Two Stage Shows and a Funeral

I was going to title this entry "Three Stage Shows and a funeral" and then discovered that I wrote that very entry on March 12 in 2012, when the funeral was for my mother's stepson, Fred Rynders.  And actually in 2017, you have to discount the show that wasn't, the night I wandered around the cemetery looking for the show that won't be presented until next month, so it's really only Two Stage Shows and a Funeral.  But it does seem that after 6,600 journal entries, I seem to be living my life in circles!

Today we said good bye to a great man.  If the impact a person has on the world is indicated by the number of people who attend his memorial service, John Vlahos was indeed a great man.

It was a beautiful day for a memorial.  The sky was blue and clear and this is that rare time of year, which lasts so briefly, when the hills everywhere you look are carpeted in a beautiful green.

The service was held at Mira Vista Country Club, high in the hills overlooking San Francisco bay.

When we arrived, there was a long stream of cars entering the club grounds and all of the parking areas were already full.  Walt let me off and he parked outside, down a steep hill, a couple of blocks away. (He was picked up by someone in a golf cart who drove him to the clubhouse).

There was a long line outside the clubhouse, waiting to file in.

All the chairs were already taken and people were starting to sit at tables on the side of the big room.

By the time the service started there were probably twice as many people as are shown in this photo.

John had been an attorney and comments were given by a couple of his partners and long  time friends.  One of his sons gave a wonderful eulogy that was both funny and touching.

A large group of Lamplighters performed songs that John had performed in his days performing with the company (after which he went on to be Chairman of the Board for 30 years or so), including a song rewritten especially for him for the very last time he was able to get to the theater (Music by Sullivan, lyrics by Barbara Heroux).

They ended their set with a beautiful song, "If these shadows have offended," which combines Gilbert & Sullivan and Shakespeare, that has become a Lamplighter standard (but which is copyrighted and can't  -- and shouldn't) be linked here, and the finale, "Hail Poetry," which left not a dry eye in the house.  I've decided that every memorial service should end with "Hail Poetry."

After it was a madhouse of people trying to just move but it was more congested than a New York subway at rush hour.  I met Judy N, who has been reading this journal, I was surprised to learn, for many, many years and was determined to check behind potted palms to find me.  We had a lovely chat until I had the first back pain I've had since I started the cream and I had to go find a chair to sit down (when the pain left, it left and I am still relatively pain free for several days now!)

I had a chance to visit with several of our friends and as I looked around that crowd, I got all verklempt thinking of how many very good friends have come from the Lamplighters, how much I love this company, and, sadly, how many memorial services we have attended over the years (we have another coming up in June).  Now we are getting old, grey, and doddering. Some are now housebound and were unable to attend today.  At least 3 of us that I saw had canes.  Bill Neil sat down next to me with a heavy sigh and said "It's really hard to get old...."  I pointed out that we were the same age, and agreed with him.

My father told me, when I was a kid, that Gilbert & Sullivan was the worst music in the world (that was before rock and roll came around, which replaced it) and I never would have learned of the Lamplighters without Walt, who brought me to my first shows.  The rest, as they say, is history.  60 years of history with us and the Lamplighters.  How very different my life would have been if I had never gone to that first HMS Pinafore (not even my favorite).  

I felt surrounded by love today as we all joined together with attorneys and judges and who knows what other groups, to celebrate John's life and to acknowledge what a very special person he was.

Thank Goodness for Pirates

I was very grateful for pirates yesterday.

It was my afternoon at the hospital and I had brought along my Kindle to continue reading the book I had been reading the last time I worked.  This is a book written by a friend of mine.  He has written several books and I am embarrassed to admit I had not read any of them.  I finally read one a few months back and it was OK, but I had some complaints, mostly that there were so many characters that it was like reading an American version of "The Brother Karamazov" and I couldn't keep them all straight.  This resulted in my not really caring about any of them and since the action that kept you reading didn't happen until about 2/3 of the way into the narrative, the only reason I kept reading was to see if it would ever happen at all.  

