We have twenty-eight Margaret Explosion songs in a folder called “Arcadia.” They were all recorded live over the last two years. We are sifting through them in preparation for a new release. About half of them will find a place on the CD of the same name.
“The Chase” is one of the songs from that folder. We put it together with some footage I shot from the car while Peggi was driving. We had this fall-colored leaf stuck to our windshield in spring, so we took it for a spin. Margaret Explosion plays at the Little Theatre Café on Wednesday, June 3.
When we would visit my parents in their last years, my mom often had the obituary page from the local paper open nearby. She’d say, “Did you see that so-and-so died?” Often it was a former neighbor or one of their friends’ spouses. We still read the paper and, of course, at our age we’ve seen plenty of people we know listed there.
Yesterday there was a name I was trying to place under a picture of a guy who looked a bit like Ricky Nelson or Frankie Avalon with his guitar. The obituary for Richard Nicholas Tosti was short, but it included a link to the funeral home’s website. We learned Dick graduated from Aquinas in 1959 and died after a struggle with cancer at 84. It also mentioned that he played at Gigi’s Italian Restaurant on Hudson Avenue.
I found an article that announced Gigi’s closing in 2018. The owner was quoted as saying, “When we were on East Ridge, there were eight Italian restaurants in a few-mile radius: Gigi’s, Pasta Villa, Dentico’s, Mamma Rosa’s, Nick’s Sea Breeze Inn, the Italian Osteria, Ciprianni’s/Carpani’s, and one other just down the street from us.” For a few years Peggi and I tried to keep track of the many Italian restaurants in Rochester but Gigi’s was not there.
So I searched “Dick Tosti” on the PopWars site and found this entry from 2012.
Long live Dick Tosti!
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