Popular Culture

Sunday Night Open Thread: Happy Birthday, Melissa Ethridge

 

And she’s on tour, too.   Still too soon for me to be tempted by a very  indoor venue, assuming there were tickets to be had.   But these days, I’m just happy to see Happy Birthday! instead of R.I.P. on the Twitter timelines…

 

 

May 29, 2022 by Open Threads Popular Culture

Friday Evening Pop-Cult Open Thread: Boomer Options

 

 

Something for practically every taste!

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May 27, 2022 by Nature & Respite Open Threads Popular Culture

Deliberate Distraction Open Thread: The Great Bored Apes Caper

 

Hollywood guy, who made his fortune playing characters like ‘Dr. Evil’s son Scott’ in the Austin Powers movies, announces his plan to monetize those ‘Bored Apes’ NFTs for something more tangible than bragging rights.  Hilarity ensues!

Not even gonna try to TL; DR this mess, because if your interest is tweaked, you’ll wanna RTWT anyways…

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May 25, 2022 by Open Threads Popular Culture

Sunday Morning Open Thread: A Little Distraction

I don’t watch SNL very often, but I do catch up with sketches on Youtube occasionally. But for reasons, last night I actually caught the cold open live. I’m glad I did. Kate McKinnon is a gem and I hope we see her in fun things for years to come, now that she’s unleashed from her weekly gig.

Her work in this skit was…otherworldly

 

 

And rewatching the skit this morning led me to this…

 

Which is really the reason I even wrote this post. If I’m grabbing for the box of tissues, well, I’ve got to share. This was the cold open after the horror of the election of 2016.

Still hits hard.

I’m busy packing up the house so I can get new floors in a week. What a PITA, but it’s given me the chance to do a big purge. 5 bags of clothes to the homeless shelter and I’m up to 4 boxes for donation and I’m only 1/3 of a way through the house, so I’m assuming there will be more. I’m not a packrat, but still things crept up over the last 5 1/2 years – when I purged before I moved to this house. Gonna be a busy few weeks, with painting on the agenda before all the stuff gets moved back into the house from the garage.

What’s on your plate this Sunday?

 

 

May 22, 2022 by Open Threads Popular Culture

Excellent Read: Carol Burnett Gets Her Sondheim Award

 

 

From the Washington Post, “For Carol Burnett, the Sondheim Award Is Personal”:

When Stephen Sondheim asked his friend Carol Burnett years ago if she would come to New York and sing “I’m Still Here” from “Follies,” she instantly agreed. Though somehow, Burnett had failed to absorb one crucial detail: She would be required to belt the number for, gulp, an audience of 2,700 Sondheim freaks in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall…

That 1985 concert — with the likes of Barbara Cook, Mandy Patinkin, Elaine Stritch, George Hearn and Lee Remick — is a milestone in the Sondheim annals. Burnett could still chuckle at the memory of her misapprehension as she reminisced last Sunday in an elegant meeting room at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons in Northern Virginia. The next day, Signature Theatre would bestow on her its Stephen Sondheim Award, whose past recipients have included Angela Lansbury, Harold Prince, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald.

The pandemic delayed the honoring of Burnett for two years, and then in November the revered Broadway composer died, at 91. One poignant result is that Burnett — who met Sondheim six decades ago, when both had just begun to make their marks — is the last person handpicked by Sondheim to receive the award…

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May 21, 2022 by Popular Culture

Friday Morning Open Thread: A Truism

 

Lyle Lovett has a new album, and the Washington Post has the story:

… Lovett never expected to become a first-time father when he was nearly 60 years old, with a daughter and son born in June 2017.

“It’s wonderful. I mean, I’m so grateful to have had this experience at all,” says Lovett, 64, his warm, gravelly drawl beaming from the other end of the line. His parents were less than half his age when they had him, but at the same point in his own life, Lovett poured everything into getting his music career off the ground. “I always imagined having children,” he insists. “But I had absolutely no idea how much I would enjoy it.”

That joy is stamped on the cover of Lovett’s new album out Friday, “12th of June,” which takes its title from his children’s birthday. It’s his first collection of songs since 2012, when his longtime contract that he first signed with Curb Records in the 1980s came to an end. “I always knew I wanted to record again,” he says. But he was more than happy to bide his time, stockpiling songs and waiting for the right deal to come along, which it finally did in the shape of an offer from Verve Records. “It was nice. If somebody called up and asked for me to sing a harmony with them on a record, I didn’t have to ask anybody’s permission,” he says of the intervening years…

The influence of fatherhood on the album can perhaps be most clearly seen in the comedic turn of a song like “Pants is Overrated,” inspired by Lovett’s children and written with a playful, adolescent sensibility. “That’s just something I started singing to them as I was trying to convince them to wear pants,” he says. Similarly, “Pig Meat Man” came from his son’s love for eating bacon. The singer takes clear enjoyment in learning to see the world through his kids’ eyes. “These are the two most interesting people I’ve ever met,” he says proudly…

Now, with “12th of June” available, Lovett can look forward to getting back to his element: on the road with the Large Band. If life, and the outside world, have slowed him down in recent years, he’s nowhere near stopping. “Not many people in their lives get to do something their whole life that they love to do,” he says. “And I’m grateful for that.”

 

And that being said…

 

May 20, 2022 by Open Threads Popular Culture
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