I'm Gonna Be Strong.

One of the women who auditioned for our Houston production of LIZZIE yesterday sang this song, which I hadn't thought of in a long time but for a while years ago I was obsessed with: I'm Gonna Be Strong (by Weil/Mann). I knew it from this Buddy Miller version on his great record Cruel Moon (that's the incredible Joy White on the duet vocal). With its Brill Building history I should have known there'd be an earlier hit version but somehow this one satisfied me enough that I didn't investigate.

I think the arrangement she sang in the audition was this one. Check out Cyndi Lauper, so young, and already blowing my mind:

And Jackie DeShannon? How did I not know about this song?

Here's the original by Gene Pitney. Pretty great:

I think I still like the Buddy Miller/Joy White version best.

Nothing, Really.

Two things that I’ve started to blog about have turned into much longer, in-depth pieces of writing than I’d planned. One of them is, well, C and I have been watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show, starting at the beginning – we’re on season 3 now – and it stirs up all kinds of stuff for me from the various times in my life when I watched the show. So that blog entry is turning into a sort of biographical essay.

The other thing is a meditation on how C and I are different. I mentioned this topic to C and he was afraid I might paint an unflattering picture of him. I just think it’s an interesting topic. I married a banking lawyer. How could I not find that a rich topic to contemplate?

So I find myself with nothing to write about but a residual urge to post something today.

We went to Target today. There’s a Target about a 5 minute walk from us, across the bridge to the Bronx. Very convenient. I love that it’s there when we need toilet paper, or laundry detergent, or kitchen tools, but I don’t enjoy the experience. It’s always mobbed. (Did you really need to bring all five kids and grandpa to the Target? Really?) It’s always hard to find what you need. You always come home with 25 plastic bags for 20 items. (I’m not generally a fan of the Bloomberg nanny state, but I support the plastic bag ban. The plastic bags are out of control. It’s an addiction. It’s pathological the way cashiers are constantly pushing plastic bags at you. We need an intervention.)

Mostly what we went to Target for was cleaning supplies. We just hired a new apartment-cleaning service (see above re how C and I are different) because the woman who was cleaning our apartment was siphoning off and watering down our dish soap and shampoo. This new service uses all natural products, so they asked us to lay in a store of vinegar and baking soda, neither of which I could find at Target in the sizes I wanted.

So I apologize for this blog post which is really about nothing. I’ve spent a lot of time lately being either angry or sad or anxious or some combination of those. I could rifle through the various possible reasons, but to be honest I think it might just be seasonal or hormonal or random. There are stresses in my life, but aren’t there always? I want to recommit to the project of figuring out if our health insurance covers psychotherapy because I would love to start seeing the therapist I saw for years and who was measurably helpful back before I left New York. I read all the various booklets about our insurance plan and the language was too vague for me to be certain. The answer must be somewhere.

Here’s a picture of my mom. The Mary Tyler Moore essay is in part about my mother because the image I have of Mom from the seventies is mixed up with the image I have of Mary Tyler Moore. (My dad is Bob Newhart.)