Hopefully her birthday will be a fun, eventful day. I’ll have to ask her dad (my brother Brian) if Dora is still cool with her. Kids are outgrowing toys so quickly. They rush right into makeup and video games too quickly, it breaks my heart. The Star Wars action figures children have today come with an amazing level of detail and Barbie has pretty impressive accessories, a VW Beetle for one. How could they want to give those things up before 12?
I received a recent e-mail from Brian too. He said her violin playing is coming along well for someone her age. My guess is it’s material to teach children the essentials: chords, technique and how to read music. If she can do the solo at the end of “Baba O’Riley,” then I’d probably buy her something equivalent to an iPod Nano.
This year I’m giving her the big treatment because she shares her birthday with numerous entertainers yet no historical figures and the events are mostly morbid or ghastly.
- To start, today is the beginning of CNN in 1980. Everyone laughed at Ted Turner then, now there’s multiple versions and knockoffs from the BBC, Bloomberg and (ick) Fox.
- Way back in 1958, WWII hero Charles DeGaulle is made the leader of France again since the country was on the verge of a military coup. It’s still debated how serious the coup actually was.
- The “event” I’m sure we’ll be subjected to all weekend is the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles being released today. Regardless of my musical tastes and opinions, I have always admired the album for its technical merits: recorded in five months, done with only a four-track and it cost $75,000 (1967 USD) to record which is over $450,000 today—U2 couldn’t make anything that cheap or impressive to save their lives.
Birthday-wise, Anna shares the day with the hockey legend in waiting Paul Coffey (played for Edmonton in the Eighties with Gretzky, Messier & Fuhr), composer and conductor Nelson Riddle and singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile. She also has two favorite supporting actors in movie-TV geek realm: Powers Boothe (specializes in heavies and is the voice of Gorilla Grodd) and Rene Auberjonois (comic foil on Benson and Odo in Star Trek: DS9). Others of note are elderly fave Andy Griffith, Morgan Freeman (he’ll always be Easy Reader to me), Cleavon Little (Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles) and model Heidi Klum. The remaining two I hope won’t be omens of things to come with Anna: the overrated, overmarried Marilyn Monroe and overhyped Alanis Morrissette.
Maybe Brian will send me a picture of Anna so I can post it for my friends and readers. She resembles Brian very much. The cooler option would be a movie of her playing “Turkey in the Straw” on her tiny violin.