Raising bleach awareness

While watching the news report of the Phillies last win before the All-Star break, The Blonde Accountant raised a question: “Who thought it was a good idea to put baseball players in white pants?”
I gave the standard, simplistic answer, mostly because I couldn’t come up with a snappy comment. “The home team wears white uniforms and the visiting team wears gray uniforms.”
But her perspective was different. Ballplayers play in the dirt and their white uniforms get dirty. But the Phillies have red pinstripes in their white uniforms, which The Blonde Accountant said would prevent the uniforms from being bleached.
I don’t believe I’ve ever thought of using the word “bleach” in the same sentence as “baseball.” Of course my mom and many other moms — who have spent years washing dirty baseball uniforms — probably think otherwise.
“I can understand a doctor wearing a white coat, because when it gets dirty, it can be bleached,” said The Blonde Accountant. “But the red stripes in the Phillies pants would prevent them from being bleached.”
I will defer to her bleach expertise. After all, I wash the colors with the whites, so bleach doesn’t even figure into my laundry equation.
And really, we do have more substantive conversations during the 11 o’clock news. It just so happens this wasn’t one of those times.

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.

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.

I'm done with these TV dramas

I’ve pretty much had it with television dramas. In particular, my days of watching “Grey’s Anatomy” and its spinoff, “Private Practice,” as well as “Desperate Housewives” and “Brothers and Sisters,” are over.
Why? Well, too much drama for me. Duh, that’s why those shows are called dramas, huh?
I really don’t have much invested in “Grey’s” or “Housewives.” If I miss those two, I don’t lose sleep. I like “Brothers and Sisters” because I like watching Sally Field and Rob Lowe perform. I go all the way back to Ms. Field’s film performance with Burt Reynolds in “Smokey and the Bandit” and I like Lowe’s character on “West Wing” several years ago.
And I started to follow “Private Practice” from its inception because of Kate Walsh (Dr. Addison Montgomery), who I had the opportunity to interview during the 2008 presidential campaign when she was in Montgomery County stumping for President Obama.
Ms. Walsh was very gracious and articulate during the interview. I would be remiss in my job if I also didn’t report that she is what we in journalism call “very humma humma” in the looks department. (Just doing my job there folks.)
But it was “Private Practice” that finally put me over the edge. In this year’s season finale, there was an accident (there are always accidents in TV dramas, which of course is no accident); a pregnant teenage in the accident, forcing the doctors to choose between saving the baby or operating on the mother’s spinal injury so she would not lose the use of her legs; an engagement, ill-timed at best; all kinds of romantic feelings flying between the characters; and the death of one of the regular characters on the show.
All in one episode.
And then Lowe’s character on “Brothers and Sisters” died in a horrific multi-car crash in the same week as well.
It was too much for me. Real life is difficult enough, filled with challenges and tragedies.
I am no longer am interested in being reminded that real life can stink. From here on out, I’m sticking to watching the Phillies on TV. If they stink, I’ll just turn the channel to something less dramatic and more cerebral . . . professional rasslin’.

The class and grace of Robin Roberts

It was in the mid-1990s and Robin Roberts was appearing at an autograph signing event, the proceeds of which would benefit something called the Bottomley-Ruffing-Schalk Baseball Museum in the little central Illinois town of Nokomis, a spot on the map just outside the state capital of Springfield.
Named after National Baseball Hall of Famers Jim Bottomley, Red Ruffing and Ray Schalk, the museum honors people from the central Illinois area who have contributed to baseball in some significant manner.
Roberts, the Hall of Fame Phillies pitcher, was born in nearby Springfield and would occasionally go back to his hometown area for events such as this one.
The weather was uncomfortably hot that day, like many summer days in central Illinois. The small museum — which lacked air conditioning — couldn’t accommodate the overflowing crowd that a hall of famer, and a local boy at that, had drawn. Fans eager for Roberts’ signature had crowded toward the table where he sat, making it even hotter and more uncomfortable than it already was.
I had met Mr. Roberts a few times before that day in the museum. At that point in my career, I had no idea I would move from central Illinois to the Philadelphia area and would have many more occasions to be in his company and interview him for stories I was writing.
Like that day in Illinois, Mr. Roberts always handled himself with grace and class, even under trying circumstances. He signed every autograph request, and it became quite a windfall for the tiny museum out in the middle of nowhere. I remember thinking at the time that the ex-player was the epitome of grace under pressure.
Once I moved out here, Mr. Roberts would occasionally show up in the Ambler area, mostly in October for a golf outing at Limekiln Golf Course, owned by another Whiz Kid, Curt Simmons. Although I’m not a golfer, there were a few occasions before tee-off where I got sit in the golf course clubhouse and listen to some baseball stories.
I crossed paths again with Mr. Roberts at the National Constitution Center in 2008 when it hosted a traveling exhibit from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. It was there that I got a chance to interview him for a story on the exhibit that appeared in Montgomery Newspapers.
His baseball career ended in the mid-1960s and I never got a chance to see him pitch. But he was a hall of famer in every sense of the word, especially off the field. Never in the dozen or so times I was in his company did he have a cross word for anybody or refuse an autograph request.
Robin Roberts died last week in his Florida home at age 83. He was a first-class player and a first-class human being. Not only was he one of my favorite baseball players, he’s one of my favorite people of all time.

Elvis just too cool in 'Blue Hawaii'

Every once in a while I enjoy being reminded just how cool Elvis was. And in the film “Blue Hawaii,” Elvis is cooler than the other side of the pillow.
It’s always been one of my favorite movies, so seeing it again recently was a treat. In fact, while watching the movie and enjoying the music, I got online and ordered the soundtrack, which arrived in the mail a few days later.
Elvis, whose character is named Chadwick Gates, was only 26 years old when the film was made in 1961. One thing I didn’t know was that Angela Lansbury, who played his mother, Sarah Lee Gates, was only 36 years old at the time of filming. She later said the role was the worst of her career, but really, the comedy interaction between her and Fred Gates (understatedly portrayed by the brilliant actor Roland Winters, who I quite enjoyed in the role of Charlie Chan in several films) is hilarious.
Despite the wonderful Hawaiian scenery and, of course, the pretty girls that were a staple of many Elvis films, I always go back to the music in this movie.
Critics over the years have described these Elvis movies as having dull plots and mediocre songs. But I really like the CD and have been playing it in my car since I got it. I particularly like “Rock-A-Hula Baby” and “Moonlight Swim.” Of course, the Elvis hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love” would become Elvis’ closing song for many of the concerts in the 1970s.
The album spent 20 weeks in 1961 as No. 1 on the Top Pop Albums chart, was Elvis’ biggest selling album during his lifetime and has been certified as triple platinum. The CD I have is a remastered version of the original with eight bonus tracks and was re-released in 1997.
The couple of hours I invested in watching the movie and the $10 I forked over for the CD was time and money well spent.