The sweet sounds of summer

Many of our communities have summer concerts series. We’ve seen some wonderfully talented local musicians at Temple Ambler, in Royersford, Spring City, Lower Gwynedd, Montgomeryville, Ardmore and countless other communities.

Add Doylestown to that list. Last Sunday evening we went to the Doylestown Community Sounds of Summer 2010 for the township’s Fourth of July celebration kickoff concert and fireworks display at Central Park.
The featured band was the Philly Horn Band, which put on a great show. There was a pretty big crowd, all seemingly relaxed and having a good time listening to music and awaiting the fireworks.
The thing that strikes me about these events — in Doylestown as well as the others — is the sense of community I feel when we attend. They are intended to be family friendly events and they achieve that purpose. It’s a nice respite from all the ugliness in the world.
Check out the rest of Doylestown’s summer offerings by going to www.doylestownpa.org. You can contact any respective township to see what entertainment options are being offered or you can visit www.montgomerynews.com for information.

The ups and downs of Father's Day

As it stands now, there is a minimum height requirement to get on an amusement park roller coaster. But the older I get, I think maybe there should be a maximum age limit, one that determines when it is no longer fun to hurtle through the skies strapped to a giant corkscrew.
It was a wonderful Father’s Day recently with Younger Daughter. And I had the added pleasure of having my mom visit from Illinois on Dad’s Day. The three of us decided to spend the holiday at Hershey Park, which in theory was a nice enough plan. But the realities were (1) Mom isn’t as young as she used to be and the hills at Hershey Park were challenging for her in the hot weather; (2) I’m not as young as I used to be and thrill rides scare me a lot more now than they used to; (3) Younger Daughter is both young and not scared in the least of thrill rides.
So while Mom found benches in the shade on which to rest, Younger Daughter and I tackled a few of the roller coasters . . . under protest from me I might add.
First it was “Great Bear,” which was not all that great but bearable; next it was the “Comet,” which was better than “Cupid,” “Donner” and “Blitzen” combined; and then it “Fahrenheit,” which just may be the last roller coaster I ever ride.
If I had a nickel for every time I said, “I don’t think I’m going to like this” while standing in line waiting to get on a roller coaster that day, I would indeed have paid for the admissions of all three of us.
The thing about “Fahrenheit” is that it has a straight up and straight down feature. The straight up provides one with a view of nothing but blue skies and the feeling of falling over backwards and the straight down is so steep that the lump in one’s throat created by the deep drop is no doubt one’s knotted-up undershorts lodged tightly.
It was all worth it, though, because no matter how many twists and turns of the roller coasters I had to endure, I got to spend the day with my daughter and my mom.
And I’ll get on those rides for as many years as I have to just to be able to do that.

Skynyrd drummer's art rocks

Michael Cartellone is a class act. The drummer for the legendary southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd for the past 11 years, he’s been painting since he was 4 years old. Many of those paintings, a lot of them with a rock theme of course, were on display Sunday at Wentworth Gallery in the King of Prussia mall.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Cartellone for a preview story on the event, which appeared in the Ticket entertainment section of Montgomery Newspapers a few weeks ago.

Cartellone was just as pleasant and accommodating in person as he was on the phone during the interview. He had a lot of family and friends at the exhibition with him, including his parents, and spent a lot of time talking with fans of his music and art during the three-hour event.
One of Cartellone’s pieces, titled “New York,” features a likeness of his father, Joseph. The fan that purchased the piece at Wentworth on Sunday got both the artist and his father to sign the artwork, creating a uniquely one-of-a-kind aspect to the painting.
Wentworth has in the past hosted exhibits by Paul Stanley, lead singer of KISS, and actress Jane Seymour. Gallery director Tom Curley always hosts a nice event for local fans and art aficionados and makes sure they get some face time with the artists when they purchase a piece of art.
On that particular Sunday afternoon in June, Cartellone plus Curley equaled . . . cool.

Meat and music in Perkasie

Got a chance to go to Perkasie Olde Towne’s “Hot Ribs, Cool Music” event Saturday. Unfortunately, we got there too late to sample the ribs or the pies. Frankly, given my fondness for both ribs and pie, that’s bad weekend planning on our part and an adjustment will have to be made to rectify that before next year’s event.

The festival is built around two favorite pastimes: music and food. It features ribs-grilling and pie-baking competitions, a pie-eating contest and several music performers, including Zydeco-A-Go-Go, Dirk Quinn, Mike Greer & Co. and the Pennridge High School and South Middle School Jazz bands.
Despite the steaminess of the day, there was a bit of a cool breeze blowing through the big tent as we enjoyed the music of Zydeco-A-Go-Go. I like any band that features a squeezebox and a guy who plays a metal washboard strapped to his chest with spoons, and Zydeco-A-Go-Go has both.
If there was a consolation to missing the ribs and pies, it’s that I didn’t spill any ribs or pie on my shirt. Next year, I’ll plan better and take another shirt along.

Topps promotion is top-notch

The Topps Company, longtime maker of baseball cards, has decided to feature one of my past columns in its “Topps Million Card Giveaway” promotion. I am both humbled and honored.
The column was from earlier this year and centered on a father-son-baseball-baseball cards theme. The piece included some very personal and wonderful memories about my father and the collecting of baseball cards when I was a kid.
Topps figured out a way to bring baseball-card collecting into the digital world with this promotion. It has reinvigorated my interest in baseball cards — something I never really lost through the years anyway — and I now get to share the hobby with my stepson. It’s heartening to watch the joy he gets from collecting and trading his cards.
You can read the column here: http://bit.ly/aaazFf

A manly man of an outdoor grill

The new outdoor grill has been secured and the first round of meat was successfully charred over the holiday weekend. But I must admit the cleanup has been a little more complicated than I anticipated.
We had purchased the Char-Broil brand, commercial series model, which is a manly man of an outdoor grill. In fact, when the guy at the big home improvement store wheeled it out from the back already assembled (my inadequacy at putting things together is well documented), I felt the urge to do The Stupid Man Dance, which includes jumping around, chest-bumping and high-fiving with other guys in the store while shouting “Woof-woof-woof!”
Gentlemen, go ahead and perform the dance in front of your wives and female companions. They will be so impressed and will want to go shopping with you more often.
The one thing we needed to be aware of with this grill, though, was how it was cleaned. The grates are made of cast-iron (a manly metal) with a porcelain coating (a manly coating). But the usual grill-cleaning tool, a wire brush, could wreck the porcelain finish. So we took the guy’s recommendation and bought what we thought was the right soft brush for the job.
Personally, if mankind can invent a self-cleaning oven, then I think it should be able to invent a self-cleaning grill. Failing that, we should at least be able to remove the grill’s grates and place them in a self-cleaning oven and let the oven do the work.
After the first round of grilling, I was using the soft brush to clean and ended up just shredding the thing. It was not the appropriate tool for the job.
So back to the big home improvement store I went, where another guy explained to be that I needed a brass-wired brush and a squirt bottle. He instructed me to heat the grill, squirt the grate with water to create steam, and then use the brass-wired brush to clean away the grime.
That worked, and it appears the porcelain coating has remained undamaged after the initial cleanings.
Now that the worry over cleaning the grill has been solved, I can go back to burning meat for the rest of the summer. Woof-woof-woof!