Skip the Apple Pie

Click here for appropriate listening.

The New York Yankees just signed Andy Pettite for one year at $2.5 million.  (Read all about it here.)


I would like to get paid $2.5 million dollars for one year of work.  In my field of Jewish Education, that will never happen, and I will be lucky to ever even see a job that pays any Jewish Educator remotely what I believe we are worth, but that's not what this blog is about.


This is about one of the truly American things... BASEBALL.   
I love it.  Well, I love New York Yankee Baseball.


But, getting back to Andy Pettite, I'm sure that $2.5 is a lot less than he used to make, and he's gotta start in the minors, but still, I'm thrilled.  I like Andy a lot. In my mind he's a true Yankee and it will be good to see him in pinstripes again.


As I said, love Yankee Baseball.  I know that if you live somewhere else it's cool to put down New York teams, especially New York.  Okay.  "Dis" all you want.  There's something very exciting about this team and they're starting to rev up now.


I did not grow up a Yankee fan.  I've lived in lots of different cities through my life, and had a only mild interest in baseball.  I don't like other sports at all.  (Rumor has it that a New York team won the football thing this year.  Big deal.)  I only marginally follow other sports so that I don't seem like a complete idiot if and when I am ever invited to a party and the discussion comes around to something other than Jewish Education, parenting or music.


When I lived in Boston in 3rd grade, the kids were allowed to bring in their transistor radios to listen to the Red Sox games in school, so I remember pretending to like baseball then.  My Grandmother was a baseball fan and I think my Dad might have taken me to Shea Stadium to see the Mets in the 70's.

I just spent an hour trying to photo shop my own face where Susan Sarandon's  face is.
If someone knows how to do this and then get it to stick on the blog, I'd be forever grateful.
And able to be even more hilarious.

While living in Durham, NC, I started to really enjoy the game, going to the Durham Bull Stadium to watch the Durham Bulls play.  The draw, at first, I'll admit was the dozen or so local brews on tap that they had, and the low priced tickets.  But I understood the game, and it was a fun, inexpensive night out.  (A short time later, the movie Bull Durham was filmed there, and by a lucky coincidence, I was there for a cast party and met Kevin Costner. I'll bet he remembers me too.  I'm not in the film, but my friend Jean is in some of the crowd shots.)


When life took me to San Francisco, my appetite for live music surpassed by far my interest in baseball, but I still took in a few games at Candlestick park and saw the SF Giants play there.


But it wasn't until 1995 that I became a Yankees fan.  I had been living in New Jersey for several years.  Three children, two cats in the yard...the American dream!  My husband and I were both working hard at our jobs and enjoying domestic tranquility.  We'd take our kids to the park, and to little league, and the movies, drive the carpools and have family dinners on Shabbat, and on Sunday nights with my parents and my brother's family.


And when it was time for the Grateful Dead to go on tour, we would line up our babysitters, save up our money, make some sandwiches, throw some beer in the cooler and spend a few nights doing what we loved best.  Going to concerts.


Until August 8, 1995.  That was the sad day that Jerry Garcia died.

Jerry Garcia, Captain of our team.

That night we put the kids to bed and stood on our back porch and listened to tapes till the middle of the night.


Everything was gonna be different.


And that was the summer I started to watch Yankee baseball.  I had concert tickets to a show that would never happen, and fan energy that had no where to go.  But the Yankees were on top... they were a young team with great energy and they were winning too!  My husband got a pair of pretty good tickets from a client at work, and we went on a starry summer night.  It was not a Dead show, but there was an undeniable air of excitement.  Yankee Stadium was fun.


And the the players!


Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettite, and one year later, my favorite Yankee, Tino Martinez... young handsome guys just playing baseball, every single night (practically) all summer and right through October?  How come other women don't know about this!?


Going to more games turned out to be a challenge.  It was difficult to get tickets and EXPENSIVE.


I watched a lot of baseball on tv and listened to it on the radio.  Once in a while, we would get tickets.


