Now THIS is pretty cool! Disney has created a website where you can listen to the soundtrack of nearly 50 Disney classic films online – and I’m not talking about just the songs, but the entire soundtrack – dialog and all. In fact, I’m listening to Peter Pan right now, and listening without the visual aspect changes the whole experience.

http://www.tubedisney.com

The boss has a blog! Lesley Leighton, the artistic director of Los Robles Master Chorale (with which I sing) has gone and published A Musician’s View in which, in her words, she will “write occasionally about music, politics, food and anything else that comes to mind.”

First post was July 8 2009 and there have been two since. As busy a career as she has, I don’t know how she finds the time to post, but I’ll be reading when she does.

So where were you on July 20, 1969?

I was thirteen at the time, headed into my freshman year in high school. It was my first summer going to church at Merced First Baptist, and the youth choir was on a mini-tour of churches in Concord and Richmond. We were set to sing in the evening worship service at First Baptist in Richmond. We were one of the church’s classrooms, gathered around a 13-inch black-and-white TV. The lunar lander was already on the surface of the moon, and we were watching what could have been a still picture from a camera mounted on one of the LEM’s landing legs. The service was to start at 7PM, and we were waiting until the last minute in hopes that we’d see Neil Armstrong clamber down the ladder and stand on the moon.

But it was not to be. It turned out to be almost another hour, at 7:56 PM Pacific Daylight Time, before he stepped off the LEM onto the lunar soil and uttered those immortal words. So we all missed seeing it live.

That was 40 years and 39 minutes ago as I write this; in some ways it seems like a long time, and in other ways like no time at all. But to put it into perspective, do you know what was happening 40 years previous to man’s first steps on the moon?

• The first Academy Awards were presented that year as people were flocking to movie theaters to see the latest innovation – ‘talkies’.
• The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, then the longest in the world, opens for the first time.
• Herbert Hoover was sworn in as president that year.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average was at 381, followed shortly by the Wall Street crash that heralded the beginning of the Great Depression. The Dow wouldn’t be that high again until 1954.

So is forty years a long time? I’d say so – but what have we done with that opportunity? I can scarcely believe that we were ever on the moon. We’ve squandered our momentum.

Oh, by the way – another momentous occasion on July 20, 1969: I had my first Big Mac. McDonalds wouldn’t make it to Merced for another three years or so.

I was all set to watch a local fireworks display this evening, put on in conjunction with the Valley Cultural Center’s annual 4th of July concert in Woodland Hills. They were expecting upwards of 25,000 people for the concert and the fireworks display to follow (I kinda doubt that number). The fireworks were to be launched from the rooftop of the Marriott Hotel tower, so I figured that anywhere in the vicinity would yield a  pretty good view. Wrong again. They didn’t much clear the treeline from where we were, and since we were a half-mile away, they pretty much disappeared in the surrounding streetlights. I’ll know better next year.

I must say, though, that the ad hoc illicit displays in the surrounding neighborhoods were very impressive. In fact, they rivaled the displays from the fairgrounds after the stock car races that we’d watch from the street corner by my house when I was growing up, waving the sparklers with the white-hot metal wires, feeling the sparks fall on our bare legs. OOCH! OUCH! MORE! MORE! Now what sparklers are allowed are made of wood, and barely throw off any heat at all. Too bad for the kids of today.

Hope you enjoyed the holiday!