[lit-ideas] Re: Hollaback Girl
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:46:30 -0700
on 6/12/05 5:59 PM, Erin Holder at erin.holder@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Aha! I knew this song had profound meaning.
> http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/05/35/music-stacy.php
>
Funny. Very funny.
What have we been doing? In the pouring rain the new Portland Rose Queen
began her reign with the usual parade which lacked, among the assembled
throng, any and all representatives of the Greenberg/Ritchie clan. You, of
course, have been waiting, with bait on your breath, to hear whether we're
talking Queen Bosombath (a South Asian name, I kid you not) or Queen A. N.
Other. The answer is that they chose a blonde Irish girl, Katelyn Jean
Callaghan. Somehow the Ohio State Alumni marching band was including among
the umpteen thousand tuba players that sloshed their way forward toward
Goose Hollow or wherever the parade ends (it's been a good while since we've
attended). It really was a lot of rain.
We were at a Humanistic Mitzvah ceremony, which was heartbreaking and good
at the same time. The boy did a fine job. The girl did too, talking about
her father's village in Bavaria, which had a Hitler Youth camp that was
turned into a resettlement center for those who survived concentration
camps. Some people elected to go no further, and so the father grew up with
an odd mix of folk around him--conservative Catholic Bavarians, among whom
there were probably early supporters of Hitler, and Jews who made it
through. The father married an American Jew, came to live here, became a
cardiologist. He had been in practice a matter of months when he was
diagnosed with a brain tumor. I can't recall how long ago that was, six
months perhaps. What was clear to all, when he came to the podium to say
how proud he was of his daughter, was that the tumor was pressing on speech
and motion centers.
After the ceremony, we went on to a party to celebrate Sarah's graduation.
Sarah, Eve and Mike's firstborn, was the first baby I liked enough to think
that fatherhood might be for me. And here she was, out of school and headed
to a year in Israel. We asked her to promise that she wouldn't join the
army. She didn't. But she did read from a graduation gift, which you might
enjoy:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/060961021X/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-6950553-0399000
#reader-page
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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