Quinceañera!

News flash: I am not female and I am not Hispanic.

And neither is my blog. But if it were, today would be a day of great celebration!

Can you guess why? The title of this post gives a hint.

Quince (kin-seh) is the Spanish word for fifteen. A quinceañera (kin-seh-an-yehr-uh) is a festive time celebrating a Hispanic female's fifteenth birthday. It's rather like a Sweet Sixteen birthday party, only a year sooner. To be more accurate, in Spanish countries the word refers to the honoree herself; in the U.S. it refers to the festivities.

Sixteen in Anglo families and fifteen in Hispanic families has traditionally been the age when parents consider a daughter to be available for courting by suitors with an eye toward eventual marriage.

Today -- September 28, 2022 -- my blog is fifteen years old.

So even though this blog is neither female nor Hispanic, if you want to hire a mariachi band or do a flamenco dance or drink a margarita or two, I will not stop you.

No way, José.

It’s funny, the things you remember

I don't mean funny ha-ha, I mean funny peculiar.

I remember that before Bob Keeshan played Captain Kangaroo on TV he was the original Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody.

I remember that when I played clarinet in the Mansfield (Texas) High School band back in the 1950s, Marshall Tyson played alto saxophone, Dianne Phillips played tenor saxophone, and Bruce Hornell played baritone saxophone. John Galloway, Jerry Willis, and Jerry Harmon played trumpet and the latter Jerry's twin brother Terry played tuba. Kenneth Green played snare drum. There were a lot of other people in the band but I don't remember them or what they played.

I remember when there were nine planets in our solar system.

I remember that when Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles and became the Princess of Wales she bobbled the order of his names during their exchange of vows, saying "I take thee, Charles Arthur Philip George" instead of what she ought to have said, "I take thee, Charles Philip Arthur George" and I remember wondering whether the marriage was therefore not valid.

I remember watching the Democratic National Convention on our black-and-white television set in the summer of 1956 when newly-chosen candidate for the presidency Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois let the delegates decide who his Vice Presidential running mate would be. They chose Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee over someone I had never heard of, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

I remember that Adlai Stevenson, when asked how he felt after losing to Dwight D. Eisenhower, cited Abraham Lincoln's remark after losing an election, that it reminded him of the little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark and said he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh. I cannot remember whether he said this in 1952 or 1956 but he lost to Eisenhower both times.

I remember seeing Olga Korbut and Mary Lou Retton and Nadia Comaneci win gold medals in gymnastics at various Summer Olympic Games.

I remember Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean's spectacular ice dancing to the music of Maurice Ravel's Bolero in the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. They wore lavender.

I remember attending two musical productions at the Texas State Fair in Dallas in the mid-1950s. In one, Victor Herbert's operetta Naughty Marietta, I remember Patrice Munsel singing "Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life, At Last I've Found You". In the other, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific, I remember Kay Armen as Bloody Mary singing both "Happy Talk" and "Bali Ha'i". I have no memory at all of who portrayed Ensign Nellie Forbush or French expatriate Emile De Becque but undoubtedly they sang "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair" and "Some Enchanted Evening", respectively.

My most vivid memory from the world of sports is a tie between (a) Atlanta Braves TV announcer Skip Caray yelling "Braves win! Braves win! Braves win!" in 1992 after Sid Bream slid into home base in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the National League Championship Series and (b) University of Georgia announcer Larry Munson yelling "Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott!" in 1980 after the 93-yard winning touchdown play near the end of the fourth quarter in the Georgia-Florida game that year.

Here is a knock-knock joke for you.

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Sam and Janet.
Sam and Janet who?
(singing) Sam and Janet evening you may see a stranger, you may see a stranger across a crowded room.

I'm guessing you will remember this knock-knock joke.

Connexion

As you may or may not know, I am somewhat of an Anglophile. I decided to watch today's funeral -- if you have to ask whose you must have just arrived here from another galaxy -- but not on one of the American television networks. Instead, wanting to experience what the people in the U.K. were experiencing, I decided to watch the day's proceedings on BBC television.

I'm glad I did. It was solemn, dignified, and riveting. Even better, I avoided commercial breaks, bantering hosts, royalty-fawning, and, as Americans are wont to make, inane comments about Harry and Meghan.

My Anglophilia didn't just come out of the blue. One of my maternal great-grandfathers, Solomon Aarons, was born in London in 1847 and came to America before the Civil War, I mean the War Between the States, I mean the War of Northern Aggression, I mean the Late Unpleasantness. I'm joking. As it happens, Solomon lived in Philadelphia and served as a drummer boy in the Union Army, the winning side.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

In the last little while I have composed half a dozen blogposts and discarded them all. Nothing satisfied.

I spent two days in hospital last week, during which time two kidney stones were surgically removed from my right side. The larger of them measured 7mm (approximately 1/4 inch). No one wants to read about that. No one wants an organ recital unless your name is Diane Bish (British, E. Power Biggs).

Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland at the age of 96. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know this.

I was hoping Prince Charles would choose to become King George VII, but no one ever listens to me.

A blogger friend, Rachel Phillips of Norfolk in the U.K., is in the midst of her first trip to Albania. Today, on Day 4, her post included a photograph of a statue in Vlorë and she also mentioned visiting the excavations and museum at Apollonia. My father-in-law was from Vlorë, which he called Vlonë, and my mother-in-law was from Fier, only 5km (3 miles) from Apollonia.

People often say it's a small world, but today it seems smaller than usual.