"The Death of the Audio CD"

I heard just this past evening that the audio CD is now an endangered species.

Rather upsetting to me.

After all, I own more of them than I can count.

In the late 1960s, I read "God is Dead" on the covers of Newsweek and Time.

As a good, Italian-American, Roman-Catholic boy, even the early 70s stint at the University of Colorado in the hey day of the Students for a Democratic Society, LSD, Marijuana, methamphetamines (cross-tabs), Hashish, and Mescaline couldn't quite pry me away from traditional values.

But now, we have no sooner experienced the age of the CD, it seems, than it is gone - dispersed by the electronic and technical world by MP3 and other formats, and all the music drifting one way or another into I-Phones, I-pods, Blackberries, Verizon, All-tel, AT&T, Next-tel, AOL, Comcast Cable, and all manner of cellular devices and gadgets.

Want a gadget? Hell, have one. They're pretty much on the house these days.

Just search via Yahoo, and you've got it. It can be on your internet search inviting you, or the desktop sidebar.

Just belly up to the bar, and you get pretty much anything you've a mind and patience to search for.

Yet in my lifetime, I've watched Lawrence Welk, listened to radio when swing hadn't yet died with its stars and big bands aplenty, held witness to the advent of Rock and Roll with Elvis the King, then sung along to the British invasion of the Beatles.

Hey, I was always the kid in front of the TV, being told: "Charles, you make a better door than a window!"

I insisted even then on dancing and singing.

And I still do.

A pretty cute kid, I availed myself of the dancing expertise of my female Californian cousins to learn every dance that came along after bobby sox arrived.

Later on in life, I experienced the era of sit-com stars and music legends, as a theater professional, meeting the likes of Herb Mills (never liked dining alone at breakfast), Roger Miller (kicked the sound monitors off the stage during a sound check - apparently dissatisfied with too little cocaine and Black Jack Daniels), Herb Rawls ("Don't worry "bout moving the follow spot boys - I just stand there and do my thing."), Brenda Lee (yes that is a photograph of her on my lap that I just inserted - wherein I look a lot like Cat Stevens),

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