A good daughter cooks and bakes for her mother and answers her father's questions before going out to play.
"What band sang 'Highway to Hell'?" he asks from the family room. AC/DC, I tell him
"Who was the 'Originator'?" When I say Bo Diddly, he fills in the crossword blanks with a satisfied smile. "Ah, yes!"
At this point, Mom gets involved. "If you need any more assistance, you'd better ask her now before she goes because I can't be of any help to you on this stuff."
I assume that she means she doesn't know anything about music history. "I blocked out that whole rock and roll period!" she says with disdain, although the truth is she's been to multiple Neil Diamond concerts and some of her favorite songs are by Stevie Wonder.
It's all rock at this point, Mom.
Today's road trip to the Northern Neck had been motivated by Mom's bridge luncheon tomorrow, so I'd spent my time helping make chicken noodle soup, chicken salad and a Viennese torte, all of which took a solid three hours and endless conversation.
Answering Dad's questions takes seconds, and that includes him asking me about my love life.
As parents go, mine are pretty cool.
After driving back through a series of rain squalls, I consider my evening's options and decide that Quill Theater's historic play reading series wins out because it's "Luminous One: An Evening with Ethel Barrymore" and I know nothing about the woman besides that she's a distant relation to Drew.
It doesn't hurt that it's being presented at the Branch House and while I've already seen the new exhibit, I certainly don't mind seeing it again. To my amazement, I overhear a woman say she's lived in Richmond for 17 years and never been in the building.
"What is this place?" she inquires of her clueless friend. Tragic.
I, on the other hand, am enchanted to find the heavy leaded windows are open on this unusually balmy, wet November evening, allowing the moist air inside. This fact alone makes the evening special.
The one-woman show, ably written and directed by Melissa Rayford and starring the reliably impressive Melissa Johnston-Price is set in Richmond and kicks off with its premise.
"I've been asked to write a memoir. Horrors!" Ethel exclaims, standing next to a typewriter. From there, she reminisces about some of what's happened in her life, never writing a word.
She talks about her grandmother who "experimented with marriage" (haven't we all?), her memories of going to the Jefferson for the wedding of Charles Dana Gibson and Irene Langhorne, saying, "By the time she married, she'd had 60 proposals," and dancing on the Jefferson's rooftop garden the night before.
And, like my Dad, Ethel's father kept his word count to strictly what was necessary. When she cabled that she was getting married ("I was constantly trying to let myself get married and it never worked"), he responded with, "Congratulations. Love, Father."
When she broke the engagement and cabled her father the change in events, he responded, "Congratulations. Love, Father."
Turns out Ethel's life involved Winston Churchill, Henry James, the Duke of Manchester, Teddy Roosevelt and Spencer Tracy while wearing black, white and gray clothing because they were cheapest.
Apparently the Barrymores are known for two things: mismanaging money and drinking excessively.
In a particularly telling moment, Ethel complained about the current generation expecting art to be an instantaneous pleasure. As if. Or, as Ethel put it, "If you don't like it, you need to figure out why!"
When the reading ended, we broke for a dessert buffet and mingling. In the course of commiserating about the evils of Verizon, I manged to devour four little sweeties, as my Scottish friend would say, followed by chatting with a handsome stranger.
My mother and her sweet tooth would be proud.
A panel discussion followed, where we gleaned obscure tidbits such as the fact that if Drew Barrymore's children become actors, they'll represent 300 years of Barrymores in the profession. And how Ethel's hair was imitated just like Jennifer Aniston's was a century later. That the Barrymores gave each other red apples on opening night.
Yet another fine Ethel-ism: "You grow up the day you have your first laugh...at yourself."
The logical place to end my evening was celebrating the third Thursday of November, also known as the day Beaujolais Nouveau is released and as good an excuse as any to visit Amour, enjoy some young wines and sample Beaujolais Nouveau sorbet (while patting myself on the back for missing last night's guests).
Not only is this years' Georges du Boeuf Beaujolais Noveau far better than the usual bubblegum-flavored sipper, but one of last year's Noveaus has aged amazingly well and how often does that happen?
My favorite French teacher and part-time model tries to convince me to consider modeling in local fashion shows and I wonder how I would like being looked at for wearing clothes not my own. The entire bar discusses the difference in "cruise people" and "boat people."
