Month: July 2017

Sarah and Dave gave us tickets for our anniversary to see “Motown- the Musical” and I am glad they did.

We went to the show yesterday at the National Arts Centre. Great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

I was wondering how Barry Gordy – who wrote the musical book – could fit a storyline around 60+ Motown classics but it didn’t take long to find out. There were actually three storylines:

1. How Barry Gordy founded Motown Records, how he developed it from a “black artist” label to a worldwide success, how he moved to LA, how the major record companies stole his performers away and left him bitter and disillusioned.
2. How Motown and specifically Marvin Gaye reacted to, and interacted with the turbulence in American society in the ’60s and early ’70s.
3.  Gordy’s long term romance with Diana Ross.

All the hits were there. All the major players were portrayed – Marvin, Smokey, the Funk Brothers, Mary Wells, The Four Tops, The Temptations, The Supremes, The Contours, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, The Jackson 5, Holland Dozier and Holland etc. etc.

Chester Gregory (Barry) and Allison Semmes (Diana) were standouts. Both had show stopper numbers, as did the precocious 12 year old who played Michael Jackson (right down to the Moonwalk moves and uptempo vocals.)

The story begins with young Barry in 1938 and ends with the Motown 25th anniversary celebration in 1983. They used lots of actual film footage of the historical events as a backdrop to the music.

Barry Gordy is now 87. All his fans are getting old too. But we had a good time yesterday.

Remember back when you dialed up one of the 4 VHF channels you could get on your 21 inch B&W TV, and then went outside to pull the wires to rotate the antenna? I do too – but nowadays ain’t your grandpa’s TV era.

Last weekend my wife went down to visit her mother – and noticed that MIL’s 10 year old LCD TV was a mess. It had double images, shadowy figures and jumpy behavior- all bad. I checked online and this was symptomatic of display failure. Not worth fixing.

Maria’s mom is 87 years old and mostly watches Italian TV shows. She doesn’t stream video, has no DVD player. All she needs is a simple dumb LCD TV the same size as the bad one. So it was off to Amazon where we got a new 32 inch Vizio – decent specs, good price. In a couple of days it was here and then we were off to Kingston to install the beast.

After disconnecting the old TV and putting it in the car to recycle later, we took the old SDTV cable box to the Cogeco store and swapped it out for an HD model – new TV, no point in watching crappy old standard def shows. I got everything hooked up. Then I had to wait an hour for the box to initialize – which it did NOT do. I had to call Cogeco tech support, then wait another 45 minutes. I was 2 hours into the install and still didn’t have a picture.

Finally I got some action out of the box. Then I had to reprogram the remote so that it would switch the TV off and on, and finally switch both the box and TV off and on in sequence. This activity was slightly more complicated than installing a wifi computer network – but I digress.

After the remote was working I then had to deal with Cogeco’s archaic high definition programming. Unlike Rogers Cable – which just broadcasts HD on every channel if it’s available – Cogeco is still in the late 20th Century. You have to dial up the HD channels in the range of 700-800 and none of the channels have numbers remotely similar to the old SDTV ones. Maria’s mom will have to relearn her channel surfing I guess.

It was worth it though – at least her TV picture stays in one place and looks great in HD. She’s happy. And I am longing for that rotary dial and wires on the antenna.