Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most

This song is in my all time Top 20 Songs Of All Time. I have perhaps 12 artists giving their spin. I play it often at this time of year & I have 2 different versions (Ricki Lee Jones & Ella Fitzgerad) that bookend my Spring Mix that friends are clamoring for:

Once I was a sentimental thing

Threw my heart away each spring

Now a spring romance hasn't got a chance

Promised my first dance to winter

All I've got to shows a splinter

 For my little fling!

Spring this year has got me feeling

 Like a horse that never left the post

I lie in my room staring up at the ceiling

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Mornings kiss wakes trees & flowers,

& to them I'd like to drink a toast

I walk in the park just to kill lonely hours

Spring can really hang you up the most.

All afternoon those birds twitter twit,

I know the tune, this is love, this is it!

Heard it before & I know the score

& I've decided that spring is a bore!

Love seemed sure around the New Year

Now it’s April & love is just a ghost

Spring arrived on time,

 Only what became of you, dear?

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Spring is here, there's no mistaking

Robins building nests from coast to coast

My heart tries to sing

 So they won't hear it breaking

Spring can really hang you up the most!

College boys are writing sonnets

In the tender passion they're engrossed

But I'm on the shelf

 With last years Easter bonnets

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Love came my way, I hoped it would last

We had our day, now that's all in the past

Spring came along, a season of song

Full of sweet promise

 But something went wrong!

Doctors once prescribed a tonic,

Sulphur & molasses was the dose

Didn't help a bit, my condition must be chronic

Spring can really hang you up the most!

All alone, the party's over

Old man winter was a gracious host

But when you keep praying

 For snow to hide the clover

Spring can really hang you up the most!

Landesman/Wolf

1955

May Day, My Way

May Day has to be the Teabaggers favorite holiday; they just love to celebrate the seeds of Socialism & Unions, mixed with a little Paganism. I am sure that they would find solidarity with me, I am after all, a TEAMSTER (SAG, AFTRA, AEA) & a supporter of workers' rights.

Banksy

May Day just might have more holidays than any other day of the year. It is a celebration of Spring. It is a day of political protests. It is a pagan festival, the feast day of St Philip, & St James- patron saints of laborers, & a day for organized labor. In many countries, it is a national holiday. In medieval England, people would celebrate the start of spring by going out to the country or woods to "go a-Maying, gathering greenery & flowers. Another English tradition is the maypole. Some towns had permanent maypoles that would stay up all year; others put up a new one each May. The pole, a phallus symbol of virility, would be hung with greenery & ribbons, brightly painted, & decorated, & served as the focus for the festivities.

My first May Pole Dance, in the school's new gymnasium.

Here is Portland, where there are as many strip clubs & titty-bars as churches, we have a special way of exalting the May Pole Male Pole Dance:

In many countries, May Day is also Labor Day. This originates with the United States labor movement in the late 19th Century. On May 1, 1886, unions across the country went on strike, demanding that the standard workday be shortened to 8 hours. The organizers of these strikes included socialists, anarchists, & others in organized labor movements. Rioting in Chicago's Haymarket Square, including a bomb thrown by an anarchist, led to the deaths of a dozens of people & the injury of over 100 more.

The protests were successful, as 8 hour work days eventually did become the norm for most people, if not for me. Labor leaders, socialists, & anarchists around the world took the American strikes as a rallying point, choosing May Day as a day for protests, parades, & pep talks. It was a major state holiday in the former Soviet Union & other communist countries.

Portland expects 7000 + people to participate in our annual May Day parade & rally on the South Park Blocks. Occupy Portland clashed with the Portland police earlier in the day. I am too old to be proletariat. I am going to stay home & do as little actual labor as I can muster.

Books 'N Authors and All That Jazz - 10th year

 Saturday April 28, 2012, I attended Books 'N Authors and All That Jazz, a conference at Weatherford College. It was their 10th Anniversary celebration and they put on a good show. I hung in the authors' wing, chatting with folks about my book - My Zoo World. Plenty of interest and enthusiasm

 My display included pictures of some of the critters cavorting through my chapters. Linda T's cat Benji was a star, as well as son Kevin's pit bull, Rusty. Certainly conversation starters.

 Other Trinity Writer attendees included Ann Summerville (A Graceful Death, High Tide, Storms & Secrets, and her latest The Berton Hotel), Sharon Owen (Thicker Than Water), and Arly Pineo (Cheat the Wind). Not pictured here are Sheryl Nelms (poet) and Kalvin Weaver (Kobra).  We hung out, made new connections, attended some classes (Dave Lieber is always a treat), and discussed the world of publishing in 2012 - ever changing, that's for sure.

The grand finale included some Jazz, thanks to the college jazz combo - very cool. Linda Bagwell, coordinator, also announced winners of various writing contests. Alas, I did not have to leap from my seat.
Nonetheless it was a worthwhile day in the world of writing and publishing....and all that jazzzzzzzzzz!