But I heard his latest novel is getting some "buzz" and so I decided I would read that, and it is on my Kindle, though I am finding that I am having the same complaints I had about the last one about this one too.  When you have several families and each family has several children and you write about each of the children, it's nearly impossible to keep them all straight.

But nevertheless, I am plowing through it.

At some point, I hit something, I don't know what, on the Kindle and it jumped back to the beginning of the book.  No problem; I would just go to the last page read, only it didn't know the last page read.  No problem.  I would go to the table of contents and see if I could guesstimate where I was.  No table of contents.  I stymied until I remembered that I had read a particularly delicious quote while reading and had marked it so I could find it again.  It was "there were enough peg legs in town back then you'd think the town was a retirement home for pirates."  That tickled me, so I did a search for bookmarks I'd made and voila!  I was back to where I left off, just a few pages later.

More than one way to skin a cat.

So I was able to continue reading the book as I worked at the Information desk yesterday afternoon.  As usual, it was mostly uneventful, with a couple of moments of business.

Two women came to the desk.  As usual they were late for their 1 p.m. appointment, arriving t 1:15 with no idea of where to go.  They were there for a birthing class, mother and daughter, neither of whom spoke English.

I checked with the birthing center, but there was no class going on.  I called information who had no information about a birthing class.  I called Women's Health (my old office) and got caught in voice mail hell, the end of which was "leave a message and we'll return your call."  I tried calling the clinic, which is a separate office on the other side of the parking lot.  I didn't want to send them over there, with the pregnant lady in such shape.  But there, too, the best I got was a voice mail telling me to either call 911 or leave a message.

Then I checked their referral slip and saw that they had been referred from the mother's OB in Woodland, so I called THAT office.  The phone was answered by another recording, this one telling me that just by virtue of my calling that number, I had won a special vacation somewhere and the guy went on for so long explaining what I had won that I hung up.

At some point a woman came along who spoke Spanish, so at least she could interpret.  We finally decided to send them to the clinic after all, since that seemed the most logical thing to do and off they waddled across the parking lot.

I immediately went to the iPhone App store and downloaded Duolingo, determined to try and learn a little Spanish!

Then along came a guy from some Latin country who explained that his wife had finished her courses in pharmacology and was looking for an internship with a pharmacy.  I explained that we didn't do internship and that our pharmacy was very small, but he was adamant that he wanted his wife to have an internship and he wasn't interested in her going to Sacramento, where she would be more likely to find an internship, but wanted it HERE.  He asked "How many patients do you have -- a couple of thousand?"  I told him that if we were full, we had 50 and suggested to him that he go to the med school at the university.  He wanted to know if there was a hospital at the university and I explained that their hospital was in Sacramento, which brought us back to his insistence that she had to do her internship in Davis, despite the fact that there was no facility for her.

Finally, in desperation, I checked the phone number for Sutter's pharmacy and gave that to him and sent him on his way.  I'd love to know what he was told when he called.

At night we went to see a production of a Neil Simon play.  We are going to see God of Carnage tonight, another comedy.  "Two comedies and a funeral," Walt quipped, since we are going to a memorial service on Sunday.

We sat at a table with a nice couple.  Walt introduced himself to the man and explained to me that he had been his boss.  Turns out Richard Rominger served for eight years as the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Agriculture under Bill Clinton so technically he was Walt's boss, several steps up, and that explained why he didn't have a clue who Walt was.

We settled in to enjoy the play, Rumors, which I have since read is one of Simon's funniest comedies, so I'm thinking maybe it wasn't a very good production since all four of us were ready to leave at intermission.  I thought it would be an easy review to write, but it's not going to be.  This is a company that gives the term "amateur" its true meaning, people doing it for the love of it in a tiny town so I always try to be more gentle with their reviews.  As I said, this one is going to be tricky.

"To Grandma's House We Go"

Slowly, slowly I am moving things out of the way to make a "normal" house for Caroline when she gets here next week.  But like what happens with ALL of these "straightening up" sorts of things, I get sidestepped by just about everything I find, things I forgot I had.

