I love Huey Lewis and the News. There I've said it. Is there anything better than Huey jumping around the stage, playing the harmonica and singing "The Heart of Rock and Roll" while the Tower of Power Horns blasts out the tune behind him and you dance along with the music? I don't think so.
But, wait, I've never been to a Huey Lewis and the News concert where, apparently, they always sing an a Capella song or two in the doo-wop style. Probably to take a little breather after all that frenetic energy gets him huffin' and puffin'.
When I was a little girl and into my young teen years, I always knew where I would be on Saturday evenings. In front of our black and white television with a bowl of popcorn watching the Lawrence Welk Show. Yes, I was quite the nerd. I loved watching Bobby and Cissy dance their little hearts out in front of the orchestra and my mom loved Joanne Castle and her ragtime honky-tonk piano. But my favorite act was the The Lennon Sisters.
I wanted to be a Lennon Sister. My sisters and I sang all the time, and in harmony, while my sister Jane played the piano. Mostly we sang gospel hymns, but Jane loved to play pop tunes from the fifties; such as, "Sincerely" by the McGuire Sisters and "On a Slow Boat to China" and "You, You, You" and "Deep Purple". I think I would have fit right in as the youngest Lennon Sister. Cute smile, dimples, ponytail. Unfortunately, no one in my family ever thought to contact them to see if they would take me on, darn it!
Here are the girls when they were first starting on Mr. Welk's show. They always called him Mr. Welk, you know. They were good girls with good manners and very respectful toward their elders. That's little Janet in front, Kathy on the left, Diane in back and Peggy on the right.
The girls in later years singing my favorite of their songs. Notice their dresses are disguising at least one pregnancy, Peggy's (second from left). Peggy was alway pregnant, after she married, of course.
I love that tight four-part harmony that is usually only achieved with family members. Diane and Peggy are now retired from the stage, but Kathy and Janet, along with their (other, not me!) younger sister, Mimi, perform regularly at The Welk Champagne Theatre in Branson, Missouri.
"The river is within us, the sea is all about us . . ."
— T S Eliot (Four Quartets)
How does the river run within the sea?
Like the coyote, bounding deer-like
in the soy bean field last evening,
and behind him the honeyed sun
a young girl’s hair, cascading among
the trees. He distanced gradually
from the road we cycled, his body
now disappearing beneath
the shrubby, wavy green, now
reappearing in the bob and bounce
of a cork retreating from shore. Like
a dream. Like a secret stone that leaps
as the sun sets, an opal, a tiger’s eye,
to the horizon, until he and the sun are one.
~ruth mowry~
Our Lauren's Life
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
~President Dwight David Eisenhower
Websites of Mass Distraction--what keeps me from the cleaning
