Category Archives: living in the USA
The Blue Angels Over San Francisco
So the Blue Angels were here for Fleet Week. I wasn’t well enough to cope with the crowds and transportation hassles to get to a paid seat where we could see all the action, but there was quite a lot to be seen from my own balcony and rooftop and then (Sunday) from the Embarcadero (a brief walk from my home).
Yes, it’s an expensive, polluting display of America’s military might. But it also looks like a lot of fun! Next year I definitely want to be up close.
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SFGMC: Rockaria
I snuck footage at the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus Rockaria concert a while ago – couldn’t resist, particularly because I was entranced by the deaf interpretation performed by Ethan Pope (above, during a Michael Jackson medley).
Of course, there were plenty of crowd-pleasers like Material Girl:
Mickey:
Viva la Vida:
Venus:
And, in support of marriage equality, Single Ladies:
Give!
I’m a longtime reader of the newsletters/blog of fellow Woodstock alum Jim Taylor – who has been a professional writer for far longer than I have, and is a very wise man. This week’s “Sharp Edges” column is about the disastrous floods in Pakistan, wondering Why the reluctance to help? He shares some likely correct ideas about why “international aid has been disastrously slow”, ending with a cogent thought about why this is a huge mistake. I agree with everything he says, and recommend that you read it now.
But I think there’s more to this story, and wrote Jim as follows:
One thing that has surprised me since I moved from Italy back to the US is the constant pleas to give-give-give. Everyone has their “pet” cause – often quite literally about pets – and is constantly asking for “support”. Fundraising is a business in which people are paid to stalk city streets with clipboards, waylaying passersby with earnest questions. Every corporation and celebrity hastens to associate their name with some cause, preferably a non-controversial one that won’t tarnish that name with any possible customer or fan.
The result, for me at least, is a constant low-level feeling of guilt that I’m never doing enough to save the world. No matter that I gave my childhood for my father to “develop” Vietnam, Thailand, and Bangladesh. Never mind that I have given considerable time, travel costs, and professional expertise to Woodstock and SAGE. I’m a bad person if I don’t also save dolphins, pit bulls, starving children, forests, etc.
The most bizarre request I’ve seen was in a sandwich shop in Colorado: taped to the counter at the cash registers was a flyer made up and printed by an employee, concerning the daughter of his neighbor. The child was killed by a car while playing outside her home “just minutes after this picture was taken!” and we were all now invited to help the family defray funeral costs.
It’s as if we are all expected to participate, emotionally and financially, in every tragedy in the world. I don’t think the human psyche is designed to deal with that much grief, even vicariously.
So when one more cause comes along, no matter how worthy, I just shut down. It feels like yet another imposition on my emotional energy. I don’t know whether that makes me a bad person, or simply a burnt-out charity case.
Things to Love About San Francisco
above: THIS is the lobby of my ENT doctor’s building.
Makes a medical visit feel like raiding an Aztec tomb!
And what could one expect to find in the garage?