Today I found a book I bought years ago called "For Our Children's Children."  I don't know if we even had grandchildren when I bought it, but I was looking ahead to having them and thinking about the things our grandkids might be interested in knowing some day.  There is so much about my grandparents' history that I don't know and that, in my adulthood, I'm sorry I never asked them.  I have mentioned before, for example, how angry I am that I never asked my father's parents about being in vaudeville.  Now it's too late.

But I was thinking about the comparison between the two families.  They were really city folk vs. country folk.  My father's parents lived in an apartment building in San Francisco.

They lived in apartment #5 and I THINK it's that first set of windows on the right side.  They moved in when my father was a young child and my grandmother moved out after my grandfather died, more than 60 years later, so this is the only house that I ever knew.

It was a no-bedroom apartment.  There was a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and a bathroom and Murphy beds in each room.  My grandparents slept separately.  My grandfather used to sit in the window you see there, looking out on the newsstand at the corner.  In those days, the New=Call Bulletin published three times a day and my grandfather liked to read the latest print addition, so as soon as he could see it being delivered to the newsstand, he would send me down to pick up a copy for him.  I remember my grandmother (whom we always called "Nannie" because "Grandma" made her sound too old) being so angry with me because I ran down the hill and then ran back up the hill and up the stairs to their apartment.  I can't remember the number of times she told me "Don't run...it's bad for your heart!"

She scrubbed her bathroom every day, and once a week she soaked her hairbrush in Listerine (isn't it funny the thing you remember?)  She also had a walk-in closet in which hung her prized fox fur stole, the kind where the mouth of the fox grabs its tail and that's what holds it on you.  We didn't think, in those days, about cruelty to animals.  They also had a candlestick telephone for a very long time, which I always thought was kind of cool.  I wonder if Brianna and Lacie could even figure out what this odd looking thing was used for -- or how to use it!

The furniture was very formal and we kids were always scolded for doing...anything...that might ruin the furniture (Nannie should see her chair, which we have had for many years, and which a dog tore once, so it is now covered by a rug.  She's be appalled.)  I don't remember ever seeing a book in the apartment.

When we ate at her house, it was always a formal dining situation, with good silverware and good china on the dining room table, and fancy dishes served.  (To this day I can't stomach celery root because I hated it when she served it).  The best thing about the kitchen was the bottle of ice water and glass that was always kept in what was first an ice box and later a refrigerator.  It's where I got my love of ice water.

In comparison, my mother's parents moved into a small farmhouse in Inverness, California shortly after my parents married.

Behind the house was my grandmother's (who was always "Grandma") large strawberry patch, to the left of the house was the little building where my grandfather had the baby chickens in incubators and beyond that was a wall of blackberries my cousins and I used to pick when ever we were there.  There was also a chicken coop where I got to collect eggs and feed the hens when I visited.

The house could best be described as "comfortable."  In my memory I see everything as mismatched and overstuffed, but very comfortable and nobody gave us rules for how we had to sit on the furniture.  And if I'm correct, my grandparents also had "flat surface syndrome."

There was a small kitchen with a big black wrought iron stove and a table that took up most of the room, but we gathered around to eat, or to play cards if it wasn't meal time.  I remember once I had tongue for dinner and thought it the most delicious thing I'd ever had, but never had it again, and eventually developed a distaste for organ meats.

My grandparents' bedroom was dominated by an old, sagging bed covered by a big flurry quilt.  Off one side of it was a bathroom where my grandfather's teeth always remained in a glass (he never wore them--and could even eat corn on the cob without his teeth).  It had a claw-foot bathtub, and an odd antiseptic smell to the room.  Grandma was a big reader and there were always books around.  She belonged to the Book of the Month club and one Christmas each of her 32 grandchildren got to pick a book from her bookcase as a gift.

We rarely saw my mother's parents.  It was about a 50 mile drive in days before freeways.  A large portion of the road was winding and I almost always threw up before we finished our journey.  My father hated to make that drive, mostly because he looked down on my mother's family as "hicks from the sticks."  It was one of my mother's big disappointments that she got to see her parents so seldom (though eventually, after my grandfather died Grandma moved in with my aunt, who lived next door to us in San Francisco, so my mother was able to see her every day.)

