Rochester New York & the Lilac Festival

We're in Rochester New York visiting Karen & Mark. Rochester is known as the Flower City and the annual Lilac Festival started this weekend. We watched some of the opening parade and of course wandered among the lilacs.

They reminded Marlene of her grandmother's yard.

The warm weather of a few weeks ago threatened to sabotage the festival (mother nature messing with man's best laid plans) and some of the bushes had past their peak, but there were lots of lovely blooms.

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Rochester is also the home of Kodak, so we were able to smile and take pictures on some Kodak sponsored benches.

There were arts & crafts, food and music. The weather was in the 60s with a breeze, and of course mostly clouds. (Rochester is one of the cloudiest cities in the USA).

All in all a very enjoyable day.

Sometimes the best laid plans..... turn into something else. My idea when I started this blog was to record the various travels that Marlene and I might take. But now I find myself discussing music more. We saw another concert this weekend. Jeffrey Osborne is a native of Providence RI and is most well known for his hit "On the Wings of Love". We saw his performance at the MGM Grand at Foxwoods. The show was very good. He still has a pleasant voice, and he can work an audience. He really got the crowd going with his hit that I had forgotten about - "You should be Mine - (the WooWoo song)".
One unusual aspect of the show was that it started with two comedians - the first of whom was not on the billing and I never did catch his name. The second comedian was Rick Smiley. He had the crowd in stitches with what he describes as "racial humor". He's black, and he talks about the differences in how people of different races act. His description of people singing in church was hilarious. His entire show was very funny, and he doesn't resort to swearing every other line. Actually Marlene and I couldn't recall any swearing - we've seen a lot of comedians in Atlantic City and believe me, they usually love to swear.