We finally finished our home renovation project for this year.
When I say "we," I mean Lee Brady, our handyman extraordinaire who carefully planned, thought out, reworked and then executed, some wonderful improvements to our house, the most striking of which was the installation of our fireplace mantel in the dining room.
The mantel and shield before work began.
Kim and I found the mantel in a yard sale on South Main Street about 10 years ago (has it been that long?). We bought it and I stripped the white paint off of it, a laborious summer project that took several days to complete. That was my sweat equity in the project.
We brought the mantel inside the house and propped it up against the dining room wall, where it patiently waited for the next seven or eight years. In the meantime, we found a really neat brass fireplace shield in a salvage store in Greensboro, bought it and propped that up against the wall, too. A pre-existing hearth was already in place, indicating a coal-burning fireplace had indeed once warmed the room.
Whenever we had friends come to the house, they'd oooh and ahhhh about our potential fireplace-in-waiting.
They did that for years. I think they were being kind to us.
Finally, Kim and I decided it was time to get started. We hired Lee, who promptly rebuilt our deteriorating freestanding outdoor utility shed while we decided what kind of fireplace tile we needed to buy.
The old hearth needed hammer-and-chisel attention.
Once in motion, the project gradually gained momentum. The shed was redone, along with sundry other items that needed handyman attention. Lee tackled each job one-by-one, until finally, just the mantel remained.
About a month went by where Lee had to take on another paying job (We were in no hurry. Why should we be, we waited this long) at another location.
Then he said he was ready.
One of the first things he did, besides mounting the mantel on the wall, which was impressive enough, was to remove the existing hearth. We just didn't think the tile there was appropriate to our vision for the fireplace.
We are delighted with the completed project.
What should have been an anticipated easy removal turned out to be a project in itself. The tile had been installed and attached to a concrete footing underneath. That was unexpected (working on old houses almost always reveals the unexpected) and Lee had to use a hammer and chisel to chip away the footing to prepare the hearth for the new tile we had selected.
After an uneven and dusty surface had been chipped out, our cat, Halo, inexplicably thought we had installed a luxurious new litter box just for her. She jumped on the hearth and started scratching...
Noooo. (She did not).
Finally, Lee was set to install the new fireplace tile. This actually took a couple days, but when I came home from work Thursday, I was greeted by the completed project.
I was stunned. The fireplace looked to me as though it had been there since the house was built 95 years ago.
Now when we have friends over, I know their ooohs and ahhhs will be genuine. I know mine are.
For some reason, my wife wanted to see the movie 'Vacation.'
I'm talking about the current 2015 release. The one that's still playing at the Lexington movie theater, nearly a month after it opened. Not the 1983 cult classic (more on that in a moment).
I think I know why she wanted to see it. She's been humming the theme song 'Holiday Road' to herself for weeks, prompted, I think, by the movie trailers on TV. It was only a natural progression before we made our way to the movie theater.
So we went last week, fully expecting the flick to be disaster. And, it was. It's an hour and 39 minutes I'll never have again (I thought this in a note to myself, especially as I start to see the sand in my hour glass gaining downward momentum. Fortunately, I got into the theater with a senior citizen discount. That helped a little).
And, yet, I found myself laughing out loud at certain bits, in spite of myself. Maybe I was trying too hard not to laugh, I don't know. Maybe I just needed to get out of the house.
This is starting to sound like some kind of a reverse recommendation, and it's not. Not unless you want to suffer a seemingly constant barrage of F-bombs (some from children), or sometimes scatological humor or endless predictable predicaments.
I thought the best moments were the opening credits, which featured actual vacation photographs of compromising situations (I might could have stood 90 minutes of that). The movie went downhill quickly after that as presumed acting and dialogue came into play.
I think this is the sixth entry in the Vacation franchise. There were moments in the original movie that were inspired (I still chuckle at Chevy Chase's impatient, head-bobbing, time-to-leave-the-Grand Canyon-for-Walley World scene). And there's Christy Brinkley, of course.
But even the original flick was more stupid than inspired, I think.
What really gets me is that with a little more thought for craft, the entire franchise could have made for nifty little parodies or astute social commentary in the Monty Python vein.
Or maybe I'm just old.
Here, just to drive you nuts for the rest of the day, is the 'Holiday Road' theme:
It's not that I'm on a mission to see every baseball park in America (there are worse ambitions, no doubt), but a couple of weeks ago when my friend, Larry Lyon, invited me to come down to Charlotte to catch a Charlotte Knights baseball game with him, I couldn't say no.
There are several reasons why. First off, Larry was my colleague at The Dispatch back in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. He was the sports editor, I was the sports writer, and together, we made a pretty damn good two-man sports staff.
Larry stayed at the paper for about 20 years, then made the decision to enter the ministry. I rarely saw him after that, much to my regret. We just went our separate ways, as friends often do.