My father's mother was a fashion plate whose biggest disappointment was that she had not been born into wealth.  She always wore high heels, gloves and a hat when out in public, her nails were always carefully manicured, and she had her hair done every week.  She belonged to a "sewing club" (which, to the best of my knowledge never sewed a thing, but was just a social group), where every woman in the group lived in wealthy homes.  Yet Nannie thwarted every opportunity my grandfather got to improve his financial situation, while at the same time reminding him what a loser he was.

My Grandma, on the other hand, bought her dresses from catalogues and was always soft and huggy.  I hated hugging Nannie, and loved having Grandma take me in her arms and whisper "precious child" in my ear.  I'm she did that to each of her grandchildren, but she always made you feel like you were the favored one.

So those were my grandparents.  I was lucky that I had grandparents, but they definitely showed me two different sides of life!

The Patience of Job

This is how the day started, sort of.

This time the trip to Kaiser was for ME, not for my mother.  But it was just my annual exam, so not to worry.  I also wanted to talk with her about my worsening back problems.  Two years ago she took x-rays and diagnosed disintegration in my lower spine as well as arthritis. She really didn't suggest anything but an exercise program I could not do because it required lying on the floor--and if I get on the floor, I can't get up again!

But it has started impacting the quality of my life and I decided it was time to Do Something.  She prescribed some cream and also set me up to start physical therapy in April, after Caroline returns to England.

As we discussed options, she entered the prescription for the cream into the computer and I could pick it up after our exam.

I was also due for lab work, so I went to the lab, where you take a number and wait until it is called.  My number was 87 and they had just called 85.  I figured this should go quickly, but the guy at the desk was anything but quick. I would say he was new and trying to learn how it all works, but he was new and trying to figure out how it all works the last time I was there with my mother a month or so ago.

Not only did he have to call #86 first, but he also had to call all the people he had already checked in who were waiting for their turn in the phlebotomy room.  Finally he finished up with #86 and I looked up expectantly....and the desk was empty.  Apparently they had called a staff meeting.  So I sat there and waited for someone to come back. A couple of people who had numbers after mine just left.  Finally after about 10 minutes, a woman came to the desk, with the speed and efficiency I am used to experiencing in that department.  She got me registered and my blood taken in no time at all.

Next was to go to pick up my prescription.  There was a line that zig zaged through the maze set up, and then down the hall.  But if I wanted the med, I had no other recourse but to stand in line.  Up to this point my back hadn't been that bad today (maybe a 1 or 2 on the 1-10 scale), but by the time I stood in line for 15 minutes, it was pushing a 7 (standing is the worst for my back).  I must have looked horrible because a clerk finally asked me if I felt all right and I told her to just help the woman in front of me and then I could get my meds.  But the woman in front let me go ahead of her.  By now it had been an hour and a half since the prescription was called in and it is just a tube of cream. but I was told it "wasn't quite ready yet" (what? they were filling the tube?) and that if I would just sit down they would call me when it was.

So I sat down.  A guy wearing a "Kaiser Security Guard" shirt came in.  He looked older than my mother and didn't move as easily.  I sure hope they didn't give him a gun to keep us all safe.  I suspect he couldn't quiet an unruly toddler.

I finally got the cream and decided I'd stop at the nearby Applebees for lunch since it was getting close to 2, but the road to Applebees was blocked off with street construction, so I went instead to Tres Hermanas, a Mexican restaurant near the train station.  Whenever Walt goes to Berkeley for his dental appointments, he has lunch at La Fiesta, where we used to eat when we lived in the 

neighborhood.  I always got 2 flautas, one beef and one cheese.  I think they are the ONLY Mexican restaurant offering flautas that offers cheese....and Tres Hermanas has flautas, but no cheese either.  Still it was a delicious lunch.

I was the only person in the restaurant, except for the figures on the wall.  I admired the decor as I ate.

