The Oppenheimer Report 6/26/17

Last Thursday night, Hunters Bay Radio held its annual fundraiser concert at the Algonquin Theatre in Huntsville. It’s something HBR has been doing for a while, but this year, the theme was The Last Waltz. Local singer/songwriter Sean Cotton organized and produced this reprise of the 1977 concert in which The Band performed their farewell show along with many famous musical guests. The last concert that The Band would ever play, the original The Last Waltz, was legendary. Some of you have likely seen the very well-known documentary film about it, produced and directed by Martin Scorcese.    

When Sean Cotton asked me to be a part of the show, many months ago, I didn’t think much of it. Sure, of course I’d sing a song and do my part. I was flattered to be asked to perform with a band on the stage of the Algonquin Theatre. What I did not see coming was the enthusiasm with which the other local musicians embraced the show. Over the past several months, there were hundreds of emails and Facebook messages fired back and forth to finalize the plans for the big night. There was a palpable energy in the air, and I was quite frankly surprised to see everyone so excited about performing. One marathon rehearsal session was scheduled at Kandis and Troy Sinister’s house (brave souls!) in Huntsville, two days before the show . While I only heard some of the artists rehearse (there were fifteen or twenty different artists who rehearsed), I knew then and there that this was going to be a great show.

Last Thursday night marked the very first time I have ever rehearsed a song with a full band and sung in front of a paying audience. I don’t play live very often, and of course I was apprehensive. I’ll perform if I’m asked, usually solo, but I don’t love the stage the way some musicians do. Since I’ve moved up north, I’ve had some opportunities to play with full bands, and most of the musicians up here are generous and accommodating. I remember my musical colleague Juan Barbosa once telling me that he prefers to play with a band, although his solo performances are exceptional. I better understand this now that I have had occasion to perform with a band. When everything clicks, and the musicians are firing on all cylinders, as they were last week, it’s a huge rush. “The Band”, Sean Cotton, Michael Phillips, Sean Roper, and Alison Boyer all did a wonderful job, and as a neophyte to the world of musical entertainment, this was heady stuff for me. To perform in a proper theatre such as The Algonquin, with a good band backing me, well it doesn’t get much better than that! I was up second on the roster, and before I had a chance to get nervous, I was on and off. For just one moment, right after I sang, I was ready to hop on the tour bus and hit the road with the band.    

Hunters Bay Radio, or The Bay 88.7 FM as they’re calling themselves these days, is the main focus of my efforts now that I am retired. Because of the forward-thinking vision and determination of Managing Director Jeff Carter, this station is poised to grow exponentially over the next few years. In under three years they have more than doubled their advertising revenue and our on air and internet audiences have grown substantially.  While the station is still not on firm ground financially, with every penny earned pumped back into operations, equipment, and charitable contributions, new satellites in Gravenhurst and  soon Bracebridge will help to grow our audience quickly. My small part is to contribute to the music end, and to try and  to help draw in the best local and regional music we can attract. Word is out that we are musician -friendly. Commercial radio is, in my opinion, on injured reserve. The playlists are lame and redundant, and the support for the local residents is virtually non-existent. The Last Waltz concert last Thursday night was a reminder of what a small community radio station can mean to the locals. As anyone who was there will attest, that show was the meaning of community, a community of which I am proud to be a part.   

 - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 6/19/17

My grandfather Harry Lehman and me, shortly before he passed on

Yesterday was Father’s Day, and I offer a belated Happy Father’s Day to all who deserve it. As I’ve said many times in this blog, I am not a father, but have ever-increasing respect for all the good parents out there. I had a conversation with my cousin from Oregon, Harry Lehman III, or “The Third” as he signs his correspondences, and we talked a bit about our respective fathers. His dad, my mother’s brother, was a wild man when he was a boy, and Uncle Harry got into all sorts of trouble. If I recall correctly, he once stole the family limo for a joyride when he was far too young to drive. Harry III was amused by my story about stealing a box of crayons when I was little. He told me a similar story involving him and his dad. When he was young, he stole some candy bars from a store while shopping with his dad, and when his dad asked where he got the candy bars, he lied and said the store owner had given them to him. Harry Jr. said something like “What a generous thing that man did; we should go in and thank him.” Busted, and lesson learned. The unruly boy had grown into a pretty good father.