Another reason why I wanted to go to the game is because I seem to be taking in at least one minor league baseball experience per year, and this season was running out. A lot of this has to do with the Civil War Round Table I attend. We make an annual reconnaissance to a random battlefield each spring, usually near a city (i.e. Chattanooga, Charleston, Richmond) that has a minor league team. Consequently, we've taken in the Lookouts, the RiverDogs and the Flying Squirrels over the years.
Thirdly, I like to drink beer and eat hot dogs at ballgames. I try not to miss an opportunity.
It's all great fun.
So last Thursday, I met Larry in Davidson, and together, we drove to BB&T Ballpark for a noontime "businessman's special."
The view of the Charlotte skyline was pretty impressive from our seats.
The game was slated for a noontime start because that night, just a few blocks away, North Carolina and South Carolina were going to open the college football season at Bank of America Stadium at 6 p.m. Yikes. I had forgotten about that. That explained why the parking deck next to the ball field was charging $40 a pop. Yikes again.
We finally found a reasonable place to park about a mile away and made our way to the game.
I always get a feeling of sublime awe when I walk into a baseball stadium. There's nothing quite like that first glance of inviting green grass — a pasture within a city block — as you enter the gates. It just gets better when you find your seats and acclimate yourself to your own personal view of the playing field, wondering if you might have a chance to catch a foul ball.
I really liked BB&T Ballpark. The city's futuristic high-rise office buildings loom like stalagmites just beyond the outfield fence. It makes me wonder if a view like this isn't part of the homefield advantage, reminding visiting teams that an entire city is right out there ready to back the Knights, to smote your pitching staff and baffle your bats. Proceed at your own risk.
So there we were for the next three hours. We barely watched the game. Instead, we were mynah birds, or maybe magpies, chirping away about everything from the decline of the newspaper business to former associates to growing old to future plans.
The ball game was merely a backdrop. I do remember the Knights trailed the Durhan Bulls for much of the game. Somewhere around the bottom of the sixth (or was it the seventh?) inning, trailing 7-3, the Knights hit three home runs into the beckoning skyline and regained a lead they would not relinquish.
Larry and I left shortly after that rally, not only to beat the incoming football traffic, but get on with our day. It was wonderful.
We talked about doing this again sometime. I hope it doesn't take another 20 years.
This month, which is about to expire, has five Saturdays, five Sundays and five Mondays in it.
The Chinese actually have a name for it — Silver Pockets Full.
It's supposed to be such a rare collection of days (a month of Sundays?) that the odds of that reoccurring are said to be once in every 823 years.
Wow, I gullibly thought to myself. Once in 823 years. I'm lucky to be alive to see this. Incredible. It'll be almost a 1,000 years before anyone sees this again.
Wrong. It's misinformation. A myth. Just look ahead to this coming October, which has five Thursdays, five Fridays and five Saturdays in it. Suddenly, it's not such a big deal. In fact, a quick Internet search tells me that the first three weekdays of any 31-day month are repeated five times within that month.
So, once in 823 years? It's more like once in 823 hours. Sheesh. I suspect my pockets are full of something else, and it's not silver.
But that's not all.
The other day my wife came home from work telling me she heard there was going to be a double moon that night.
"Now that's impossible," I thought, less gullibly this time.
Hmmmm.
"Unless," I said to myself, more gullibly again, "there's some weird atmospheric condition that I don't know about that somehow causes the moon to reflect itself in the evening sky."
I bet that happens once every 823 years.
Anyway, another quick look on the Internet told me the double moon hoax has been floating around social media for about as long as there's been social media.
The whole premise of the double moon thing took root back in 2003 — before Facebook —when the planet Mars actually came within 35 million miles of Earth. I vaguely remember that. You could almost feel the breeze as Mars whistled by. At the time, it was the closest approach to Earth by Mars in 60,000 years and, consequently, Mars appeared six times bigger and 85 times brighter to our eyes than it normally does.
Six times bigger than normal would take Mars from the size of a pinhead to perhaps the size of a small nailhead to our earthbound vision, but no matter. We were in for a treat.
Extinction.
Really, can you imagine what would happen if Mars suddenly showed up one night the size of our moon? The gravitational violence alone would no doubt turn us all into asteroids.
I don't know. Maybe it's the heat. But I'm ready to get out of August and into a more stable month, like October. And Halloween.
Kim and I went to see The Blue Eyed Bettys perform a private concert at Winfield Farm in rural Pfafftown Sunday evening. The Bettys are a harmony driven Americana trio, based in New York City, that features Ben Mackel on vocals and guitar, Daniel Emond on vocals and banjo, and Sarah Hund on vocals and fiddle. They all have blue eyes. Another thing they have in common is that none of them are named Betty.