From there I went to Atria to visit my mother but I had just finished a heavy Mexican meal and I could not keep my eyes opened to save my soul.  Knowing that I had to review a Chekov play I decided to cut the visit short and come home to take a nap so I could hopefully stay awake.  I think I was asleep within 5 minutes of arriving home and slept for an hour and a half, waking refreshed and ready to tackle Chekov.

I fixed an early dinner for Walt (the show was at 7), and I grumbled a lot about who in God's name would scheduled an outdoor performance of a play (at the Davis cemetery) in the middle of March, when the temps around show time have been in the 50s.  I even contacted the director to see if there would be blankets.  He hadn't thought of that, he said, but I might want to bring one.

So I got all suited up in a long sleeved shirt with a sweater over it and a parka over that.  I gathered up a knitted cap that would cover my hears and I wrapped a scarf araund my neck. I found a blanket and packed it in a bag to take with me.  I waddled out to the car like Cartman in South Park.

We headed over to the cemetery and at first I was really upset that there was no signage anywhere letting people know where to go.  But the director had told me he was going to set up behind the main building, so we went there, thinking it odd that at 10 minute to show time there were no cars around.

I took a flashlight and went stumbling around the cemetery trying to find this damn play.  When I got back in the car, very angry about the whole thing, I checked the theater's web page and see that it opens NEXT month, when the weather should be quite pleasant and the cemetery not quite so dark as it was tonight.

I felt very dumb, but at least we were home to watch Jeopardy which had been recorded, and were able to watch the opening of Season 2 of Designated Survivor live.

Toward the end of the evening I noticed that my arm is very sore.  I couldn't figure out why, since it's not like I've done anything physical or anything like that.  But then I remembered I had a pneumonia shot today, so I guess that's why. I'll sleep in the recliner tonight, because I don't want to sleep on my sore arm.

Transate Dog to English

Lord, I wish there were a dog-to-English dictionary.  I desperately want to figure Lizzie out. Now Polly is easy to understand.  There are only three words in her vocabulary:  "food" and "lap" and occasionally "open the door."  She may seem to bark all day long, but she makes it perfectly clear that she either wants me to feed her or stop doing whatever I'm doing and sit down so she can jump in my lap or she wants to go outside.  The degree of urgency in her mind dictates the volume of her demands, but really it doesn't take much to figure it out. (She always wants to go outside around 10 at night, but then she stands on the patio and barks her "it's time to give me a treat" bark.)

Lizzie, however, is a more complex canine.  She is mostly the strong silent type and speaks more with her eyes.  When she wants something she comes to find me and then gently pokes me with her nose.  I can usually figure out what she wants by what time it is.

Both dogs used to be very happy eating dinner after Jeopardy.  In fact, the final Jeopardy "think music" was like a Pavlovian response.  As soon as the music came on, they would get up and come into the family room and start looking at me.

But they have been pushing the time back and back and back.  Now they try to get me to feed them at 3.  Both of them will come in here and first look at me and then when I don't respond, they poke me with their noses.  I don't look back and just say "no" and they turn and walk away.

But then there is Lizzie.  Whenever I let her out, she immediately goes to the back fence and barks.  It doesn't make a difference if it is night or day, dark or light.  It doesn't matter if there is someone in the next yard, a workman in a tree, or nobody.  She just stands and barks.  I give her a bit of time to bark, say 5 minutes, before calling her in.  She comes in and is just fine and content to sleep but when I let the dogs out again, there she goes to that same spot and barks.  I think if I didn't bring her in she would bark for hours and it drives me nuts because I can't figure what in the heck she is barking for.

If there is a guy pruning a tree, sure.  She's barking at him.  If there is someone in the back yard, she's barking at them.  But at 11 p.m. at night? Or at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning?  What in the world is she barking at?  She doesn't question anything if I call her in and close the door, but then an hour or so later, she'll look restless, I'll let her out and she goes back to that same spot and starts barking again. She doesn't move from her spot.  She doesn't run back and forth.  She just stands there and barks and I can't figure out what she is saying.  This has been going on for years.

