Happy New Year

I blew right through the leap second last night watching Good Will Hunting on the dish. When the movie ended at 12:10 AM, I switched over to see the ceremonies at Times Square.

The crowd was already breaking up. Dick Clark spoke. Post-stroke, he wasn't speaking clearly. I powered down and went to bed.

New Year's is a holiday that doesn't do much for me. When I was a youngster, the main attraction of New Year's Eve was that my parents would let us stay up until midnight. Back then, Dick Clark did not do New Year's Eve. Instead, they had Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians performing at some hotel in NYC. His music was not my cup of tea, but there was not much else to watch on the tube back then New Year's Eve-wise.

By the time Dick Clark started doing New Year's Eve, most of the music that accompanied his New Year's shows was not my cup of tea either. My rock tastes were firmly entrenched in the 1950s and 1960s and what he was presenting was not.

Last night, Mariah Carey was the big attraction on his show. In my opinion, Mariah Carey is not rock 'n' roll and I had no interest in watching her performance. Instead, I watched movies on the dish and finished reading Jerry Lewis' book, A Love Story, which is about his relationship with his ex-partner Dean Martin.

The beginning of the book started slow and I thought I would give up on it, but it got more interesting around Chapter 3 and I finished it in a few days. Go figure... I never was a big fan of Jerry Lewis' comedy, but I always found him to be an interesting person. (Coincidentally, as I write this, a Gary Lewis song started playing on iTunes.)

I learned in Jerry's book that his son, Gary, enlisted and went to Vietnam after his rock career tail-ended. He came back from the war "a wreck, unable to sleep, unable to erase the horrible images of combat from his mind." ...another victim of the American military-industrial complex.

Gary Lewis appeared here at the Wolcott country fair a few years ago, performing all his big hits, and was a real crowd-pleaser. We had a great time, bought Gary Lewis & the Playboy T-shirts, and my sister even got his autograph for me. I feel bad for him in retrospect.