Hi Public

I am working on the post about the writing workshops. It is taking me a long time. I cannot tell anymore if it is the time or the stamina I lack to get anything done. Even five years ago I used to be able to put something out a couple of times a week.

I have had a pretty good life, but I wish I could have had more fun, learned how to dance, met more girls. That is really my only regret. It would have been nice to have had a distinguished career, but even at age 44 I don't have any sense of what I might have been any good at, to the level of having a distinguished career, so I can't really regret what might not have been possible in the first place.

I like these videos for 1960s TV show dance parties:

Here's one for the 70s too. It may be even more amusing than the 60s ones, for the George Jefferson dance alone. I am clearly more of a 60s guy though. There is actually a picture of me dancing with my wife that looks very similar to the dance Dick Van Dyke was doing in his living room. Dick Van Dyke of course had a lot of real dance training, and was known for his talent in that area, so I sure I looked much worse than he did in the show.

While we're in this vein, here's a well done tribute to Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island that gets at the essence of its subject, always an achievement. My children had never seen this show, or any of the 60s junk that I grew up on. It came on when we were in Florida. They regarded it from an almost anthropological standpoint, but I think they found it interesting.

I used to like Bruce Springsteen when I was about fifteen. This was the time when he was most popular, but as he came out of the same part of the world and general part of society as I did, I gravitated to some of his older songs. After about a year though I pretty much stopped listening to him, 'and never went back', as the song goes. I don't think all of his stuff has aged well, but recently I listened to a few of his old songs that I think have held up. "Blinded by the Light" is a great song. Most of the album The River still resonates with me. That's a world, and people, and an emotional response to people that I recognize. I like 'Atlantic City' too, and the video is very reminiscent of the visual life I had at age fifteen, shambling around the not especially mean but decidedly forlorn streets of Northeast Philadelphia, Cottman and Rising Sun Avenues especially. I have never acually been to Atlantic City itself. I have been to every other place all around it, and I distinctly remember being on the southern end island just north of it (Barnegat?) and staring across the sound there at its high rises and whirling lights. But by the 70s and 80s it was too seedy for any of my relatives to consider taking me there.

I found another winsome Dianne Lennon video. This one has her children in it. Usually other people's children annoy me, but now I realize that that is because I don't really like the mother. Where I like the mother I find I am inclined to feel kindly toward the children, even though obviously I am not the father. But in most cases of this sort the father tends to be somebody like me, who got his girl by a combination of luck, choosing wisely, and finding somebody the extent of whose real worth was not widely appreciated by our stupid society (and yes, I think even someone like Dianne Lennon could fall into this latter category), and I cannot begrudge anybody for that.