The dogs are lucky.  They can't read and they don't pay attention to anything on TV (and if they did, they wouldn't care).  I actually got sick to my stomach this morning reading posts on Facebook.  Just when you thought a story was terrible, the next one is worse.  And on and on and on until I just had to get up and walk away.  I couldn't handle it.

It's surprising how many people are suffering mental problems because of the current administration.  This may be the best thing that has happened to pharmaceutical companies that make anti-depressants.

But I now have an escape from all the ugliness of the real world.  Benny and Brianna.  There was yet another letter from Bri today, with a picture of Gasper and his two friends sitting at a table.  Her letter was short, but Gasper's letter to Benny was quite long.  

Her letter inspired to make my Benny/St. Paddy's Day photo.

Then I sat down and wrote to her about Ireland and leprechauns and finding gold at the end of the rainbow.  I also told her about when her dad climbed Croagh Patrick, the hill where St Patrick built a small chapel.  All the family climbed up, but I still remember  the guy in the shop at the foot who looked at me and said "You aren't going to go up, are you?"

Somehow when you have a leprechaun on the screen and a 9 year old to write to, it's easier to forget the 70 year old child having a tantrum on the other side of the country.

Speechess

I'd never seen anything like it before.  Now, granted I've only been watching Morning Joe for six months or so...and since it runs here from 3 to 6 a.m., I don't see it often.  But in my months of watching the show I'd never seen anything like it.

Mika Brzezinski, coming to the "wrap up" part of the show, looked shell shocked following 3 hours of discussing Trump's (aka "45 because I am tired of typing his name so often!) unproven allegation of wire tapping by President Obama, summed up her feelings as saying "I used to be hopeful and open minded, but I'm no longer hopeful and my mind is closed."  Then she went around the table asking for comment from the rest of the panel, and one by one, with a look of real depression, they said essentially the same thing.  

Next you saw Brzezinski remove her microphone and start to leave the table, with still a few seconds left of the show.  The tone of the whole day had been one of deep depression on the part of anyone who was on the panel or who had been interviewed.

Even the most ardent 45 supporter (Kellyanne Conway) could only look at the camera with that Stepford Wife smile and reassure everyone that the president had access to classified information that the rest of us did not and she was going to be supportive of whatever he had to say.

A reporter from Mar-a-lago reported that 45 had arrived that weekend livid because there was still talk about the Russia ties to his campaign team.  He reported 45 had been angry when he arrived, was angry over dinner and still angry in the morning.  Presumably at the height of that anger was when he decided to go on Twitter to accuse his predecessor of something which there seems to be unanimity among Republicans (including March Rubio) and Democrats that a president is unable to do.

A lot of people are speechless over this allegation and sputtering trying to come up with something intelligent to say.

It was a day for thinking about being "speechless."

I went in the evening to see comedian Jack Gallagher in his latest one-man show.

This is his 7th show premiered at Sacramento's B Street Theater.  I first saw Gallagher at his previous show, 5 Songs.  Prior to that I only knew him as an amiable guy who did the Crystal ice cream commercials on TV.  In 5 Songs he got suggestions from the audience of five different songs in a long list of options and then he talked about each song and his memory of those songs.  It was a fun evening, an evening he now admits he doesn't really remember very well.

The new show is called Concussed; Four Days in the Dark, which tells of an incident 3 or 4 years ago when he was out riding his bike and had a collision with a car.  Gallagher flew over his handlebars and hit the window of the car (fortunately he was wearing a helmet) and ended up on the concrete.

He felt shaken but didn't think there was any damage and rode his bike home again.  Three days later he was still having headaches and having trouble with word finding.  He went to the doctor, who diagnosed traumatic brain injury and ordered him to bed in a dark room with no TV, no computer, no music, no radio, no nothing.  Just lie there for four days and allow his brain to heal itself (just the thought of lying alone in a dark room with zero distraction is enough to make me claustrophobic.  In fact, every time he got into the on-stage bed and the lights lowered, I felt a shiver of fear up my spine.)

