New Year!

Hola darlings!  How are you all - hope you're doing great!  I can tell you right now I'm sure enjoying this January thaw that's enveloped my home town for the past 3 days, just wonderful to not be freezing my fingers and toes off every time I step out the door.  Yesterday it got up to 54 degrees F and the Sun felt fabulous!

Sad news.  As the new year churns forward, we are losing more and more of the generation of my Dad (Dad passed at the age of 80 a week before Veterans' Day in November 2002).  I read this morning in The Washington Post that Christine McGuire, the oldest sister of the three McGuire Sisters, had passed away.  Link to article.

As part of the baby-boomer generation, the McGuire sisters were already grown up by the time I and my younger siblings came along after the end of WWII, when millions of GIs came home, got married, got jobs or went on to college, and got married in droves.  And they nearly all had children, often large families.  My family of six was not considered unduly large in those days and was more the norm in the neighborhoods were I grew up.  One of our neighbors had 14 children in their family!  The family we lived upstairs from for years had five kids.

I literally grew up watching black and white movies on television - FOR FREE! - back in those "old" days in the 1950s and 1960s.

I remember the McGuire sisters only from those old movies.  One song I remember in particular was "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B" and the McGuire sisters dancing while dressed up as WACs in WWII.  I actually found an old clip of the McGuires performing the song from the 1941 movie, "Buck Privates" starring Abbott and Costello, thanks to TCM online - Turner Classic Movies.  The sisters rocked out the song!  Many years later, the incomparable Bette Midler featured the song in several of her shows over the years - this montage is a hoot (from Youtube):