Non-political party

It’s Election Day, so in honor of the recently deceased Vaughn Meader, I’d like to remind you to get out and vote. Vote for the Kennedy of your choice, but vote!

So, let’s see . . . continued polarization, destruction of our freedoms, push for a theocracy — or a guy who can’t seem to make a compelling case against any of that? I just want this all to be over, even though those of us not in a swing state haven’t seen a single ad (and I’m okay with that). Tonight’s probably going to be a long night. My thought (and perhaps fear) is that in fact it won’t be close at all. But enough of that . . . .

Went to an interesting housewarming/Halloween party on Saturday. Friends had pulled up stakes from the middle of Scotia out to the Glenville hills, an area I hadn’t been in in many many years. Saw a bunch of friends, had a good time, got to have some semi-meaningful conversations about music only slightly interrupted by cries of “Daddy!” Had an interesting conversation with a woman that I apparently went to high school with but whom I wouldn’t have recognized in a million years (I think when I said that she probably thought I meant she had aged, which of course I didn’t mean, but I remembered her as a very straight-haired redhead, which she was no longer). One of those people I knew and could say “hi” to, but I don’t think we had many (or maybe any) classes together, and I can’t remember a single time after 8th grade that we were in a room together. So odd that even at a relatively small school there can be these people you barely know. Turned out she had been a professional ballet dancer for a number of years, so I could talk a little bit about my ballerinas, who were there.

Halloween? Three million kids. Nearly ran out of candy. The kids came in waves, though, so I was able to watch a really enjoyably bad drive-in feature called “Tormented,” about a jazz player on an island whose courtship of a woman is slightly disturbed by the ghost of the other woman, who proclaimed that if she couldn’t have him no one would, just before she fell from the top of the lighthouse. The big scene is in the church, when an invisible presence blows in the doors and slowly moves up the aisle, making the flowers wilt and the candles dim, and then flips the pages in the preacher’s hands from the wedding ceremony to “Burial of The Dead”! Great stuff.