May I just say...

Happy birthday, Jerry Ragsdale, wherever you are...

R.I.P. Dick Clark

Dick Clark died yesterday. He was 82.

On three occasions, I was in the same room with him. We breathed the same air.

I have expanded an earlier post of mine from back in January 2009 that will explain:


Shall We Dance?


Some of you will recognize these couples instantly. Some of you won’t have a clue who they are. I am in the former group. On the right are Bob and Justine, and the couple below are Kenny and Arlene.
Ring any bells yet?


So now you know Who. But what about Where? And When? And perhaps most importantly, Why???

I will tell you.

Where is a television studio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

When is 1957, 1958, 1959.

Why is two words -- American Bandstand!

I was there in the summer of 1958 all the way from Texas, visiting relatives in suburban Philadelphia. I was seventeen years old and had just graduated from high school. I was young and impressionable. Few things were more important than going to American Bandstand. It was a pilgrimage more to be desired than the one that resulted in Chaucer’s writing The Canterbury Tales.

So I left my aunt and cousin and boarded an early southbound commuter train in Jenkintown and made my way past Elkins Park, Melrose Park, Cheltenham, past City Line where Old York Road becomes Broad Street, past Allegheny, Lehigh, Girard, and Spring, all the way down Broad Street to City Center where William Penn’s statue stands atop City Hall. There I switched to the east-west line and, still searching for the Holy Grail, headed out West Market Street. At 46th Street I got off the train and there it was: On one side of the street were brick tenements with people’s laundry drying on the fire escapes, but on the other side of the street was the Holy of Holies: WFIL-TV, Channel 6, home of the one and only American Bandstand, the Magna Carta of teenage dance programs.

I stood in line for at least six hours, hoping to be admitted with the other pilgrims when the doors opened. Men with pushcarts came by selling pretzels with mustard, a Philadelphia staple, and hot dogs to fend off our hunger pangs. No one was about to leave the line to do an unimportant thing like eating. And because I had made sure to arrive early, I was near enough to the front of the line that I saw the regulars arrive and when the doors finally opened to the rest of us I made it in.

All the regulars were there. Bob and Justine, and Kenny and Arlene, and Pat, and Fran, and others whose faces I recognized but whose names I didn’t know. Dick Clark was there, of course, looking all of 18 even though he was 28 years old at the time. We all were there, dancing to Bobby Day’s hit, “Rockin’ Robin (Tweet, Tweet, Tweedly-Deet)” and Bobby Darin’s hit, “Splish, Splash, I Was Takin’ A Bath” and “Heavenly shades of night are falling; it’s twilight time” by The Platters and “All I Have To Do Is Dream” by The Everly Brothers, Phil and Don, and saying such profound things as “It has a good beat; you can dance to it. I give it a 92” to Dick Clark on national television!

I went for three days in a row.

Back in Texas, everybody had been watching American Bandstand five afternoons a week after school for more than a year. It had taken the teenaged portion of the country by storm. Two months later, when I dropped in at my old high school before I went away to college, I was treated like a celebrity (there wasn’t that much to do in small towns in Texas in the fifties, as you would know if you ever saw The Last Picture Show or Places In The Heart). It wasn’t that I myself was great, you understand, but clearly I had been in the presence of greatness.

Any other acclaim I might have received since then has been pure gravy. My fifteen minutes of fame happened early, when it could be properly appreciated by the only people who could pay me homage properly, the new crop of high school seniors at my old high school.

Photo by Dick Clark Productions, Inc.

Later on, American Bandstand was televised in color and moved to California and became a once-a-week show, broadcast only on Saturday afternoon. It was slicker, and over-produced, and lasted until 1989, but it was never as good as the original, more innocent, five-days-a-week, black-and-white version from Philadelphia. It may have still had Dick Clark, but it didn’t have Pat. It didn’t have Fran. It certainly didn’t have Bob and Justine, or Kenny and Arlene.

We had American idols before there were any American idols. Ours didn’t even have to sing.

