July 6 – Bobby Rydell – The Very Best of Bobby Rydell

Ooomigod, this was a find! I am squealing inside as I write this. Look what I came across at my local Barnes & Noble –$4.99.

If you remember back in the G’s when I had to exercise to the cast album of the movie version of Gigi, I bemoaned the fact that while I had several albums leftover from the family, I no longer had Bye Bye Birdie. When I was a little girl, my friend Claudia and I had our mothers take us to see the movie many times. We were seven, so many could have been anything more than once. We had such a crush on Bobby Rydell, who played Hugo Peabody, the lusty young Ann-Margaret’s Kim MacAfee’s boyfriend. We looked up Rydell in the Nassau County phonebook and don’t think we found any. Maybe they were all in Suffolk, the next county over. Rydell was a singer, whose skills as a drummer were highlighted in the movie’s best musical number “Got A Lot of Livin To Do,” when he had the chance to bang on a table and sing about being a “ring-a-ding drummer.”

At 72, he still gets out there now and then to perform, and let’s not forget that the famed Rydell High from Grease was named in his honor. This CD contains his hits like “Volare,” the fabulous “Swingin’ School,” and my personal favorite “Wild One.” Oh, and there’s “Sway” (squealing again), and the last number is a duet with Chubby Checker on “Jingle Bell Rock.” As they’re both short CDs, I topped Bobby Rydell off with The Association, and, in keeping with the situation, added Lou Christie’s classic masterpiece “Lightning Strikes” in between, which I think we’ll all know as Lightning is Striking Again (and again and again). And yes, I ponied around the place like I was seven years old again, cha-cha’d too, at least in my mind until my body reminded it that we were decades, generations, half a century even away from that. Darn good sweaty workout tonight though. Oh, and I saw parts of the Macy’s 4^th of July fireworks display to the east Friday night, and New Jersey’s counter attack to the west right on the Hudson, and could catch glimpses in the distant background of displays throughout other Jersey towns. It was intense.

Tomorrow would have been my mother’s birthday, and is the birthday of her favorite Beatle. Happy birthday to Ringo Starr.