In the strictest sense, I qualify for neither. On the other hand, I've been proposed to eight times, I've experimented with marriage and I've laughed at myself for as long as I can remember.
And you know what I'd hear from the Northern Neck about that?
Congratulations. Love, Dad.
Showing posts with label georges deboeuf beaujolais nouveau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label georges deboeuf beaujolais nouveau. Show all posts
Friday, November 20, 2015
Monday, January 13, 2014
Some Are a Melody, Some Are the Beat
People always expect me to be out doing something.
Like the friend who e-mailed me one evening not long after 10 p.m. When I responded immediately, he expressed surprise that I was home.
I can't be out dancing on bars or dating lawyers every night of the week, I reminded him.
No, some nights I'm at a friend's house watching "Napoleon Dynamite" for the first time, laughing and relating to being a nerd in high school.
I've never been to Idaho, but I do know plenty about growing up in a mid-century rancher and wishing I were more popular.
I hear several good songs I already know that were used in the film, like When in Rome's "The Promise" and Alphaville's "Forever Young."
So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams are swinging out of the blue
We let them come true
Between the actors' deadpan delivery, the quirky subplots and the bad costumes, I begin to see why this became a cult classic. Favorite line: I caught you a delicious sea bass.
Or I'm opening a bar of Choco-Love with sea salt and almonds, only to have the poet sitting beside me notice that a Roethke poem is included with the chocolate, something I'd never noticed despite weekly purchases of this particular chocolate.
Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval...
I tossed a stone and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, she
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.
I should not have to have poetry pointed out to me. I am thrilled that it was.
Sometimes I'm invited to an afternoon fire where people sit around outside under a brilliant blue sky drinking Georges duBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau while we still can and listen to music, talking about early New Order versus late New Order and how Helena Christianson once dated Michael Hutchence but is now married to Paul Banks.
Oh, what a tangled, incestuous musical web they weave.
Meanwhile, the fire burns on through the afternoon as the blue skies become cloudy ones and the fire's warmth becomes more useful than decorative.
Other times, I'm traveling to the hinterlands for an unlikely meal.
It's an Italian restaurant called Palermo and although we're the first people at the bar, before long there are three regulars surrounding us.
One, a deep-voiced man who retired from Reynolds and is now consulting for them, tells me that he built his house in Salisbury in 1989 after designing it himself.
I continue to be impressed with people who design their own houses and have no training to do so.
Coppola "Director's Cut" Zinfandel gets us started, but we soon pounce on $4 happy hour specials of crispy Buffalo wings and shrimp cocktail (a steal of a price for five good-sized shrimp).
Our bartender is young and gregarious and tells us he is a substitute P.E. teacher who has mistakenly kept the equipment room key in his pocket after a day subbing.
Also, he mentions that chivalry is not dead.
I hadn't thought it was.
Dinner is gnocchi verdi - spinach pasta with procuitto and more of it than I can possibly finish after all those wings.
Then there's the time I'm riding down a country road in Fluvanna county listening to Jimmy Martin on the radio singing "Drink Up and Go Home" as the sun sets.
Don't tell me your troubles, got enough of my own
Be thankful you're living, drink up and go home.
Oh, so thankful I'm living. Even when I'm not doing much of anything.
Like the friend who e-mailed me one evening not long after 10 p.m. When I responded immediately, he expressed surprise that I was home.
I can't be out dancing on bars or dating lawyers every night of the week, I reminded him.
No, some nights I'm at a friend's house watching "Napoleon Dynamite" for the first time, laughing and relating to being a nerd in high school.
I've never been to Idaho, but I do know plenty about growing up in a mid-century rancher and wishing I were more popular.
I hear several good songs I already know that were used in the film, like When in Rome's "The Promise" and Alphaville's "Forever Young."
So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams are swinging out of the blue
We let them come true
Between the actors' deadpan delivery, the quirky subplots and the bad costumes, I begin to see why this became a cult classic. Favorite line: I caught you a delicious sea bass.
Or I'm opening a bar of Choco-Love with sea salt and almonds, only to have the poet sitting beside me notice that a Roethke poem is included with the chocolate, something I'd never noticed despite weekly purchases of this particular chocolate.
Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval...
I tossed a stone and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, she
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.
I should not have to have poetry pointed out to me. I am thrilled that it was.
Sometimes I'm invited to an afternoon fire where people sit around outside under a brilliant blue sky drinking Georges duBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau while we still can and listen to music, talking about early New Order versus late New Order and how Helena Christianson once dated Michael Hutchence but is now married to Paul Banks.