By another lucky coincidence, an old high school classsmate met my parents at a diner and had a conversation that I can imagine went something like this:

"Hi Doctor and Mrs. Cantor."
"Hello, didn't you go to high school with our daughter, Juliet?  Didn't I fix your broken nose in 1983?  How are you? Do you live here?  How's your family?  Look at those pretty girls, your daughters?  Is this your wife? She's lovely.  Just look at these pictures of our grandchildren!  You know Juliet lives in New Jersey again now, these are her kids, aren't they gorgeous?"
"Um, yes... I..."
"So where are you all off to on this fine day?"
"We are going to a Yankee game."
"Juliet is a Yankee fan.  Here's her number.  You should call her, she doesn't really have any friends here in New Jersey anymore.  She and her husband would love to get together with you."
"Um, well..."
"Okay, well, here's our lunch, you should try the Reuben here, it's fantastic.  Enjoy the game, I think you should put on the radio and check the traffic at the bridge.  I'll tell Juliet we saw you."

And that is how it happened that I was the lucky recipient of fantastic Yankee tickets at least once or twice a season.


That gravy train ended when he gave up his tickets... when the new Yankee stadium opened in 2009 he opted out of the price gauging upgrade and we've been fending for ourselves.


March is a very long month.  Typically it's cold and there are no vacation days or days off, unless you are lucky enough to have Spring Break, which I have never had.  (Well, I have once, but I can't write about it because this is a family blog.)  But March brings spring training.  And that means you can count down til opening day!


But with the date of April 6 being opening day and the first Seder of Passover, my excitement for some Yankee baseball may have to wait for the first few home games of the following week.  In the meantime it's time to bring up the Passover dishes and the pinstripes too, both signs that winter is almost over (was it ever here at all?) and spring feels like its on it's way, with unseasonably warm temperatures in the Northeast.

(And for those of use who can't wait, there's spring training baseball which is also televised and on the radio!)


So welcome back to Andy Pettite, I hope you play a lot this season and do what we need you to do for our pitching on the Yankees.  And good-bye and thank you to Jorge Posada for your great tenure as a Yankee since I became a fan, and was a real mensch and role model for (almost) the entire time. 


Anyone for a hot dog and a beer?

It's Just A Box of Tapes

You and Me, iPod!

I have been involved in a love affair.


It began in 2003, on Valentines Day.  And it continues to this day...


This is sounding cliche, and wait, because it gets worse.  My husband is responsible for introducing us.


He bought me my first iPod with his first bonus check from a then-new job, and I have never looked back.


This did not start my love affair with the recorded song, of course.
My first records, two 45's,were given to me with my first record player when I was 6 by my parents.  I remember vividly sitting right down on the kitchen floor in our little house in Sacramento, California, and playing "Heroes and Villains" by the Beach Boys and "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles over and over again.  These were the brand new hits (1967) and being played on every radio station in America.

A small sampling of my wonderful collection of 45's.
I'm waiting til we get a Jukebox for the billiards room.
I'm waiting til we get a billiards room.

When I hit middle school, I would save my allowance and babysitting money to buy records.

My  record collection was expanding, and now technology had really taken off.  Cassette tapes!



I never was one for buying pre-recorded tapes, but I quickly realized the joy of making a mixed-tape.  Every new car had a cassette player ... (or an eight track, but I seemed to skip that whole genre somehow).


When my boyfriend got his license I made him a tape for his car. Car songs, mixed with my favorite songs to hear while riding in a car.  I'm sure he never played it.  My creativity was bursting.  When my friend moved to Chicago, I made her a poignant tape of songs about being friends, imaging how she'd cry when she heard it.


Headed down the Jersey shore?  I made the "perfect" mix of classics by the Beach Boys, Steve Miller Band, the Beatles, SuperTramp, Kansas, Foreigner, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, and the Who, with a few of the radio's top hits mixed in to get us down there and back.


What started as a few tapes for a car ride, however, morphed into a shoe-box of tapes for longer rides. By the time I was in college, my record and tape collection was still modest compared to what it is now, but it all had to come with me.

American Beauty...A New Reality?

And then came the spiritual awakening  known to many as American Beauty.*


Can a record album be life changing?


Yes.


(You know this scene in Freaks and Geeks?  Yeah.  Like that.)


Once I got on the bus**, my music collection took a weird and wonderful turn.  My record catalog doubled, my tape collection grew exponentially. I no longer stuck to one favorite radio station. I began to search to the origins of blues, soul and country music and had to discover the roots of everything.  At parties I'd gravitate to where the music was.  Soon I was travelling with a wooden crate of tapes just to get back and forth from Boston to New Jersey for breaks.


