Go outdoors and play says my father around eight on Saturday mornings as he heads to work in the middle of the 1950s, when the brainchild of Philo Farnsworth and company was yet creeping, it delighted me to gallup into adventureland,
My stint at the Idiot Box enough for an episode or two of Hopalong Cassidy, following ten, fifteen minutes of test pattern mesmerization, accompanied by In The Hall of the Mountain King*, the original earworm, which teased me and tickled me and nearly blew
My Peter Pan mind fifty years later when I witnessed a most improbable mashup: Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, together with Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, who play both the European
Classical version of Edvard Greig’s Peer Gynt Suite and its adaptation for jazz band by Duke Ellington, alternating movements back and forth the score of players led by Marsalis seated in the midst of the four score musicians under Ozawa’s invisible baton
At Tanglewood, on Mohican land in Massachusetts, two hundred miles from my boyhood home sited five blocks from the mouth of the river that was Main Street to Onondaga Fire-keepers twenty five miles upstream of Lake Ontario.
Ten years before shooing me outdoors, my father was busy shooting his way toward the coward Hitler, along with the best of his generation of Americans, and her allies, such as New Zealand, home of the politician who sneered “OK Boomer.”
Now, kids, what does your Saturday look like?
– Dave Read
*”In the Hall of the Mountain King” is a piece of orchestral music composed by Edvard Grieg in 1875 as incidental music for the sixth scene of act 2 in Henrik Ibsen’s 1867 play Peer Gynt. It was originally part of Opus 23 but was later extracted as the final piece of Peer Gynt, Suite No. 1, Op. 46. (Source: Wikipedia.)