Oh, what a tangled, incestuous musical web they weave.
Meanwhile, the fire burns on through the afternoon as the blue skies become cloudy ones and the fire's warmth becomes more useful than decorative.
Other times, I'm traveling to the hinterlands for an unlikely meal.
It's an Italian restaurant called Palermo and although we're the first people at the bar, before long there are three regulars surrounding us.
One, a deep-voiced man who retired from Reynolds and is now consulting for them, tells me that he built his house in Salisbury in 1989 after designing it himself.
I continue to be impressed with people who design their own houses and have no training to do so.
Coppola "Director's Cut" Zinfandel gets us started, but we soon pounce on $4 happy hour specials of crispy Buffalo wings and shrimp cocktail (a steal of a price for five good-sized shrimp).
Our bartender is young and gregarious and tells us he is a substitute P.E. teacher who has mistakenly kept the equipment room key in his pocket after a day subbing.
Also, he mentions that chivalry is not dead.
I hadn't thought it was.
Dinner is gnocchi verdi - spinach pasta with procuitto and more of it than I can possibly finish after all those wings.
Then there's the time I'm riding down a country road in Fluvanna county listening to Jimmy Martin on the radio singing "Drink Up and Go Home" as the sun sets.
Don't tell me your troubles, got enough of my own
Be thankful you're living, drink up and go home.
Oh, so thankful I'm living. Even when I'm not doing much of anything.
Thursday, November 28, 2013
First, Last, Everything
Ah, yes, the annual Thanksgiving eve get-together with the city-bound.
I got the e-mail this morning, inviting me for what sounded like the typical Italian Christmas Eve meal - all kinds of seafood- and since it also promised, "reds, whites and a bubbly," I RSVP'd yes indeed.
The evening began with music from a Buffalo Springfield box set while we marshaled our forces and decided how to best attack preparing this meal.
My charming host began with the most time-specific wine choice for the next few weeks, a Georges Duboeuf beaujolias nouveau to celebrate the harvest.
That got us through the Stephen Stills covers of Neil Young songs, into the Graham Beck Brut Rose and through the shrimp cocktail, lobster tails, crab legs and basmati rice.
My charming hostess told me how she'd seen a blast from the past today: the Thanksgiving episode of the "Beverly Hillbillies" from 1963.
They ate on the pool table, FYI, she said.
It was four hours in when we retired to the living room to continue sipping and discuss life that I made the mistake of yawning.
"Don't you dare," my hostess instructed firmly. "Ordinarily, you'd just be going to Balliceaux now."
She did have a point. It was then that the host decided to put on "The Velvet Underground and Nico," the banana album, saying that he wanted to play a song for me.
The grand irony was that I'd never heard the album start to finish, so even after he'd played "Femme Fatale" for me, I insisted on hearing the rest of it.
Interestingly enough, my hostess had never heard it, either, but then she's a fan of '40s and '50s music, so there are a lot of '60s and '70s bands she doesn't know.
But after a few songs, and she did admit that Nico must have sounded like a revolutionary vocalist for the time (1967), she rolled her eyes at me as I rhapsodized about finally hearing this piece of musical history.
You have to remember, I reminded her, this band and this unique sound inspired legions of people to start bands.
And she, out of step with much past 1979, said, "And now they just sound like everybody else!"
Talk about nailing it on the head, but what an evolution that is.
When "Banana" finished, my hostess requested something from the disco era and the host obliged with "Saturday Night Fever."
Overplayed? Yes, to death. Listened to much recently? Nope, definitely not. Evocative of a very young period? Without doubt.
The host was not the disco fan we were, but totally got into it when "Tragedy" came on and picked up a nearby kazoo (noteworthy in and of itself) and played kazoo accompaniment for the rest of the song. And pretty damn well, too.
We challenged him to reach out to that other side of our impressionable young selves and he responded admirably with Joni Mitchell's "Hits" (as opposed to "Misses"), starting with a song from "Court and Spark," a high point for both her poetic songwriting about youth and the perfection of her voice.
I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the starmaker machine
Behind the popular song
"Stoking the starmaker machine" may be one the of the most well-written musical phrases of 1974.
Talking about "Court and Spark" reminded my hostess that on the "Beverly Hillbillies" episode she'd just seen, Elly Mae had been given lessons of courting and sparking.
