South of Town: Notes and Scenes from Texas' Upper Gulf Coast
Life in Lake Jackson, Texas viewed and photographed by one citizen who spends his time with Methodists and Democrats mostly
This from the entertainment section of my Friday edition of The Facts.
Louie is coming to town. What fun! But, sorry. It is sold out.
Rep. Gohmert is a leading climate change denier who, nevertheless, thinks it would be a good thing since more carbon dioxide in the air is good for plants.
And if you have any doubts, watch this video from the New York Times web site this morning. We haven’t had a leader with such serious mental health issues since King George III.
Here’s a piece by Jennifer Senior that helped me understand him. From her February 9 column in the New York Times:
I’m not convinced, as some people are, that the Twitter fusillades from the White House are part of a larger strategy of distraction, specifically intended to divert us from this particular administration’s malfeasance and failures. I think our president’s attention span is genuinely scattershot. (“Post-literate,” Michael Wolff called him in “Fire and Fury.” Seems about right.) When I imagine his brain, I imagine a bug zapper in a drizzle. Bzzzzzzzzzzt. Fzzzz. Bzzz fzzz bzzzzzzzzzzt.
And there is this from the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank citing his Rose Garden performance as evidence enough to provoke discussion of invoking the 25th Amendment.
If you were coming of age in the Fifties and Sixties, the music you heard every day on the radio still lives in your head. “Yakety Yak,” “Searchin’,” “Charlie Brown,” “There Goes My Baby,” “Spanish Harlem,” “Hound Dog” – to name a very few – are songs that never go away. But do you have any idea who wrote them? Probably not.
Brazosport Center Stages opens “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” tonight in the Freeport LNG venue, aka, the large theater. Directed by Jean Warren, it is really more of a musical revue than a play. It consists entirely of songs written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller performed by excellent musicians from our area. Just a few of the singers you will hear are Elon Coates, Lizzy Conger, Amber Crawford, Jacob Aguilar, Cameron Losoya, Mason Rod, Chayton Herbst, Maurice Williams, and some new folks whose names I can’t recall to tell you right now. But they are all good. (Send me a tip if you identify them in the photo below.) More photos are posted to the Flickr site here.
Lest you think this is a show for old timers, I can tell you that when I finished shooting photos of the invited dress rehearsal last night, I spotted some high schoolers on the third row and I asked a young man if he knew someone in the cast.
“No but I love this music,” he said.
“A gift to you from my generation,” I said.
“Wow. Thanks,” he said.
“Fee, fee, fi, fi, fo, fo, FUM, I smell smoke in the audi-tor-i-UM … ” I said.
It’s a great show. Come out, listen, and re-live to the birth of rock and roll – back when you could make out the words in the songs.
Maybe you can even learn how to shimmy.
Reservations available online at The Center web site. The remaining shows:
Saturday, Feb 2 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Feb 3 at 2:30 p.m.
Friday, Feb 8 and Saturday, Feb 9 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Feb 10 at 2:30 p.m.
I ran across this report in The Guardian tonight. While it seems like a pretty weak research design, I concur with their finding based on my own experience that there can be happiness after Facebook. I ditched my account in April or May of 2018 (I’m not counting) and really haven’t missed it a bit. I write more letters with ink and pen. Anything Putin wants to know about me, he just has to wait for me to write him a letter.
Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be?
When my daughter came home during a break in her first year in college in 1996, she drove up to Angleton one day to meet me at work and have lunch. We headed over to the Texas Rose, an establishment run by a British expat who made the best hamburger in Brazoria County at the time. As we left the Texas Rose, young Dennis Bonnen followed us out the door and stopped us on the sidewalk.
“Mr. Fowler, I sure would appreciate your vote in the runoff next month.”
Dennis was pretty fresh out of college with a political science degree, a boatload of energy, and presenting for public office for the first time. He had barely made it into the runoff by edging out Beaver Aplin (yes, that Beaver) by ten votes. I had to tell Dennis that I was not qualified to vote in his runoff since I had voted in the Democratic primary.
The rest is history, of course. Beaver Aplin invested his free time in his gas station business and went on to develop the regionally famous “Buc-ee’s” brand. Dennis, won the runoff, served the next twenty-two years in the Texas House and on January 8 of this year was elected Speaker by unanimous vote of the membership.
I grew up in the South in segregated neighborhoods, schools, and churches. I was born in 1943. The world was in violent upheaval across Europe and in the Pacific. That year, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was finishing high school and preparing to enter college at the age of 15.
I can’t remember when I first heard of Dr. King but I think it was probably a six o’clock news report of one of the bombings of Dr. King’s home. Or maybe I saw him on the cover of Time magazine or television during the Montgomery bus boycott. 1957 was an eventful year in the life of Dr. King and in the life of our nation. When they were happening, these events didn’t make much of an impression on a white teenager from Houston’s blue-collar ship channel neighborhoods. I was in my middle teens and not as precocious as the young Martin, so the events of the day didn’t move me the way they would when I read about them later in my life.
At that age I was more interested in Houston Buffs and socializing with my church youth group than I was in the evening news. You may think that the brutality and injustice suffered by American citizens across the South would have gotten even a kid’s attention. But we white kids suffered from a vision problem that kept us from seeing the world of privilege we lived in and the injustices it had been built upon.
When I was a kid we listened to Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on the radio. If you ever listened to Sergeant Preston on the radio, you know that he sometimes got lost in the snow. Everything was white. The ground was white. The sky was white. Even the Yukon River was white. Everything ahead was white. Everything behind was white. White to the left. White to the right. He was blinded by the whiteness. Like Sergeant Preston, we had been snow-blinded.
Continue reading “Growing Up White in Texas: How I Remember Dr. King”
South of Town: Notes and Scenes from Texas' Upper Gulf Coast 