Today is the Municipal General Election in Louisiana. And today is the Third Day of the First Weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
The Municipal General Election in Louisiana is being held today (but with nothing on my ballot). Today is also the Third Day of the First Weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Today’s schedule highlights Chris Stapleton, Vampire Weekend, Fantasia, and Big Freedia, but unless you clone yourself, you cannot see and hear them all, because with twelve music stages, some acts are on at the same time as other acts. The music starts at about 11:00 am each day and continues until 7:00 pm, if everything goes according to schedule.
Last night I finished reading The Cat Who Went Up the Creek by Lilian Jackson Braun (Ebook). And our LSU Tigers won the first game of a three-game three-day Home SEC College Baseball series with the Auburn Tigers by the score of 5 to 0.
Richard fed the cats, and I woke up at 7:45 am. I did my Book Devotional Reading, and posted to Facebook that today was the Municipal General Election in Louisiana. Richard went to drink coffee and to pick up a prescription at Walmart Pharmacy. I did my Book Review for this weblog and for my Goodreads and Facebook accounts for The Cat Who Went Up the Creek by Lilian Jackson Braun (Ebook). I then paid a bill and wrote out my checks for church. Richard came home, and I ate my breakfast toast and read the Acadiana Advocate out on the porch. I then did my Internet Devotional Reading, and ordered a set of labels for my spice jars from Amazon. I continued reading A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy by Richard L. Hasen (Ebook), then did a couple of Advance Daily Update Drafts for this weblog. I went to the 4:00 pm Saturday Anticipation Mass for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (Cantate Sunday) (Alleluia!). At the NBA Playoffs – First Round, our New Orleans Pelicans lost their Home NBA game with the Oklahoma City Thunder by the score of 85 to 106; our New Orleans Pelicans will be playing a Home NBA game with the Oklahoma City Thunder on Monday, April 29th, with the series at 3 and 0 in favor of the Thunder; our Pelicans need to start winning, or else they will be out of the playoffs after Monday’s game. We ate stuffed bell peppers for dinner, and watched You Can’t Take It With You (1938), which won Best Picture and Best Director, and the first Best Picture adapted from a play that won the Pulitzer Prize (the only other one being Driving Miss Daisy in 1989). Our #6 LSU Lady Tigers lost the second game of a three-game three-day Home SEC College Softball series with the #15 Arkansas Razorbacks by the score of 1 to 4, and our LSU Tigers (27-16, 6-13) are playing the second game of a three-game three-day Home SEC College Baseball series with the Auburn Tigers (20-21, 2-17). And I will now finish this Daily Update, do some reading, and go to bed.
Tomorrow is the Fifth Sunday of Easter (Cantate Sunday) (Alleluia!), the Optional Memorial of Saint Louis Marie de Montfort, Priest (died 1716), the Optional Memorial of Saint Peter Chanel, Priest and Martyr (died 1841), and the Optional Memorial of Saint Gianna Beretta Molla, Wife and Mother (died 1962). And tomorrow is the World Day for Safety and Health at Work, Workers’ Memorial Day, and the fourth day of the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. I will set up my medications for the week starting next Sunday, and make bread. Our #6 LSU Lady Tigers (35-13, 11-12) will be playing the third game of a three-game three-day Home SEC College Softball series with the #15 Arkansas Razorbacks (34-12, 13-17), and our LSU Tigers will be playing the third game of a three-game three-day Home SEC College Baseball series with the Auburn Tigers.
Our Parting Quote on this Saturday evening comes to us from Frankie Manning, American dancer and choreographer (died 2009). Born in 1914 in Jacksonville, Florida, after his parents separated in 1917 he moved at the age of three with his mother, who was a dancer, to Harlem, New York City. Manning’s mother sent him to spend summers with his father, aunt and grandmother on their farm in Aiken, South Carolina. On Saturdays, farmhands and locals would come to the farm to play music on the front porch with harmonicas and a washtub bass. Manning’s grandmother encouraged the bashful boy to get out in the yard and dance with the others. Once he got in the dance circle, he developed a feel for dancing and did not want to stop. Back in New York, he started attending the dances at the Renaissance Ballroom in 1927 after his mother invited him to help her decorate the ballroom for a Halloween dance and promised to take him to the 9:00 dance that night. Watching from the balcony, he was surprised to see his mother dancing formal ballroom styles such as foxtrot and waltz, having only seen her dance before in a much looser and casual style at neighborhood rent parties. He danced with his mother later that night and she told him afterwards that “Frankie, you’ll never be a dancer, because you’re too stiff.” He started listening to records on a Victrola in his bedroom and would practice dancing with a broom or a chair trying to get “un-stiff”. When he was older, he started going to Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, which was for better dancers, and which was also the only integrated ballroom in New York. He frequented the Savoy in the 1930s, eventually becoming a dancer in the elite and prestigious “Kat’s Corner,” a corner of the dance floor where impromptu exhibitions and competitions took place. During a dance contest in 1935, Manning and his partner, Frieda Washington, performed the first aerial in a swing dance competition against George “Shorty” Snowden, the inventor of the term Lindy Hop, and his partner, Big Bea, at the Savoy Ballroom. The airstep he performed was a “back to back roll” and was danced while Chick Webb played “Down South Camp Meeting,” which was Manning’s request after having heard the song earlier in the evening. The airstep went flawlessly to the music and astonished the more than two fhousand audience members. In 1935 Herbert White organized the top Savoy Ballroom lindy hop dancers into a professional performance group that was eventually named Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. Manning created the troupe’s first ensemble Lindy Hop routines and functioned as the group’s de facto choreographer, although without that title. The troupe toured extensively and made several films. While with Whitey’s, Manning also danced with Norma Miller, who became known as the Queen of Swing. Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers disbanded around World War II when many of the male dancers entered the armed forces. Manning himself served in the U.S. Army. After the war, in 1947, Manning created a small performance group called the Congaroos. When the Congaroos disbanded in 1955, Manning quietly settled into a career with the United States Postal Service. Some thirty years later, Manning started his second career in dancing: travelling the world as a renowned instructor and inspiration. In 1982, Al Minns, a former member of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, started to teach Lindy Hop at the Sandra Cameron Dance Center, where he introduced a new generation of dancers to the Lindy Hop. Before he died in 1985, he told his students that Manning, another surviving member of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, also lived in New York City. In 1986 dancers Erin Stevens and Steven Mitchell contacted Manning and asked him to teach them the Lindy Hop. Manning at first declined, before finally agreeing to meet with them; he was skeptical that a much younger generation would really be interested in swing or Lindy. However, Mitchell and Stevens returned to California and helped to spread Lindy Hop to the West Coast and other areas of the United States. Thus, the swing revival began. That same year, Lennart Westerlund contacted Manning and invited him to Sweden to work with The Rhythm Hot Shots. Manning traveled to Sweden in 1987 and returned there every year from 1989 onward to teach at the Herräng Dance Camp. Once the swing dance and Lindy Hop revival took hold during the late 1980s, Manning taught Lindy Hop to eager devotees around the world, occasionally appearing with Norma Miller. At the age of seventy-five, Manning co-choreographed the Broadway musical Black and Blue, for which he received a 1989 Tony Award. Manning’s annual birthday celebrations attracted dancers and instructors from all over the world. His eightieth birthday, in 1994, was commemorated by a weekend-long celebration in New York City; his eighty-fifth celebration culminated in a sold-out party at New York’s Roseland Ballroom, where a pair of his dance shoes were placed in a showcase along with those of dancers such as Fred Astaire. In 2000 he was a recipient of a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States’ highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. That same year he was featured in Ken Burn’s Jazz: A Film. For his eighty-sixth birthday, a huge gala was held in Tokyo in his honor, which included workshops taught by the maestro himself; the climax of the festivities featured a live orchestra. Manning drew a huge crowd of Japanese and foreign expatriate swing enthusiasts for this memorable occasion. Sometimes, dance workshops returned him to places he had not been in decades. For example, Manning first visited Melbourne, Australia in 1939 to perform at the Princess Theatre. The swing revival and Melbourne’s Swing Patrol, brought him back again in 2002; it was his first visit to Melbourne in sixty-three years. Dedicated cruises were organized for his eighty-ninth and ninetieth birthdays; for his birthday dances, Manning followed his custom of dancing with one woman for every year of his life, partnering eighty-nine and ninety women, respectively, in succession. Manning’s autobiography, Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop, written with co-author Cynthia R. Millman, was published by Temple University Press in May 2007. It contained a collection of stories about the early days of swing dancing, Manning’s years performing with Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers, his experiences during World War II, and his post-war dance troupe, the Congaroos. The book also recounted his experiences of the revival of swing dancing that began in the mid-1980s, and the two decades following. Manning was inducted into the National Museum of Dance’s Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in 2009. Manning had been planning to celebrate his ninety-fifth birthday in May 2009 in New York City at a special Lindy Hop dance event over Memorial Day weekend. The event, commonly referred to as Frankie Fest or Frankie 95, proceeded without him but in his memory and gathered dancers and instructors from around the world. In anticipation of the event, dance groups from all over the globe posted more than 160 videos to YouTube of local performances of the Shim Sham (a swing line dance long associated with Manning) as well as many videos of a Savoy-style routine choreographed especially for the Frankie 95 celebration by noted swing dancer and Lindy instructor Peter Strom. On Sunday of Frankie 95, attendees attempted to set three Guinness world records in Central Park, including one for the greatest number of people dancing the Shim Sham simultaneously in one place. Proceeds from the five-day Frankie 95 celebration were used to create a Frankie Manning Foundation. On July 4th, 2012, a road in the village of Herräng, Sweden, was named after Manning, as a gift from the municipality of Norrtälje for the thirty-year jubilee of Herräng Dance Camp (died 2009): “When you are dancing with your partner, for that two and a half minutes, you are in love with each other. You’re corresponding with each other by the moves that you make. It’s a love affair, between you and your partner and the music. You feel the music, you feel your partner, she feels you and she feels the music. So there the three of you are together. You’ve got a triangle, you know. Which one do you love best?”
From The Recamier 