Both my mother and her brother had an excellent role model in Harry Lehman Sr., founder and CEO of The Wildroot Company, the successful hair tonic business in Buffalo. By most accounts, Harry Sr. was a very successful, kind, generous, funny, philanthropist who had an “open door” policy for his all employees. Harry Jr. may have been a handful, but he grew into a kind and generous man as well, who was loved by everyone who knew him.

I never knew my paternal grandfather; he died before I was born. Diminutive in stature, fastidious in both personal appearance and habits, and far more introverted than my maternal grandfather, Walter was quite a different man than Harry. The family history on my dad’s side is a little murky. Dad did tell me that Walter Oppenheimer was a strict man. My dad is a bit of a mystery to me, I suppose I didn’t show much interest in his past. He was in his mid-forties when I (his only biological child) was born, and he was not a particularly demonstrative man. Still, he was always there to catch me when I fell, and in retrospect, he was a fantastic dad. Because of our age difference, we locked horns when I was a teenager. I regret giving him such a hard time. In the end, we grew to know and respect each other as colleagues in business, and the greatest lessons he taught me were by example. I wish I’d asked him more questions about his family history. I loved my dad a lot.

It takes a village, right? I look around today at the young people in distress who cross my path, and I want to help them. Some are orphans, some did not have great parents, some are the by-products of bitter divorce, some just lost their way despite having good parents. It is hubris to assume I can change another human being for the better, and I don’t presume to have those skills or answers. I was shown unconditional love, without judgment, and my goal is to pay that valuable lesson forward. The heroes in the world are the good parents, the teachers; the positive role models who touch our lives, not the spoiled celebrities and entitled athletes whose bad behavior attracts an inordinately large amount of public attention. I read that Father’s Day had its origins in the commemoration of a single father who successfully and selflessly raised his five children. Perhaps we’d do well to focus on these good people and leave the spoiled and unworthy to the annals of historical anonymity.     

Thursday night, pending no healthcare crises, I’ll be singing a song by The Band at the Hunters Bay Radio Last Waltz fundraiser concert, at the Algonquin Theatre in Huntsville, along with 24 or more of my fellow local musicians. To Shauna’s mom, the resilient, remarkable, and ever-entertaining E.T., I wish you a speedy recovery from your recent health issues. To the rest of my readers, if your parents are still around, give em a hug for me. It's a tough and often thankless job,  and I suspect most of them are doing the best they can.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report - 6/12/17

My best friend Bob piloting the Porta-Bote on Lake Erie

Yesterday, I melted my sandals. Yes, I melted my sandals. I didn’t mean to, and I was very upset to have done so. Those sandals and I have traveled the country over the years. It was just one of those days.

Did you ever have one of those days, when you could swear some little gremlin was behind the curtain screwing with you? Yesterday was like that for me. I’d set something down, and when I looked away, it simply disappeared. I’d drop something and it would fall into the one place where it was unrecoverable. There were at least ten or fifteen annoying little things that happened in a short time which suggested to me that I was out of sync with the universe. Upon reflection, it’s funny, but I wasn’t laughing at the time.

Yesterday, the weather was fantastic, and after doing all the bungled projects I needed to do, each which took twice as long as it should have, I decided to reward myself with the first lap of the season around the lake in my Porta-Bote (my little folding dinghy). Yes, I’d spent most of the day breaking things, looking for things that went missing under my nose, cleaning up things I’d spilled, etc., but now it was time for some good old-fashioned fun in the sun. There are few things I enjoy more than putting around in a boat, any boat.

I pulled the little outboard out of storage, mounted it on the boat, and put the gas can in the boat. I had to go up to the house for a minute, and when I came back, I stepped into the boat before I realized that there was liquid in the bilge. I thought it strange that water had suddenly leaked into the boat. As it washed over my feet, I realized that it wasn’t water but gasoline, about a half a gallon of it. Somehow, the gas can that I had placed in the boat, which had held gas without leaking for the last three weeks, emptied into the bilge making a big mess. I decanted most of the spilled fuel into another gas can, and mopped up the bilge with a rag, grudgingly accepting that this was just one of those Murphy’s Law kind of days. What did not occur to me was that the rubber (or plastic) soles of my sandals might decompose in gasoline. As I got back on the dock and looked down on the dinghy, I could see multiple black footprints on the floor of the boat, made out of melted plastic from the bottom of my beloved sandals. For some inexplicable reason, that became the tipping point. I wish someone had been there to film me losing it on that dock, jumping up and down screaming FUCK! FUCK!! FUCK!!! FUCK!!!! FUUUUUUCK! That would have been Facebook gold for sure.

