Seeger & Springsteen

In case anyone missed Sunday's inaugural festivities, I highly recommend taking a look at Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen's inspiring rendition of "This Land Is Your Land." Although I hadn't sung or even thought about the lyric in years, I was amazed at how quickly it came back to me as the music played.

Beyond whetting my appetite for Tuesday's inauguration, it also transported back to my kindergarten days during the U.S. Bicentennial. At the end of the school year we put on a pageant celebrating Amercia's 200th birthday, for which we learned and sung various patriotic ditties. I vividly recall stomping around with a toy rifle on my shoulder, singing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again." But my favorite memory is the grand finale, when we all stood on the risers and belted out "This Land Is Your Land," to our enthusiastic parents, though only the first couple of verses. There was nothing about "relief offices" in the lyric we learned, and I'm glad I was able to hold onto my innocence about those things for at least a little bit longer.

Albee and the Baby

Because it takes very little to amuse me, I couldn't resist snapping a photo of this "Albee Baby Carriage" van when I spied it driving through Brooklyn Heights the other day. I hope at least some of you will be nerdy enough to find it humorous too.

Great Things From Gina

Gina Gionfriddo

Not only did I have an enjoyable conversation with rising-star-scribe Gina Gionfriddo about her disturbing and provocative new play Becky Shaw for Time Out New York, I felt as if I'd found a kindred spirit who shared my interest in true-crime TV.

When I saw a preview of Becky Shaw a couple of nights later, I was pleasantly amused to see that in the opening scene, as a character sits on hotel bed watching the Court TV series Forensic Files, they used sound from an actual episode. Having seen nearly every episode of that show, I recognized the voice of narrator Peter Thomas immediately.

Gionfriddo's also a longtime Law & Order writer, and as a longtime fan of that fictional-crime franchise, I must confess I thought the business card she handed me with the show's logo on it was quite cool. You can also read about her in this New York Times profile.