Kim and I had heard them before, for the first time, about a year ago, when they opened for Underhill Rose, another well-polished Americana trio, at the Lee Street Theater in Salisbury. Usually, I'm ambivalent about opening acts. I want them to play their three songs, bow politely, and then get the hell off the stage because I paid good money to listen to the other guys.
But we were dumbfounded by what we heard from The Bettys that night. Tight harmonies. Crisp musicianship. Theater-like stage presence. Holy cow. Who are these people?
When they came to Foothills Brewing in Winston-Salem a few months after that, we jumped at the chance to hear them again. Foothills isn't the best listening room around, but The Bettys clearly overcame that obstacle with another stunning performance. And this time, we got a little chat time with them between sets. I can tell you now, they are really nice people.
Then came this past Sunday. I don't know if it was the chirping crickets, the late summer heat, the half-moon in the cloudy sky, the camaraderie of the 200 or so who showed up to sit under crab apple trees, or what. But everything came together perfectly. The Bettys were brilliant and they evidently enjoyed themselves, sharing a joy that seeped unabated from the homemade stage and into the audience.
Now here's why I'm beside myself:
All three musicians were initially stage actors. Ben graduated with a degree in theater from Catawba College, where he first learned to play guitar (he later became a resident actor at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, VA, for eight years); Daniel graduated from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts with a BFA in acting and where he learned to play five-string banjo; and Sarah graduated from St. Louis University, summa cum laude, with a degree in theater and music. She has a résumé of theater credits longer than her fiddle bow.
All three have powerful voices. Daniel describes himself as a "Bari/tenor", and Ben has similar range as well. Then there's Sarah: she can be a throaty Janis Joplin on one tune and an operatic Celine Dion on another. More amazingly, theirs are voices that blend naturally, like a delicious vocal tiramisu.
More astounding, they've only been together since December of 2013. Less than two years. When they don't spend time performing as Bettys, they're acting in theater productions. So right now, being a Betty isn't even a fulltime gig. It's perhaps more like an ongoing experiment. A work in progress.
G'wan. Get out of town.
Serendipity strikes without warning. They met by chance as cast members
of a stage production ("Poems, Prayers and Promises"), and left as a
nifty little three-piece band. Wow.
"We were all in a play together at the Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota," said Sarah in response to my email questions for her. "We spent a lot of time hanging out together after our performances, and eventually we started jamming and making music together (in about March of 2014).
"We tried out our songs at a few open mic nights in Sarasota, and we were very encouraged by the response," added Sarah, who first picked up a violin when she was 10. "When our play closed, we decided to try to play some gigs as The Bettys on our way back to New York, and it eventually turned into a tour of sorts. It went so well, that we decided to tour again. And now we just can't stop!"
Soooo, when do they rehearse? Those terrific harmonies, after all, aren't an accident.
"These days, we fit practice in when we can — oftentimes in the car on a long drive," wrote Sarah. "If we have a few days in the same city, we'll set up rehearsal time to write or learn new songs. When we were starting out, we spent a lot of time together making music.
"I suppose that is when our sound really came together. It's tough for us sometimes, because our acting jobs take us to so many different places, so we are not in the same city as often as we would like."
And that's another thing: although they do great covers (Sarah's soulful vocals on "Landslide" are heartrending), they also write their own stuff (credited collectively as The Blue Eyed Bettys). "Free" is perhaps as truthful — and as humorous — as a tune can be about life on the road with your bandmates. Indeed, much of their original work will make you smile with their sometimes mischievous — and clever — lyrics.
So just where are The Bettys headed? Are the members actors, or are they musical performers?
"I'd say that acting is more of a profession than an interest for us," said Sarah. "This past year, we've taken advantage of the short periods that all three of us are between acting jobs by writing, playing shows, and touring together.
"Make your own work, as they say!
"It would be difficult to choose between acting and music because they are both such a huge part of me," said Sarah. "But if The Bettys did start to make it big, I suppose I could put aside acting for a while. For the time being, we are doing our best to balance The Bettys with our acting careers."
If you ever get an opportunity to see The Blue Eyed Bettys, don't let it pass. Otherwise you might be beside yourself with regret, knowing that they're more fun than a phalanx of fiddles or a barrel of banjos.
(The Blue Eyed Bettys recently released their first EP — financed through Kickstarter and self-titled, featuring seven original tracks — that is available on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify.)
There's a standing joke between several of my sports writing colleagues and myself that whenever I appear somewhere to cover a game, it's time for them to run for their lives.
They don't want anything to do with Wehrle luck.
Wha...? What's that?
It's when I'm at a game, and for no reason at all, it goes into overtime. Or extra innings. Or it goes into extra innings, and then it rains. Or it's raining and lightning before the game even begins, causing a two-hour delay before the game is finally postponed.
