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In Honor of Rachel Carson: “There Was Someone Named Rachel”

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

Jean of "Sheville.org"

Oops50 received the following email recently from our friend Jean Cassidy, one of the great women over at SheVille.org, who has written a piece of music in honor of Rachel Carson. We love Rachel Carson, too, so we are including the lyrics below, from Jean’s email. We would have included the actual score if we could have figured out how to post it! Please contact us at Oops50 to obtain a copy!

Dear Friends,
I’m on a mission to spread the word right now about Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring on its 50th anniversary of publication. Her lifetime work was the catalyst to our environmental movement. Included please find the lyrics page along with the original score of my piece. A small group here will be recording this and sending it out on YouTube soon. If you would like to be notified when it’s available, you can let Oops50 know, and we’ll make sure you get it! In the meantime, please send and share this post with your personal friends and colleagues who might be interested in using or performing the song in celebration of Carson and her important work…no charge, the benefit to me is in the enjoyment of creating the piece and of celebrating her monumental work.

Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist and nature writer and one of the most influential environmentalists of all time. Her books The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and especially the publication of Silent Spring on September 27, 1962, essentially began the environmental movement as we know it today. Silent Spring not only influenced the practices of agricultural science and government, but encouraged all of us to be conscious of and drastically change the way we view our relationship to the natural world.

For more information, please go to: http://green.wikia.com/wiki/Silent_Spring

Jean Cassidy

www.SheVille.org

Rachel Carson

Here are the lyrics to Jean’s piece:

There Was Someone Named Rachel

(words and music – Jean Cassidy/arrangement – Catherine Haas Riley)

Verse 1: Middle’s Melody

There was someone named Rachel, was very wise you see.

She knew a town in America that lived in harmony

with all the life around it, birds and all living things.

She wrote a book you might have read, it’s called Silent Spring.

Chorus

So that the day will dawn upon us when we will see the light,

as the night returns to morning everything will be all right.

Verse 2

There was someone named Robert, was very wise you see.

In nineteen forty-five he feared the destruction there could be

with energy and matter, Los Alamos was the place,

but he knew through history and art that humanity had a face.

Bridge: Soprano’s Melody

We are a people coming to light, humankind regaining its sight.

Can you feel it? Can you feel it?

Verse 3

There was someone named Julia, was very wise you see.

Within the redwood forest she saved an ancient tree.

She lived among its branches, that’s how she earned her fame.

‘Twas rescued from the lumberjack, now Luna is its name.”

Chorus

So that the day will dawn upon us when we will see the light,

as the night returns to morning everything will be all right.

Coda

We are a people coming to light, humankind regaining its sight.

Can you feel it, can you feel it, (can you feel it)?

Tags: environment, Rachel Carson, Sheville, Silent Spring, women over 50, women over fifty, women writers, womenbabyboomerbloggers, womenbabyboomerwriters
Posted in Beautiful Women >50, Other Voices, The Environment | No Comments »

Watching the Olympics

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

I must be getting old. Watching the Olympics last night, I found myself doing the following: worrying about all the potential injuries that those young, driven bodies could sustain (or already have sustained!); suffering through the gymnastic routines with the mothers in the stands (my favorite part of the games was watching Aly Raisman’s parents move back and forth with her routine); feeling sorry for the beautiful Russian gymnast who lost to the American team because of a series of unfortunate events; and, finally, thinking that maybe it isn’t all that great for a young, 25-year-old athlete to win 19 medals—that maybe it would be better for Michael Phelps if he actually didn’t conquer that record–if he actually encountered something that he couldn’t do!

Michael Phelps

That wasn’t all I was thinking.

I admit I was also blown away by some of the amazing things the human body can do when it is trained and trained and trained into shape. And I found myself, like so many other people, wanting to go outside and do a cartwheel on the front lawn.

Weightlifter's Injury

But I also couldn’t help wondering–especially during the gymnastics and the weight lifting, where you see the athlete’s muscles straining–how we will know when we have actually reached the limit of human potential—how we will know when to stop pushing for more world records, since that final push could be the one that kills a young athlete instead of just putting them out of commission for a while.

As I said, I must be getting old.

Finish Line

Tags: gymnastics, injuries, Michael Phelps, Olympics, weight lifting, women over 50, women writers
Posted in Aging, Getting Older, Health | 2 Comments »

Saying Goodbye to a Childhood Hero?

Thursday, July 26th, 2012

I guess childhood heroes can’t stay that way forever.

