Elvis Presley - An American Trilogy (Live Hawai)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Feyu3er5fRc
Sending you grilled-hamburger 
+ fireworks-filled July 4th 
greetings from Central Florida w/an iconic #Elvis performance that NEVER disappoints! 
I lived in #Memphis for three years as a kid in the mid-1960's, and was driven past Graceland ad the crowds many dozens of times before my family and I moved to #Miami in summer of 1968, so I grew-up as a devout Elvis fan, knowing everything about him, good and bad, as well as millions of bits of trivia.
So, a bit of an overdue update for you regular readers of Hallandale Beach/Hollywood Blog: Yours truly is currently visiting his mother in largely rural, orange grove-centric Central Florida, where she lives on the east side of Crooked Lake in Babson Park, about 70 miles south of Orlando and 70 miles east of Tampa.
As I've previously remarked here on the blog as well as on my Twitter and Instagram feeds, it's a place where, at night, absent all of the overpowering light pollution I am used to dealing with in Hollywood and Hallandale Beach, I can actually see -if not count- thousands and thousands of stars at night overhead if it's not overcast, or, there's not yet another end-of-the-world thunderstorm full of booming thunder and a zillion lightning strikes taking place, as there so often is in the summer here, where it can seem like the hurricane scene from the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall classic, Key Largo, when Edward G. Robinson's tough, abrasive and domineering mobster character visiting Florida starts getting freaked out by the sound of the howling wind outside. It's like that here at times just with the thunderstorms, whether day or night.
Which is to say, they didn't name the NHL hockey team in Tampa Bay the Lightning for nothing. Central Florida is the most lightning-intensive area in all of North America for very good reasons, though when I was growing up in 1970's North Miami Beach, I don't recall anyone -friends, teachers, media- ever mentioning or commenting on that fact:
https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/weather/2023/01/04/four-corners-lightning-capital
So, this being the case, I was not able to do any of my usual Fourth of July routines that first started when I lived for 15 years in the Washington, D.C. area, where by the time I showed up around 7:30 p.m. or so on the west side steps of the U.S. Capitol for the annual Fourth of July fireworks and National Symphony Orchestra extravaganza that annually airs on PBS -one of the few things that PBS does not ruin or make ridiculous via its never ending quest to inject identity politics or political grievances into every subject- featuring an army of singers and performers of every musical niche, I have consumed quite a lot of hot dogs, hamburgers, ribs, crab cakes, potato salads of very types, barbecue beans and several helpings of Dr. Pepper, beer or wine to wet my whistle and clean my palate. But there was none of that this year.
Without any high-quality fireworks displays in this area that were worth driving to on a very hot and humid day where the feels like temps got up to about 105,, and with no friends in the area, per se, to bring some homemade food or goodies from Publix to, in order to partake in a Fourth of July all-afternoon buffet, I stayed home avec ma mere, talking and watching a lot of red, white and blue musical films, including Yankee Doodle Dandy and 1776.
Capped off the night with the original Top Gun.
Mid-afternoon I was also reminded all over again that Major League Baseball (MLB) continues to be lapped by the NFL since they are STILL not smart enough to insist in their many TV deals that there is always at least one nationally-televised baseball game televised on network TV on the afternoon of July 4th, a day where there are, literally, tens of millions of Americans killing time, waiting for others to stop eating or maybe finish off an after buffet nap, before heading out somewhere nearby to seen some fireworks with hopes of not being caught in impossible traffic tie-ups, as so often happens.
