stars baby, stars

I was running to and fro the market this afternoon and tuned The Ring’s radio to an oldies station I’ve taken to of late. By oldies I mean the Journey, Whitney Houston, Billy Joel oldies, not the Frankie Valli and Fats Domino that served as oldies in my youngies. The voice I hear at the first song break is that of the one and only Kasey Kasem – doing the countdown on a rainy Sunday. It used to be a three or four-hour process of Kasey rocking through the Top 40 those long ago Sunday nights on AM radio in Omaha. He gave you flashbacks, nuggets of trivia, and the ever-popular long-distance dedication. What he does now is something called the AT10, which must stand for American Top 10 (genius, I know) that appears to take about two hours based on how quickly he was actually spinning the ‘hits’. What I heard were two songs back-to-back as flashbacks to previous AT10 charts: Whitney Houston doing Greatest Love of All, and Extreme rocking More Than Words from 1991. Wow! Kasey added in the little nugget that Gary Cherone was, for a short time, the lead singer of Van Halen after Sammy Hagar’s departure. That’s not trivia, that’s merely propping up ol’ Kasey with something to say. Eventually I heard Alicia Keys singing her newest hit that must blasting at all the local roller rinks. The Top 40 was an amazing thing back in the 70s when singles were actually sold for $.99 a pop at Westroads Mall. I’d take them home and organize them in a little hard case with handle that held about 60 or 70 discs. I kept them in order (as one would expect), I learned the b-sides, and I stacked them on that .45 tirejack device that spit down a new pop hit ever three minutes. Man, you could stack about a dozen on the portable turntable. Those were the days. I used to tape the Kasey’s Top 40 onto a quality Radio Shack cassette by a microphone laid up against the speaker on the nearest radio; I remember spending eight or nine hours every New Year’s Eve writing down every song that made the year-end Top 100. Kasey still has the pipes and could probably make me tear up if he played David Soul (aka Hutch) singing some dedication to a love lost across all the miles. “Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.” You know it baby.



The President’s daughter had a lovely wedding dress. Don’t say I’m partisan, I can reach across the aisle.

Hey to people.

T