And now the guy who was there at the beginning, the guy who was part of our growing up years, Dick Clark, “America’s Oldest Teenager,” is gone. He was not a father figure exactly (he was too young for that). He was more of an older brother, already out in the world, making his way, but remembering us younger kids back home, affirming our existence, validating our musical tastes. For an hour every afternoon, he was up there presiding over the proceedings, paving the way for us into the wider world, talking to us as though our music mattered, as though what we thought actually mattered.

The more cynical might say he had just found a way to make an easy buck. But when you’re a teenager and ignored or shunted aside most of the time, being treated as though you mattered was a rare thing indeed.

In recent years he had become almost a caricature of himself. Having a stroke that resulted in the permanent slurring of his speech didn’t help his image with the current crop of the hip and the cool. But those of us who were there when his star was first rising are sad today.

Here is a fitting eulogy by one of the groups from back in the day.

From the archives: It’s bluebonnet time in Texas. (April 8, 2008)

I grew up in Texas, my family having moved there from Rhode Island the summer before I entered second grade. I left Texas at the age of 20 -- how can it possibly have been 47 years ago? (Editor’s note. It isn’t; it’s 51. --RWP) -- but even though I now live in an area of the country where every spring is absolutely gorgeous with white dogwoods, pink dogwoods, purple redbuds, purple tulip trees (Magnolia soulangiana), white Bradford pear blossoms, pale pink cherry blossoms, azalea bushes in many shades, daffodils, phlox, forsythia (I could go on and on), every year around this time I become nostalgic for flat land, mesquite trees, and a field filled with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush.

The photograph (click on it and it will get larger) could have been taken from the front yard of my childhood home (it wasn’t, though --I found it on the internet). All it needs to make the scene complete is a dirt road and what people in Texas call a “bob-war fince” (barbed wire fence). If the photographer had then turned and taken a snapshot in a different direction, you might see a pasture full of Hereford cattle, the reddish-brown kind with faces of white. And if the photographer had turned in still another direction, you might see my mother picking blackberries or peaches or roses or lilacs, or you might see my father coming home from work, carrying his lunchpail, walking up the lane all the way from the paved road where his carpool dropped him off.

As an old poem says, “Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, / Make me a child again just for tonight!”

I don’t really want to go back; it was not an idyllic period of my life. I am just missing the bluebonnets today as only someone raised in Texas can.

“I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers...”

Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, there are four ways you can spend Sunday afternoon:

1. In the park with George:

(A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, oil on canvas by Georges Seurat, 1884-1886 -- click to enlarge)

2. In rehearsal with Sutton Foster (8:45)

3. With Texas Bluebonnets and a Pit Bull named Sharky (0:41).

4. With Texas bluebonnets, a Pit Bull named Sharky, and a Guinea Pig named Penelope (1:52).

Please tell us which one you prefer and why.

If you pick number 2, state whether you would rather be on stage or in the audience.

If you pick number 4, state whether you would prefer to be Sharky, Penelope, or the bluebonnets.

If, all in all, you would rather be a bee, buzz off.

The Easter joy continues

...with this performance of the opening Sinfonia from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Easter Oratorio conducted by Philippe Herreweghe (4:07).

The Easter joy practically jumps off the screen at you.

Okay, so it’s not the Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Chorus singing “Sweet Home Alabama,” but hey, you can’t have everything.

Except that you can. Here is the entire Bach Easter Oratorio (45:21) conducted by somebody else.

And for those of you who wish every day were Christmas, here is Bach’s Magnificat (41:19).

To all Eastern Orthodox folk everywhere...

Greek, Russian, Serbian (you know who you are):

Happy Easter!

And to the ones who understand Albanian:

(Church with Easter banner in Berata, Albania -- click to enlarge)

Krishti u ngjall! Vërtetë u ngjall!

(He is risen! He is risen indeed!)

Anne Frank was right.

I suppose the most famous sentence from The Diary of Anne Frank is this:

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Here’s proof (or some evidence, at least) that she was right (3:44).

And the moral of that video clip is crystal clear:

If you are kind to others, your life will have had a porpoise.