Jim Bartlett’s Blog

Forty years ago this week, Journey, then an up-and-coming rock band, was set to play the Orpheum Theater. Also on the bill was the band Montrose, and a new band from Los Angeles called Van Halen. One month after releasing their first album, Van Halen was already generating a buzz,

Last weekend, the American Top 40 show on Sunday at the 80s was from February 1984. It gave me flashbacks to a time when I was a far younger man, a time that was pretty awful for a while but eventually turned out OK. In the fall of 1983, married

So the other day I walked into the Magic bullpen, the office we share, looking for some tape to seal up an envelope. I said to Ginger and Jillene, “Do either of you have any sticky tape?” They both looked at me like I had two heads, so I decided

Ann and I don’t usually take long vacations. We started 2018, however, with a nine-day trip, the longest one we’ve been on together in something like eight years. Our first stop was to visit Ann‘s sister and her family, who live in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. We decided

When I was a kid, I was quite a nerd. (Cue people who know me personally: “What do you mean, ‘was’?”) I used to watch baseball games on TV and keep statistics in my own little scorebook. And for a lot of years before I was old enough to do

In December of 1980, John Lennon‘s comeback single, “(Just Like) Starting Over” was riding high on the charts. On December 8, 1980, a Monday, he was shot to death in New York City. This left the producers of American Top 40 with a dilemma. The show for the next weekend,

I grew up in a musical house. One of the bedrooms is still known as the “piano room,” where my mother’s upright piano has sat since the day my parents moved in, before I was born. I started piano lessons when I was eight, and I learned how to read

Lanette and Sara both posted recipes on their blogs this past week. Ginger says she’s been doing some fancy cooking at her house lately, too. But if you are waiting for me to post a recipe, you’ll be waiting a long time. I don’t like to cook anymore, although I used

You have probably seen some of your friends on social media posting #MeToo. This is a campaign that started last weekend, encouraging women who have suffered sexual assault or harassment to post the hashtag #MeToo. The goal is to make people visualize the scope of the problem—that victims are not

This past weekend, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I was hanging out in a brewery tap room when a woman came in. She was there to lead a yoga class (yoga in a brewery is a concept I can get behind). While she was waiting for her students to arrive, we started