Despite this dark subject matter, the show is alternately emotional and funny.  Gallagher is a consummate story teller and knows how to engage an audience.  In fact, I was impressed that he managed to draw everyone in at all times.  The theater isn't in the round, but kind of a u-shape and one-third of the audience is along either side of the stage, while the other third is in the center facing the stage.  Even when lying in the bed, he managed to face each 1/3 of the audience so normally that you never felt you had to watch the back of his head for long stretches of time, and it was so unobtrusive that it was only when I got home and checked out a couple of his videos that I realized how skilled he was at this.

He talked about how the scariest part for him being his difficulty with word finding.  He's a man whose entire career is based on words and finding the right phrases and knowing how to put them together to make the best script.  He had always been proud of being able to edit and then mentally cut and paste himself during a show, based on the response of the audience.

Now, like my mother and her problems with word finding, his brain didn't work right and he had a real terror of what would happen if he couldn't get it all back.

This is why he doesn't really remember 5 Songs very well.  He knows he did it, and as a member of the audience, I certainly could not detect any problem with his delivery (which is like sitting in his living room chatting, so it lends itself to covering up memory problems), but I could understand that the thought of not being able to get back the skill that had been his entire life must have been terrifying, especially lying in the dark with nothing to distract him.

As someone whose life also relies in large part on words, finding them, manipulating them and then sharing them with either readers or people with whom I am talking, I understand his terror.

His self reflection led itself to very funny bits about things like family, parenting, and growing older (he had just turned 61 on the day of the accident and as the majority of the audience had grey hair, we all laughed and nodded along with his observations).

He says that his skills have mostly returned, but he now needs a few notes on the stage, which he never did before ... you'd never know it, though, since it is done so subtly.  It's really a great show and if anybody reading this is in Sacramento, I highly recommend getting yourself to B Street to see it before it ends (April 16).  

I don't know what Jack Gallagher thinks about the current Trump brouhaha, but I suspect he would be speechless too...and glad of it.

Famous Relatives

Looks like there's no Sunday Stealing list this week, which is OK because I spent an hour live-streaming a ceremony from D.C.

It's so nice to have famous relatives.  Ernie Baur is Walt's cousin and has been in broadcasting for 50+ years (he has something like 14 Emmys).  He is one of only 17 Gold Circle honorees.  It's wonderful to live in the modern age where we can watch Cousin Nora's funeral live from Dublin, Jeri's concerts live from Boston and, today, this ceremony honoring Ernie, among others.

The 2017 honorees join an impressive group of industry professionals who have helped shape the broadcast industry and continue to influence its future. These leaders have inspired excellence and innovation in every communications discipline. Devoting a quarter-century or more to the broadcast industry, these remarkable media professionals have made significant contributions to the National Capital Chesapeake Bay community. With the induction of the 2017 honorees, the Silver Circle totals 234 and the Gold Circle totals 17.

The Gold Circle honorees are:
Ernie Baur Director Comcast SportsNet
Sid Davis Journalist & Author

I sat here doing "print screen" over and over again, and saving the results on Photo shop, so I could post some 19 photos to Facebook.

Out of high school, he got a job at a local TV station doing whatever they had for him, whether it was sweeping the floor of being the hand inside a local puppet

Along the way, he got a job in the control room and he met and married Lucille Huddleston, to whom he has been married for over 40 years.

They had a daughter, Kayleen, and then a son, Ernest Kevin, who is now himself a well respected sports director.

Ernie has been well respected in the community for many years.  I remember when they had Ernie Baur appreciation day.

and now, today, he is being honored by his peers for his 50+ years in broadcasting.

Ernie has always been a master story teller, and today he told his story as if it were a script to It's a Wonderful Life.  And it was, of course, a fun story to listen to.  And he only almost lost it once, when he spoke of wife Lucille, but he managed to hold the tears in (he did explain that he is an easy cry-er).

I'm so glad that Walt (and his brother and sister) were able to fly to DC to be there to share the day with Ernie ... and for the marvelous technology that allowed me to be there by video, if not in person.