It's the kind of luck that extends your time in the stadium or arena longer than it normally should. For people working on a deadline, it's very frustrating.
You get the idea. Wehrle luck. It feels like it's happened more often than the odds might suggest — especially the games that go into overtime — that "Wehrle luck" is now a proper (or maybe an improper) noun among my colleagues.
Every now and then I wonder why this dark cloud should follow me around.
Then I got an email from my brother, Scott, who is kind of the family genealogist. Scott has done a wonderful job tracing our Civil War ancestors, pointing out to me there were more connective bloodlines in that conflict than I ever imagined.
Then he sent this email a few days ago after he investigated a few leads in Newspapers.com (Huh? I worked 30 years at a newspaper. How come I never heard of Newspapers.com before?). Scott started off relating the familiar tale of our great grandfather, William, who was electrocuted and died while working for Pennsylvania Power and Light. That's family lore. Also, logically, maybe that's where Wehrle (bad) luck began.
But nooooo.
William's father, Francis (or Franz) died at the age of 53 when, according to Scott's email, he fell from a trolley pole in 1893. This is precisely why I don't mess with anything that requires the use of electricity.
On top of that, Franz' brother, Frank was hit by a train somewhere in Clinton County, PA. Hit by a train? Yikes. That's some pretty bad Wehrle luck right there. Kind of makes me wonder what happened. Was he trying to race his buckboard over the railroad crossing — and just mistimed it? I have no clue.
But it goes on.
Franz was rather prolific before his death, spawning sons Francis Joseph (who was a justice of the peace and a choirmaster), William (who was electrocuted), John, Edward, Frank (named for his train-racing uncle, I guess), Charles and Emil.
Scott points out that Emil and Francis Joseph both died in their 40s because of tuberculosis.
Emil was already a marked man. When he was a teenager, he lost his right leg when he jumped off a trolley to avoid paying the fare — and was run over by another oncoming trolley.
If this wasn't so sad, it would be funny. A Max Sennett comedy, maybe. I'm still trying to figure out why these boys keep getting run over by trains and trolleys. Maybe the smart gene hadn't found its way into the lineage just yet. Maybe we're still waiting.
Anyway, John, Edward and Charles, it turns out, lived long lives, although Charles was a "troublemaker" and worked at a bar in the hotel his mother owned.
I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about my own brand of Wehrle luck, given some of the things my forebears have gone through. What's a few extra innings anyway compared to jumping in front of a trolley?
When we finally sold our 1966 Wimbledon White convertible Mustang back in February, and collected our check, we pretty much thought that was the end of the story (see here).
Kim and I were excited because we found out the car was bought by a person in Maidstone, Kent, England. Cool.
Happy ending, right?
Not even close.
About a week or two later, Ellen Kelly, the office manager from Streetside Classics in Charlotte (where we had taken the car for consignment) called to give me a heads up.
"There's a bit of a problem with the VIN (vehicle identification number) on the title," she said. "There's nothing you have to worry about. I'm trying to straighten out the paperwork with the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles), and it's possible they might accidentally send the correction to your house instead of to us.
"I'm calling just in case it comes to you, could you please forward it to us?"
Sure, no problem. She went on to tell me there was some kind of typo in the VIN on the title. Meanwhile, the car had been relocated to the port for shipping, but because of the paperwork snafu, it was back in Charlotte. Otherwise, Streetside Classics would have to pay for storage.
Sheesh.
Anyway, I thanked her for keeping us informed, and thought that was the end of it.
Until she called again, a couple weeks later.
"I'm emailing you a document to sign that gives us power of attorney to represent you," said Ellen. "It's a big hassle. We're still trying to get this straightened out."
Holy smokes. All I could think about was that poor buyer in England who'd already paid for his classic 1966 Mustang more than a month previously and had yet to see his car.
I also got curious about the VIN on the title. Kim, fortunately enough, had taken a picture of the VIN plate on the Mustang. We compared it to the one on the title, and sure enough, there it was: in the middle of the long row of numbers and letters, the correct VIN had three ones — 111 —consecutively listed. The title, meanwhile, only had two of those number ones listed.
Yikes. You mean we had the Mustang for more than 20 years with an incorrect VIN on the title? Thank you, DMV.
I thought that was the end of it, that Ellen had finally taken care of everything.
Until I called her a few days ago.
"Ellen," I said. "I can't stand it anymore. Does this story have a happy ending?"
"It does," she assured me, telling me that the car had been shipped to England in April, a couple of months after it had been purchased. The buyer had been completely understanding about everything. Not sure I would have been.
But calling Ellen gave me a sense of relief, knowing that everything was where it should be: the car was correctly retitled and the new owner was delighted, happily driving his classic Mustang with the top down and on the wrong side of the road.