I just finished reading an article in “The Atlantic” about John Kennedy. It was actually a review of two new books about him, but the review seemed really to be the author’s expression of her extreme disappointment in finding out that John F. Kennedy—as in “Ask not what your country can do for you…” and “Profiles in Courage”—was actually not that great a guy. He was a terrible womanizer, and his marriage was a sham. Or, if not a complete sham, since the couple did seem to love each other on some level, at least a partial sham that doesn’t add up to the rosy picture that Jackie and John presented to the press and the world.

I share the author’s disappointment. It’s hard for me to square in my head my childhood picture of Kennedy and the one that apparently comes out in those two new memoirs. Let’s put it this way: the escapades that John Kennedy had with multiple White House interns make Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout!

So, it got me to thinking about how political heroes were a huge part of the mythology of my childhood. My mother was an ardent Democrat, and her motto was, basically, if the person was a Democrat, he/she had to be all right. She didn’t really want to know the dirty underbelly of any politician’s life—as long as they thought and believed the way she did. Her great heroes, in descending order: Adlai Stevenson, “the man with the hole in his shoe,” Franklin Roosevelt, the man of “fireside chats” and the kind of courage in the face of fear that had carried her family through the bleakest hours of World War II, Hubert Humphrey, a worker for equality and justice whose own shot at the White House was ruined by the Vietnam War, and, toward the end of her life, Bill Clinton. She liked Lyndon Johnson, and she liked John Kennedy, but they never made it to the same level on her podium as those other four.

My Hero in the White House with his kids

But John Kennedy was my hero. He was young and handsome. And he had a glamorous wife. And, most of all, he had Caroline and John-John. And, when he was shot in Dallas, and my 4^th-grade teacher collapsed in grief, it seemed natural to me that the whole world stopped turning for a day or so. I just couldn’t see how such a handsome, glamorous man could actually be dead. As we stood in line for hours upon hours to try to walk by his casket in the Rotunda (we never made it to the Capitol building, since the line was too long, and my sisters and I were too cold and hungry, so my mother took mercy on us) or as we shivered in the cold on a Washington street to watch the funeral procession go by, I got it. I was only 10, but I felt caught up in it all. I cried to see the riderless horse. I was already completely enthralled by Jackie, but her long, black funeral veil was the final touch—topped only in tragedy by John-John’s salute. When Kennedy died, and the whole country went into mourning—over lost youth, lost beauty, lost Camelot—I was right there with them.

John-John's Salute

In my head, JFK became larger than life.

(more…)

Tags: Adlai Stevenson, Bill Clinton, Camelot, fantasy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, heroes, Hubert Humphrey, John F. Kennedy, real people, women over 50, women writers, womenbabyboomers
Posted in Beautiful Women >50, Getting Older, Politics | 4 Comments »

Sadhvi Sez: Being Terminated, Hurray for ExxonMobil, and some Pink Floyd

Friday, May 6th, 2011

SADHVI

Well, I want to thank all of our readers and fans who clicked on the Google Adsense ads to the left side of our site. It did help us out with a penny a click. And we got our first check for $100 recently, which means 10,000 of you clicked on one of those ridiculous ads that seemed to have nothing to do with our site. If you notice, there is now a blank space where those ads used to be. It seems that we have been terminated since someone clicked too often on those ads, according to the terms that we agreed to. I was a bit surprised & embarrassed to get that email notification from Google, but after a short while, I realized that whoever was the guilty party was only supporting us.

What else? Well, according to the May 16, 2011 issue of TIME magazine (did you know they date their magazine ahead?) which I subscribe to and get in my mailbox located at the end of my driveway, and actually sit down to read,

69% is the “increase in ExxonMobil’s first-quarter earnings from the same period last year; the oil-and-gas giant made almost $11 billion, marking one of its most profitable quarters ever”.

With gas prices going up weekly during the last couple of months based on whatever fear-based shortage is being fabricated, I was deeply saddened by the greed of, well, whoever owns ExxonMobil – who is that? Mr. Rogers? Big Bird? Wall Street?

Maybe I really should consider getting some sort of pill that will make me feel comfortably numb. Some of my closest friends have told me that I am bi-polar, and it’s just a sickness that can be fixed with a pill. Which makes the following YouTube video of one of my favorite bands, Pink Floyd, performing “Comfortably Numb” rather appropriate. Enjoy!

Tags: crone, pink floyd sadhvi sez, sadhvisez, women growing older, women writers, womenbabyboomers, womenover50
Posted in Aging, Beautiful Women >50, Health, Home, Journey, Living, Main, Menopause, Sadhvi Sez, World | 2 Comments »