Coincidence? We didn't dwell on it.
Not sure what possible musical direction we could go in with our Lemarca Prosecco, in a masterful stroke, our host chose "Barry White's Greatest Hits," a record so worthy I also own it.
A record so satisfyingly danceable that two of us were soon dancing on the couch, at least until the host grabbed his woman and danced with her on the floor.
The other of us continued her couch dancing.
When they finished, he chided her for not wanting to dance more with him. She challenged that she didn't know how to dance.
If you're old enough to have danced to Barry White the first time, you can dance. Hell, if you can do it, you can dance.
Never tell a man who's said out loud that any night he sees you is a special night that you don't want to dance with him.
Remember Barry's advice, my dear? "I'll Do anything You Want Me To."
Second only to "Let the Music Play."
I got the e-mail this morning, inviting me for what sounded like the typical Italian Christmas Eve meal - all kinds of seafood- and since it also promised, "reds, whites and a bubbly," I RSVP'd yes indeed.
The evening began with music from a Buffalo Springfield box set while we marshaled our forces and decided how to best attack preparing this meal.
My charming host began with the most time-specific wine choice for the next few weeks, a Georges Duboeuf beaujolias nouveau to celebrate the harvest.
That got us through the Stephen Stills covers of Neil Young songs, into the Graham Beck Brut Rose and through the shrimp cocktail, lobster tails, crab legs and basmati rice.
My charming hostess told me how she'd seen a blast from the past today: the Thanksgiving episode of the "Beverly Hillbillies" from 1963.
They ate on the pool table, FYI, she said.
It was four hours in when we retired to the living room to continue sipping and discuss life that I made the mistake of yawning.
"Don't you dare," my hostess instructed firmly. "Ordinarily, you'd just be going to Balliceaux now."
She did have a point. It was then that the host decided to put on "The Velvet Underground and Nico," the banana album, saying that he wanted to play a song for me.
The grand irony was that I'd never heard the album start to finish, so even after he'd played "Femme Fatale" for me, I insisted on hearing the rest of it.
Interestingly enough, my hostess had never heard it, either, but then she's a fan of '40s and '50s music, so there are a lot of '60s and '70s bands she doesn't know.
But after a few songs, and she did admit that Nico must have sounded like a revolutionary vocalist for the time (1967), she rolled her eyes at me as I rhapsodized about finally hearing this piece of musical history.
You have to remember, I reminded her, this band and this unique sound inspired legions of people to start bands.
And she, out of step with much past 1979, said, "And now they just sound like everybody else!"
Talk about nailing it on the head, but what an evolution that is.
When "Banana" finished, my hostess requested something from the disco era and the host obliged with "Saturday Night Fever."
Overplayed? Yes, to death. Listened to much recently? Nope, definitely not. Evocative of a very young period? Without doubt.
The host was not the disco fan we were, but totally got into it when "Tragedy" came on and picked up a nearby kazoo (noteworthy in and of itself) and played kazoo accompaniment for the rest of the song. And pretty damn well, too.
We challenged him to reach out to that other side of our impressionable young selves and he responded admirably with Joni Mitchell's "Hits" (as opposed to "Misses"), starting with a song from "Court and Spark," a high point for both her poetic songwriting about youth and the perfection of her voice.
I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the starmaker machine
Behind the popular song
"Stoking the starmaker machine" may be one the of the most well-written musical phrases of 1974.
Talking about "Court and Spark" reminded my hostess that on the "Beverly Hillbillies" episode she'd just seen, Elly Mae had been given lessons of courting and sparking.
Coincidence? We didn't dwell on it.
Not sure what possible musical direction we could go in with our Lemarca Prosecco, in a masterful stroke, our host chose "Barry White's Greatest Hits," a record so worthy I also own it.
A record so satisfyingly danceable that two of us were soon dancing on the couch, at least until the host grabbed his woman and danced with her on the floor.
The other of us continued her couch dancing.
When they finished, he chided her for not wanting to dance more with him. She challenged that she didn't know how to dance.
If you're old enough to have danced to Barry White the first time, you can dance. Hell, if you can do it, you can dance.
Never tell a man who's said out loud that any night he sees you is a special night that you don't want to dance with him.
Remember Barry's advice, my dear? "I'll Do anything You Want Me To."
Second only to "Let the Music Play."
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