Blue October in April
Friday, April 27th, 2012
Following the Easter holiday, my focus was mostly on getting prepared for my upcoming trip; there was a lot of grass cutting, laundry folding, finding autographs, searching out DD&Ds and movie locations, getting slightly ahead on this here website, uploading CDs, visiting the library, and getting Mindy and her daughter Taylor prepped to take care of Tiny and Baby. So with the lone exception of having lunch at Chick-fil-A with Mom on Thursday the 12th, this was aobut all that I did with my week. Read the rest of this entry »
Neither I nor Patti LaBelle are strangers to Billboard’s Number One Hits charts. I’m a student and collector of music, while Ms. LaBelle actually had two songs hit the coveted number one position. The first one came in 1975 when the song Lady Marmalade by LaBelle, the band she was fronting before become a solo act, topped the charts for a week in March. The second came as the result of another collaboration – this time with Michael McDonald. The song On My Own capped out at number one for three weeks in June in 1986. 
There were a couple of odd things about meeting Jane Wiedlin when she appeared at the Chiller Theatre Show in Parsippany, New Jersey, on April 30, 2011. The first was that although she is primarily known as the rhythm guitarist of the all-girl New Wave band The Go-Go’s (with whom she is pictured, second from left), she didn’t have a single photo of herself with the band to offer. The second odd thing was that every one of the photos that she did have for sale had been pre-signed by her. It’s as if she had gotten bored sitting there and just went ahead and signed all of them. As any autograph collector can tell you, part of the thrill of getting an autograph is watching it come to life right before your eyes. 
If you answered Ghostbusters! to that question – and worse yet, sang in the cadence of the classic song from the 1984 film Ghostbusters, well than I must say, you are quite predicatable. The answer I was looking for was actually Ray Parker, Jr., the solo recording artist who wrote, produced, and recorded the chart-topping #1 hit theme song that people are still singing ad nauseum today. 
After Jamie and I had spent our day at the Willow Springs Water Park in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 6, 2011, we made the three-hour journey back to Memphis, Tennessee. Of course if you’ve been following this series of road trip posts, you’ll know that we had already spent Sunday in Memphis. But I had purposely made the plans so that we would hit it both coming and going. Following our long drive, we were both ready for a late dinner and we arrived at Uncle Lou’s Chicken at about 7:30pm.