I got to do a fun story I'd wanted to do for years, even decades.
When I was the last one on the bus, he'd invite me to move up to the front, and would play cassettes for me, exposing me to music I did not know.
Like ska.
A few years later, we'd go see his band, the Scofflaws.
Thirty five years later, Brooks is still the frontman for the band--singing and playing an array of saxophones.
I had a fun chat with Melvin Seals, bandleader and keyboard guy for JGB, as the Jerry Garcia Band became known after Jerry died. The story appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, as Seals is a lifelong Bay Area resident.
Seals said this about Garcia:
You hear the phrase, this guy would give you the shirt off his back. Jerry would give you the shirt off his back. He did things for singers and band members who were struggling that he just didn’t have to do. It wasn’t publicized, no one knew it, but he did it. He really was that guy.
Seals said he figured the Jerry Garcia Band scene would die down after Garcia died in 1995. It has not.
"It’s not going to die," said Seals. "It’s a scene, it’s a style. It just amazes me how it grows and grows."
It's about some dads I know here in the New York suburbs. They are musicians and they were frustrated that their rock bands could not play out in the bars amidst Covid, and for the most part could not even get together and rehearse for much of the past couple years.
So, working remotely, as has become the norm, a couple of them wrote some songs, and reached out to a couple more, and everyone recorded their parts of the song.
The main dudes are guitarist Phil Went and singer Joe Walden, thus the W2 name, and the side guys are Peter J. Blume and Brian Doherty.
“We saw an opportunity to do something positive and something healthy,” said Walden. “It’s a chance to express ourselves – what we’re feeling, what we’re going through, what the world is going through.”
The band is W2 and the album is "4 Corners of a Circle." You can hear it here.
Where exactly does "upstate" New York begin?
If you're in Manhattan, you may well consider Westchester upstate. After all, it is north of you.
But if you're anywhere else in New York--Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo, heck, even Kingston--you'd never consider Westchester upstate. It is, after all, a suburb of NYC, quite close to the southernmost edge of the state.
I did a story on the topic for Westchester Magazine. I checked in with Mark Monmonier, distinguished professor emeritus of geography at Syracuse University, on the topic, and some other map experts. He mentions late-night host Stephen Colbert, who invented the concept of “truthiness,” suggesting different levels of being factual.
“Stephen might say something like ‘upstatedness,’” says Monmonier. “Westchester County has a relatively low degree of upstatedness. Dutchess has more upstatedness. Albany has a considerably high level of upstatedness.”
I wrote about alcohol-free beer getting a bit tastier in the Journal News.
But it got better. A handful of breweries that do only NA beer, including Athletic and Partake, launched, and traditional craft breweries are experimenting with alco-free brews now.
“It’s a good way to not only have a new product, but also to speak to different people and different crowds,” said Kasey Schwartz, head brewer at Broken Bow Brewery of Tuckahoe, NY. “People that don’t want to drink alcohol or can’t drink alcohol, and want something refreshing in the middle of the day.”
I got to write about it for the Journal News.
Harvest Moon Farm and Orchard was one destination for Sesame.
Exec producer Ben Lehmann said Harvest Moon was pulsing with vitality. “Apples were on the trees, stuff was blooming in all the fields,” he said. “It was just a beautiful time to be there.”
I got to do a NY Times story on those who do not finish the marathon--the dreaded D.N.F.--including what caused them to come up short, and how they reacted to this grave setback.
It is a surprisingly low number of people that don't finish. Just 263 people out of almost 16,000 did not finish the Boston Marathon last month, while 380 out of over 25,000 did not finish New York. At other marathons, including Hartford and Rehoboth Beach, the numbers are a bit higher.
Paradoxically, it is the seasoned marathoners who are more likely to pull out early. “If they’re not going to win a race or place, they may stop and that’s it,” said Kathleen Titus, the race director of the Philadelphia Marathon. “They’ll save their legs for another race they can compete in and win prize money."
Several sources spoke of the despair they feel after pulling out--sitting on the curb, crying, not quite sure how they'll get home. “The first thing that comes through your mind is all the time you spent training,” said Maria Luisa Cesca, who once sustained a hamstring injury during the Jacksonville Marathon. “You were doing so well, so many mornings with 4:30 a.m. runs before the kids get up.”
Yet everyone I spoke to gave it another go, and finished.