Sometimes karma’s a bitch, and every so often, life throws me a little curve ball to remind me of my place in the cosmic food chain. Maybe it was that raccoon I hit with my car in 2003, or the time I tried to steal that box of crayons when I was five, or the morbid fascination I have with the natural disasters that befall other people, or the fact that I stopped giving to certain charities, or that I sometimes over-stuff garbage bags that I take to the dump. Hell, I don’t know, maybe it was the accumulation of thousands of other little crimes against humanity of which I am guilty. Sometimes life throws a day like yesterday at me to remind me not to take my good fortune for granted. I lose my perspective from time to time. Lesson learned; thank you. There, I have purged my dysfunction (for a few days).

Shauna never liked those sandals anyway.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report - 6-5-17

Kareen on left and James in the middle 

It’s been a strange week. I’m fighting that old beast depression, and this past week it grabbed me by the neck like a pit bull. There’s a lady who passed away last week in Huntsville, and although I did not know her well, we’d spent a little time together while James Carroll was undergoing his chemo treatments. Kareen Burns hosted a show at Hunters Bay Radio called K On The Bay and, I believe, she was the longest running show host on HBR. Her interviews were always insightful and interesting. I spent a little time with her on the several occasions when she’d come to visit James at the hospital, and I know she was a good friend and a great comfort to him. A two-time cancer survivor herself, Kareen helped James cope with his anxiety and fear. I can’t say I bonded with her, because most of our contact was when she came to see James. Having faced death more than once, she was well-equipped to help James on his journey.  I felt her strength and determination.

Last Friday afternoon, HBR aired a pre-recorded MyTunes show featuring Kareen. This is a show wherein the featured guest plays and hour of his or her favorite tunes. Kareen pre-recorded this show three weeks ago, and she called her show Kareen’s Death Music. In the show, wherein host Jacob Kriger interviewed her between songs, Kareen discussed, with baffling philosophical detachment, her mortality, and her ongoing 15+ year battle with cancer. At the time of the recording she had not officially learned that her cancer had returned, but I think she knew. The songs she picked were beautiful, and I was moved by her hopeful outlook on life. It was about the time of that MyTunes recording that I learned she was not well. Within three weeks she was gone. Hearing her guest host that show was haunting. One of my many regrets is not getting to know her better.

When James passed away, his death really hit me hard. I’d never experienced grief like that, and it was a sucker punch. I was with him when he received the diagnosis, and I was around him for much of the last months of his life, and although I did not know him for long, we were close at the end. I felt profoundly sad when he died. James was a month younger than I, he was a creative; he was a drinker, and a smoker. I suppose that I was subconsciously thinking, there but for a roll of the dice go I. Were it not for some alignment of the stars, some cosmic arm that pulled the switch and diverted me to a safer track, I suspect things could have gone very differently for me.  

Saturday, I spent some of the day building flower boxes for our garden shed. Flowers are everywhere on our property, because they remind me of my mom. As I put together these boxes, sitting on the front porch, feeding the mosquitoes and feeling strangely ashamed and ungrateful for the blessings I have known, I couldn’t stop thinking about these two relative strangers. I thought of all the others who have touched my life and are now gone. As James ran out of time, there was a chaotic effort on his part to bring order to the end of his life. I got caught in that chaos, and in the no man’s land of another soul’s confrontation with his or her imminent death. Hearing Kareen on the radio last Friday, brought that all back. I look around at my beautiful, disorganized life, which surrounds me like the cloud of dust that surrounds Pigpen in the Charlie Brown comic, and I start asking questions that have no answers. I did not know Kareen well, nor did I know James all that well for that matter, but we became close near his end. The one thing I sensed from all I’ve heard about Kareen, was that she gave more than she received, and that she was driven to help others. I hope I’m worthy of being remembered that way when I go. I’ve learned a great deal from the heroes and strangers who have touched my life. What to make of their loss is something with which I will struggle as long as I live.

 -Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED