Washington Cube

Rocks And Stones Won't Hurt My Bones

2011-01-02T19:30:00.002Z

I have no idea where I acquired this. Logically I would say "my mother" since she was always the one hauling rocks and driftwood and bionic pine cones home; my father complaining of the weight of boulders in his car trunk with Mom's argument being, "...but there are fossils in there." I have that boulder by my back gate now--the tiny animal indents collect pools of water.

. I know my parents found large deposits of amethyst when they were in Nova Scotia, so maybe there? Some day I'll pass it on, but for now, I like holding it. I've only been in Nova Scotia once. I was going to London on a Pan Am jet, and the windshield blew out over the Atlantic Ocean. We had to drop thousands of feet in altitude very quickly: some were calm, some were crying, some were praying. They tried landing us at Bangor, but the runway was too short, so we landed in Halifax on another short runway and I spent the night sleeping on molded plastic seats. We couldn't leave the airport, not knowing when the next plane was coming in. I was wearing an amethyst ring--that I had bought at a Bermondsey flea market in London.

As a child, I had to go to West Virginia where my parents spent their free time building a church camp. My brother and I felt like child labor, which we were. We had to clear the land, sleep in pup tents-- (until a building was constructed,) digging trenches to keep out the copperhead snakes out at night. One afternoon my mother showed up in a field where I was and said, "Let's go climb that mountain," (pointing above our heads,) and of course it was straight faced lichen covered granite with only the tiniest grasping points. No rappel and belay. No "North Face." I was wearing Keds.

We made it to the top, this jagged edge, and I looked down and found this bone. We never could figure out how an animal managed to get up there (the bone is about 4 1/2 inches long.) My father's running joke was that it was a cow. One more talisman in a home full of them.

Time Is Money If You Know What Time It Is

2010-09-20T10:59:00.000+01:00

There is one bank I use where I almost always go through their drive-through bay. Over time, I've gotten to know the three men who are usually in the booth. An older gentleman, (who is a native Washingtonian,) and I have discussions about "the old D.C." When people slept in parks to escape the heat, or the trolley cars, trying to make a comeback as part of the 11th Street bridge project. There is a young man in dreads with the name of a major character from the tv series, "The Wire." He shares the name, but lacks the violence, being very sweet-natured, and then there's a young man from Africa who upon meeting me for the first time swore I would never remember his name, and the next time I saw him did remember, and he said, "I was sure you wouldn't."

During this past year I've noted that the clock in their booth doesn't work. At first I jokingly said I was going to buy batteries for it, but over time they told me they had fiddled with it, and it wasn't a question of batteries but "just not working." Two weeks ago, I said to the man from Africa, "Doesn't it drive you nuts that you look at the wall and it's always 7 o'clock?" He said, "That clock has it's uses. I can use it's reflection to see who's behind you, and if someone is trying to walk up to the booth." I asserted, "I am buying you a clock!" He laughed and said, "Do it and we'll hang it with gratitude!"

This weekend, instead of going to the bank first, I drove to a Target and bought a clock with big black numbers (easy to read.) The clock was only $10.00-- but the batteries were $8.00. Once I got out to my car, I had to use a key to unscrew these Phillips head screws securing the clock to the cardboard packaging and me cursing the Chinese. The new Chinese water torture. Merchandising torture. Chairman Mao proclaiming against the weak Imperialist paper tigers.

While I was waiting in line at the bank, I took a picture of the car in front of me with it's back window loaded with clouds. I felt like it was my blogging friend Reya saying, "Nothing to worry about. Waiting is good!" (She's know for her cloud photographs.) When I finally got to the window, the money drawer slid out, and I put in the clock and my check. Mr. Nigeria was at the window. He started laughing and said, "Is this for real?" I told him, "Ab-so-lutely," and he replied, "...but I was joking!" I said, "I wasn't. I've talked to all three of you and want you to have a clock while you work in that booth."

He was waving his hands around at this point, not quite knowing what to say, but very formally did say "I do not know how the ___Bank can ever repay you for this kindness." I wanted to say, "With large unmarked bills," or "...add some more zeros to that check."

I shook my head and said, "No need. This is to make your work day easier. In the end...

... The Clock Always Wins"

tOy Veh Story!

2010-06-28T12:29:00.003+01:00

I doubt that I'll be going to see Toy Story 3. For one thing, I am not a fan of Pixar animations. If anything they creep me out. I'd much rather watch old Betty Boop cartoons:

I heard from my friend Phil (formerly of Playaz Ball) this weekend. He was taking his children to see Toy Story 3. I had just been reading various reviews of the movie. So many cited this "beautiful full-circle ending for the toys," and "...a beautiful transition ending for Andy's childhood," and "...as long as we remember that our inner child isn't what we're told, but what we invent."

After listening to Phil's little adventure into Toy world, I wonder how much of his own inner child survived. Here it is in his own words:

This is neither here nor there, but I had to share this. We were taking our girls to see Toy Story 3 today. We had a coupon for a free TS3 movie ticket from a DVD we bought recently. All you had to do was log on and print your ticket with the code they give you.

We logged on to the Disney site, put in our code, and they gave us some "validation code" and they - I sh*t you not - ask you to hand write the validation code onto a ticket you print, then TAKE A PHOTO OF THAT - THEN....UPLOAD IT BACK TO THEIR WEBSITE before they would give you your "free ticket." I thought, "Am I being had? Is someone filming me right now?? Am I running this site?" (meaning the surreal creations on his blog.)

This morning, he sent me the directions and the sample photograph of what Disney provides:

Create Your Proof Of Purchase

1. Place your 1 tickets next to each other on a table.
2. Check out our example proof on the right.
3. Clearly write your unique submission code 8132478 on each of the tickets
using a blue or black pen - as illustrated by our example right.
4. Use a digital camera to take one picture of all the 1 tickets. Try to make
sure that the tickets fill up as much as possible of the picture.
5. Save the picture to your computer (refer to the computer or camera manual
for how to do this).
6. Upload your proof of purchase photo.

Phil said, "I did go to the movie. I did not jump through their (hula) hoops." One reviewer said, "I raise my hand, and without shame, add my name to the list of adult males who shed more than a couple of tears at this movie." I'm guessing after his own ordeal, Phil may be shedding a few of his own over lost innocence. Define "free," eh Phil?

"All this for a ticket? What? You don't think I'm human?"

..that's all folks!

(Keep On) Truckin' On Tite Street

2010-06-25T18:29:00.001+01:00

....get me The Royal College of Heraldry....STAT

Many of you who read my blog know that I sell things online through eBay and Amazon. This past week, I finally had my first royal sale. I sold a cd of the Grateful Dead to a Marquis in London, and "yes," he's the real deal. I googled him.

I always knew there might come the day, when I would be selling a beanie baby to Brad Pitt, or a Hound Dog Taylor cd to Margaret Thatcher, but I never quite pictured a hereditary royal scanning for sales.

The cd was mailed off to his London home on Tite Street, an infamous street in Chelsea that previous housed, among others, Oscar Wilde and John Singer Sargent. I show Sargent's studio in a picture below. My Marquis bought his own home from a Rothschild in the 1990's.

He also inherited the family castle in the Northern part of England. I was telling Reya of http://thegoldpuppy.blogspot.com/ about this sale, and how I had a hard time reconciling this man listening to the Dead in his castle. She wrote back, with a *snap*, "Looks like the perfect place to crank up the Dead, if you ask me."

The Man In The Moon White Suit

2010-06-22T23:42:00.022+01:00

"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody."

~~Mark Twain

I caught a blurb in Entertainment Weekly that said a memoir was coming out this November: "The University of California Press will publish Volume I of Mark Twain’s autobiography (volumes II and III are to come at later dates).Twain himself gave the university some 5,000 pages but stipulated that the work had to remain unpublished until the 100th anniversary of his death, so the manuscript has been languishing in the vault all this time — available to scholars (who have been able to use the work for their own Twain biographies) but no one else. On its' website, UCP says that “the strict instruction that these texts remain unpublished for 100 years meant that when they came out, he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent’ and therefore free to speak his ‘whole frank mind."

Oddly enough, I had been thinking of re-reading Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn just in the past weeks: both books not read by me in quite some time. On my regular trip to the library I went into the children's section with it's reduced shelves and tiny tables and minute chairs and while there was no Tom Sawyer (off whitewashing a fence, I reckon,) they did have a recently published Huckleberry with some interesting illustrations, so I checked it out, thinking, "A lazy summer read meandering down the river on a raft." I settled into bed. In the introduction, there was what I would call a "disclaimer" about the dialect (Read: "Don't take offense that he has black people talking this way,") and another disclaimer about the use of the "N" word. Lawdy.

I begin. Chapter One. Wait. I have to ask. Have any of you returned to these books in oh...the past twenty years? Hep me Jebus. I was....floored. The dialogue? Not just Jim the runaway slave, but everyone. I suppose this regional dialect writing passed for humor in 1885. I read on Wikipedia that when the novel came out, there was controversy over the "coarse language," (that would be the swearing,) which is minor to what more modern eyes now see. I also Wiki read, "...it became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur _____." If I say "racial slur used every five words," I think I would be understating it.

When I was checking the library shelves for the book, and picked it up, I noted that it seemed remarkably "clean," as in "children haven't been chewing, doodling, or dripping their Creamsicles down the pages." I think a modern child would find it impossible to read what William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, and many other noted authors have labeled "The Great American Novel." Thematically? Perhaps. But the written word? I'm going to be honest. I have read some really dreadful stuff in my time and stuck with it to the bitter end. I couldn't finish Huckleberry Finn. Finn did me in. I swirled in the currents of the Mississippi and sank.

That same day in the library, I stumbled on a tiny book entitled Who is Mark Twain? by "Mark Twain Himself," Never Before Published. What this book consists of is a lot of essays that never saw the light of day, and I might add, Twain was a shrewd editor in leaving them unpublished. To his credit, I do believe that Twain, like many a writer, felt that if you had a calling for writing, then you did it, come what may and let it fall for posterity.

In an 1865 letter to his brother, Twain wrote, "You had better shove this in the stove, for I don't want any absurd "literary remains and unpublished letters of "Mark Twain" published after I am planted." Obviously his brother didn't obey him, nor did many others who received similar requests over the years. Considering that he wrote his brother those words before he had his first big publishing success, and two years before his first book, it was a remarkably prescient thing to say, even jokingly.

When Twain died in 1910, he left behind the largest cache (over half a million pages,) of personal papers of any 19th-century author. How did he really feel about posterity poking through his stuff? I think it is clear that, unlike many writers, Twain wasn't embarrassed by his "literary remains even if they were failures." It is very unusual for a writer to expose his efforts that might caste ill on his posterity, or even something as simple as an unwillingness to let the world see how he worked. Many a time I have read "The letters of...." or..."The journal of..." and it is obvious that every line was carefully written, or correspondence saved, which did not reflect poorly on the deceased.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a woman who had a heightened perception of her own role in history, and knowing she was dying, called her former school chum (and social secretary) and they sat in front of the fireplace, re-reading and laughing, but burning and destroying page after page of personal papers. Let the walls of Camelot remain sound.

When social commentator and judicial investigator Dominick Dunne died, in his last novel his protagonist (himself,) revealed that he was bi-sexual and had been involved with other men. Mr. Dunne said, just a short time before his death. "You have got to tell the truth at the end. No lies. You have got to tell the truth." I am also of the school, "Let the truth prevail. For better or worse." There's something profoundly sad in someone wanting to control what their life seemingly was--when it wasn't. I say there is more to be gained in telling the truth, because we are all part of this process. Another way of saying, "Be prideful of your scars with your successes," I suppose.

Referring back to these memoirs on Twain that will be coming out (and the delay in their release,) I want to mention that this subject crops up in this book of essays, quoting from Twain's autobiography of 1906 (four years before his death) that the full publication of his life would not occur until 100 years after his death. He makes this precondition explicit, and then explains why he thought he was taking no real risk in the matter:

"I can speak more frankly from the grave than most historians would be able to do, for the reason that whereas they would not be able to feel dead, however hard they might try, I myself am able to do that. They would be making believe to be dead. With me, it is not make-believe. They would all the time be feeling, in a tolerably definite way, that that things in the grave which represents them is a conscious entity; conscious of what was saying about people, an entity capable of feeling shame; an entity capable of shrinking from full and frank expression, for they believe in immortality. They believe that death is only a sleep, followed by an immediate waking, and that their spirits are conscious of what is going on here below and take a deep and continuous interest in the joys and sorrows of the survivors whom they love and don't."

"But I have long ago lost my belief in immortality--also my interest in it. I can say, now, what I could not say while alive--things which would shock people to hear; things which I could not say when alive because I should be aware of that shock and would certainly spare myself the personal pain of inflicting it."

...in other words, Twain was perfectly willing to let us read his most intimate manuscripts precisely because he knew that when we did so, he would no longer exist. Think for a moment, about "...things which would shock people to hear." A world and society where there were still checks and boundaries that prohibited laying it all out there. Is it silly to long for the day when we weren't blasted by the minute with every burp, blat and blather on Twitter? Gee. Should I really write that I have a wart on my labia? Oh...go ahead. Be honest. Tell us what you are really thinking. What would Mark Twain tweet? "My moustache is yellow from smoking these dang nabbit ceegars." The problem is, there are no qualifiers on what is worth reporting. Have you read Courtney Love's Facebook page? Be still my heart. Code blue.

The book wasn't a total waste of rejects. I found an amusing essay about standards Twain set "Whenever I Am About To Publish A Book." His means of jumping the critics by using the verdict of the general public. He states he always showed his manuscripts to a private group of friends composed as follows:

1. Man and woman with no sense of humor.
2. Man and woman with medium sense of humor.
3. Man and woman with prodigious sense of humor.
4. An intensely practical person.
5. A sentimental person.
6. Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.
7. Hypercritical person--natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.
8. Enthusiast. Person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.
9. Person who watches the others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.
10. Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.
11. Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.
12. Person who detests them.
13. Person of evenly balanced judicial mind.
14. Man who always goes to sleep.

...and for those who didn't agree with him on any of this?.....

Pumping Mud

2010-06-20T18:57:00.012+01:00

I just finished reading a novel called Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes. Given the subject matter, Present Imperfect or Future Imperfect might be more apt.

Fellowes' previous novel, Snobs, was equally good. True to it's name, it was about social classes in Britain, and where you might think Past Imperfect is about social class distinctions, since the bulk of the characters are of the upper class in Great Britain, in truth it's about youthful dreams and time and and what time does to our lives...and our hopes. So many of Fellowes' characters wind up with flawed lives and crushed promise. That won't lure you in?

There are so many changes in social mores that he nails. Ascot. Debutante balls. Toeing parental lines. The death knell pain of being at a party with a controlling personality. In one passage, at a debutante ball Fellowes, like a social anthropologist reporting on tribal mating patterns, describes the pain of trying to engage someone in polite conversation where there is a complete lack of interest, no matter what topic is touched on. He says a friend always said of this type of social interchange, that it was like "pumping mud." Far more vivid than the proverbial "like pulling hen's teeth."

The book opens with a scene that was very painful to me, because it strikes at my heart at this moment. The protagonist is reflecting on the London of his boyhood, versus his middle age, and he says, "London is a haunted city for me now and I am the ghost that haunts it. As I go about my business, every street or square or avenue seems to whisper of an earlier, different era in my history. The shortest trip round Chelsea takes me by some door where once I was welcome but where today I am a stranger. I see myself issue forth, young again, and as I watch beside that wraith of a younger me walk the shades of departed, parents, uncles, aunts and grandmothers, great-uncles and cousins, friends and girlfriends, gone now from this world entirely, or at least from what is left of my own life. They say one sign of growing old is that the past becomes more real than the present, and already I can feel the fingers of those lost decades closing their grip round my imagination, making more recent memory seem somehow greyer and less bright." Washington holds many such losses and ghosts for me.

I remember my father telling me that if you live long enough, you see your friends go away, or even more so, die off, until there is so little left of what was your life. Making new acquaintances is not that easy with the passing of decades, and if it's hard in youth, even more so for the isolated elderly. I can remember in the later years of my father's life, I drove him to a funeral viewing of a man that he had known for decades, that he rode to work with for decades, and when we arrived, and he had paid his respects, he said to me, "Get me out of here. I cannot take it anymore." This from a man always present and accounted for to honor his peers. But he had finally hit the wall. No more. And that...was that.

The next piece I write is going to be about one of my own personal walls, and my ghosts, and how going through something like that can now haunt me, and level me.

I'm Feeling....Daffy

2010-03-24T00:10:00.002Z

A request was made to bury that Virginia license plate. I am trying like heck to get back to blogging. My living room and dining room look like the Rubbermaid Bin Grand Canyon from hell, and if you even had a whiff of mental illness, you'd be in full blown psychosis in five minutes. Then a friend called with a story about a body donated to a medical school. That's up next. I'm always quoting the Godfather. "Just when I thought I was clear, they drag me back in." Back shortly. Promise. ...and the "daffy" quote is from Miller's Crossing.

Virginia Is For Lovers...Maybe

2010-03-10T15:48:00.004Z

...Thanks, Drew.

Duly Noted And Marked

2010-03-02T23:33:00.009Z

I've been busy trying to clean a house out before settlement that is part of an estate. Did I get the price I wanted? No. Far less. Am I glad it is almost out of my hair? Yes. I want my life back. In the meantime, I've been contending with collapsed garden sheds (snow,) and shoveling snow (snow,) and making alien snow people (snow,) and oh yeah...I fell...a bad one. Nothing broken, but I was limping for a few days at a time when I need all of my wits about me. I'll be back over at house central this week hauling out an 1890's treadle sewing machine that has to be shipped to Oregon and crawling in decades old filth in an attic and other fun things.

Right in front of me is a pile of things "to blog" about. I gave up on the subject of desire. See above. Wait a minute. I would still like to write about desire someday. The strange paths it can take and who is to say what driving passion fuels you is wrong. Did you know that rubber fetishes have diminished as an aging population are the only ones who remember childhood rubber pants? It's true. I have charts. I have tables. And, I would add, just in time to get back into them. Full circle, as it were.

But still, I want to write, but between answering emails and doing sales on Amazon and eBay and writing Phil of The Playaz (God love you Phil for checking on me,) it's been unholy. Yesterday I went to a Starbucks to hook up with a former neighbor who moved way out to Eldersburg, and I caught her at the end of her work day at her chosen destination point before she headed to the netherlands. I am so Starbucks naive, I had to look on line to see what I would order and how to order it. I got a Tazo Shaken Iced Passion Tea Tall. OH...sweetened. What a litany. I feel like I need to go into more coffee shops just to learn the language of latte. Did I mention I'm fussy about coffee and think Starbucks is crap? No? Well. I do.

While I was out, I ran by my local library to pick up some books, but also to return those due and see if I could nab them another round, which I did. When I got home, I don't know what triggered this, but I decided to make bookmarks for them on photo paper, and using craft scissors I deckled the edges to make them look like old-timey photographs. The idea being, when I return the books, I will leave the bookmarks in as a surprise for the next reader.

The first bookmark I made was for a book called L.A. Noir by John Buntin. I thought, without checking, that it was part of a noir series I had been reading that features major cities, then has crime-mystery writers from those cities and their short stories. D.C. Noir has George Pelecanos, of course. There is a Baltimore Noir, a New York Noir, even a Dublin Noir. This book, however, is about mob activity in Los Angeles in the 30's-50's and the city's police captain and his involvement with Jack Webb who based the television show Dragnet on real police work.

I also learned that Jack Webb's overvoice "This is the city. Los Angeles" was a direct rip from a movie where he played a forensic specialist (Lee) called He Walked By Night (1948.) He also ripped off his "ching ching" hammer music from the same film. So I found a noir shot of Los Angeles. I also discovered while google goofing that there's a software game called L.A. Noir. Why that could be right up my... ALLEY.

I've been trying to finish up Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. If you've never heard of him, he's a Nobel Prize writer. He's Turkish. He's political and he's pissed off. I still love his writing. His sentences could be filagree in the Hagia Sophia. Much like travel writer Paul Theroux, Pamuk just put himself into his own latest novel: his family attending a wedding reception. Nice way to control getting the waiter over to your table with the tiny kebap.

Yeah...he looks pissed off here, too. He's one of those guys you can jokingly let loose a "trigger" word and watch him blast off. When he goes out in public, citizens of Turkey are either cheering him and treating him like a rock star-guru, or they are hanging him in effigy. Guess it depends on which side of the Bosporus your freak flag flies.

Another book (in a stack) I picked up is a new release called Baby Let's Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him by Alanna Nash. It's already deep into good and white trashy, and I haven't even gotten his mother married yet. I know this one is going to be a pissah. I was flipping through, looking for a bookmark image and bingo. One I've never seen before. I couldn't even believe it was Elvis, but 'tis and just months before he died:

The girl on the back is a dancer named Mary Kathleen Selph. She died in a car accident a month after this picture was taken. I showed this photograph to a friend today, and they said, "THAT is NOT Elvis...that is some ole black woman pretending to be Elvis." He immediately amended himself after looking again and said, "Actually, I think Elvis is trying to look like his mother, Gladys. " I agree. Also, if you can see? The little boy in the car next to him has his mouth open, and it almost seems like he's screaming "ELVIS!"

Can you imagine the things that are going to come out in this book? The author interviewed a lot of his former loves, going all the way back to childhood. I mean, I knew about the white cotton panty fetish. (Note to Self: Add that to desire article and fetishes.) This same friend and I were discussing how a certain level of talent walks off the planet, and it's never seen again.

I got into a weird frame of mind (as if I ever leave it,) the other day, and I started You Tubing Andy Williams and Sammy Davis, Jr. and these variety shows. What really triggered this was me wanting to see and hear Jobim and Elis Regina singing Águas de Março (Waters of March) cause well...it was the first of March, only March in Brazil comes after summer (go figure,) but still...great song.

The next thing you know I'm watching Jobim singing Girl From Ipanema with Andy Williams which led to Tony Bennett singing with Andy and people You commenting "Why don't they have shows like this on t.v. anymore? Such talent!" and me thinking Yah! Why not? Somehow that led me to Michael Jackson singing at Sammy's 60th birthday celebration and Sammy doing "Bad."

Don't even ask me about Billy Wilder and Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) and that wild You Tube ride I took on Sunday. (Note to Self: Write about the German Film School, Berlin 1930, the onset of Nazism and this new Nazi zombie film with Norwegians called...uh... DEAD SNOW!!!) More snow!!! Full circle. I'll stop. Cyndy? Watch and enjoy.

I'm riffing! Patrick. Do you miss me? :)

Fettuccine With Braised Fennel, Walnuts, Saffron and Cream

2010-02-17T02:35:00.009Z

2 medium fennel bulbs (or one large)
1/4 cup minced scallion (white and green)
1/2 cup walnuts
1/8 teaspoon loosely packed saffron thread (about 15 threads)
1 pound fresh fettuccine
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup minced parsley
Grated Parmesan cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread walnuts on a baking sheet or pie pan and toast until fragrant and lightly browned, about 15 minutes. Cool, then chop fine and set aside.

Cut off the stalks of the fennel bulb(s),if attached. Finely mince and set aside. Try to include some of the feathery leaves.

Dice the scallions.

Melt the butter in a skillet overly moderately low heat. Add the diced fennel and scallions and season with salt and pepper. Toss to coat with the seasonings.

Add the chicken stock and saffron threads, bring to a simmer and cover. Adjust the heat to maintain a simmer and cook until tender and much of the liquid has evaporated, about ten minutes.

Stir in the cream. Bring back to a simmer and cook briefly to incorporate. Take care not to reduce the sauce too much as fresh pasta absorbs a lot of the sauce.

Taste and adjust the seasoning. Keep warm over low heat.

Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling, salted water until al dente. Drain. Transfer the pasta to a large bowl. Add contents of the skillet and mix. Serve immediate on warm dishes, topping each with a reserve of a few chopped fennel leaves, if available.

Serves 4.

NOTES: * This recipe comes from a book called Pasta Harvest by Janet Fletcher. The book is all vegetable pasta dishes, with the dishes listed alphabetically by vegetable, starting with artichokes and ending with tomatoes. There are separate sections on pasta shapes, how to make pasta and creating sauces.

* I only eat this dish in the winter. Why? I dunno. I guess I think of fennel and heavy pastas as "winter."

* I know I should photograph food in natural light, but I didn't want to wait until tomorrow and wade out through snow to get to my garden table. I also forgot to mix the sauce with the pasta so it's sitting there like vom on top of the pasta. But it was good tasting vom.

* I went to reach for my saffron threads and "oops." I didn't have any. I did have a package of Spanish yellow rice, so I tapped into that to get some saffron flavoring. It really needs the saffron, though. Guess what got added to my "to buy" list?

* I usually cut this recipe in half. I could even see eating it over rice.

* I don't go to the trouble to roast the walnuts in the oven. At best, I may toss them around in a smaller fry pan for a few minutes.

* You can vary that butter-oil ratio. The recipe does need butter. It does not need oil. I only used butter tonight.

* I use a bit more of the feathery leaves than the recipe calls for, simply because I like the look of them.

* I never use heavy cream. You can use half and half, probably even whole milk. I would not make it using skim milk.

Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T13:46:00.001Z

Angels Wear Red Shoes

2010-01-13T00:44:00.011Z

Miep Gies died yesterday. Miep was the young secretary who with four others aided the Anne Frank family during their annexed hiding in Amsterdam during WWII. She died at age 100. A piece of history goes with her. Of that dangerous time she said, ““I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch people who did what I did or more – much more - during those dark and terrible times years ago, but always like yesterday in the hearts of those of us who bear witness. Never a day goes by that I do not think of what happened then.”

I learned something about Miep today when I went to her web page. She once brought Anne red shoes to the hideaway, sensing the girl’s sensitivity to having to wear clothes that didn’t fit her growing body and shoes that no longer fit her feet.

The back of the Frank House showing the upper windows

I took the following directly from her web page:

“Over the course of the period in hiding, everyone's clothes gradually became a bit tattered and shabby. Anne moreover physically grew out of her clothes, everything became too short and too tight, and her shoes no longer fit her feet. This was, at the same time, the period in which girls become very concerned over their appearance and wish to look pretty and adult. I sympathized with her situation and went in search of something that would make Anne feel particularly attractive. Of course, in the midst of war it was next to impossible to find a beautiful piece of clothing that was also affordable, but during one of my quests I came upon a handsome pair of shoes. “

Miep was often sympathetic to Anne's plight. For all the occupants, being in hiding was incredibly difficult and taxing, but especially for Anne, in the midst of her pubescent period, it must often have been awful. She loved the film stars in the weekly magazine Cinema & Theater, and she will certainly have imagined, from time to time, how glamorous she herself could look. But the reality of the situation was that her clothes not only started wearing thin, but also and especially started becoming too small.

Miep at sixteen...

Anne had grown out of everything she had, which brought Miep to the resolution:

"I became determined to find something grown-up and pretty for Anne in the course of my searches. One day I stumbled onto just the right thing. I had found a pair of high-heeled red leather pumps. They were secondhand, but in good condition. I hesitated about the size: how awful if they didn’t fit her. But then I thought, Buy! Take a chance. I brought them up to the hiding place behind my back. I went to Anne and stuck them in front of her. Never have I seen anyone so happy as Anne was that day. And quick, on went the shoes, and they fitted just right.

She got very quiet then: she had never felt herself on high heels before. She wobbled slightly, but with determination, chewing on her upper lip, she walked across the room, and back, and then did it again. Just walking back and forth, up and back, more and more steadily each time."

Miep during the war...

In her diary entry of August 10, 1943, Anne writes of her immense happiness with the red high heel shoes that Miep managed to acquire for her. Every week, Anne would devour the weekly magazine Cinema & Theater, which Victor Kugler always brought for her. She knew every film star and pored over their beautiful dresses and glamorous hairdos. Wearing her new shoes, she must also momentarily have felt like a star.

From the diary:

"Everywhere I go, upstairs or down, they all cast admiring glances at my feet, which are adorned by a pair of exceptionally beautiful (for times like these!) shoes. Miep managed to snap them up for 27.50 guilders. Burgundy-colored suede and leather with medium-sized high heels. I feel as if I were on stilts, and look even taller than I already am."

The diary, given to Anne on her thirteenth birthday. One month later, she went into hiding.

God bless you, Miep Gies.

“'I am one hundred years old now. That is an admirable age, and I have even reached it in fairly good health. So then it's fair to say you've been fortunate, and being fortunate seems to be the red thread running through my life.” ~~ Miep Gies

Classic Food Combinations

2010-01-02T16:19:00.003Z

Explaining the symbiosis and synergy of powerful food combinations is one thing, but experience and experiment with as many of them as you can. Better yet, discover on your own.

Duck and Orange

Orange and Fennel

Fennel and Arugula

Arugula and Balsamic Vinegar

Balsamic Vinegar and Strawberries

Strawberries and Cream

Cream and Garlic

Garlic and Haricot Verts

Haricot Verts and Almonds

Almonds and Trout

Trout and Horseradish

Horseradish and Roast Beef

Roast Beef and Potatoes

Potatoes and Duck Fat

Duck Fat and Parsnips

Parsnips and Beets

Beets and Lemon

Lemon and Poppy Seeds

Poppy Seeds and Radishes

Radishes and Sea Salt

Sea Salt and Caramel

Caramel and Chocolate

Chocolate and Red Wine

Red Wine and Filet Mignon

Filet Mignon and Truffles

Truffles and Leeks

Leeks and Chestnuts

Chestnuts and Venison

Venison and Shallots

Shallots and Corn

Corn and Chipolte

Chipolte and Mayonnaise

Mayonnaise and French Fries

French Fries and Mussels

Mussels and Saffron

Saffron and Lamb

Lamb and Cardamom

Cardamom and Rose Water

Rose Water and Pistachios

Pistachios and Artichokes

Artichokes and Mozzarella

Mozzerella and Tomatoes

Tomatoes and Cucumbers

Cucumbers and Lingonberries

Lingonberries and Wild Goose

Wild Goose and Wild Rice

Wild Rice and Sausage

Sausage and Spinach

Spinach and Pine Nuts

Pine Nuts and Couscous

Couscous and Chicken

Chicken and Peanut

Peanut and Cilantro

Cilantro and Avocado

Avocado and Grapefruit

Grapefruit and Jicama

Jicama and Mahi Mahi

Mahi Mahi and Mango

Mango and Thai Basil

Thai Basil and Japanese Eggplant

Japanese Eggplant and Miso

Miso and Shiso

Shiso and Yuzu

Yuzu and Tamari

Tamari and Pecans

Pecans and Pumpkin

Pumpkin and Prawns

Prawns and Sirloin

Sirloin and Blue Cheese

Blue Cheese and Asian Pears

Asian Pears and Pomegranate

Pomegranate and Yogurt

Yogurt and Meyer Lemon

Meyer Lemon and Green Olives

Green Olives and Manchego

Manchego and Quince

Quince and Vanilla Bean

Vanilla Bean and Peaches

Peaches and Brown Sugar

Brown Sugar and Bacon

Bacon and Eggs

Eggs and Cotswold Cheddar

Cotswold Cheddar and Walnuts

Walnuts and Honey

Honey and Apples

Apples and Cinnamon

Cinnamon and Star Anise

Star Anise and Mint

Mint and Grand Marnier

Grand Marnier and Crepes

Crepes and Mushrooms

Mushrooms and Goat Cheese

Goat Cheese and Figs

Figs and Foie Gras

Foie Gras and Brioche

Brioche and Butter

Butter and Marjoram

Marjoram and Pearl Barley

Pearl Barley and Pearl Onions

Pearl Onions and Sweet Peas

Sweet Peas and Pancetta

Pancetta and Capers

Capers and Smoked Salmon

Smoked Salmon and Bagels

Bagels and Cream Cheese

Cream Cheese and Caviar

Caviar and Oysters

Oysters and Turkey

Turkey and Turkish Apricots

Turkish Apricots and Spanish Onions

Spanish Onions and Brisket

Brisket and Bread

Bread and Dijon Mustard

Dijon Mustard and Pork

Pork and Juniper Berries

Juniper Berries and Pineapple

Pineapple and Coconut

Coconut and Lemongrass

Lemongrass and Ginger

Ginger and Duck

January 1, 2010 - The Blue Moon New Year

2010-01-01T19:39:00.003Z

Makemake* - Greetings From Traffic Island

2009-12-26T16:59:00.001Z

*Makemake is the Creator God of the Polynesian People, or "How I Spent Christmas Day."

Christmas Time Is Here - Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T16:37:00.001Z

Redefining "Going Postal"

2009-12-25T02:28:00.003Z

I was out running errands today and my first stop was the post office. There was one Hispanic woman in there mopping the floor, and two workers behind the counter. I was the only customer. As I approached the counter I heard one of them commenting to the other about how they had gotten rid of a "crazy woman" by hitting her with a broom.

I said to the woman who made that comment, "And what if I was a crazy woman? Would you hit me? I was half teasing. She looked me dead in the eye and said, "I'd hit you." Then she said, "Lavita (not her real name.) Get that broom out of the closet. This woman doesn't think we wouldn't hit her for being crazy."

I knew her co-worker realized this could get them into trouble, and she was quickly back pedaling saying, "Oh. We don't really hit crazy people with a broom. She was just joking (I knew otherwise.) I shifted the topic to two little girls who had come in with elves hats on, and how the post office had closed early the day we had snow, but...that whole exhange really gave me pause about what's going on in there.

Later, I went into a Staples. There was a line. I was talking to the man behind me about calendars and other things, and I told him the above story. Somehow during the telling of the story the whole crowd went silent: the clerks, the people in line. I looked around at them and said, "Listen. You can't make this stuff up," but I could see their jaws had dropped. The man I had been talking with said, "Well, I guess this redefines "going postal." I said, "Usually don't they have a gun in the back and just go crazy themselves?"

I can't joke this off, I'm afraid. I know in my heart those women hit a person. I could hear it in their voices. It's been bothering me all day.

Brrrffday

2009-12-21T15:10:00.015Z

I spent a lot of time outside yesterday taking snow pictures. Did you?

I opened my hall window that is over an exterior porch roof. It was a wall of snow.

What's he doing there? Childhood duck.

My neighbor's children at the end of their time sleighing down the hills. His twin was wisely in the house, cuddled up reading. I like how seasonal their jackets are. I like how he hugs his little sister and is kind to her. He had me take a lot of pictures using his camera.

A rose that doesn't know any better. I love late roses, and God bless Homestead Gardens in Davidsonville for selling such sturdy plants.

My squirrel wind chime from Harwichport, Massachusetts. He's used to snow.

.....and someone made me a snow birthday cake with pod candles made from the ornamental grasses in my yard. The bestest gift I could receive. This Winter Solstice baby, born during a blizzard and who loves snow, wishes you a good week. Enjoy the white cold. The days now grow longer.

Winter Wonder Where All the Food Went Land

2009-12-19T16:59:00.000Z

No toilet paper...

No eggs...

No milk....

Yep. It must be snowing in Washington. I told my friend Tony, "The bread selection wasn't bad, but the potato chip aisle was wiped out." Tony said, "The essentials."

Have An Ah Oooga Christmas

2009-12-15T22:39:00.008Z

I spent this evening writing to two men (and I almost typed "boys,") that I have known since I was born. Yes. Born. One is five years older than me, and the other one or two. We grew up on the same street, and there are a lot of memories between us.

I was rather sad this season. Usually I am putting up three trees (one silver,) and making wreaths for myself and friends and sending out these funky cards I make using funny photographs and writing long letters and going over "Christmas Cheer" recipes (Memo to Self: Remember to ask Lee where that Christmas Cocktails Web Page is that we did.) Last weekend, with all that's going on, I spent the Saturday thinking it through and decided to put my big girl pants on and realize I couldn't "do" Christmas this year: Please...and I'm begging you...do NOT write me and say, "But you can do something!" If I'm not doing what I normally do, I'm doing none of it.

Earlier this fall, I went through last year's Christmas and Hannukah card list and really whacked away at it. I am the type who usually gives people a few years to come round, but this time, I thought, "I'm tired of being the one always trying." For some people, it was the end of the trail. I'm pushing them off the life raft. Sink or swim. Find me or not. I don't care anymore. The list is still too big, and I know it's only going to get smaller as each year passes. I did decide the one thing I would do. If someone wrote me a Christmas or birthday card with a message, I would write them back. That, I am honoring.

I had to run an errand recently that was going to take me near my old neighborhood, and I thought, "I know I'm going to write "the guys" this year, so let me swing by and take pictures of our childhood homes." In D.C. you get an odd mix of "JesusMaryand Joseph what happened here? to "Still the same. Norman Rockwell. Let's sing a carol." As I told the guys writing them today, "Our old street is a mix of "trashed out," and "Haitian Disneyland."

I wound up writing them a 13-page Christmas letter that had me laughing. At one point I wrote, "I jut realized that deaths, muggings, robberies, bodies in the road don't exactly scream "Merry Christmas,"and I told them that I was laughing as I wrote that: but I did write them honestly about the changes and things going on lately.

I also wrote them about some shared memories. One winter the older boys got very ambitious and decided to wage a snow war. This was back when Washington still had deep snows. That morning they gathered up empty cardboard boxes and shovels and things to "level" with and actually had a little snow "brick" factory going: filling the boxes with snow and levelling them off and dumping them; using the same techniques you would use to build an igloo, only they were making snow walls. The girls and little ones, myself included, were busy making snowballs and stacking them like cannonballs at either snow fort. I told them, "Nowadays kids would just play this on Wii and that "PlayStation snowballs don't hurt." One's dumped in a bucket of water to give them an ice veneer do.

I reminded the younger of the two men, too, how one summer when I was 14 or 15 and he was 16, we spent that summer on my front porch sucking on grape Kool Aid ice cubes, playing gin rummy. We had quite an addicted group, and I told him "I still have that same deck of cards!" It wasn't until I was getting reading to sign off with a hand written closing that I remembered something else. That gin rummy summer. There was a boy in the neighborhood restoring an old Model T Ford. Their horns were a distinctive klaxon "Ah Ooh Gah" sound. He would drive from his house and pass mine. I was teased that he had a crush on me, because he'd always honk driving by. And to the man I was writing today I said, "You used to constantly tease me that summer and say, "Here comes your boyfriend.....Ah Ooooog AH!"

I went to You Tube, and sure enough. There are tons of videos of young men with these horns in their cars, including one actually punching one in an old Model T. I only remember the horn the boy used in his car had a much more drawn out oooooohga. So I got to thinking. Some of those boys on You Tube? They are popping the hoods and showing you the horn. In one, there are a group of them with their cars in a semi circle having a "honk off" contest. I'm not making this up! Then they start revving their engines in competition.

This is why I love men. Men are so simple and easy to please. One reason, anyway. Buy your honey a horn that sounds like the Queen Mary coming into dock. Or plays the theme from The Godfather. Ladies? If you want your man or boyfriend to go into orgasmic bliss this holiday? Order him a J.C. Whitney automotive parts catalog. Yes, they are online, but you've got to get them the actually catalog. http://www.jcwhitney.com/ This is primo toilet reading. This is where men go to get dice gear shifts and those naked lady mud flaps and chromed skull speakers for the rear windows of their cars.

I turned some men onto the Whitney catalog when I was in my teens? To this day they are still talking about it. Call me Santa Cube, and I do this in memory of my own Ah Ooga boy. I never met him, but I hope he's still out there honking somewhere.

http://www.jcwhitney.com/ANTIQUE-STYLE_OOOGAH_HORN?ID=12;0;0;0;100005;ProductName;0;0;0;0;2009071;0;0

HO, HOO GAH!

The Angels Want To Wear My Red Shoes

2009-12-10T16:44:00.010Z

I hedged posting this piece after burying teeth and so many matters of loss and death. I was talking to a commenter on this blog, "Home Before Dark," and we swapped some e-mails back and forth about degree of loss to the point it seems bottomless, half joking, "When does it end? When does a period of happiness ensue?"

I have never wanted happiness more than now in my life. Mentally and physically I have had enough. So I write this next bit with tongue in cheek, since, well, "Here we go again."

Over the weekend, I had a lot of errands to run. I had switched handbags from the very chi chi Mark Jacobs to the "seen a few years" Kenneth Cole, thinking it would be fun to carry a red purse during the holidays, but it needed a bit of touching up, so I went scouting for saddlesoap and red shoe polish. Trust me. Red shoe polish? Not easy to find. I knew of a few sources: the shoe repair shop at White Flint Mall (wonder if it's still there?), Fortuna Shoe Repair in Bethesda, and a tiny hole in the wall shop run by this Greek man named Joe. I can hear Velvet saying, "Go to the Greek."

I ran my errands. It was a long day and one heading for dark, stormy thunderheads. I did go to Joe's, and that's when it hit. An older obviously Greek woman was in there. The rest of the staff, Hispanic. They had my red polish from England, and the saddlesoap. I asked the old lady if she was married to Joe and how was he? She immediately teared up and held up one finger to make me stop. She was choked with tears. My eyes welled with tears. We stood there staring at each other with tears in our eyes.

She told me he had died a year ago. She was "all alone." I know she had had two sons, at the least, but I swore she told me one died in his teens. I'm still not sure about that. She was very emotional when she was talking to me. That and a language gap and who knows. I told her that I had loved Joe: his wonderful work ethic and business, and what a great personality he had--tons of charm. I said all of the right things. I did not have enough to cover the two items I was buying; falling 35 cents short. She debated about it. Quite a while. Finally, a Hispanic woman said, "That's ok," but I could see it bothered Mrs. Joe to let it go. I know. 35 cents. Yet, I understood.

I told her I would be back tomorrow with the money, also bringing a friend so they could express their sympathy to her about Joe. As soon as I left, I drove to the bank, not only to get some money, but another roll of quarters, (God bless you D.C. parking meters,) and...the money to pay Joe's widow. I drove right back to Joe's and gave her 75 cents. At this point, she was waving it away, telling me, "That's okay," but I insisted and she took it, telling me, "You and I are the same. I cannot sleep knowing I owe someone."

I agreed I was the same and that is why I had gone to the bank and come back. Finally. She smiled at me. I again reassured her that I would be returning with someone to let them pay their respects to her, and she told me to come back at any time.

Home? Are you reading this? Are you laughing? I mean right after our discussion?

I was up and having coffee yesterday morning, purusing The Washington Post, and reading the obituaries (a habit since childhood.) You are born and grow up in Washington, you read the obits. You know people. There was a period, during my parents prime years, where someone was always showing up. Now. Not so much.

There she was. My mother's old church friend: a lady whose family I grew up with, whose daughter I played with, and a woman I had been meaning to call for the past few weeks.

About a month ago, I made a call to one of the "church ladies," the few remaining who were part of my family's social circle at church, and I had to track them down because they had shifted residence. In fact, in calling another woman who had also lost touch with "the group," I found she had moved as well. So now with two women found, I told them both I would make two more calls. I knew where woman #3 was, as well as #4, but I wanted to tell them the plan on the telephone: that I would be writing them all a group letter, and then have a separate sheet of current names and addresses. They all loved the idea. I knew Mama was smiling down, saying, "I brought you up right, and thank you for helping my friends."

There's also this whole issue of social groups. The church group had splintered when a massive, old church with history in Washington had sold the church for millions, then moved to the suburbs. Demographics changed. People weren't happy. People left. Networks were broken. People were angry, too. The church's pastor had wanted to preach to college students, somehow overrode everyone and gotten the church moved to a piece of land my father had rejected ages ago for NASA due to it's problems, and the millions went into the bad soil and were lost. Then to make it even better, the pastor sought transfer and went to a parish in Florida with five churches. Money gone, church hanging by a thread, and long gone (those with money) parishoners. So the church will die, I am sure.

In the interim during of all of this, another woman died who they all knew, from a sister church. Another one down. I scanned her obituary, in case they had missed it. This is why, when I was talking to "Home Before Dark," I meant what I said, "Where does it end?" I sat yesterday evening and wrote for hours in my private journal what this woman had meant to me, to our family; and how she was one of a very few sources I could turn to for adult sympathy and support. I called the ladies. Some knew. Some didn't. Since they were her friend, as well, I knew they had to be secretly wondering, "Which one of us is next?"

The visit with Joe's widow? The shrinking generational circle? It's all taking it's toll on me. And I have to laugh because the next piece I was going to write was about London and Highgate Cemetery. Do you think you could stand it? Even if I made it funny? Even if I told you that Karl Marx is buried there? I dunno. We'll see. After that, what a deadbeat Lord Byron was, and come to think of it, he left a messy death as well.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-27T01:24:00.005Z

:::Blowing dust off blog:::: Anyone out there? A rough year for me. Rough. A rough decade. A rough 15 years. I just finished reading a mystery by Dick Francis (a friend had recommended him to me, and I thought, "nah," but then I thought, "She has good taste," and I've been enjoying the books,) in between reading about Merv Griffin and his hustler boy pool parties with Liberace, or books about how we become autonomous and why. In this particular Francis mystery, Rat Race, the protagonist, a pilot, befriends a jockey and his twin sisters, one of whom has leukemia. They are a united family and enjoy each other's company. The pilot sees the healthy sister, reflecting on her sick twin, and he thinks, "I knew she was thinking of Midge. Face something big enough and you always have to grow up."

That sentence stuck with me all day, "Face something big enough and you have to grow up." I've had to face a lot of big somethings in the last decade, foremost the loss of my parents, but other things. The school of hard knocks. I was trying to decide what to do about Thanksgiving this year. In my early youth, Thanksgiving was just our immediate family, plus my aunt and uncle, but she died when I was seven, and that ended until my parents, with two other church families decided to do this trade-off: where the families would rotate Thanksgiving between the three, theoretically to give the women every two years off. Reflecting back, I don't see how this was "better," per se in that "yes" you got time off, but when it was your turn, you were cooking for 20.

My mother was a masterful cook, and everyone always said, "This is her favorite holiday, where her cooking skills shine," but thinking today of how it would be: my father screaming at me the night before to set the formal table, having the crystal washed and the silver polished, and just the sheer tension the whole next day; which was odd, because my parents constantly entertained, and a level most people wouldn't believe. Once I started doing Thanksgiving myself, it struck me as more odd (the stress,) because you can cook everything (theoretically) the day before. I'm still pondering that one. One friend speculated that maybe my mother saw this as some test of her womanhood, or just testing in general, and performance anxiety set in. Maybe. I'm not sure.

Yesterday, I took off early and hit Whole Foods to pick up my "on order" free range turkey. It was horrible in there. Just horrible. I stopped counting how many times I had a cart slammed into my body after 20. And yet. The woman who works in the vitamins section that I've befriended came up and gave me a big hug, and we stood in the swirling aisle chatting and ignoring the hubbub. She even walked with me to my checkout lane, while we continued chatting. More hugs. Nice.

While I was in there, I was studying the pies. They had them on a large baker's rack. The pumpkin looked...bleh. Pale undercooked crusts with overcooked fillings. Sweating. The cherry and apple held portent of sour fruit and cardboard crust. A German man was standing next to me and he saw me rejecting pie after pie, and I guess I mumbled, "That's not even cooked," and he said, "Zees pies are not kooked?" I reassured him that they were, but how do you translate, "They are both overcooked and undercooked?" I went over to the dessert section and studied the cakes. Better. This woman next to me: a tiny little thing who looked like Andy Warhol's Sylvia Miles in the face (and voice,) but had on weird après-ski wear: Fair Isle knits and furry boots and a cluster of diamond rings on every single finger. She kept screaming (to this very well dressed mature man,) "ALLEN (pure New York.) ALLEN!!! I'VE SCORED!!! Beaming. A peach cake. I thought, "If I were Allen, my peach pits would be shriveling right now at hearing my name screeched that way.

Later that night, I took a picture of the turkey in my refrigerator and sent it to friends. My buddy Drew emailed back, "I can't believe how tidy your refrigerator is compared to mine!" I wrote back, "I was just thinking it doesn't look tidy at all." I was also studying that bottle of Veuve Clicquot that's been sitting in there since last New Year's.

When my mother took sick, we tried to sustain Thanksgiving, but it was such sadness. You would hand her a potato and potato peeler, and she would have this sad little smile on her face. So much wanting to be part of things, but no longer remembering. My San Francisco friend Lisa instant messaged me last night. Her mother, widowed and living in their home town 90 miles out of San Francisco, fell and broke her hip and had to have emergency hip replacement surgery. I told Lisa that for a stretch (in this lost period of my life,) I spent close to eight Thanksgivings between two parents, always in the hospital, either missing Thanksgiving totally, or eating it in a hospital cafeteria at noon so they could close early, or not having it at all: Chinese in an underheated house with my mother saying "Why isn't Papa here?" To quote John Lee Hooker, "Don't Look Back." I felt for Lisa. She has a lot of difficult choices facing her in the next months. "Something big enough and you have to grow up."

I was supposed to have Thanksgiving today out in Eldersburg at a former neighbor (and friend's) sister's house. I had even met with all involved, and we had talked about the day, what to eat, etc. Then by the time last week rolled around, and no proper invitation was forthcoming, I realized I didn't want to be an afterthought, nor ignored for whatever reasoning, and I was going to have to make up my mind what to do. In those years after my parents, I tried it all: going to the ocean, eating at a fancy restaurant, eating buffet at a restaurant, not eating turkey food at all (Chinese, Indian,) going to the movies all day. Nothing seemed to satisfy. Then I started cooking for older people I knew, and that entailed a new set of skills: cooking for the elderly. I've blogged on that topic before. The last of the women died last fall, and I took on the responsibility of her estate--something I have sworn I will never do again (and I've done it a lot.)

I thought I finally had her house sold. It was on the market since February. I had restored it without going insane in expenditure, and there it sat with nary a nibble until recently. A D.C. schoolteacher was going to buy it. Settlement date was the 24th (this week,) and then on Monday, (thank you Michelle Rhee,) her work hours were cut back, the bank said, "Nope!" and the deal fell through. Back to square one. Plus I had been putting pressure on myself for weeks to be over there in filthy packrat conditions (have you see A&E's Hoarders? Then you know.) In garden sheds, in the attic, in the basement. Vermin droppings, untouched decades of dust. Hello Miss Haversham. So that bad news.

This was the first Thanksgiving I truly had no responsibility to honor the holiday other than for myself. I thought I could easily ignore it, but I thought, "Why?" Why not do it and use the time to remember, to think of my future, to be thankful for the blessings of simple things. And so I got up this morning and began (and this photo blog is mainly for the amusement of my friends, so if it bores you, come back later and I'll be writing about what a total loser Lord Byron was or the Romanov jewels or magical thinking and luck.) I am getting ready to write again on a more regular basis.

The first thing I made was crinkle carrots in a curry-butter-brown sugar glaze. Easy peezy and put them in the fridge for later.

A friend told me just this week how his mother always put roasted chestnuts in her dressing. I've always made what my mother made: old-fashioned cornbread-white bread sage stuffing. But I thought, "Chestnuts? Sure." They had chestnuts from Italy at Whole Foods. They also came already done and in a jar, but for something like $14.00 for a tiny jar. I thought, "Google!"

I put out peanuts for the squirrels this morning, and they came running. I watched them while they watched me. We call this ritual, "The floor show." One of them said to me, "I hear you have Italian chestnuts roasting in there...so what's with the peanuts?" I went and got him a chestnut.

Scored with the cross mark of Christ's death and resurrection and served at the time of his birth. Memento Mori. In truth? To let the steam out so they don't explode in your oven.

Not a dud in the bunch. I read online this morning. You should put them in cold water to begin. If one floats? Toss it. If they don't pop open? Toss it. Even then, you may peel and find one rotten inside. Not my fancy dancy Italians. They were like Fabio on Top Chef. "We are not purrfict, no?"

Perfezione! Bella!

Now that the oven was free, it was time to start the turkey. Just a peek at turkey porn, and it's not a pay-per-view site:

I never put stuffing in the 'boid. ("ALLEN! It's the poifect boid!") I put in a chopped onion, an apple, an orange, a lemon, and some thyme and rosemary. Actually, while all of this was going on, I was thinking of that movie Avalon, set in Baltimore, and the family that is perpetually late to the family meals. "You cut the toikey without us? You CUT the toikey?"

This was me goofing on taking pictures with one hand, while cooking with the other. Taters. Lots of taters.

Buddah and Organic Cream Cheese. Lots of buddah.

Whisk, whisk.

Whip, whip

There will be no lumps in these taters! Did I ever tell you I went out one rainy Thanksgiving night with my highly stylish friend Mark? We were going to see Leaving Las Vegas where Nicholas Cage basically drinks himself to death. Mark had a briefcase. We were at the Dupont Theatre. Pouring. Torential. We get seated and Mark pops open the briefcase. It was a traveling bar. Rye predominated. Every time Nicholas Cage (a raging alcoholic) had a drink, we had a drink. Mark and I still giggle about that night. I don't remember a thing about the movie. Cage dies at some point, and Elisabeth Shue wore this great bustier by Vivienne Westwood.

I mixed a can of whole berry sauce with some of my own. I had orange zest in it and only left that orange slice on top until I served the food later.

Ta Da! Nine pounds and four hours later...Let me tell you. This bird amazed me. I was dreading carving it. Not my best skill, plus I was tired at this point. But. I did the basic anatomy you do with a turkey: twisted off the wings, then the legs. The meat was so tender it fell right off the bone. I did the same thing with the main torso. Ripped off big hunks for ziploc bags and didn't carve at all. Into the freezer you go. Unlike Claudette Colbert, I could shoot this bird from any angle. It didn't have a bad side. I thought about The Road. I'm going to go see that this week. Isn't there a cannibalism scene in there?

After all that, I sure didn't eat much. That's a salad plate of my everyday and right purdy. And my mother's little quail (one of a pair.) There is so much butter on that plate, call me "Paula Deen, y'all." I chopped the chestnuts coarsely after debating grinding them up in the Cuisinart. They turned out beautifully. Now I want to explore things like chestnut soup.

...and the cake. Allen! The cake! On a pretty piece of Majolica pottery. German Black Forest. They had just put it out at Whole Foods. It tastes very fresh. The cherries are not cloyingly sweet, but have a "very slight" sourness and tasted of pure black cherry--real black cherries, not from a can. They were also between the layers. The cake was a mocha light chocolate (again, not overly sweet,) and the frosting was whipped cream and chocolate chips. It looks heavy and rich. And yet....no. But mit schlag. Lots of schlag.

Happy Thanksgiving all. Guess what? Thanksgiving doesn't have to be dysfunctional. You can do it solo and have it be fun. Honor your holidays. Corny, yes, but of such things memories made.

Well....As Hamlet Would Say... "What Is This Quintessence Of Dust?"

2009-09-30T16:59:00.003+01:00

I’ve been writing about an older woman I knew who died last September at age 96. I’ve been dealing with her estate, and all of her personal effects, for the past year. Let me tell you another story about this woman.

Her parents were from Russia, and they came to this area at a time of great turmoil in their country. Her teenaged mother had fled their burning village during the Russian Revolution with only a copper pot and pillow. She was smuggled out and never to see her family again. I knew her mother, as well. When "Granny" was in her last week of life (and she lived to be a grand old age,) she reverted back to speaking only Russian, and she kept talking to her mother (whom she hadn’t seen since she was seventeen) up high in the corner of the hospital room. She had once told me when I was a young girl that she loved her mother so much, she would put two chairs together to sleep next to her. I found the copper pot in the basement about a month or two ago.

I had heard about this pot for quite some time. You can't imagine how I felt when I found it. Realizing that this teenage girl ran from her village during a revolution. Never saw her family again. And she entered this country with only a pillow and this pot. To paraprhase Nabokov, "Speak, History."

They ran a little Mom and Pop store named after their daughter over on A Street on Capitol Hill. When they died, they were buried in this really old cemetery over off Benning Road which is a part of D.C. you don’t want to linger in, not even the residents, not even during the day. Things were so bad, they had to keep the cemetery gates locked, so to visit you would have to call the caretaker and meet him there so he could let you in…and wait to let you out. And yes, I've heard of muggings and murders in graveyards. We aren't even safe with the dead.

Several times I was asked to go with the lady so I could re-landscape the gravesite. It was a very dark, dank, dismal place to be. High iron gates, a lot of overgrown vegetation. Leaning markers. Very little sunlight (so shade plants) and always the danger some “youth” would come through the back way and attack you. I was never comfortable there. The place reeked of neglect and being forgotten and lost in this changed world where it was plopped down under lock and key. Everything said “stay away.”

All of this upset the lady greatly. She wanted to be able to visit her parents in peace. She decided she would unplant them and move them to a cemetery not far from where she lived. Her family was there, all in a row: her sister, her brother-in-law and her niece. She approached her spiritual leader about how to go about this, and he forbade it; saying it was against religious law…which was hogwash on toast.

What was odd, (to me,) was that she had worked for Congress in the 1930’s…up through the 1970’s. She never married, was a career woman and very opinionated and strong minded; i.e. not a woman to hold her tongue, but just lay it right out there. She had subscribed to The Village Voice since it’s inception. The same for Rolling Stone. Very attuned to her culture. I have to admit it's interesting to know that you can yell at Bush on the television when you're ninety. She was highly political, and even in the last weeks of her life, loathing Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to the end. She desperately wanted to be well enough to vote in the last Presidential election and she missed the opportunity by weeks. I thought about her a lot on that day.

Her parents had been Orthodox, but she never really pursued religion until after her mother died. This adherence and obedience to a controlling bully, I could never understand. There are so many stories I could tell against this man, but won’t. While I never called him a self absorbed, lazy creep to her face, I did tell her to go ahead and move her parents, because it was so important to her. She never did, and she carried that upset with her to the end.

In the last year of her life, she lost her teeth, and we went through hell with that. It took a good nine months to replace them (a lot of trips to the dentist on day’s off,) as she was so frail and it was hard to get accurate measurements. It was also an out of pocket expense, so a lot of sacrifice on the part of everyone to get this done. And when the teeth were done? She wouldn’t wear them.

A few weeks ago, I was in her basement: bad lighting, overheated and tossing, tossing, storing, and I found a pair of teeth. I had to wonder. “Are these hers?” I showed them to her nephew, and he held them up to the light, much as Hamlet hoisted that skull, and he said, “No. This is my grandmother.”

Later that night, the nephew said, “I think we should go to the cemetery where she is buried, and bury Granny’s teeth there.” You have to understand. I’ve been doing quirky things like this my entire life, so I was game. Soooo…this past weekend I said to the nephew, “Let’s go bury the teeth” because it was the week of her birthday.

As bizarre as this seems, I hope I am doing things like this when I’m eighty, because it sure keeps life interesting. I’ve dug graves in my past, I’ve landscaped them, and now I’m doing burials. So yeah…..we didn’t get Granny replanted next to her daughters….but on the other hand….we did.

Postscript: I went to see my dentist this morning. He's originally from India and into high tech interactive server everything. Huge enthusiasm about you name it. I got a tour of his new offices, very modern, very elegant, and we talked about all that he had done. He just kills me. He has got "a guy" for everything: "You like that tile? I got that from a guy in Philadelphia who knows a guy in Italy. You need a plumber? Call my guy. Computer tech? Carpenter? Jewels? I've got a guy in Jaipur." His wife is a pip, too.

I was telling him the story above, and he listened and nodded--he got it, then he told me his story. In moving his offices, he was getting rid of some things, including plaster molds of teeth. One set belonged to a young man of eighteen that had died not long ago. He was driving on River Road in Potomac at 3 a.m. and hit a tree. The car burst into flames and he died trapped inside. My doctor had kept the mold because it was an interesting dental correction, and in the end, the parents sent the police to him to identify the young man's remains through his dental records. He had just completed this sad task, so it was still fresh in his mind. He hated to toss the molds, but it was obviously a very sensitive thing to ask the parents about; i.e. "Do you want your son's dental molds?" He approached them with delicacy, and in the end they did want them.

He understood my story completely. I told him, "I have my own plaster molds, and my mother's molds, on a shelf on one of my bookcases." They make an interesting conversation piece." Then we stood and both of us took pictures with my camera of the beautiful vista out his office windows. "Look at that sky," he said. "I need that sky."

OM-elette Or Suburban Satori

2009-09-29T15:59:00.000+01:00

Back in August, I read about a website that I thought would be fun to participate in. It's called Book Crossing, and the idea is you register a book you wish to give away, (you can print numbered labels,) then you seal the book in plastic (if you wish) and find a spot and leave it, waiting to see if the finder goes back to the website to acknowledge the find and keep. Their term for this is a "travelling book," and if the book is never recorded as "found," then it is called "wild." At first I focused on the idea of someone recording the find and how cool that would be, but then I went into a more "release and giving" mode and found acceptance in letting the book go on it's way into the world.

I had been watching over a senior citizen who died last year, and in the process of cleaning out her house, I also had to deal with her voluminous book collection. I had done so much with all of her books: let friends come in and pick and choose, selling them on Amazon (which I continue to do,) and taking a lot of bags and boxes to local libraries where you get a tax deduction for their resale rooms. My friends were done, so I was pretty much reduced to winnowing out for library donation, but I thought, "Book Crossing might be more fun," and it appealed to my sense of street art.

Let me explain. I've always been a big fan of projects where you do something that goes back out into the world. One thing I've done for years is whenever I am on a beach, I bury pennies. This started at the ocean when I would see those elderly men with their metal sweepers and massive earphones, searching for pieces of eight and Spanish doubloons. I would get a little ahead of these men, dig, dig, digging (sometimes including a nickle,) then sit back and watch them come towards me. Eureka! El Dorado!

Another project I do on Cape Cod in Massachusetts is carving these elaborate pumpkins for Halloween, then after the season has past, going back to retrieve the pumpkins from people who were recipients, then leave them in Colonial cemeteries: on stone walls by the side of the road, or up in the branches of a lichen covered trees, or sitting on a skull tombstone aslant.

Cape Cod and beaches are rife with these ideas. I would also go to a toy or craft store and buy oh....1,000 marbles. KMart sold a set where different kinds each had their own little tray: cat's eyes and auggies and such and then in the center, the King of Marbles. A large black marble covered with opalescence sheen, and every evening when I went for a walk at sunset along Cape Cod Bay at low tide, I would toss some marbles out far into the water. My last night there was always reserved for King Marble. My hope was they would make their way back to the rocky shore and perhaps a few summers later, a lucky child searching for shells would find a marble--maybe even scrubbed down to plain glass. Even if they didn't come back, at the very least a curiosity for the lobsters.

I've gone into woods and created art in nature, leaving maps for the person receiving the gift to go on a treasure hunt. I was going to do one of those this Spring and ran out of time, so I can't describe it for now, since it's on hold for next year. So leaving things out for others to find was not a novel idea to me and leaving books seemed appealing.

I thought the elderly lady would like it, too. A few years back, I had gathered up a ton of books she was finally willing to release. Her idea was to donate Judaica books to her temple. Her rabbi, always the pill, demanded that someone provide him with a list of every book: it's title, author, publishing information and a brief summary, for his review. I do believe I cursed the man through the whole ordeal, and I know a control freak when I see one. More on him later this week.

Given the generous nature of this woman, and the breadth of the books she was offering him--basically an entire library, I thought surely he could find someone to do this for him, but...."no," so during a very hot period in August, I had to box up all of the books, (and I was recovering from a back injury,) haul them out to my car, haul them into my home, unbox them, create these "lists," rebox and wait. He did accept them, and then I had to haul them over to the synagogue where I believe, to this day, they continue sitting in a large storage space.

I half thought about approaching him about creating a memorial library for the old lady, since she was kind enough to give him this gift, but I'd fear he'd demand me removing them, following her death, and I was not opening the lid on that jar of herring. The sad thing is, they were great books: religious, history, novels, children, language, cookery...every aspect of Jewish life and most "like new" in condition. I could go on about this man, but won't out of respect for the dead, but to say he's a piece of work is not even beginning to tell his tale.

The first book I chose to release, (or travel,) was a book on meditation. At first I was going to leave it on an outdoor bench at a Buddhist Kaikon. Then I remembered a little park with a duck pond the lady had always enjoyed, and it was situated in an Orthodox community, so I drove there to leave the book. The day of the drop, it was just me and ducks for the most part, and the book is still listed as "wild" although I am sure someone took it and didn't follow through.

The letting go felt right. I am sure the ducks were thinking, "If that's not Wonder Bread, stop bugging us." And thus ended my first book drop, and I've done another since, which I will write about later this week. It involves feet washing and Charlton Heston.

The new Zen goose: We don't migrate. We meditate.

She's A Brainiac, Altair

2009-09-27T16:59:00.002+01:00

Last week, my friend Reya over at Blog Gold Puppy was talking about the luxury of time, and how she often tries to slow things down to enjoy them more. I wrote back, telling her how I try to stay in a "patience" zone and absorb the moment when I am doing those things she described. I always felt my late father was rushing through his life, with each event being hurried along. The first to arrive at a party, (and positively antsy to get there,) then once there, he couldn't wait for it to end.

I told Reya that I listen and watch a lot to what is going on around me, trying to understand what it means and stay sensitive to it; seeing the big picture, as it were. A few years back, I read an article about animal's "rhythms" and how their heartbeats were slower than humans, so it helped to move more slowly around them in every way. I tested it out and I found dogs, cats, horses and squirrels very responsive to it. It even worked on crows who are incredibly wary around humans. They tend to scatter when you are near, and for a few years I was able to study crow behavior--and, I would add, they are highly socialized, community driven birds.

Older people respond to slowness, as well. The only contrary thing I would add is that you have to speak louder, but still slowly. Slow and loud. I've been caregiver to some seniors, and I've been working on the estate of one who died last year. Once again into the fray of emptying out a house and handling once loved possessions, not without it's own sadnesses. I'll be writing an oddball story about one such moment later this week.

The other day I was doing a drop at the library book depository. Recently, they had added medium sized rocks between the curb and the sidewalk, and I had made a note to myself what a treacherous bit of land this had become; especially involving feet, ankles and knees. I had twisted my right ankle the other day (thinking with relief when I did so, "Whew...that was a close one,") only I must have sprained it, because it remains weakened, and I am still wary of it, not giving it full weight, so I was carrying around my own slowness.

There was a minivan parked in front of me with it's side door opened, and I thought "Soccer Mom," only a little old lady was inside, removing her books to return. She was dressed rather nattily in black Bermuda shorts and a pressed cotton top, but her legs were skeletal; that cliché of skin and bone. I watched her cross the rocks and saw how her feet tilted unsteadily, so as she made her way back to her car (and I practiced "stillness" in standing, waiting--wishing not to startle,) I said to her, "These rocks are highly impractical in terms of crossing them to get to the sidewalk."

She looked into my eyes for the longest time. Then she said, "Would you mind repeating what you just said to me?" So I did. Another pause. Another long stare. At this point I had the sense I was gazing into the innards of a dated computer: watching synapses firing, seeing lights bounce. Point A to Point B to Point....then she said, in a very formalized, very slow voice, (but well ennunciated) "I concur with your assessment."

I had to stare back, thinking, "There is your future." I held back while she returned to her car, wondering how she even maneuvered such a heavy vehicle. While I waited, I took out my camera and shot a picture of the shrub next to the book depository. For some reason, it struck me as "brain like" in it's appearance. I shot a close-up of the brain shrub, as well. After all, I was in slow mode and waiting my time through this event. I don't know why, but those branches were like a symbol of what I had just experienced.

A few days ago, once again at the book drop, I got out of the car and saw this:

Saturday, September 26, 2009

2009-09-27T04:19:00.006+01:00

September's Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets--Crows--and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming--
An Inneundo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.

~~ Emily Dickinson

Aloe Vera Juice DrinkHold The Pickle

2009-08-30T23:14:00.001+01:00

Two or three years ago, my friend Laura went to California with her mother and her Aunt Edie to stay at a desert spa and basically high colonic their way to health. This wasn't one of those "now we march through the mountains" retreats, but more, "let's rest your system by the pool waiting for the next enema assault." I'm not sure if Laura picked up the recipe for this drink at the spa, or later in persuing "health is our only real wealth" mindset, but she got me on the kick, and I stuck with it for a good while. I do remember one plus is that's it's suppose to keep your metabolism at a healthy level.

I still had the ingredients floating around, so I decided to start doing it again. Simple really. Aloe vera juice (not the gel,) organic apple cider vinegar (both of which I got at Whole Foods,) and fruit juice.

The portions are as follows:

1/4 to 1/2 cup Aloe Vera juice (I usually go with 1/4 cup)
1-2 Tablespoons of Apple Cider vinegar (I usually do two)
Remainder of glass with grape or apple juice.

I've varied the juices. Since it's not necessarily something that's in the "sip and enjoy" category, but rather "get it down," I think you have to play around with the "juice" part. I tried cranberry, but that didn't really work. Now I do grape juice, but I could see orange juice working. Just something with more substance to override the vinegar.

I'm putting this on my blog, because I think Laura has given up on me in keeping my own copy safeguarded somewhere. Now I know where to look when I can't remember my portions.

I photographed this with an antique glass from Posin's. Do you remember Posin's? It was a Jewish market founded by Abraham Posin. His family had come to the United States from Russia around 1910. Young Abraham visited an uncle living in Washington, where he met and married Gertrude Rose, another Russian émigré.

The couple opened a store in Foggy Bottom, later moving to the Arcade Market in Columbia Heights and then in 1947 they moved to 5756 Georgia Avenue. Abe’s sons, (World War II veterans Max and Hyman,) eventually took over the store. Although most of his Jewish customers moved on in the 1950's, Max stayed to serve the African-American and Caribbean immigrants who took their places. He died in 1995, and his son Randy closed the store three years later. If you say to me "Posin's," I say "pickle barrel." Something that has disappeared from Washington in just the past few years. Even Giant, another store founded by Jewish immigrants, had pickle barrels in every store, next to the deli section.

A friend of mine remembers his aunt and grandmother going to Posin's every week. They would buy smoked whitefish (with the eye,) lox, bagels, challah, pickles, brisket (which Posin's was famous for,) and other Eastern European delicacies. I like shopping at stores with that Mom and Pop vibe, but they are harder and harder to find. Easier in the Asian community, and there are still some remnants of Italian stores floating around, over by Catholic University which at one time had a large Italian-American community. The passing of the pickle barrel. Sigh. (My friend said, "Bad little boys used to piss in them." Thank you for sharing that fact, Friendo.)

Founder Abraham Posin at the meat counter, with his son's Hy and Max.

The Shooting Of The Hip Yoga Death Goddess*

2009-08-14T09:03:00.016+01:00

Woody Harrelson just shot me in yoga class. I was dreaming I had returned to my yoga class. The studio was dark and people were in class in the shadows working through a series of movements. I told myself I was only returning to retrieve purple pillowcases from my locker. I was wearing the wrong clothes. I walked into the studio and fell in line doing the poses. I was thinking, "I can't do this. I am wearing the wrong clothes." Yet I could.

My yoga instructor left the room and Woody Harrelson walked in, (as the teacher,) and he seemed normal at first, but then he shifted into political tirades a la Oliver Stone, just talking madness. I tried to speak to him rationally. He kept babbling insanity.

I was holding an art book, and in the back was this folded diagram in green and white expounding and building out as a "tree" chart on some art movements. Woody ripped it out of the book, claiming it was a book he had written, and he taped the diagram on the wall, still ranting and pointing at the paper and talking political conspiracy.

Savasana Corpse Pose

He came over to me while babbling at the others. He grabbed me and produced a gun and pressed it into my flesh. I kept talking to him as if he were normal, knowing he wasn't. When I realized his intent: to kill me, I started wrestling with him for the gun, but he was stronger than I was, and he shot me in the side. People pulled him off of me, and I sat trying to stay very still to assess how damaging the shot was. It took a long time for the EMT's to arrive. I thought, "If I am conscious this long, I won't die from this."

When we arrived at the hospital and they had me in the emergency room, I asked the doctor who was prepping me for surgery if I should say my final goodbyes to the world, meaning I wouldn't make it through the surgery. He had a funny look in his eye.

I awoke with a start. Now I'm sitting here with a pain in my ribs where the phantom bullet went in. I guess I should go back to sleep and see what happens next.

*The title refers to an Ultimate Spinach song entitled, "Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess." It's on YouTube. I tried embedding it, (with my phantom bullet pain still hurting,) and it kept failing, so foo, yanno? Go look it up.

Weddings? Who Knew? You Get Presents!

2009-08-12T00:34:00.005+01:00

I thought I was done with wedding and baby gifts, but this summer I was invited to another wedding; a young woman that works the reception desk where I get my manicures. Close? Sort of. She took to me right away--the kind of girl who is just very optimistic and bubbly and happy and comes from a loving, stable family (and "yes," over time I've met her Mom and Dad, too.) She always gives the biggest hugs, is spontaneous and laughs more than anyone I know.

I wanted to get her something nice for her marriage, and I needed to get the gift to her today, as she is getting married this weekend. I am putting this up because: 1) I do keep a photographic record of cards I create and packages I wrap and 2) this shows me (at least) how I can have a solid idea in my head of how I want something to look, have to amend it, then have to amend it again. It pays to stay flexible.

I'm not that thrilled with this wrap job. It wasn't my first vision, but I just couldn't find the right paper, so I shifted to a traditional wedding paper in pale pearlized champagne with white flock fleur-des-lis. I used a champagne tulle ribbon FROM HELL. It was just murder working with it, so lesson learned there. "Never again."

Once I had the paper set, then I had to go looking at flowers, and it took forever. Back when we had MJ Design around this area, I could walk in and always find quality products. The closest I can come to that now is an American Florist out on River Road (and that's an iffy source off season,) and Homestead Gardens, but that means driving to Davidsonville. A.C. Moore's is crap. Sorry. It is cheap crap. I settled for Michael's, but that's a lot of picking and chosing, because they aren't top of the line, either.

By the time I put the flowers together, it would have been double in cost in what you see in hydrangeas and snapdragons and some tiny pink roses with strands of pearls on tiny plastic threads dangling down, but I had to cut the big flowers in half, ditch the roses and pearls and use a vine of pale variegated ivy. To create what I wanted would have been over fifty dollars. The downside of this is I know what's in my head, and this wasn't it, but it was going to have to do.

After all that last night: running for supplies, wrapping an oversized box, (and it did take every bit of the paper,) then fighting the ribbon, it was just icing to have to fight the flowers as well. I finally shoved it all off center angular and said, "Good enough."

I hear so many troubled stories these days from friends. So many bad stories. My own life hasn't been going smoothly. Deep in problems. I wanted to sign her card "Have you really thought about this? Seriously?" But. She's in love. She's young, she's level headed, she comes from a really good, stable family. I adore her Mama. I pray she stays as happy as she has been this past year.

She's in her love bubble. Floating. Let's leave her there and wish her the best.

What's The Secret, Colonel Sanders?

2009-07-08T20:27:00.001+01:00

The "Tijuana Bucket." The Chicken Has Tails.

Back when Oprah had her hysteria driven "free anything" audience bombard KFC, my manicurist got online and secured about 20 print out coupons (2-piece grilled chicken, two sides and a medium drink.) Within days of that, she passed on two of the coupons to me, and off I went, in line with others waving their paper, only to be told, "You'll have to take a rain check," (which struck me as odd since others around me were buying grilled chicken.) That night on late night television, the CEO of KFC (an Australian) apologized to the viewers that KFC had underestimated the response from the Oprah offer. I don't buy that. Oprah says shit pearls, and we're all wearing six-strand Mikimotos.

I had to go to a KFC, get a special form, fill it out and attach my original coupon, mail it, then wait. The coupons finally arrived, and I picked up my freebie for lunch today. I did not announce in advance I was paying with the coupon. The sides were sides. They were fine. Pepsi fine. What floored me was the chicken. Since I don't know KFC etiquette, I was told by the cashier I had to chose "a wing and a breast," or "a leg and a thigh." I went with leg/thigh. I have never seen such greasy grilled chicken in my life, number one, and where did they get these impossibly tiny mutant chickens? I could have been eating a rat leg.

Do you think the Colonel is telling Michael Jackson the secret spices recipe? Is he saying, "I know your Daddy?"

"Fust, you git the oil really hot."

Berry Berry Good Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins

2009-07-08T17:36:00.002+01:00

Blueberry Sour Cream Muffins

2 cups flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup sour cream at room temperature
1 large egg, beaten
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups blueberries
1/4 cup butter, melted and cooled
Demerara Sugar for topping (optional)

Directions: Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Prepare 12 muffin cups with paper fillers.

In a large bowl stir together flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

In another bowl stir together butter, sour cream, egg and vanilla until blended.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the wet. Stir until just mixed (batter will be very thick,) then fold in the blueberries. Spoon the batter into tins and sprinkle with Demerara sugar.

Bake 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Remove to rack and let cool at least two minutes before serving.

NOTES:

*Makes twelve muffins

* The batter is incredibly thick. Like bread dough. You'll think you did something wrong. You didn't.

* Normally I would spoon dough into muffin tins only 3/4 full. With this recipe you can heap it up. Mine didn't spill over.

*My oven runs hot, so I thought my cooking time would be 15 minutes. It took the full 20.

---------------

As a child, I would pick berries on my grandmother's farm. The blueberries ran along side the road going into the property, the blackberries and raspberries were further away from the house into the woods, and yes, my cousins and I actually carried pails. Those berries are dicier to pick because they are on thorned shrubs, so it took patience with tiny fingers. I picked strawberries in sandy patches at my other grandmother's garden, and when I was small, my mother had a strawberry mound in the corner of our yard, again, with the sandy soil strawberries love. I liked picking berries. It's meditative and slow.

When I worked on Capitol Hill, they allowed for all sorts of things that I am sure have been nipped in the bud, including certain vendors wandering the hallways selling produce. There was a man who appeared every spring named Ike, and he would bring carts full of strawberry flats for sale. We would all buy up volumes of just picked berries. I ran into him a few years back, selling at one of the Farmer's Markets around town. I wonder if he's still out there?

Two people I went to high school with who are out in another country growing organic blueberries. I think they are really growing marijuana as their cash crop. I knew them both well enough to know the wife is working her ass off, and he's sitting around doing nothing. Your dream is realized, Homecoming Queen.

She did something incredibly stupid once involving nature. A group of us drove way out into Maryland , beyond Frederick I think, to visit some friends who had moved to a farm. Miss Paw Paw Patch wandered off to do her sufi dancing with nature. The kind of girl who would name her child "Sunflower" or some name after a pop group song. I had grown up a city girl, but with a farm girl mother, so I knew my plants and birds and the basic rules of safety around animals, like..."don't go near the bull," or "there are snakes in the hay."

At the end of the afternoon, Paw Paw came back waving a leafy branch, with purple stain all over her forehead. That's the communing part. I said, "Paw Paw? What do you have on your forehead?" and she waved her branch with purple berries at me. I said, "Paw Paw. That is sumac and it's berry is poisonous. You have to go wash that off of your forehead. It can be absorbed into your skin." She looked at me like "Cube...you don't know shit." So I shrugged and let her be. And now I'm sure she's out doing nature dancing around her berry bushes. I only hope she's learned a bit more since that day she was busy smearing poison around.

If you make the muffins? Eat them. If they stain your mouth berry purple? You'll be fine. If you are pregnant? Do not name your child "Blueberry."

What's In My Head

2009-06-23T14:40:00.000+01:00

I'm A Vampire! That's Nice Dear

2009-06-12T15:40:00.006+01:00

I'm still working my way through the four vampire books of Stephenie Meyer. Having just finished New Moon, I'm wondering if I'll make it. In this second volume, our heroine Bella continues to trip, fall and smash her way in pursuit of wild vampire love with her paramour, Edward. I wish I had kept count of the ripped flesh releasing blood lusts, concussions, and comas. And yet this clumsy high school girl from a small town in the Pacific Northwest is supposed to be an intellectual lure to the Volturi, the royalty of vampires: alive for over 3,000 years, living in the realm of the Vatican (the poor Vatican gets blamed for a lot lately.) Bella hits their radar and they think she'd be suitable to join them. And oh yes, her friend, the Indian Jacob, now running with a pack of teenage werewolves.

What we have are a group of people disaffected with their self image. Bella wants to be a vampire, the Volturi want Bella to be some kind of vampire princess, Jacob wants to be a werewolf, Bella doesn't want to get old. It's like some perversion on America's Top Model. Make me a star! Forever! Chastity Bono is in the news this week. She's undergoing sex change therapies to turn herself into a man. All news sources are calling her "him" now, and she wants to change her name to "Chaz." Somewhere in Cher's secret soul, she has to be asking herself, "Is this because I named my daughter after one of my movies?"

Then there is the return to Bella's life of Edward and how at the end of the book, Edward's little family is voting whether or not to honor Bella's wish to make her a vampire so she won't grow older than her love, and she will be bound in eternity with him and his family. I started thinking about this as I put the volume down the other morning. "Yes," Bella is in the full flush of teen love and thinks all of the passion she feels will remain forever. But I'm sure after a few hundred years, things have got to taper off a bit.

I'm not sure she's thought it out, in her posthaste to become living dead. I could just envision conversations like, "You never take me anywhere. We never go anywhere during the day," or Edward bringing home a vampire's version of fast food, some wino, and then who's turn is it to take out the leftovers to the trash. "I did it last time." Or "all you do is sleep," or having to hear his stories about how he died in the 1918 influenza epidemic at 18, for the 5,000th time. I mean "Flu schmoo. Get over it." One day, she'll be snapping out at Edward "I could have been something special....I could have been a Volturi!" Somehow, I don't think vampires escape the banality in eternity. Just remember. You once loved "My Little Pony" and lived in pink and purple. Life could be very long, Bella. Everyone wants a bite of you. Do you want to be a perpetual caregiver to bloodlusters? They'll suck the life right out of you.

Happy Birthday K

2009-06-09T21:27:00.000+01:00

Sorry to interrupt your little tete a tete. My friend Kathy had a birthday today, and she's got "that cold" going so it's all low-keyed for her today. I'd love ta kiss ya, but "that cold," and ....I jes washed mah hair.

Since we were discussing the wonderful Barbara Stanwyck, K, I wanted you to see this rarity from "Remember the Night." It has Sterling Holloway (Winnie the Pooh, Waldo from Life of Riley,) singing "The Perfect Day." And since I wish you a perfect birthday, here ya go:

Happy Perfect Birthday, Kathy. Make a wish!

A Return To Poor Person's Shopper's Food Warehouse

2009-06-04T20:27:00.002+01:00

I don't know what it is about Poor People's Shopper's Food Warehouse, but I keep getting into the most interesting conversations in there. The other night I went in for a few things. The store wasn't crowded, but there was a backed up line at one register. An older black woman was in front of me, dressed to the nines. She had on a white raincoat with gold buttons, a white lacey hat, black dress, hose and shoes. She turned and whispered to me conspiratorily, "There's only one woman checking out," (meaning the cashier.) "Really?" I whispered back. She nodded like it was a disgrace and crying shame as in "what's the world coming to?"

We started talking. She told me she had been to a funeral at her church earlier in the day, and she said, "I was in such a rush to the get to the church on time I did something stupid." I asked what and she smiled and said, "I forgot to put in my teeth." Sure 'nuff, just a few scragglies here and there. I told her I certainly didn't notice because I was admiring her hat and thought she looked "real spiffy." She thanked me then started telling me about how she had found some real bargains (mint Life Savers.) Her cart was packed, and she was leaning over it with her cane.

She asked about a cake in my cart from the bakery, and I told her I had a friend with a birthday, and even though they said not to do anything, I got a small Italian cream cake and some candles to celebrate. She said, "When a man tells you not to do anything, they really mean for you to do it." I nodded. She went on to praise the bakery and how the woman who baked for the store was "a doll." I had only seen an older woman back there with gold teeth, so I guess that's who she meant. Next time in, I'll remember "doll," rather than "teeth."

She went on discussing the store in general, then we shifted the conversation. I had mentioned I was tired from being over in a house of someone deceased, clearing things out until late, and I was really dragging. I told her the woman had been 96 years old and living on her own, and that seemed to perk her up; thinking she might make it that way, maybe. We talked about what it was like removing things from a deceased person's house. She said, "I'm originally from Philadelphia, but I've been living down here for decades. When my mother took sick, my two brothers wanted me to move back to Philly to take care of our mother, but I told them "No. I'm not doing it." She paused and added, "That would be my brothers Jack and.....Jack Ass."

She stayed put in D.C. with no regrets. She said they still want her back up there, but she isn't budging. She talked about a man in her life who is "sniffing around her." Trust me, this woman had me howling with laughter. It was all in her expressions and timing. A store manager came up and split us up to go into two express lanes. I told her I didn't want to go because when that happened last time, the cashier was looking at my coupons and check and license, just short of biting it for authenticity, and everyone being held up was pissed, and sure enough, I got back into that cashier's line again. Same thing.

When I was done, I saw the church lady over by the pharmacy talking to a friend, so I went over and said, "I want to thank you for our conversation today. It absolutely made my day, and I had such a good time talking to you." Her friend turned to me and said proudly, "She goes to my church!" I told her, "Well, it's obvious everyone in the store knows her and loves her (they did know her, too,) and that she's a very interesting lady....and funny. My church lady turned to me and said, "I'm the Whoopi Goldberg of Aisle 3!" And on that note, we parted. Laughing.

I'm Just A Teenage Dirtbag Redoux

2009-06-02T19:54:00.007+01:00

I just finished reading Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, not my usual type of read, but I like to keep an open mind. The truth is, the book was just something I pulled off the library bookshelves in desperation while I waited for my "on holds" to turn up. I was aware of all of the hoopla over these books when they came out, and nothing registered for me at the time. I had zero interest. I may have even been going through blood issues myself when the first book came out, or the movie, due to severe anemia (which has since disappeared,) but not before some nasty testing and treatment. If you want gore and pain, try a bone marrow biopsy, Stephenie.

I was surprised some Gothbag teen hadn't smeared his or her own blood over the pages of the book in some perverse allegiance. Someone did drop black ink all over the pages, so that it was like reading through brimstone.

Beelzebub Publishing -- A Bit Of Brimstone On Every Page

While reading the book, I had the unsettling feeling I was back in high school, and I'm guessing that's who's been reading these novels? But it sure wasn't my high school. My high school was rebellion and Rimbaud and Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One and beat poets and George Groz and this one sofa at the Phillips Gallery where you could be tucked in away from the Van Gogh freaks and think about the use of orange in the Renoir "Luncheon of the Boating Party," or a midnight showing at the Biograph of Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS and having my companion squirm at the maggot scene while I inched popcorn up his arm to mimic maggots, and when would I ever escape my parents and have my own life, but it sure wasn't about being a clumsy girl who needed rescuing or the living dead--unless you counted fifth period math or my biology teacher.

Probably the only thing I could connect with was that the vampires liked fast cars. And there's another song about escape for teens, Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car." I used to see her busking in Cambridge, Massachusetts near Harvard Square. Now that I can identify with. As for escapism....on the days when they had footballs games after school, I would climb through that fifth period math class window and leave the school grounds early. A ticket to football was my ticket to freedom. I didn't need the wings of the living dead to get me out of there. I did it on my own.

A Tistket A Tasket

2009-05-26T17:27:00.006+01:00

For Today...

Outside my window... rain, rain, go away, come again another day

I am thinking... why am I not living the life I want for myself on so many levels--how can I be that off course?

From the learning rooms... there are a lot of songs about rain. I'd be hard pressed to pick one favorite. I was thinking of posting Dee Clarke's "Raindrops," but then my thoughts drifted to how much I love songs about rain and airplanes. Neil Young has a great song called "Look Out For My Love," and the last stanza has him out on the runway with "hydraulic wipers pumping...but no one listens."

I am thankful for... not having dementia

From the kitchen... tonight? Jasper White's (a New England chef) three-cheese macaroni and cheese. I'll be freezing this. It feeds an army.

I am wearing... black and red. Suitable for attending a Suprematism exhibit or invading Poland.(see: mac and cheese.)

I am reading... old issues of Architectural Digest to ditch them and re-reading Raymond Chandler's Payback. The only thing I would recommend that I've read in the past two weeks is Peter Ackroyd's Poe: A Life Cut Short....and if anyone ever died screwed up and unfilfilled, try Poe.

I am hoping... I can shake this horrible mood

I am creating...I'm forcing more self-taught Photoshop tutorials on myself to stretch and learn

I am praying...that I can have the life I want, and not die feeling so disappointed

Around the house... chaos and dealing with the dead....still. Does it ever end?

One of my favorite things... I photographed them: the alliums in my yard. They are past their glory, but they stay fascinating in decay. I plant "Globemaster," which have heads that can grow 11 inches wide. They are part of the "big ball" allium hybrid group, so yes, there is even inferiority about "size," in the floral kingdom.

A few plans for the rest of the week...getting this massive amount of paperwork under control, going over to the dead person's house to continue emptying it out. I will have to force myself. I am burnt out on disposing of these things, and the idea of crawling up in an attic, which is decades of untouched old filth and hauling this stuff down and out is just.....depressing.

Here is a picture thought I am sharing with you... flying at night with dim lights in the airplane cabin, tracing the lights on the ground below and realizing that you are seeing where the shoreline meets the ocean. It sounds so romantic in French: vol de nuit...flight of night.

Twitter Twatter: Memorial Day

2009-05-25T15:18:00.003+01:00

West Point - 1911

I was lying in bed this morning thinking about (David) Dwight Eisenhower and West Point. I realized I didn't know where he stood in his graduating class at West Point (upper half,) but a lot of shifting thought like "If you are going to go to West Point, and you become a general, then what luck to stumble into a World War to show your skills. And yes, "luck," because many never see battle on that scale. When George Patton was facing multiple reprimands and being held back, he agonized over lost opportunity in terms of where he would stand in history and not being able to fulfill his destiny. Eisenhower served in two world wars.

I did a little homework on Eisenhower this morning. His West Point graduating class of 1915 was called the class "that the stars fell on." Of it's 164 graduating members, 59 became generals: the highest number ever recorded in one class in West Point's history. I also didn't know he injured his knee playing football there.

I have no idea why Eisenhower came to mind, or West Point, over say...Eisenhower's affair with Kay Summersby during the war, or the ambition it takes to claw through Army hierarchy to general, or how often ambition is overlooked in seeking the Presidential seat in government. People rarely think of Abe Lincoln as anything other than Father Abraham, but he was consumed with ambition and the fear he wouldn't reach his goals. I think it safe to say any man that seeks power at this level is consumed with the desire to win.

From West Point I thought about generals who became President. Twelve of them. Washington, Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, Eisenhower, Jackson, Pierce and Andrew Johnson. Two Whigs, Three Democrats, Seven Republicans.

"The jellybeans are mine. ALL MINE! brarahhahaha."

And from generals who become Presidents, I then had this visual image of Dick Cheney in a wheelchair at the Inauguration, and how other people jumped on that one, screaming "Doctor Strangelove!" which of course is exactly what I thought. The movie's full title is Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. What a grave fear I felt knowing Cheney could be President. Who remembers Alexander Haig rushing into a news conference after Reagan was shot declaring, "I'm in charge here," when he was anything but. George Bush the Elder was in charge, as Vice-President, as every schoolboy knows. Haig later complained "I'm being undermined by weenies and second-rate hambones." His insecurities and low self-esteem doomed his future, and that one gaffe became the defining moment of his career.

The Alien Hand Syndrome

And this is why I wonder what value Twitter has to me, holding my thoughts to 140 characters, including spaces. How do you contain the wandering mind which can be a compost pail of mishmashed thoughts. Throw them on the heap. See what they make. Think how crazed men can become in suppressing their desires in meeting the strangleholds of duty and hierarchy.

In Memory Of Emily

2009-05-15T14:59:00.003+01:00

Emily Dickinson
December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886

'T was just this time last year I died.
I know I heard the corn,
When I was carried by the farms,--
It had the tassels on.

I thought how yellow it would look
When Richard went to mill;
And then I wanted to get out,
But something held my will.

I thought just how red apples wedged
The stubble's joints between;
And carts went stooping round the fields
To take the pumpkins in.

I wondered which would miss me least,
And when Thanksgiving came,
If father'd multiply the plates
To make an even sum.

And if my stocking hung too high,
Would it blur the Christmas glee,
That not a Santa Claus could reach
The altitude of me?

But this sort grieved myself, and so
I thought how it would be
When just this time, some perfect year,
Themselves should come to me.

…and yet she died in the season she didn’t list in the above poem. Spring. Today is the anniversary of Emily Dickinson’s death in 1886. On May 15, 1886 Emily Dickinson died at the age of 55. Her brother Austin wrote in his diary that "...the day was awful ... she ceased to breathe that terrible breathing just before the whistle sounded for six."

She could see West Cemetery from her window in that room she never left. The funeral was held in the library of her family home. The service was short. A favorite poem by Emily Bronte, “No Coward Soul of Mine,” was read, and Emily’s coffin was carried out the back door and across a field of buttercups, where she was buried, laid in a white coffin with vanilla scented Lady’s Slipper heliotrope (a popular Victorian flower) and “a knot of blue field violets placed about it.” There she lies in the family plot on Triangle Street in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In the poem above, she speculates if her father would still lay out her plate at Thanksgiving, or just how she would be missed within her small social circle, but still her place in the world. I know she has haunted me for years, and I’m not sure “haunted” is the right word, but I have definitely felt an “affinity,” which seems a more appropriate and Emily-like word. I searched her poems, and apparently she never used it. She should have. I'll use it for her:

A field of yellow
Under coffin white
Petaled in varied purple hue
Lady’s slipper in wooded shade
With shy faced violets, too
Blooms that shrink
From sun of day
Have been my affinity
Now see me on my way

....and then you DIE!

2009-05-12T14:15:00.007+01:00

I just finished reading a book called Unforgettable Walks to Take Before You Die. The bulks of the "must sees" are in very isolated places of the world. You have to walk miles to gain access to them. There are dangers built in.

No leathery aunties in hiking shorts with their sticks pronging along, whistling "The Happy Wanderer." A few spots here in the States are accessible: "The Freedom Trail" in Boston (through some bad neighborhoods.) Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater" in Pennsylvania (you need to have a ticket to gain access to the interior.) Many of these trips work on luck of lottery, or hanging around or planning well out in advance.

Some have wildlife warnings: a beach in Australia where snakes come out of the water after you. Tigers. Lions. Bears. Flying Monkey Squadrons. Others have built in physical dangers: "Not good for those with vertigo," "Get there before the tide prevents you from getting back," "the path can crumble under your feet."

I made some mental notes to myself of things I would like to see before I DIE!!! Some temples in Kyoto, Japan. Scandanavian coasts. Tiger Leaping Gorge on the Yangtze River in China. The Skocjan caves in Slovenia. The Coyote Buttes in Arizona.

Looking at the back cover, I had to laugh. There's a whole series of what you should do ::tapping out the message "before you die." Unforgettable Islands To Escape To ::tapping::: Unforgettable Things To Do :::tapping::: Unforgettable Journeys To Take.....Unforgettable Things To See.....BEFORE YOU DIE!!!!

Here's what I think you should do before you die:

* Acquire a taste for prunes and Ensure

* Make sure you have a will, living will, power of attorney, trust...all of that legal stuff in place

* Understand how adult diapers work

* Work hard to keep your own teeth. Otherwise they might wind up getting tossed out with the garbage, and trust me, you don't want to deal with that.

*Take your action figures out of their boxes.

* Try to build up a repetoire of stories. You don't want all of them to start, "In 1939...."

* Get rid of stuff as each year passes. You don't want to have the authorities show up with ten dumpsters.

* Get heavily into juicing and vitamins.

* Become an evil overlord

Bonjour Tweétaire

2009-04-30T15:00:00.003+01:00

I wanted all of you to meet my French foreign exchange student for the summer. We’re going through a rough patch, and I’m not sure she’s going to last. Say something, Françoise. I guess she went out for un petit café break. If they get Twitter in France, it's going to have to be 360 characters. No way the French can hold it to 140.

Françoise wrote this novel that is considered groundbreaking for a teenager, and it’s all about ballerina flats with French sailor tops and smoking cigarettes like Jean-Paul Belmondo and racing her sports car down to the Riviera while swigging straight from the Dom Pérignon bottle , sorta like Spring Break, French style, shattering the empties against olive trees and scaring the sheep. In other words, thinking she’s pretty merde chaude (vulgaire.)

I need to talk to her about those ballerina flats. She gets them off Repetto’s in Paris cause they made them for Bebe (Brigitte Bardot,) plus they make real ballet shoes, but it was the flats and toe cleavage and Brigitte doing her mambo dance in And God Created Woman.

Françoise’s gone and whacked off her hair in some kind of screwy homage to Arthur Rimbaud, that little disaffected punk from Charleville who went to Paris and spent the bulk of his time having sex with Verlaine, staying drunk off absinthe and writing some bad poetry, then running home to Mama, when not playing games with knives and guns and disappearing into London to teach French when he couldn’t even speak English.

Françoise needs to realize this is D.C. where where we’ve got wars to deal with and a recession and Au Pied de Chochon flu. Anyway, she thought she was coming here to work for Cubism, an art movement, and instead she got me trying to teach her how a stapler works, for Christ's sake, so now she’s been slouching around a lot, sneering at everyone that crosses her path (that Rimbaud thing again,) and going around to Lauriol Plaza telling the al fresco group she’s leaving for Africa to become a gun runner and live the dissipated life of a downtrodden Colonial, talking about saints and paradise (her Patti Smith drone,) and how “Life is a farce. My innocence is enough to weep over,” and D.C. is hell and this is her season in it, and she keeps seeing fire and pitchforks in Penn Quarter. I mean, get a grip, girl. It's just an open kitchen.

She’s also given to those highfalutin’, verbose statements that aren’t working too well with Twitter, so the second she tears off with “My day is over, I’m leaving Europe. The sea air will burn my lungs. I will swim and be bronzed by the sun and smoke and drink liqueurs strong as boiling metal. I will have gold. I will be lazy and brutual.” On Twitter, that will cut her right off at "stron," and she’s got the lazy part down, I can attest to that. Her "bronzed by the sun" is turning into me running across the street to CVS to get her some Noxema and a bottle of Bayer’s.

I ought to remind her that Verlaine went so off his rocker hanging with Rimbaud that his penis and anus were examined to see if he was a “habitual” or “recent” pederast, so subsequently, we know more about his penis and anus than the intimate anatomy of any other major poet of the past. Chew on that with your croissant, Françoise. Study your croissant. Do you not note the shape, the flakiness, the pure symbolism of diseased passion?

The other day I saw “What hard angel stuffs me full/Between the shoulders, while/I fly off for Paradise?” on her computer screen. I wonder if I could find her work as a French teacher to some St. Alban’s kid needing a tutor?

Soo Ee Flu EeA Public Service Announcement

2009-04-27T15:56:00.007+01:00

KOB of DC Blogs has asked me, WCH (Washington Cube Health…or WhatCha WannHa Know?) to step up and issue a PSA (Public Service Announcement or Phuck Service Announcements) about the Swine Flu since the WHO (World Health Organization…or the group,) have been doing nothing but alarming people this weekend.

• Stay away from anything to do with pigs. I’m not even going near my piggy bank where I drop off my change every night. Why risk it?

• This also means “no” to Aunt Annie’s Pretzel Dogs at the airport (I-66!).

• Reading anything with pigs in it like Animal Farm or Charlotte’s Web. Piglet in Winnie the Pooh? Diseased Swine! This includes poetry by Swinburne. Swin? Swine? Too close a call.

• Pig movies or TV shows like Babe or Sir Oinksalot in The Simpson’s. Miss Piggy (filthy slut) Arnold on Green Acres, however, is “safe.” I received that news from a solid source.

• No Meat Loaf (the food or the singer.) Both contain pork.

• No riding Harley Hogs during this epidemic.

• No tref, but yes to Hebrew National. Kosher.

• Do not use a spork.

• You will find free antibiotics in the candy aisles at drugstores. Look near the Good N’ Plenty and Jelly Belly section.

• Do not touch anything. Yourself or anyone else. You are meat.

• Do not eat pork. This goes without saying. And when the pork industry starts screaming “unfair,” remind them how people avoided chickens during the Avian Flu epidemic.

• D.C. Metro stations are installing Purell gel machines. Do not use these as a public masturbation aid.

• Wear a respiratory mask. Then cover it with a pig mask. You’ll either look like a Kubrick extra wandering around from Eyes Wide Shut, or people will know to keep their distance, either way.

• If someone says “pig” or “swine” you can yell “Holla” as in Pig’s Holla, Georgia where The Playaz are building the world’s largest still.

• Close down Congress which is pork-tacular. H.R. Soo Ee! Pig Pig Pig!

Close down Congressman Murtha’s dead airport built on pork. Cite public health reasons. There’s no one flying in there anyway.

• Congressman, Barbara Cubin, put in almost $200,000 for digitalizing and editing the collection at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. And she's not even in office anymore. Cite “buffalo” as the next swine. Totonka Flu! When Buffalo Flu mutates with Avian Flu there will be an entirely new strain to worry about called Buffalo Wings Flu! You heard it here first.

• Tom Harkin’s request for $2 million for swine odor and manure management. Leave that alone. He’s a visionary.

• No Porkbelly’s. No Rockland’s. No Georgia Brown’s. No Famous Dave’s. No Willard’s. No Red, Hot and Blue. No Smokey Bones. No Urban and especially “no” to Three Pigs.

• No Jimmy Dean’s, even if his house burned down. No Smithfield’s and that means “no” Paula Deen as far as I’m concerned. You can’t be too safe. No bacon (Jordan Baker I mean YOU and "yes" those bacon jellybeans count!) and don’t argue with me on German Forest ham. “Nein!”

• New money. Issue all new money. Current issue could have swine germs on it. It could have been Madoff money!

• No to Nine Inch Nails "Piggy," or "March of the Pig," The Beatles "Piggy," Suicidal Tendencies

"Choking This Pig," Dave Matthews Band "Pig, " Sugar Ray "American Pig, " or Eminem Chokin’ This Pig." Pull them off yer iTunes. You could get SICK listening to this. The vaccine? Beck singing Ass-Hole, and I warned Suicide Blonde about Meatloaf, so what does she do...BLONDE...goes out tonight on a date, and he sings Meatloaf Karoke to her! You are gonna get SO sick. I am courier biking over massive amounts of drugs to you tomorrow with a vodka chaser.

• Personally, D.C., I don’t care. Go out to bars, shove your tongue down someone’s throat. Have your noses and lips drop off. Turn D.C. into Carville, Louisiana. Have people wandering with bells around their necks yelling out “unclean, unclean.”

• Lastly, do not watch Porky Pig cartoons and boycott anything Warner Brothers, Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies. Do, however, to continue honoring Mel Blanc in your hearts.

• “That’s all folks!”

The 411 On The Lincolns

2009-04-23T17:24:00.000+01:00

I've been reading about Abraham and Mary Lincoln since childhood. I do that with a lot of topics: submarines, Russian culture, those whackadoodle New England Transcendentalists, Hitler....

This winter, a ton of new books came out about the Lincolns, and I do believe I read all of them. Some I truly enjoyed, a biography by Robert C. White, Jr. Others, like the slender volume by George McGovern (part of the American Presidents series,) did nothing for me...or I learned nothing new. Lincoln achieved iconic status in our collective memory some time ago, and I started wondering, "What things are out there about the Lincolns left to be said where people would say, "I didn't know that.""

*Mary Lincoln lost her mother at age six. Lincoln lost his mother at age nine. While both fathers remarried rather quickly, Lincoln's stepmother totally understood him and gave him space to read and expand his intellect and protected him from a father who only saw value in his son's physical labor. Mary's stepmother actively worked on distancing the father from his children of the first marriage, so there was always contention and sadness in the break for the rest of her life.

*Mary Lincoln did not want to go to Ford’s Theatre the night of the assassination, wanting to stay at home with the hope she could offset a headache. She had a history of migraines. You have to wonder "what if" she had only stayed home that night in a darkened room with a compress on her head. Lincoln had many prophetic dreams: many involving ships, one tied to the end of the war, the other, to his death. He even dreamed his death, which he reported to his wife and to his law partner: "I retired late, for I had waited up for important dispatches, and I fell into a light slumber. I dreamed there was a death-like stillness about me, but I could still hear the subdued sobs of a number of people. I left my room and went all through the house in my dreams everywhere the same weeping and wailing, but I could see nobody. Finally I went into the East Room, there I saw a coffin with many soldiers as guard. "Who is dead in the White House?," I asked. "Why don't you know," said one of the soldiers, "the President has been assassinated." Then a loud burst of grief came from the crowd and with that I awoke."

*Mary had advanced education for a woman of her time. She spoke fluent French. She had shared the company of politicians from childhood. Both Lincolns were ambitious. Abraham for political advancement. Mary for the social cachet that would accompany his political rise. They both wanted success, and they both feared not achieving it. Lincoln had a habit of jotting down random thoughts and stuffing the bits of paper in a desk drawer....or his stovepipe hats. Many of those snippets expressed worry over his legacy, or sentences that lead to a legacy of speeches. History seems to have left Mary to be the driven shrew, yet her husband had the same desires.

*Lincoln had less than one year of schooling out of a dirt-floored schoolhouse. He explained his intellectual curiosity as, “I love to dig up the questions by the roots and hold it up and dry it before the fire of the mind.” And he never stopped digging. He loved going to the Library of Congress for books which he would tie up in a hankerchief and put on the end of his cane. He constantly challenged his thinking, trying to see both sides of the issue. Even during the Civil War, he saw the country as united. He viewed his work as ensuring it remained that way. I love that he wasn't complacent in his thinking and would play Devil's Advocate to himself. He also wrote poetry and invented things: patenting a device to lift boats over shoals. Patent: 6469.

*Lincoln broke off an understanding with a woman named Mary Owens because “she was a fair match for Falstaff, as well as weather-beaten and having missing teeth.” Mary Owens felt she had rejected Lincoln as “he would be deficient in those little links which make up the great chain of woman’s happiness.” One of those contentions just ripe for a D.C. blogger to give advice on.

*Lincoln didn’t visit his ailing, then dying, father, even though a request was made of him to travel the three miles to do so. He also didn’t attend his father’s funeral. One of those shrouded mysteries involving Lincoln with no answer and of interest to his historians. I do think his father, living the life of most frontier people, didn't understand a sensitive son who craved learning. A child's role was to help out and labor like an adult. His father ripped the family's roots up a lot too: many moves in childhood, each to a progressively more primitive place.

*Lincoln lacked formal education, yet he had legible penmanship, with very few quirks in spelling, even though the era was full of that habit. If you look at copies of his letters and speeches they are free of self-editing as if that process occurred earlier in his mind. There is an exhibition of his correspondence currently on display at Museum of American History and other Lincolnalia on exhibit all over town, including the Library of Congress.

*Lincoln shopped at Tiffany on his way to Washington. He purchased a six-piece seed-pearl parure (necklace, earrings, bracelets and brooch) that then cost $530. Mary wore these pieces to the Inaugural Ball on January 20, 1861.

*Mary Todd Lincoln discovered that there wasn't enough tableware available to host large State dinners. She had been left with the remains of china from the administration of President Pierce, known as the "Red Edge" set. She replaced them with plates showing the American eagle, pictured in the 1853 London, Crystal Palace Exhibition. After Lincoln's re-election she bought another set of the china with her own monogram. Two months later the President was assassinated and that set was never used.

Documents have shown that the Lincoln plates were made by Haviland and Co., Limoges, France, as were many of the sets for succeeding presidents. The "Solferino" or "Royal Purple" service,(as it became known,) was ordered by the First Lady from Messrs. E. V. Haughwout & Co. in May of 1861 during a shopping visit to New York City to purchase furnishings for the White House as well as a formal dinner service.

"Solferino," a rich fuschia color, had been made fashionable by the French in about 1859, and Mrs. Lincoln perpetuated the vogue by employing it liberally in the interior decoration of the Executive Mansion (then the name for the White House.) She had curtains made in that shade, as well as a ball gown. The china service was delivered to the White House on September 2, 1861, and numbered 658 pieces, including a dinner service of 190 pieces, a dessert service of 208 pieces, and a breafast and tea service of 260 pieces. The total cost was $3,195.00. You can still buy this design today.

*Lincoln was the total opposite of luxe. He liked to turn a chair upside down and lean against it’s back to read: a habit he acquired in youth and carried to the White House. His appearance could be sloppy and his casual indifference to wardrobe became notorious as cronies would report that they could tell when his wife was away by the “disorder of his apparel." He wore shawls. He wore slippers. He wore gray wool knit caps on his head. Lincoln was Aunt Blabby!

*In her widowhood, Mary wandered to Europe, settling for a while in Pau, France, (where she had a noted hatred of the French,) then back to the States; mainly in Chicago where the Lincolns had hoped to settle after his term of office. Hotels, relative’s homes, a stay in an asylum courtesy of her surviving son. She spent her days hidden away from people, pawing through stuffed trunks of things she had no need of: old ball gowns (she was wed to bombazine mourning for the rest of her life,) a collection of gloves that would rival Imelda Marcos in shoes. At one point she decided to hold a sale of some of her things, and there was such a scandal, she never attempted it again, other than having her seamstress make visits to New York to offer up items--under wraps. This trunk riffling went on until the end, and it's a sad image of a woman who lost so much: her husband, three of her four sons, and her place in society.

"Who In Da Back?"

*Lincoln’s “things” however became the relics of a saint. People went in and ripped the Executive Mansion (as the White House was then called) apart, just to have a piece of him. Blots of blood. A cane. There were attempts to steal his body on more than one occasion, until he was finally buried inside concrete and steel to prevent future grave robbing attempts.

I read something interesting in The Washington Post about the disinternment of Lincoln (to reenforce his grave once last time.) I’m going to quote from a portion of the article verbatim:

"On Sept. 26, 1901, a boy named Fleetwood Lindley was summoned from school by his father to see Lincoln. The President had been dead for three decades, but his coffin had been dug up and moved multiple times over the years, more times than any other President. In 1876, it had nearly been stolen by grave robbers who wanted to hold it for ransom. The crooks had sawed open the massive white marble sarcophagus and dragged the 500-pound cedar and lead coffin part way out before being foiled by authorities. The coffin was moved among several different hiding places around the tomb over succeeding years, at one point under a pile of lumber.

After a 14-month reconstruction of the tomb, it was moved one last time. At the behest of Lincoln's son, Robert, the President was going to be placed in a massive underground vault lined with a steel cage and encased in concrete so he could never be disturbed again. Before this happened, the officials hesitated. Partly haunted by the attempted grave-robbing and partly wanting a farewell look, the locals decided to see whether Lincoln was really in the coffin.

Joseph P. Lindley, one of the tomb's unofficial guardians, sent for his 13-year-old son, who hurried from school on his bicycle. Shortly before noon, according to an old account, two plumbers cut an oblong opening in the coffin, and Fleetwood Lindley and 22 others gazed on Abraham Lincoln's face. All said it was unmistakably him.

Mr. Lincoln's features were totally recognizable. His face had a melancholy expression, but his black chin whiskers hadn't changed at all. The wart on his cheek and the coarse black hair were obvious characteristics of Mr. Lincoln's. The biggest change was that the eyebrows had vanished. The president was wearing the same suit he wore at his second inauguration, but it was covered with yellow mold. Additionally there were some bits of red fabric (possibly the remnants of an American flag buried with Mr. Lincoln).

Three days before he died in 1963, Mr. Lindley was interviewed. He said, "Yes, his face was chalky white. His clothes were mildewed. And I was allowed to hold one of the leather straps as we lowered the casket for the concrete to be poured. I was not scared at the time, but I slept with Lincoln for the next six months." Mr. Lindley was 75 when he died (and 13 when he had viewed the body.) He had been the only child to do so. Mr. Lindley is buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery not far from Lincoln's Tomb." I love how he says he slept with Lincoln for the next six months. I don't think he was haunted by what he had seen, just the iconic weight of the image, and I do believe there are times in our lives, when we see something of such strength, the imagery is imprinted forever, and I'm not talking Britney's va jay jay.

Chocolate Cherry Cake For Cheryl

2009-04-23T02:35:00.007+01:00

My new manicurist loves making things gracious for her clients. She always has little extras, like a pretty flower at her station, or offerings of candy, or a sweet that another of her clients baked. She loves offering things to be gracious. She offered me a piece of cake her client Nancy made: Chocolate Cherry Cake, and it was so moist, not overly sweet, and just seemed perfect.

When I got home I started researching and found many recipes for the same thing, and what was amazing, was how easy with so few ingredients. I made one recently and took it in for others to have: play it forward in action. I'm taking Cheryl a pita chip she expressed interest in (Stacy's,) and printing out all of the dip recipes for her. What goes around, comes around. I did a little research on the cake and it was a 1974 Pillsbury contest winner:

Chocolate Cherry Cake

Vegetable oil spray for misting

1 package (18.25 ounces) plain devil's food cake mix,

1 can (21 ounces) cherry pie filling
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon pure almond extract

1. Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 350°F. Lightly mist a 13x9" baking pan with vegetable oil spray. Set the pan aside.

2. Place the cake mix, cherry pie filling, eggs, and almond extract in a large mixing bowl. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed for 1 minute. Stop the machine and scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber sptatula. Increase the mixer speed to medium and beat 2 minutes more, scraping the sides down again if needed. The batter should look thick and well blended. Pour the batter into the prepared pan, smoothing the top with the rubber spatula. Place the pan in the oven.

3. Bake the cake until it springs back when lightly pressed with your finger and just starts to pull away from the sides of the pan, 30 to 35 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and place it on a wire rack while you prepare the glaze.

Chocolate Glaze
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup whole milk
1 package (6 ounces, or 1 cup) semisweet chocolate chips

Place the sugar, butter, and milk in a small saucepan over medium-low heat and cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture comes to a boil. Boil, stirring constantly, for 1 minute. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the chocolate chips. When the chips have melted and the glaze is smooth, pour it over the warm cake so that it covers the entire surface. The glaze will be thin but will firm up. Cool the cake for 20 minutes more before cutting it into squares and serving.

* This cake is so "Honey, I'm home," family sitcom easy. I was surprised by the cherry pie filling, thinking it would cloyingly sweet, but it wasn't.

* I used a whisk and hand mixer, and it was mixed in minutes. The icing mixed down incredibly quickly too.

* Store this cake, covered in aluminum foil, at room temperature for up to 5 days or in the refrigerator for up to 1 week. Or freeze the cake, wrapped in foil, for up to 6 months. Thaw the cake overnight on the counter before serving. (Mine went into work and whoosh Gone in Sixty Seconds.)

I only listed it here to have a record of my handiwork. Back to my usual craziness.

Thi Hi Boots And Corset Cake

2009-04-22T15:38:00.003+01:00

I have a friend named Loralee whose nickname is Thi Hi Leather Boots, and she made herself a corset birthday cake last weekend. Lee (or Thi) moved away a few years ago, and her D.C. friends sorely miss her. She had come here from Massachusetts, her native state, and now she is in another part of New England. I keep running into women who have (had) motorcycles, like Lee and Velvet in Dupont, who know how to renovate houses, and in Lee’s case, how to be a chocolatier.

A few years back, I designed a corset birthday card for Lee, corsets being another of her passions, and I wish I had better photographs to offer up, but those got lost in a hard drive fry. I used very heavy black stock paper (which was a doozy cutting) off a corset template I designed. I also used red stain ribbon, red satin rosettes and red crystal hearts. The card was designed to be opened after being unlaced. I only made one other card like that again in greens. It was labor intensive, but the hardest part was that stubborn black paper that showed every scissor nick. I’m guessing Lee still has the card. I know she retains a passion for corsets.

This birthday she decided to make a corset birthday cake, and it came out pretty good for a first try. It was a white cake with vanilla butter cream frosting, and covered by a fondant. Fondants give shape to desserts, but are rarely popular to eat, and Lee confirmed this, but she added people loved the butter cream, and she’s going to be doing a series of chocolates with them. She also made a simple syrup of amaretto and vanilla (using real vanilla bean,) for the layers, and also vanilla bean in the frosting, which leaves these tiny brown flecks from the scraping of the bean.

If you’ve never done this, vanilla beans are long narrow brown beans, fairly pricey (you usually get two per purchase,) that you cut lengthwise, then run a knife down, scraping off the brown seed interior for the cooking process. It looks like brown “gunk,” but it breaks down upon stirring into tiny dots the size of grains of sand, and it gives anything you use it with a highly aromatic flavoring—absolutely nothing like liquid vanilla extract that most cooks rely on. I would list vanilla beans under “sensual experience” as odd as that sounds, and given Lee’s love of the sensual, entirely appropriate.

I hope you continue to evolve your corset cake building skills, Lee, but more importantly, you had a wonderful birthday and all my best wishes. Love, Cubie

What Would You Say If....?

2009-04-21T15:31:00.000+01:00

I started thinking about some of the odd conversations I get into with people, and this passion people have for giving dating advice in Washington blogs. Me? I can talk to anyone about anything, but I was thinking: maybe conversational gambits would be good advice to pass on to people. Let's keep it to "five."

“What Would You Say If....,” you meet a man or a woman,( let’s say a bar,) and they share their interests or passions, and then, there’s that one thing said into drunkedy drunk drunk number five that is extreme, but could be the home run of answers in sealing the deal for a date.

For example, you are sitting next to a nice looking young man at a bar, and he tells you he is into death metal, guns and plumbing. Could you come up with five things to say to hold his attention and draw the conversation out? Things like:

1) I think the Desert Eagle is a superlative handgun….and I want one in gold.

2) What’s wrong with cleaning your AK-47 on the front porch. It sends a message to the neighbors.

3) Ozzy kicks Ronnie James Dio’s ass.

4) The "Do-It "Heavy Duty Toilet Auger kicks the Drum Auger’s ass.

And then when you’re really drunk:

5) I got the lead singer of Slayer to autograph my back, then I went and got the signature tattooed on.

It's always good to have a few bar tricks up your sleeve as well. Here's a good one for the cocktail napkin. You know how to draw Slayer's pentagram:

STEP 1.
A simple drawing lesson. You will first draw a large circle with another circle in the outer middle. Then you will start with the inner lines like the two slanted vertical lines and the beginning lines of the "Slayer letters" in the middle of the vertical lines.

STEP 2.
Start drawing out the sword lines that will make up the pentagram symbol. There is a total of four blade lines and on each blade you will add the short vertical lines for the handles. Add more lines for the lettering as seen here.

STEP 3.
Add more lines for the logo lettering as shown and then detail the handles of the swords.

STEP 4.
Draw out each individual blade that will later form a sword like pentagram. One edges of the handle draw teeth like spikes as shown.

STEP 5.
If you are having a cocktail for each step, things "might" not look this clean. Erase all the guidelines and shapes that you drew in step one. Finish off the lining for the blades until they are completed and whole looking as well as the details on each handle. You will then draw the rest of the letters that say "Slayer". When you are done, move to the next step to check out what your drawing should look like.

If you're still talking at this point, color it in and write your phone number or Tweets ID on the bottom of the napkin.

--------------------------------------

*Thanks to Drago Art for the drawing lesson.

Twitter Twatter Cutting Blog Roll Fat

2009-04-17T04:05:00.003+01:00

Per someone's gentle nudging (Reya), I finally sat down tonight and updated my blog roll. These are the main people I follow, or who hang around here. I think I got you all. If I didn't, forgive me, but writing out code on Amoxicillin sucks. I tested all of the links and they seem to be working.

I read a lot of decorating blogs, but they come and go so quickly, I don't even want to begin listing them all. Two that I have listed are (or were) local: Pigtown Design out of Baltimore (Pigtown being a section of Baltimore over by Hamburg and Ostend Streets where Carl's Little House is.) The other is Hue. Rachael is a color consultant-specialist. She moved to San Francisco not too long ago. Since I like thinking about color and space, I went out West with her so Rach is listed too.

It was rather sad who I removed, since so many good bloggers of the past bit the dust. I read tonight within D.C. Blogs where someone described ongoing bloggers efforts as "quaint," versus the latest thumb craze, Twitter. Say it all in 140 characters, kids.

I am joining Twitter as Cube, due to another nudging by KOB-Patrick of D.C. Blogs who wants to throw me out to a larger readership. Do ya think, Pat? We'll see.

I've been dumping blog sized comments over here: http://www.wowowow.com/ Some of their readers respond back to my comments, which is nice, and I like reading what some of them have to say, as well. I am always looking for good sources of things to read.

I still need to do more with this blog. Add a nice fat photo masthead. Perhaps play with the template colors. It just seems there is never enough time, and I have other blogs, I have completely let drift, and wish I hadn't.

I try to keep my avatar changed every few weeks. This will always be the one I consider most representative of me. When I go back to the Cape, I'm taking a picture of my laptop out on the sand. Already this desk by the sea is dated, but you get the drift(wood.)

....and Reya? Thank you. I discovered I was set on Abidjan time. I mean...what the...

I Scream "No" To Lost Love

2009-04-10T11:59:00.001+01:00

I was walking downstairs , staring at the cover of a book I had just finished, realizing I didn’t have one thing to say about it. Did I enjoy the book? Yes. Aren’t there clever quotes inside? Yes. But what popped into my mind was all of these women who achieved world fame; lasting fame that has carried them from their time into the beyond, and each had, for want of a better expression (and forgive me, ladies,) “unrequited love.” I became frozen to the place where I stood.

Emily Dickinson locked in her room in white, pouring out her passion. Edith Wharton giving us poor, fallen Lily Bart that society rejects at its hard door. Edith, swathed in familial and earned wealth, never got her man either and lies in an untended grave in France. Dorothy Sayers. Plain as boiled potatoes, but wrote one of the most passionate passages ever written about a woman in love. Nancy Mitford, recreating her rejecting lover over and over again in her literature. Why weep at my bed now, lover? Now that I am dying?

Critics and theorists who rip through their lives and words say, “They chose the wrong man.” “They needed to live solitary lives to create.” “It was subconscious.” “He had to be unavailable.”

At the moment I arrived at that thought, I silently screamed “NOOOOO” at the top of my lungs into eternity.

“NOOOOOO.” They loved.

“NOOOOOO.” For them, “he” was their true love.

“NOOOOOO”, you people who sit and judge a life. You are wrong.

Remaining where I had stopped, I wrote Emily a poem:

That bundle you call “joy?”
Was the last nail
In the coffin I call “hope.”

I guess I had something to say, after all.

Do I Really Want To Be Joan Of Arc?

2009-04-09T22:59:00.003+01:00

I was lying in bed this morning, thinking about Joan of Arc, how she rallied her countrymen in fighting through victories in The Hundred Years Wars, and how great it must be to be able to gather people around you to do something, because I can't even get AT & T on the phone.

Of course, if Joan were around now, what's she gonna do? Twitter it? gather@4ish for a burning. It's me that's burning, so don't even begin to tell me you're busy, aiight?

I'm on hold with AT&T, by the way, after having been told I got "Texas," disconnected, given a number to use that gave me everything in Spanish, redialing, and getting India, where I am on hold....wait...I got someone...in Los Angeles...really Los Angeles. I'll take it! God bless.

P.S. I may also have scored another victory, because I just blogged the above, while on hold.

What's In My Head: Nefertiti - Miles Davis For Cyndy

2009-04-09T01:13:00.002+01:00

The epitome of cool

Who, What, When, Where, How

2009-04-08T17:59:00.005+01:00

Lately in the news, it's the same ole, same ole. I wonder if the same ole standards of good reporting still apply: Who, What, When, Where, Why?

"She's gonna love Queen's "We Will Rock You."

1) What is with the Queen's iPod?

QEII asked the Obama's for an iPod, and they obliged, filling it with her favorite Richard Rodgers show tunes. What was he gonna slap on there? Me So Horny by 2 Live Crew? Be glad Obama gave her Richard Rogers. I would have picked an iPod in acid green and slammed the Sex Pistols opening with “God Save the Queen,” followed by The Clash doing “London Calling,” The Kinks doing “Victoria,” and “She Bought a Hat Like Princess Marina,” then The Beatles, “Her Majesty,” (Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say.”) The Obama gift? Trust me. It could have been worse. How about Queen doing "Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy," "Another One Bites the Dust," and "We Are the Champions (of the World.)"

2) When are we going to get over the whole cutsey-bowing thing. Our Queen, Elizabeth Taylor, said, "I've met them, and they are just regular people. Shake their hand and act normally."

Frankly, I’d be more impressed meeting Ms. Taylor. Could the Queen rule in her slip, the way Liz did in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? Could QE II make her Christmas speech, uttering a line like, “Mama, face it: I was the slut of all time,” like Liz did in Butterfield 8.

Don't You Just Know That Madonna Was That Kid Saying "I'm taking the ball and going home if we don't play my game." Only now she's taking home her baby, her millions, a phalanx of media coverage and that promised party.

3) Who's is happy that Madonna's adoption fell through in Malawi?

Me, Me, Me!!! Happy over the Madonna decision? Yes. She goes in waving her fame and money around trying to actively circumvent a country’s laws. Who named her Queen of the April? And I read she had a temper tantrum back in her hotel room after the Court ruling, storming at her lawyer’s failings, “How could this happen to me?” With her child Lourdes….her CHILD folks, wrapping her arms around her mother trying to calm her down. Reflect. WHAT is wrong with this picture? THEN she decides to…oh I don’t know…THROW A PARTY. This isn’t about a child in a Malawi orphanage, and don't try convincing anyone otherwise.

4) Where is that great baby video?

Go watch this past weekend’s satire on Saturday Night Live where “Angelina” and “Madonna” fight over babies. The sketch is called “Spicy Brown Babies and (spoiler alert) Angelina wins the baby game when she announces she’s getting a baby from Russia that has a baby, within a baby, within a baby. This is what really has people up in arms. It’s not the poor orphaned child and rescue thereof. It’s motive. And we aren’t fools.

5) How come Nefertiti always looks so good without plastic surgery?

Recent reporting indicates that Nefertiti, history's first great beauty, also may have undergone history's first makeover. The famous bust of Nefertiti has long been a standard of beauty. Now researchers have discovered that beneath the stucco head, there exists another face, the original created from stone. The differences are minor — creases at the corners of the mouth, a little bump on the nose.

" These creases and bumps? What surgery? What plaster covering? This is me. I never had a bump. I just….eat healthy, drink lots of lotus juice and rub tons of eucalyptus oils followed by a mask of pyramid dust clay. Oh yeah…munching a grape…my trainer has me run out to the Valley of the Kings then do Pyramid steps. Great for the abs and butt. And those rumors about my having my organs removed and put in Canopic jars? I mean…really. I’m Queen of the Nile….Madonna….or should I say…Denial?

What's on MY iPod? D'uh..."Walk Like An Egyptian."

What's In My Head: Legend of a Girl Child Linda

2009-04-07T15:59:00.002+01:00

My blog friend M.A. over at her blog The Culture Wars has once again resurrected her "Haiku Tuesday" moments. I added this at her blog, and just another "hello" through the internet waves, M.A., this song as well:

Listen to me now
And I will sing you my songs
Drifting in your boat

There is no romance
In the litany of flowers
If you choose to float

Madoff Enough For Ya?

2009-04-07T10:59:00.000+01:00

Lately, I've seen a lot of articles about Bernard Madoff crop up where Madoff is compared in appearance to George Washington, or if you look like Madoff, you can't hail a cab. Many people are calling Madoff a "Shylock," which I don't like at all. For starters, Shylock was this Jewish character in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice that was a cliché of the moneylender as "penny for a pound," where Shylock literally weighs your overdraft flesh to take. For the longest time, he was always portrayed with a large, hooked nose, rubbing his greedy fingers and speaking with an English-Yiddish accent. A bit of anti-Semitism from The Bard.

"Will You Be My Special Friend?"

Oddly, it’s not Madoff's thievery among best friends that interests me the most, but rather his character. It’s what he did to alleged "friends," even until the last moments of exposure and arrest. Words like "pathological," and "sociopath," come to mind, and don’t mistake those words to mean "serial killer." It involves missing parts of self like "the ability to feel emotion," "empathy," but also to perhaps possess personality traits most of us wouldn’t want landed on our brow: being evaluated a "Narcissistic Sadist." Endulge me in my posting this. I found it on Goggle by the search query: "narcissistic sadist." It is a diagnostic evaluation. You can get back many, many articles on this, all more or less using the exact same language:

"The narcissist simply discards people when he becomes convinced that they can no longer provide him with narcissistic needs. This is an evaluation, subjective and highly emotionally charged. It does not have to be grounded in reality. Suddenly - because of boredom, disagreement, disillusion, a fight, an act, inaction, or a mood - the narcissist wildly swings from idealization to devaluation. He then "disconnects" immediately. He needs all the energy that he can muster to obtain new Sources of Narcissistic Supply and would rather not spend these scarce and expensive resources over what he regards as human refuse, the waste left by the process of extraction of Narcissistic Supply.That the victims of his sadism are still his only or major sources of Narcissistic supply, but are perceived by him to be intentionally frustrating and withholding it.

Sadistic acts are his way of punishing them for not being docile, obedient, admiring and adoring as he expects them to be in view of his uniqueness, cosmic significance and special entitlement.The narcissist is not a sadist or a paranoiac, per se. He does not enjoy the application of pain to his victims. He does not believe firmly that he is the focal point of persecution and the target of conspiracy. But he does enjoy punishing himself - it provides him with a sense of relief, exoneration and validation. In this restricted sense he is a masochist. Because of his lack of empathy and his rigid personality he often inflicts great (physical or mental) pain on meaningful others in his life - and he enjoys their writhing and suffering. In this restricted sense he is a sadist. The narcissist is an artist of pain as much as any sadist. The difference is motivation.

