one near my chiropractor, another at the Mostly Dead Mall I explored for #13 last week, and the one a few miles from my Rochester office which I turned into the fourteenth stop on the quest on Wednesday.

Now I'm off from all that for at least a few days. There's still dog-walking and lawn-mowing to be done, anyway.

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* Outlaws on the bench

If I needed any extra motivation to get through a tough workout on Friday, it was wanting to outlive at least the oldest of the current assholes on the Supreme Court.  For after teasing with decency earlier in the week, they spent the last two days of their term coming into full Fuckishness with decisions that gutted affirmative action, slapped LGTBQs in the face on the last day of Pride Month, and, in their final move, just added ten grand to my remaining share of Emily's college debt, at least for now.

Just the other day, after reading a more minor decision from the Supremes, I boldly noted here, the challenges to Biden's partial forgiveness program "stand" on some of the weakest and most thinly constructed concepts of actual injury. Roberts might get two of the four in the Republican bloc to reject the case on that ground.  And they did! Unanimously! Just one of them, though: the one brought by unforgiven borrowers who felt "aggrieved" because they weren't in on the Biden gravy.  But then Roberts and his five cronies brought the whole thing down in finding that the State of Missouri did have standing to oppose Joe's plan because their poor state's student loan agency will lose money from not being able to service those tens of thousands of pounds of flesh.  That got them to the "merits" of whether the executive can do something on a "major question" without Congress expressly saying the executive can do exactly that. Apparently if that executive is not named "Trump," the answer, for now, is no. Never mind that four of those six naysayers now had no trouble saying "Yes, Dear Leader!" back then, when TFG put forth his Muslim ban on authority not expressly granted by Congress.

So for the moment, we're fucked. I'd planned on resuming those payments anyway, and will wait to see if Dark Brandon finds a way through the thickets of what SCOTUS did. Or wait until some of these old coots start falling off....

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* Remembering "The In-Laws"

Hey, maybe it's something I can help with through my writing, because Oh my God, I killed Alan Arkin, you bastard!

No, really. I was writing my last post here about the Barry show on HBO we've got on binge , and I'd JUST gotten to the comparison between Fuches in that show and Arkin playing the parallel character to Michael Douglas in Kaminsky Method- and poof! Arkin's dead.

I then thought about expediting this post, about what assholes Alito and Thomas are, but apparently I still have to learn to control my superpower.

Anyway, after I got home from those farewell radio shows and workout Friday, Eleanor brought home The In-Laws, the wonderful 1979 farce of a film with Arkin and Peter Falk as the titular leads. (Oddly, a quarter century later, Michael Douglas would attempt a remake of The In-Laws, which by all accounts sucked.) Written by one of Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor's partners in crafting Blazing Saddles, and directed by Arthur Hiller, it's an utterly absurd but incredibly funny romp. A good way to send out the late man's memory. It's on Prime for $2.50, or you can probably find the Criterion DVD of it at your local library, which includes a great interview with a much older Arkin remembering its creation and production.  Among other things, he mentions that one of the film's most famous scenes is the only one in the script Peter Falk balked at. In the end, they talked him into it, and the watchword from it is one that fans would shout at them for the rest of their respective lives:
 

Watch on YouTube

He and Falk plainly enjoyed the filming and each others' company in making it, and I'm glad we finally got to see them both in it.

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* Finally, just slightly In the way....

Much quieter day yesterday. Eleanor only left the house once for a Lowes run for a downstairs project- missing the spectacle of me running down the hall in the pattern of the cat toys the boys had left on the ground calling out, "Serpentine!"

That hardware run to acquire a new 2x4 to a stud for a project in the cellar. Then we went down to put it up: a task that required Eleanor to work with a drill, a stepladder and a steady hand while I stood by holding the beam in place and watching the bubble in the level.

 

It did NOT require Bronzini supervising from the rafters-



- but cats gonna cat.

I made my own hardware run later in the day, looking for a seemingly impossible to find grill replacement part. I was wearing my 10,000 Maniacs shirt from That Weekend last year; the older gentleman looking up the part number helpfully informed me that  the band is actually named for an early 1980s December Bills game at Rich Stadium that was so cold there were only 10,000 Maniacs still in the stands at the end.

I told them I’d inform Steve Gustafson, a now Facebook friend of mine who co-founded the band and named it after a cheesy 60s horror film.  But who knows? Maybe the guy at Valu has the real In-side scoop;)