  When my friend Patti was going on a road trip I made her a tape (Life in the Fast Lane by the Eagles and Helen Hell on Wheels by Wings).  There were party tapes and mellow tapes.   All my mixed tapes took a psychedelic turn as my musical tastes did as well.  Jefferson Airplane, It's a Beautiful Day, Blind Faith, lots of Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Jimmy Cliff joined the Grateful Dead on the lovely montages I was putting together with still contained classics like the Eagles, Elton John, Chicago and Paul McCartney's solo stuff.  I had dreams of becoming a radio DJ and playing what I thought were perfect mixes of music, getting lost for hours in my own record collection. 



  And then, there were the Grateful Dead live tapes.


  One of the more remarkable and outstanding things about the Grateful Dead is, and always has, been their generosity with their music.  They have allowed and encouraged taping of their live shows, and these tapes used to be traded around, mostly for free or for a blank tape.  If you attended a concert that you loved, you'd make a few calls and try to find a good version of that tape, so you could hear it over and over. (The sharing of the music continues, by the way.  It is now done online, by those "tapers," who upload their shows, with the generous permission of the band.)


I'd hunt down rare versions of singles and live versions of concerts.  Did Jerry Garcia actually make a little joke at Bob Weir's expense in Buffalo?  I had to have that tape! The Blues Brothers joined the Dead for the closing of the venerable Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco? I needed the soundboard this time, not an audience version!

I did go to class, in case you were wondering.  By this time, the Walkman was invented!  So wonderfully small, you could take this thing everywhere and bring your music with you!

The Walkman, next to an iPod shuffle, in my hand.

After college, I married my boyfriend, and we decided to make San Francisco our home. He understood my music addiction and was okay with it.  That drive required a new dimension of tape toting.  All the tapes fit snuggly into a wooden crate, re-purposed from a wine crate, that had a rope handle.  Well, let me be honest here.  The tapes fit into three of these.  And these were just the tapes I chose for the car ride across the country.  The rest were packed into boxes and I prayed they stayed safe and dry on their trip.

One of the boxes of tapes.

When CD's started to become popular in the late 80's I was cautious, but excited.  Recorded music that doesn't get warped, scratched, melted, or tangled up in the player? And the sound quality is better than anything yet? Of course I had to try it.  The last records I remember buying were Paul Simon's Graceland (1986) and the The Traveling Wilburys (1988).  We did not have the technology to burn CD's yet, nor did we have a CD player in our car or van, so we pretty much stuck with records and tapes for quite a while, while slowly adding CD's to our collection.


Lets just say that if they had not come up with the iPod when they did, I might have qualified for a role on that show called "Hoarders."


Now, don't get me wrong, I still have all the tapes, CD's and records.  I still buy a new CD every so often.  But when I want ONE song off one album?  Or I have the record already and I just need it digitally? I am thrilled to save the room and click "buy" from iTunes.  I can even do it right from my phone when the muse hits me waiting online at Shoprite.  (Come on, haven't you ever heard the Muzak version of Spirit in the Sky by Norman Greenbaum and needed the original immediately?)


My latest download was, like many people, a Monkees compilation, to round out my iTunes catalog and join the world in mourning the death of the cutest Monkee, Davy Jones.  My favorite download lately?  I guess the one I've played the most is Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood at Madison Square Garden. It amazes and delights me that I can now carry all my music, create moods, cheer myself up, and quickly "name that tune," all with this one magical perfect little device.


Well, two little devices.  My iPhone doesn't quite hold enough music, so I still cart around my iPod as well, because, well, you just never know which of the 4,500 songs you might need at any given moment.  The good news is they all fit in my pocketbook!

True love 4ever.

NOTE: I guess a blog post about my love of my iPod would not be complete without a playlist to accompany it.  So,  if you'll notice some of the songs are highlighted, so they are clickable links.  They should lead you to YouTube links of songs to listen to as your read about my somewhat abbreviated journey through the recorded song.

*You know, man, that if you look at the lettering just right, dude, it also says... American Reality. WHOA.

**Became a fan of the Grateful Dead

New note:  This iPod has since actually died, may it's memory be for a blessing.  I am now, somewhat dubiously, in the cloud, trusting my catalog to the people at Apple.  We will see how that goes for one year.