The narcissist tortures and abuses as a means to punish and to reassert superiority and grandiosity. The sadist does so for pure enjoyment. But both are adept at finding the chinks in people’s armors. Both are ruthless and venomous in the pursuit of their prey. Both are unable to empathize with their victims, being, self-centered, and rigid.He acts the guru to her need of guidance, the avuncular or father figure, the teacher, the only true friend, the old and the experienced. All this in order to weaken defenses and to lay siege. So subtle and poisonous is the narcissistic variant of sadism that it might well be regarded as the most dangerous of all.Luckily, the narcissist’s attention span is short and his resources and energy limited. In constant, effort consuming and attention diverting pursuit of Narcissistic Supply, the narcissist lets his victim go, usually before an irreversible damage occurs. (I would add, or get caught.)

The victim is then free to rebuild their life from ruins. The sadistic narcissist perceives himself as Godlike, ruthless and devoid of scruples, capricious and unfathomable, emotion-less and non-sexual, omniscient, omnipotent and omni-present, a plague, devastation, an inescapable verdict. He nurtures his ill-repute, stoking it and fanning the flames of gossip. It is an enduring asset. Hate and fear are sure generators of attention. It is all about narcissistic supply, of course - the drug which narcissists consume and which consumes them in return.Deep inside, it is the horrid future and inescapable punishment that await the narcissist that are irresistibly appealing. Sadists are often also masochists. In sadistic narcissists, there is, actually, a burning desire - nay, NEED - to be punished. In the grotesque mind of the narcissist, his punishment is equally his vindication. By being permanently on trial, the narcissist claims the high moral ground and the position of the martyr: misunderstood, discriminated against, unjustly roughed, outcast due to his very towering genius or other outstanding qualities. To conform to the cultural stereotype of the "tormented artist" - the narcissist provokes his own suffering. He is thus validated.

His grandiose fantasies acquire a modicum of substance. "If I were not so special - they wouldn’t have persecuted me so". The persecution of the narcissist IS his uniqueness. He must be different, for better or worse. The streak of paranoia embedded in him, makes this outcome inevitable. The Narcissist is in constant conflict with lesser beings: his spouse, his shrink, his boss, and his colleagues. Forced to stoop to their intellectual level, the narcissist feels like Gulliver: a giant strapped by Lilliputians. His life is a constant struggle against the self-contented mediocrity of his surroundings. This is his fate which he accepts, though never stoically. It is a calling, a mission and a recurrence in his stormy life."

This was quite a lot to dump out, and I edited it down, but all of the studies say more or less the same. Sound like anyone you’ve ever known or heard about? I have to admit I've known a few.

There was a good reporting about Madoff in the recent issue of Vanity Fair. One recurring theme kept popping up. The need of his friends to be let into the exclusive "club" of his earning genius, and since he only allowed "friends," in: also being considered a friend (and all that it encompassed.) One individual negatively affected by this man said, "He did these things to me, knowing he was about to be charged. How could he?" How, indeed.

TAX....!Fuggetaboutit

Twitter Twatter: Oh No You Didn't

2009-04-04T06:31:00.005+01:00

Sigh. What a hard, hard week. Some respiratory thing that had me low for days, when I wasn't begging some deity to put me out of my misery. Toward the end of this week, and back in the world, everything was such a struggle, and I had to get it done, so pushpushpush, tiredtiredtired, stressstressstress. Tonight I had several errands to run; those things you "have" to do, like go to a bank.

Folks? While I've been in bed sick, and reading when I could, I started thinking about things I wanted to write about in the future, and one of them was just how thin that societal veneer can be when money is involved, but overall the idea that we haven't come as far as we'd like to believe and we can be reduced to club wielders in a blink, with the right trigger.

My last stop (and ounce of strength) involved entering a Whole Foods (on a Friday night) for precisely five things. I was sick, but I had a list! I had fought bad traffic, I had made all my stops, I was in the 15 or less aisle, the one where the doors open and close to exit? I had just turned my cart toward the door and this woman stepped in front of me, stopped, lifted her bag from the cart and just walked away, leaving the cart completely blocking the now opened door.

The second she did that, in a voice that can only be described as something involving brimstone, this roar issued from my mouth screaming, "YOU BITCH!" There were three Asian employees standing there and they all let out an audible gasp, that sounded like what you would release after inhaling tsunami wind. My hand popped to my mouth. My eyes widened. I said "She just left her basket there, completely blocking the exit." They said, "Oh"....relaxing...."people do that all of the time."

I walked to my car feeling like I had been eating fire. Of such things, my readers, are civilization constructs . "People do that all of the time."

Good to know since, I felt like I had just stepped back onto the planet from hell.

What's Playing In My Head: Little Jimmy Scott The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

2009-04-03T20:19:00.005+01:00

Yeah, I know...Roberta Flack owns it, and she used to sing at Mr. Henry's on Capitol Hill. Upstairs. Gay bar downstairs. Every time Little Jimmy Scott sang at Blues Alley, I was so there, and I am so grateful I was.

How Does Love Weather A Recession

2009-04-03T11:59:00.002+01:00

I’ve been living a practical life for the past few years, and it is humdrum, given that I love luxe. I still follow all of the personal maintenance I believe in, but it is stretched out further between appointments.

Nancy Mitford wrote a scene in Love in a Cold Climate. Linda, a British "Hon," has landed in Paris and begins an affair with a Duke, Fabrice. Fabrice insists Linda return to England at the onset of World War II, and he goes out and buys her things he believes will get her through the war including a mink throw and velvet boots. "He seemed to regard the acquisition of clothes as one of the chief duties of woman, to be pursued through war and revolution, through sickness, and up to death. It is as one might say, "whatever happens the fields must be tilled, the cattle tended, life must go on." He was so essentially urban that to him the slow roll of the seasons was marked by the spring tailleurs, the summer imprimés, the autumn ensembles, and the winter furs of his mistress."

I was reorganizing things tonight in this little triangular antique semaniere (no regrets there) where I keep hair accessories, scarves and gloves, and while I got rid of a few things, for the most part, the rest remained as active wardrobe. I stay on top of weeding out, and try not to buy "regrets." Before you issue a sour "Well good for you," (and I hope you’re laughing,) it got me thinking about an article I’ve been trying to find ever since I read it.

It was in The New York Times Sunday magazine, and it was a two-paged piece about how expensive it is to have an affair. It was dead-on truth listing expenses for anyone engaged in a relationship that wants to put her (or his) best bits forward. Workouts with personal trainers, spray tans, waxings, expensive lingerie, a lot of very costly shoes that may never touch the ground, Wolford lace-topped hose, jewelery, makeup, teeth bleaching, anything involving a plastic surgeon including surgery and the regular "needled touch-ups," plane tickets, hotel suites, private beach houses, on and on. When you saw it all laid out over two pages (with the average price of each thing,) it was appalling. And if things go wrong? You’re left gasping; walking around like a shadow, and paying off some very expensive bills.

It left me wondering tonight. How does love weather the recession? That former sheaf of cellophaned wrapped orchids may well become a a daffodil secretly picked in a public park…and I hope equally cherished and pressed between the pages of a beloved book.

Your Dog Is Fat Adorable!

2009-04-02T13:42:00.012+01:00

"Was That Phat?"

Late last night, I was reading columinist Liz Smith over at wowOwow about Peggy Siegal and her upcoming piece on the Oscars. Ms. Smith said, "I like even better her complaint as a writer who has to put up with being over-edited. Siegal sniffed at Avenue’s hand on her manuscript: “Why, they wouldn’t let me describe Barbra Streisand’s little Maltese dog as "fat?" I had to change it to ‘"adorable.’”

I wrote back, "If Ms. Siegal described the dog as "fat," I am assuming that was her first impression, or overall impression, "That dog is FAT!" ::scribbling in notebook:::

So she gives her piece to her editor and it’s ~~fat~~ "Adorable!" If the dog is fat, could we say the dog is "portly," "rotund," "chunky," "solid?"

What is really at stake here? That a reader will see the word "fat," and jump to the mindset, "Barbra is fat!" "Zut!"

~~"Barbra is fat!"~~ "Wait a minute. Siegal put an extra "a" in Barbra. Strike that, tooz." Isn't that what this is about? That means Kirstie Alley is ~~fat~~... adorable? "Marie Osmond is a lot less adorable than she used to be?" "Wyonna Judd wants to be a lot less adorable?"

"Adorable!" STET

-30- *

*And for those not in the know, STET was (and maybe still is) editor language for "leave it alone - as is,"

while -30- began in the Civil War at the end of messages to mean "this is the end of the message." This practice shifted over to newspapers to mean -30- "this is the end of the piece."

April Food Day

2009-04-01T17:29:00.008+01:00

My blogging friend over at a Baltimore blog called Pigtown Design (and Pigtown is an old, ethnic community of Baltimore under revitalization,) has asked fellow bloggers to acknowledge and promote April Food Day.

I am using her words, "Everyday, the news is filled with the dire news about the current economic climate and a lot of us use the blogging community to take a break from the constant drumbeat. However, we can not ignore the fact that friends and family members, and even some blogger friends have lost their jobs because of the recession.

People who never had a worry in the world now have to think about where their next meal is coming from. People who never would have dreamt that they would need help are now showing up at the local food banks. But when they get there, the shelves are bare. There is not enough food being donated to meet the sudden rise in demand. There is not enough money to buy the food for the food banks. There is not a general understanding that food banks need help to help fill their shelves.

Bloggers and their readers across the country are posting on April 1 and asking their readers to make a contribution to either a local food bank or the national food bank, Feeding America. Every dollar contributed provides seven meals or 10 pounds of food. A gift of $25 provides 75 meals. If we all post together and ask our readers to make a contribution on April 1, we can make a huge difference in our communities.

We hope that you will help us help others. The need is great and the time is now. Thank you.
April Food Blog.

I know from recent articles I've seen in the media that food banks are hurting. I would add my own reflection, as you consider a donation.

When I was in college, through the Campus Ministry, I was sent to counsel homeless women in a shelter called New Endeavors for Women. They are still there doing good work in taking homeless women, teaching them skills while in a safe environment, setting up bank accounts, and helping them find careers and places to live to rebuild their lives. I am not going to lie. The shelter was in a terrible community off North Capitol Street. At the time, there was a drug kingpin ruling D.C., living in his Momma's house, just blocks from the place.

I would head to the shelter on Sunday mornings and face down the boys on the corners, tossing hand signals for drugs. The funny thing is, as I became known in the community, I would hear my name being yelled out in greeting. One time, sitting with a friend at the stoplight at New York Avenue and Florida Avenue, car windows down, we heard my name being yelled out from the large bus stop there. My friend said, "Are they yelling for you?" Expect the unexpected. That's all I can say.

I am also not going to lie. It was depressing working there and hearing the stories, sometimes listening to lies, seeing the poverty. I remember going outside to gather some leaves for an autumn table to make it prettier, and every leaf looked diseased. The birds looked horrible. Missing feathers, misshappened. Poverty hits nature full force, too.

Often I would stay past my time and help the ladies fix lunch; all the food donated from various food banks. Again. Why lie? The food looked horrible. Boxes of bruised apples. Fungal potatoes. Things you would peel down into ongoing spirals, getting rid of the bad bits, until you were holding a golf ball sized potato in your hand. And guess what? Poor people don't want to eat a diseased, rotten potato any more than you do.

So I would say, having seen it. If you do donate, and I wish you would? Chose wisely. Even think creatively. The food banks get a ton of cans of beans (any kind of bean,) or soup. Think, what might be something...a real treat they never get...and splurge on a bag or Oreo cookies, or a bag of candy, sodas, a jar of salsa. String beans they've got, 'til they would come out of your nose. Ditto peanut butter.

People can become poor in a blink. Do not think it could not happen to you. I saw people lose their lives in a matter of two months: a husband dies or leaves them. They miss the rent or mortgage payment in two months. Already it begins, and then it spirals, very quickly: you can't make the car payment, the phone bill, the utility bills. If it gets bad enough, children are taken and the next thing you are in a shelter with a schizophrenic prostitute telling you she was a realtor (true story.) And "no" she wasn't a realtor. Visit the April Food blog. If you can spare a little, they would truly be grateful. If not, no shame. Maybe next time. I find it does the soul good, even when you might be able to donate a tiny bit yourself, despite your own worries, because it lets you retain some pride, and a sense that you, too, are part of a community, in all it's varied aspects.

Haiku Achoo

2009-03-31T20:59:00.008+01:00

I'm into Day Four of (for want of a better wording,) what they used to call "La Grippe." Some respiratory, flu, "I don't feel so good thing." I thought I was better this morning, and Lord God Jesus, "no."

I was bopping around your blogs in between bouts of "retreat to the bed," and I noticed my friend "M.A." over on her blog The Culture Wars was also not feeling well, but not "off" enough not to return to her past habit of "Haiku Tuesday":

An Old Standby: Haiku Tuesday!

Forgive me, for I am out of practice.

1.
So, I cannot hear
sound is clogged in my right ear
time to see someone.
2.
Before I was silenced
by acute laryngitis
I did not sound good.
3.
What is going on?
A sign for me to slow down?
Yes! Of course it is.
4.
Me. This is all me.
Argh. How much more can you take?
Vacation time, please!
5.
Blah. blah, blah, blah blah.
This is what I sound like now.
Yes, this will change soon.

In empathy, I wrote her back:

I sit here with flu
Achoo instead of haiku
Yes, this will change soon

Cherry blossoms bloom
Construction next door goes boom
The world is all change

Nurture yourself now
Return stronger to the fray
Of life's constant needs

We will heal and write
We will return to the flow
Read my words and rest

I need to go make some tea, I think....

What's In My Head: Chaiyya Chaiyya

2009-03-30T07:37:00.005+01:00

If you go to India, it's trains all the way. Why aren't we doing this on the Metro? I guess we remember that old adage from George of the Jungle, "Watch out for that tree!"

'Tis Grand Being Green...Soup

2009-03-29T17:09:00.011+01:00

I went overboard during St. Patrick's Week, making a lot of green food. I am just now posting this on the blog. It is a recipe for Roasted Potato and Leek Soup from Ina Garten's (The Barefoot Contessa) latest book Back to Basics. A friend and I were discussing cookbooks during the time I made this soup, and we both agreed that Ina Garten really seems to test, then test again, all of the recipes in her books, because they almost always taste good, and you rarely have to tweak them to get them to come out right. This is not the case with Martha Stewart recipes where my personal experience has been the recipe sounds great, but something is "off" in the final product.

Several blogs devoted to food writing have made this soup and written about it. Consistently they wrote about it's "depth" of flavor; achieved through the roasting of the vegetables. I would agree with their assessment. One writer said "less salt," and I see her point, but it's a minor quibble. The recipe actually doesn't give a measurement on salt, so I would caution to start slow, then build on it. My mother's old adage? "Potatoes take a lot of salt." But for this? I would warn to go easy and add as necessary.

When I am making a recipe for the first time, I usually follow it to the letter. The only time I deviate from this rule is when there is some glaring flaw that just tells you it a bad measurement. I also always do the prep work before I start cooking a recipe for the first time. It is only after I have really mastered a recipe that I grab and cook. I will say, during the various steps of making this soup, I did have adequate time to wash dishes and do cleanup as I went along, up until the final moments. I'll have notes at the end of what I did that wasn't stated, and where (if any) I would make changes..

Roasted Potato Leek Soup

(Recipe from Back to Basics by Ina Garten)

2 pounds Yukon gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 3/4 inch chunks
4 cups chopped leeks (4 leeks), white and light-green parts, cleaned of all sand
1/4 cup good olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 cups baby arugula, lightly packed
1/2 cup dry white wine, plus extra for serving
6 to 7 cups chicken stock
3/4 cup heavy cream
8 ounces crème fraiche
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus extra for garnish (see note)

Crispy shallots, optional (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Combine the potatoes and leeks on a sheet pan in a single layer. Add the olive oil, 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon black pepper and toss to coat the vegetables evenly. Roast for 40 to 45 minutes, turning them with a spatula a few times during cooking, until very tender.

Add the arugula and toss to combine. Roast for 4 to 5 more minutes, until the arugula is wilted.

Remove the pan from the oven and place over two burners. Stir in the wine and 1 cup of the chicken stock and cook over low heat, scraping up any crispy roasted bits sticking to the pan.

In batches, transfer the roasted vegetables to a food processor fitted with the steel blade, adding the pan liquid and about 5 cups of the chicken stock to make a puree. Pour the purée into a large pot or Dutch oven. Continue to purée the vegetables in batches until they’re all done and combined in the large pot. Add enough of the remaining 1 to 2 cups of stock to make a thick soup.

Add the cream, crème fraiche, 2 teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper and check the seasoning.

When ready to serve, reheat the soup gently and whisk in 2 tablespoons white wine and the Parmesan cheese. Serve hot with an extra grating of Parmesan cheese and crispy shallots, if using.

CRISPY SHALLOTS

Makes about 1/2 cup

1 1/2 cups of olive oil or vegetable oil
3 tablespoon unsalted butter
5 to 6 shallots, peeled and sliced into thin rings

Heat the oil and butter in a saucepan over medium-low heat until it reaches 220 degrees on a candy thermometer.

Reduce heat to low, add shallots slowly to make sure they brown evenly. Remove them from the oil with a slotted spoon, drain well and spread out to cool on paper towels. Once they have dried and crisped, they can be stored at room temperature, covered, for several days.

Yield: 6 - 8 servings

MY NOTES

I used less than four cups of leeks, and at $4.99 a pound at Whole Foods, three worked out fine. I thoroughly washed the leeks (which I had first cut up into about four inch pieces,) for sand, after cutting off a lot of the green tops, then I took them apart under cold running water. It's all going to be pureed at the end, so yes, thoroughly wash. I can't stress that enough. Leeks are just one of those foods that hold sand in their leaves, and we don't want gritty soup.

I'll repeat my earlier warning. Start slow with the salt. I used an artesan Hawaiian pink salt, and I went easy on it, and I thought at the end it could have used less, but I am sensitive to salt since I rarely use it in my day-to-day cooking.

I used a bag of organic arugula from Whole Foods, and I probably used half the bag. Arugula turns up a lot in Ina's cooking: on top of pizza, in soups, with fruit. I liked having this so much in two meals, it became my food fetish item for the week.

Toward the end of my roasting the vegetables, I had to shift them to the left side of the cookie sheet, since my right oven side was running hot and browning things a bit too much. Even so, what did get brown never showed up brown in the soup, which surprised me. Also, for that putting the cookie sheet on two burners and adding the wine to scrap up browned bits? I did start things that way, but there was so little browned bits, I just scrapped the tray into the Dutch casserole and proceeded from there.

I did make the crispy shallots as a topping. I would not call them optional. Friends who had the soup said the shallots totally "made it." So make them. I did not use a candy thermometer, but eyeballed the progress in cooking them. I let them go just a "bit" too long, which was fine, but since they continue cooking after you take them out, I would say, right when you are thinking, "They are almost there," that is when you should take them out and drain them.

I'm sure if you attempt this soup, you know not to put hot soup into a blender or food processor and start blending. Lids will pop. Mess will ensue. So forewarned. Also, I made the mistake of blending the vegetables separate from the broth. Leave them together and scoop by the ladle. My way, I had to go back and use a hand held blending tool, and I had too many pots and such about to wash later.

I think this would be a very nice soup for an Irish-themed party. It does take time. If I were going to make it for a dinner or party? I would make it the day before. Day two tasted just as good, if not better.

It's Aht With Heart, People

2009-03-27T22:30:00.016Z

The bullets are at the end of this piece...

Over at wowOwow, they were asking, "Who's Your Favorite Artist, Toots?"

Too many to choose from, but off the top of my head: Henry Ossawa Tanner, J.M.W. Turner and James Whistler, and all for the same reason. Each began his creative process thoroughly engrossed in depicting their world in finely tuned detail: Tanner and African-American culture (The Banjo Lesson):

Turner’s masts and waves:

Whistler’s ….Mother.

As each artist grew in skill and his search to see with new eyes, they became more and more abstract. (This is true also of Michaelangelo’s unfinished pieces where you can sense the figure in motion, trying to emerge beneath the chipped stone):

Later in their careers, Tanner’s "Annunciation," becomes an angel that is no more than a line of blinding gold:

Whistler’s "Nocturne: The Fallen Rocket: Black and Gold" leads art into Impressionism:

and Turner’s Abstracts from the Biblical Book of Revelation, "The Angel Standing in the Sun," that swirls with the blur between heaven and hell.

Drown in Eternity, Suckahs

Footnotes? We gotta have footnotes and musings, and I did promise you "bullets" and such:

* Bill Cosby owns a lot of Tanner paintings. This reminds us that Bill Cosby is a very rich man.

* Not "too" long ago, The National Gallery of Art had a Turner exhibit. I went on my birthday, taking on the Christmas crowds. I "did" the ships rooms, but I soon tired of the pressing crowds and loud critiques, "Look at that whitecap," and headed for those Bible paintings. That's where I spent the bulk of my time, letting myself fall right into them and hang out for a while."

*You want to see some Whistler? Go to the Freer Gallery of Art, but first go to the National Gallery of Art to pay a visit to "Symphony No. 1, The White Girl," a painting I went to see FIRST, every time my Mama took me to the gallery. Also, often told, but here it is again: the infamous story of being five years old, and my mother and I were going down the winding (and massive) back staircase of the Gallery, me holding Mama's hand and saying "I want to live here." She said,"Oh no, Little Cubie. Wouldn't you be afraid to live here all by yourself? Me: (shooting her a look) "No." Then go on over to the Freer Gallery and do "The Peacock Room." Ask the guard to show you the secret window. Charm him. Get him to say "Okay, but don't tell." Then hit Whistler's "Nocturnes." Old man Freer was loaded and bought a ton of them. Think about fog. Think about London. Think about why London doesn't have fog like that anymore.

*Michelangelo's stuff screams to be touched. We won't go into why David screams to be touched, and how you'd be screaming if you did. Walk tall and carry a big stick, indeed.

*Tanner's "The Annunciation." Lemme tell ya something. I became so obsessed with this painting, that when I was presenting a paper at Georgetown University (with slides people, but no snacks,) I was so gaga over it, I heard a loud "AHEM" from the back of the room, basically my professor saying, "Wind it up." Back then, you could not shut me up about Tanner.

Don't even ask me who my favorite artist is. Talking to a friend while I wrote you guys just now? We both went off on 1) Georg Groz; 2) David Stone Martin; 3) Friedensreich Hundertwasser; 4) Edward Keinholz; 4) Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross; 5) The Belarusian School of Icon Painting and 6) the Desert Eagle large-bore, gas-operated, semi-automatic pistol.

"Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual. " ~~ Arthur Koestler

Please Tiptoe Around (Not Through) The Tulips

2009-03-27T20:03:00.013Z

(Photograph taken by Janet Draper)

In this week’s "Home Section" of The Washington Post, Adrian Higgins writes an interesting article about the damage done to flowers and plants by crowds and festivities during the Inauguration (“For Smithsonian, a Sad Souvenir of the Inauguration.”) Higgins interviews Mary Draper, a horticulturist with the Smithsonian Institution, where they discuss the trampling the gardens took during this time of national celebration.

(Photograph of Mary Draper by Juana Arias of The Washington Post)

Friends tried to prepare Ms. Draper for the damage done, but “….when a shell-shocked Draper got there the next day, she found the mulch had been turned to dust, 3,000 pansies and other winter plants were gone, evergreen shrubs had been beaten in and several prized woody plants had disappeared.” Have you ever done anything on a par like plant 3,000 pansies? Every joint and muscle in your body will remind you about it for days.

As we enter this time of nature's renewal: garden cleanup, and reading our favorite plant catalogues: wondering what we can afford in this time of economic hardship (and plants ain’t cheap, folks,) you need to remember that plants will tolerate only so much. "Cal? Keep your soccer ball out of that flower bed!" Ask my amsonia.

(photograph by Juana Arias of The Washington Post)

What these images from The Post remind me of is something I read about a few years ago regarding Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. During the time of the kidnapping (and murder) of their son, their sorrow became a world-wide media event, with reporters and the curious trampling through their property, trying to keep on top of the "scoop." Anne Morrow Lindbergh later wrote in her journal of her further sorrow, when spring arrived, and all of the white tulips she had anticipatingly planted coming up mangled and destroyed, from the foot pounding of the earth above their resting place; and for her, a hauntingly symbolic reminder of what her family had been through and their loss.

If you’ve ever had to spent three days chopping deep into a weed’s root system to clear gardening space, or baby along something that could be irreplaceable (your grandmother’s narcissus,) it’s wise to remember that plants are genetically wired to take somewhat of a pounding from nature, but they can endure only so much. We are not, of course, discussing bamboo that backhoes so dearly love, or that trumpet vine I was warned about that refuses to fall on its sword and die. I have sliced it’s root stem open and poured straight Round-Up on it, and I swear I heard it say, “I laugh at you, you foolish woman.” Slice away. I will return.”

The Sarah Palin of Plants. Pretty, yes? Try getting rid of it.

What's In My Head: The Harlem Shuffle

2009-03-26T01:55:00.001Z

I've been dropping these protracted comments all over blogdom, including a woman's blog called wowOwow. A question was posed on "wow" about the value of the iPod, and I wrote,
"I have an iPod. I rarely use it. So many other ways to hear music including You Tube and iTunes on your computer. When I hear "iPod shuffle," it makes me think of the "The Harlem Shuffle" (the Bob and Earl version, not the Rolling Stones,) and whaddya know. It’s on You Tube.

Remember me warning you about ear worms, folks? REMEMBER???? Because apparently I don't. Would someone please thwack me with a rolled newspaper right now?

Twitter Twatter: You're An Acter. Act.

2009-03-25T10:59:00.006Z

"You will be a creative soldier, once you get all this "thinking" knocked out of you. "

Recently on wowOwow, the query was posed, "Is it fair for us to hold actors up as role models?" Well. Let's see. Just in this past week, Lindsay Lohan has begged to be taken seriously as an actor, and Madonna has lectured her daughter to be true to herself, while if what is true about Madonna lately is that she is running around with a man much younger than herself and has asked her assistant to go to Malawi to pick a new baby; an appropriate baby that would "fit in." Sorta a "I hope it matches the drapes kinda thing." Role model for what, I query.

I just finished a biography about Marlon Brando, Somebody: the Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando by Stefan Kanfer. Brando would have done better focusing on his craft, rather than belittling his talent (being an actor is like being a butcher,) while demanding justice for (fill in the blank.) The Native-American? He sent one up to make his acceptance speech for his Oscar win in The Godfather. Full buckskin regalia, too. Only it turned out she wasn't really what she said she was. Same with Wife Number One: Anna Kashfi, given to wearing sari's and nose rings (even at their wedding,) only it turned out she was really Joan O'Callaghan. Didn't he check under the carpet? Weren't the freckles a give away? "Freckle? I thought that was a bindi spot."

"Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great." ~~ Fred Allen

I have to relay one moment from the book. In the film The Young Lions, where Brando plays an overly blonde Nazi, he fought with the director (Edward Dmytyrk,) and at one point in the script he wanted to have his character, Christian Diestl, make a speech about racial inequality in America and the Scottsboro boys. When he also suggested that Christian (in his death scene) wind up twisted in barbed wire and arms extended like a wounded Christ, co-star Montgomery Clift said, "If Marlon's allowed to do that, I'll walk off the picture." Brando didn’t. Instead he died in a muddy pool of water, and lay there so long, technicians came running up to make sure he wasn't truly dead. Now that's acting. Playing a Nazi with a British accent? Uh.....not so good.

"Remind me to tell you about the time I looked into the heart of an artichoke."

Not that we can't learn life lessons from the movies. To quote from the most quotable movie of all time; George Sanders as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve (speaking of the Marilyn Monroe character as an "actress,") "Miss Casswell is an actress, a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art."

That pretty well sums it up. Learn your lines. Learn your fellow actor's lines, while you're at it. Show up on time. Do your work. Go home. I think Robert Mitchum said that.

"I kept the same suit for six years and the same dialogue. They just changed the title of the picture and the leading lady. "

Twitter Twatter: Chuck Jackson

2009-03-23T11:59:00.000Z

Over the weekend I was in (what Elvis would call) the ghetto grocery; a store where they play soul oldies from the '50's through the '70's. Peepaw demographics. Often I hear customers singing along to the muzak. I do it myself since I know my Ruby and the Romantics. Often enough these songs repeat.

I was three-fourth's down one aisle when I passed an elderly man refilling a greetings card display, and he started singing along with the sweetest voice. I had hit the end of the aisle, but I turned around and called back to him, "You're singing Chuck Jackson!" He smiled this huge toothless grin and said, "That right!" then he went right back to his singing. Mister? You made my day.

And as a Cube aside, the song "Any Day Now," (1962) was written by Burt Bacharach and that's Burt doing the flutter keyboard work on the organ. Elvis, Luther Vandross and Ronnie Milsap also did notable versions.

Hostest With The Less-test

2009-03-21T22:14:00.019Z

This afternoon, I was thinking about this woman I worked with a few years back and what a train wreck she was.

Today I went out for a manicure, and my manicurist and I were talking about our respective week, past and incoming. I told her about my green food week and she laughed. From there I stopped at the library to pick up some books on hold: a new one on Lincoln's correspondence, a book about socialite Brooke Astor's final years, and I grabbed Food TV's Dave Lieberman's Young and Hungry; just a portion of a huge toppling stack now next to my bed.

While I was doing some work at the computer this afternoon, a friend of mine in San Francisco sent me an instant message to tell me about her week of Junior League fashion shows and her "ex" boyfriend (who had been married to a prostitute, but didn't know it until much later.) That's an ongoing story because the woman has since become politicial and is always popping up in the news out there, shooting her mouth off about women's rights, when in truth, she uses a political agenda to justify her whoring years to her daughters, I expect. So from that to plastic surgery and posting on You Tube and honoring dead parents and beautiful homes and bouncing around from one subject to another with the ease of old friends who are in sync.

I went to lie down a few moments because I knew I had to be working on a house I am restoring tonight with my nose pressed to a baseboard to get the paint "just right," and thinking of being in an underheated house and all of the prep work and exactitude involved in good painting and what cd's to haul over and if I should stop at a Home Depot to buy new door knobs tonight or later.

I started going through the stack of books, putting aside the ones I wanted to be reading later tonight, and I picked up the Dave Lierberman book. In under five minutes I knew there wasn't one thing of interest in the book for me, I speed read the recipes, and I won't be making any of them. I couldn't even figure out who would be making these recipes. They were about three steps up from dorm cooking for the college crowd, and that crowd wouldn't bother. On the flip side, if you were interested in cooking, you wouldn't want to take the time to make and eat this stuff. A quick "back to the library" book. In his defense, the blue shirt he's wearing on the cover brings out the blue of his eyes.

For some reason, this triggered memories of a woman I used to work with, and to protect her privacy let's call her "Ellen." Ellen was married to a famous local politician of his day, and they had five children. She came from this tidy little Irish couple that always looked as neat as they could be, yet Ellen, her husband and her litter of piglets were just filthy, fat, and had the most disgusting ways about them.

Her father had been a candymaker, and in discussing Christmas candy, Ellen told me of how her father knew how to make candy canes. I asked him if he would ever make me some. He did, and they were works of art. Intensely red and white, with the finest, most delicate and delineated lines through them. I wrapped them and save them for years until they gave up the ghost, but they were things that spoke of skill and beauty. The next time you buy a box of candy canes, look at how blurred out the lines are and how washed out the colors and you'll see what I mean.

One day Ellen walked into my office and while relaying some information to me, she let rip a huge extended fart. Without a break (minus the wind) she said, "This is what happens when you've had too many children," and continued on. Sometimes, she would bring the youngest child into the office for the day, and the little girl had her mother's little puffed eye slits and mousy, greasy stringy hair and this skin that reflected no light. Just this flat, dun gray dead looking stuff that seemed so abnormal on a child. The skin looked filthy. Ellen's open toed dress sandals always showed nude hose with the toe in (or torn out) and black with filth and holes in the hose. Why go on. She was a mess.

When the office closed, she said she wanted us to all come to her house for a picnic, and a few months later, the invitation came. Then just before the picnic she called us and asked each to bring a potluck dish. I don't have a problem with potluck, but I do when it comes up a day before the event and it's not an agreed up plan. When I arrived, Ellen had cooked and put out a large, sliced ham. Within minutes of the party's start, I had to go into her kitchen to get something, and she had already carved off a few slices of ham and left them at the picnic table, and there she was wrapping the bulk of the food back up, explaining to me "I have a family to feed."

The office had closed, and I don't want to say more since it was a newsworthy event of the time, but when that happened, she asked me to hold off looking for work for two months so that I could go work for her husband. He, in turn, was waiting for his top aide to take off. It was a guaranteed hire at good pay, so I agreed. The problem being, when I got there, Ellen's husband asked the aide to start teaching me, then immediately left town on business. At some point during this two week stretch, she decided she wasn't going anywhere, refused to teach me anything, and here I had wasted two month in preparation for this new job to come my way. I was socially isolated in the office. No one seemed to ever speak to anyone else. They never seemed to lunch together. It was hard to even find food sources nearby. I remember just before I quit, (and this was the first of two jobs I ever quit,) I remember standing in a Metro car with tears just streaming down my face, realizing I was serious screwed and was going to have to quit. People actually moved away from me. I don't blame them. It wasn't the quitting. I knew it had to be. But now what?

Ellen had found work on Capitol Hill working for a New York State Congressman, and I remember going to her office to turn in her husband's office key, so upset I couldn't even get into it with her as to "why." God love him, he paid me a month's wages and begged me to come back, but I knew I couldn't. I knew the woman I was replacing wasn't budging. And that left me Mr. "X."

Mr. "X" was an underling of Ellen's husband, and he had asked to meet me the day I went in for my formal interview. It made no sense. I would never be working with this man in any capacity, yet I agreed. I'm sure Ellen's husband wondered about it, himself. The man was a horror. He sat in his office, blue with smoke, ashtray overflowing, puffing away, in between bites of a huge submarine sandwich smothered in onions. I wanted to wretch it smelled so bad in there. He sat back in his chair telling me how I would never succeed in the office, how I didn't know what needed to be done--basically playing "the big man," but given the fact I was working with his boss on projects one on one, his behavior was bizzare. Equally bizzare? Ellen's husband told me just after this meeting that Mr. "X" didn't want me hired. Which is how I acquired this information. But why tell me this?

Ellen's husband had left town. Mr. "X" pulled me from the work I was supposed to be receiving instruction on, threw his weight around with the boss gone, hauled me into his office and told me I would be working for him. He pushed this mess of jumbled paper across his desk and "explained" things (quotes meaning "his" version.) A national study was to be conducted requiring the gathering of data from every state. I asked him how much data had been gathered. None. Now whether that data was even available for the gathering was unknown. Statistics would be used. Charts would be made up. A report would be written. Are you ready? Sit down. I have to laugh.

Mr. "X" had been given two years to do this. The day he threw it across at me, it's due date was one week. Yes. ONE week. I looked him dead in the eye and said, "There is no way you are dumping your failure at me and asking me to fall on the sword and take responsibility for what you have obviously not done." (This, by the way, I think explains what he didn't want me hired. Him judging my capability of this "bail," for him.) In truth I did have statistics under my belt, despite my youth, but I also wasn't the lamb he thought I was. And this is why I quit. I could see the woman I was to replace had flipped and was not going anywhere. Ellen's husband was on the road a great deal of the time and not around to protect me from this nonsense, and I knew I would be stuck with this reeking, miserable man, and thought, "Better unemployment than this."

It's odd to think that a bad cookbook triggered all of this, but let's get back to how Dave Lieberman made me think of Ellen. At our annual Christmas party, the staff would bring a variety of festive foods. This particular year, Ellen's contribution was two tiny cans of Vienna sausage. She popped the tops, so kuddos to her for that hostessing gesture. There "may" have been toothpicks provided, but moot point since no one wanted to eat them. They just sat there in their cans. We had Secret Santa, and that was always a treat. My employer gave gorgeous gifts: jade bracelets, Waterford vases. She gift wrapped everything herself in imaginative ways, (a tiny skater on a silver foil pond!), but she loved doing it. I still have everthing she gave me: a carriage clock, a velvet lined silver box from England, a translucent white jade carved dragon pendant from China she had bought for herself when she was one of the first to go into China. (I still wear it on a thin silk ribbon in the summer and remember the geneorsity of such a rare gift.) Just the prettiest things.

One of my co-workers one year gave me a box for my pierced earrings (when I did not yet have pierced ears.) I was so naive I actually had to ask "What is this for?" Ellen beamed when she got my name one year. She had been in Baltimore and seen this coffee mug with a decal of roses and my name printed on it in heavy black Gothic font. Since my name isn't usually on those things that have names that are more common, it made her even more proud that this was, indeed, something that shared my name. I found a visual on eBay that is darn close to the original. I'd been taught to accept gifts graciously and write my bread and butter thank you's promptly, and this was definitely a "get a smile on your face fast" moment. For a few years, it sat in the back of my cupboard, and when friends would see it, they would tease me about not using it.

I don't know why, but one time I was studying it and thinking how it had been bought with affection and pride in the find, so I decided, "You know, you poor ugly duckling. Out you come from hiding." I took to drinking my coffee in it every morning. I remember a few years after I had been using it, and it came up in group conversation again, one friend said, "My God you still have that thing?" I said, "Yes, and oddly enough I've grown quite fond of it's ugliness." Fast forward to about three years ago, a friend came into the room where I was with this crestfallen face and said, "I have something terrible to tell you. I broke the (fill in my name here) cup," (because that's what we had taken to calling it. The (fill in my name here) cup.) I said, "You didn't," and they said "I did, and I feel just terrible about it."

Don't laugh, dear readers. Do you know what we did? We held a burial for it's shards in my back yard, and there it remains. R.I.P. little mug.

What Is This Thing You Call "Money"? Twitter Twatter

2009-03-18T14:59:00.001Z

My text signal just went off on my iPhone. The message is, "Man Man. TT said did pops give u some money this morning."

I am so tempted to answer him. "Gots da cheddah and carvin'."

I get too many calls from phriggin' phreaks.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-17T18:59:00.006Z

I've spent the past few St. Patrick's Days in Annapolis where I would meet friends for dinner at the Killarney House, a restaurant done up like an inn with a large fire going at the end of the room in a stone fireplace. We always order the Corned Beef and Cabbage and warm pots of steaming tea. They cook the beef for ten hours, so it tastes incredibly tender. All very civilized.

The polar opposite of where I spent my lunchtime last year in Davis' Pub, (look at their photo gallery. You walk out the door and hit the brink in just about any direction) a waterman's pub a block from the water, sailboat masts clanging in the sea wind, and everyone eating fried "you name it, but it sticks to yer ribs out on the cold wind and water" and exceedingly drunk by 11 a.m. Everyone wearing yellow rubber boat clothing, too, so if you fall overboard, "I think I see Harvey over there dog paddling by the buoy." You'd think it's a no-brainer. You walk through the bar to the back where the long tables are for serving food, and coming back out, you get hugged a great deal and make a lot of new friends; at least for that moment.

We've been planning this year's event for weeks, weighing where else we might go this year. There are several Irish pubs in Annapolis, but it became obvious in the past week, with conflicting schedules, this year was going to be a bump and no go.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

I was raised in a family that honored holidays. One year my mother and I made sugar cookies cut out like yellow chicks and shamrocks, and I took those to work in a towel wrapped wicker basket. One year, at the insistence of my co-workers, I brought in my mother's shamrock templates and we spent a few hours cutting out shamrocks to put around the office. My mother would invariably be given a shamrock, (or buy one,) and it would go inside her kitchen window sill, so that became tradition, too: having a shamrock plant.

I still have the pendant part of my babyhood shamrock necklace (the bracelet went missing,) and I still have silly shamrock earrings I paid a dollar for at a party store two years ago. I inherited the shamrock paper templates. I inherited the Waterford. I inherited the shamrock cookie cutters. What I can't have or replace is my mother calling me saying, "Can you stop and buy some beef so we can make an Irish dinner for your father?"

My parents had large gardens, and Mom would call when certain things were blooming to either cut (flowers) or pull for dinner. She always loved the new potatoes and baby peas coming in, and for some reason, I always associate that dish with this season as well, because now is when that crop is ready, and the coloration of cream with bright green.

Oh the little white road climbs over the hill,
My feet they must follow, they cannot be still,
Must follow and follow though far it may roam.
Oh little white road you will never come home.

Oh, the hills they are patient and steadfast and wise,
They look over the valleys and up to the skies,
But the little white road scrambles up them and over.
Oh, little white road you are ever the rover.

I fain would go with you right down to the sea
Where a ship with white sails would be waiting for me,
Go sailing and sailing to strange lands afar
Where deserts and forests and lost cities are.

But when I grew weary of my gypsying ways
I'd sail home again for to end all my days
In the little grey cottage, beside the grey hill.
But you, little road, would be wandering still

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind always be at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
and rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of His hand.

A small piece of corned beef I bought at Whole Foods and shredded with boiled cabbage and a cubed orange on my mother's antique Majorca plate and her antique silver (Williams Rogers "Berkshire") fork from 1847.

Postscript: My ancestry is British-Scottish. Go figure.

Twitter Twatter

2009-03-05T09:59:00.002Z

I have had no interest in signing onto Twitter. I swear I've seen some shared "thoughts" listed on other's Twitter sites like, "My baby just had a poop going up to his neck."** Or. "Kawfee. I need kawfee." Fascinating. I will never be joining the Twitter Twatters.

Here is my Twittering for the day. I was sitting in a doctor's waiting room and the aide came out and called, "Miz Merman?" A zaftig, middle-aged woman with teased hair in a flip stood up, and I swear I expected her to burst out with~"THERE'S NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS."~

I wish she had.

** ...and as aside, if I were going to write about baby poop? I would be quoting from Tolstoy's War and Peace when Natasha, (the now domesticated country wife,) runs ecstatically, holding forth a sick baby's diaper gone from green to healthy yellow. I would talk about drop seat Chinese baby outfits where babies are unbuttoned and held over trenches, or Hanoi Jane Fonda being chastized in Vietnam for her own child not being potty trained...and the Vietnamese showing her how.

Now Playing In My Head

2009-02-22T19:28:00.000Z

Early this morning. Very early this morning, my friend Tony signed online, and we greeted each other. He said, "Sigh. I woke up this morning with Herbert VonKarian's Berlin Philharmonic's Blue Danube in my head." I told him, "That's funny. I'm sitting here, and I can't get "Roses and Lollipops," and "Ole Man River" out of my head. We started talking about "song worms." Those things that you should never even think of, or they will ruin your day. Off the top of my head: "Electric Avenue," "Don't Worry, Be Happy," anything by Tony Orlando, "Lighting Strikes," "Cheeky Girls Christmas" and so many, many more.

Later today I was updating some of my varied blogs, and I remembered how back on the first one under AOL Journals, they used to have a section for "Currently Listening To" to set the tone of what you were writing. I "may" pick that up and occasionally throw up a song that's on my mind. God knows I have eclectic tastes. Ask Drew about my getting him hooked on Siberian throat singers.

What's been playing in my head tonight? Liza Minnelli singing "Don't Smoke in Bed."