Clipped Corners and Green Tambourines

Funny how life teases you.

Stopping at the light at Williamsburg Road and Main Street while coming back from the East End this morning, I spotted two middle-aged women at the base of the steps to Taylors Hill Park, aka Taylors Hell.

Not surprisingly, they were looking up at all those steep steps with trepidation, like they were willing their feet to start the ascent. Good luck, ladies.

Meanwhile, I get home to a message from Mac suggesting we begin our walk in Church Hill today for a change. So we take the 26th Street steps down and get on the Capital Trail, taking it along the Low Line, past Great Shiplock Park and over to the recently refurbished Sugar Pad.  It's there that Mac asks if I want to turn around soon because her plan is to return via Taylors Hell, I mean Hill, and those bloody steps.

Which, incidentally, in 33 years of living in Richmond, I have never climbed. But it's the unlikelihood of having looked at those women contemplating the steps just an hour earlier that makes me realize that nothing's ever truly random.

Mac warns me that once she starts up the steps, she doesn't stop because of how difficult it is to convince her legs to start up again. I don't doubt it. Even the people coming down the steps look pained, although it may be that they climbed up them first.

Fortunately, we're only going in one direction. Although I won't deny that it's a steep climb, midway up it occurred to me that it felt a lot like climbing a lighthouse - which I love for the views - minus the curved route. Just when your legs are saying they'd prefer not to go any higher, you reach another landing and another set of steps.

And it's not like we don't do hill work every time we walk the pipeline walkway, because being at river level means climbing 3/4 of a mile straight uphill - only having to deal with a short set of steps on Capital Hill - in order to return to Broad Street and head west. But inclines are one thing and steps quite another.

And for the record, we didn't so much as pause.

Once we'd conquered the hill, we walked back through Chimborazo Park, alongside Tricycle Gardens to admire the bounty of the produce and past a 19th century drug store built with a "clipped corner," a phrase we learned only because of the historical sign.

Mere diversions to distract us from our complaining leg muscles.

All I can say is, I'm pretty sure we didn't look anywhere near as worried as those two women I'd seen earlier. But then, Mac and I are walking fools pros.

The universe was still playing with me when I showed up at Holmes' digs before going to dinner at Acacia. I knocked, no answer. A neighbor sitting on her porch a few doors down told me they'd just gone out and maybe I should text them. Explaining that I have no cell phone, she offered to call Holmes for me and leave a message.

Fifteen minutes later, still no word, so she insisted on calling him again. Turns out they'd been worried about Crabcake Week crowds at Acacia, so they'd headed over to snag a table. I dutifully got in my car and drove to meet them before they downed the first bottle of Langlois Cremant de Loire Brut Rose.

I barely made it and when I did, the bartender immediately asked if he should ice down a second bottle. With these two? Good idea.

Again eating for the cause - the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay - tonight's crabcake was a sandwich, notable for the sliced housemade bread and butter pickles that gave the jumbo lump crabcake a sweet crunch that I loved. Given that it came after fried deviled eggs with pimento cheese and a stellar salad loaded with slices of Edwards country ham over Romaine, shaved Parmesan and herbed croutons with a Parmesan peppercorn dressing, it was a miracle I could enjoy it as much as I did.

The inevitable listening party followed at Holmes' man cave, tonight with a focus on 45s dredged up from some deep basement shelf Beloved and I had never been privy to before. What amazed me was what pristine condition they were all in, as if they'd been in a vault since the MTV days.

When Beloved came across the Lemonpipers' bubblegum-sounding "Green Tambourine," a debate about the one hit wonder ensued. I stayed out because frankly, I was a kid in 1967 and knew nothing about the song. But upon hearing it, I felt sure it had to have been a really early use of reverb.

Play [play, play, play, play]...my green tambourine.

Other 45 gems included Todd Rundgren's "Hello, It's Me," Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man" and the Jagger/Bowie collaboration "Dancing in the Streets,"which Beloved swore she'd never heard before. She got most excited when she came across Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You," which came from the "Streets of Fire" movie, which I never saw but sure got a lot of airplay.

To Holmes, it resembled nothing so much as a Paul Carrick song, but then he's a big Paul Carrick fan. To me, it just sounded like pure '80s: big hair, shoulder pads and dancing in clubs every weekend.

Given that so much of what we were listening to was straight out of the Carter and Reagan years and Beloved and I always want to know what year each single or album was from, Holmes came up with a dating system on the spot. When I inquired about a 45 of REM's "Fall On Me," he answered with, "Orwell plus two," a system that only works for the book-literate and math-capable.

Which we mostly were at that point. "Why can't it be Friday night?" Beloved wailed at one point as we agonized over how many more records we could play before they ought to go to bed.

Hello, it's me on a Tuesday night. Maybe not a night for dancing in the streets, but not a night to be a solitary man (or woman), either.

I say when a girl climbs Taylors Hell for the first time, she's entitled to stay up as late as she wants. Sore legs be damned.

I Don't Know, But I Been Told

Hey, hey, Mama, said the way you move
Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove

I have stopped working for the day. I've showered and the radio rewards me by playing a live version of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" recorded in 1973 at Madison Square Garden.

Outside, it's overcast because we're between showers for the fourth day in a row. I don't mind because it feels very beachy to me with constantly changing skies, winds and fronts. Walking the pipeline in a steady, warm rain made for a pretty wonderful morning.

The moment "Black Dog" comes on, though, I'm back in my high school cafeteria and it's blaring loudly from the jukebox. Because of course a school cafeteria had a jukebox in 1973. If I recall correctly, we didn't have a single lunch hour that it didn't get played - and, mind you, the song was already a couple years old then - but I never got tired of hearing it.

And while I didn't own a single Led Zeppelin album (still don't), I suggested to my then-boyfriend that we get tickets for their upcoming show at Alexandria Roller Rink. "Nah, they'll never be able to recreate their sound live," he said, dismissing my suggestion out of hand. I acquiesced because  I wasn't a big Led Zep fan, although I think the incongruity of a band like that at a roller rink spoke to me even then.

How could it not have been great/weird/awful/fascinating to experience?

While in college, I worked in a bookstore under a manager who was maybe a dozen years older than me. One slow evening, we got to talking about music and dancing. Both he and his wife loved to dance and still did so often, while my generation, he pointed out, didn't dance, we just stood around and listened to music.

Given the hard-rocking bands of the day - Yes, Jethro Tull, the Who - I'm not sure we had much choice. Dancing was uncool, old fashioned, stigmatized even.

But now that I heard "Black Dog" on the radio, I also know more about the song, namely that bassist John Paul Jones deliberately wrote it with a winding riff and complex rhythm changes so it could not be danced to.

And people question why disco had to come into being? C'mon, we were a generation starved for  music we could dance to. We took what we could get.

One thing that hasn't changed in the intervening decades is getting together to listen to records with friends. It was so commonplace in my youth that there are entire artists' catalogs I never bothered purchasing because so many of my friends owned them. Why buy Jackson Brown, Steely Dan or the Police when everyone I knew could play them for me?

Now when I go to listening parties, there's a good dinner first. Tonight's was at Acacia with Holmes and Beloved and a couple of bottles of Langlois Chateau Cremant de Loire Brut Rose (because, to quote Pru, "Why would we ever leave the Loire?"). When the sommelier opened the delicate and dry pink bubbles for us, he shared not only that it's a personal favorite of his, but that the vineyards are associated with Champagne Bollinger.

All I can say is, more, please.

The most amusing moment arrived when our young server came to open the second bottle. Unlike the first, which had been uncorked with barely a sigh, the second let off a resounding pop and from across the room, the sommelier raised his eyebrows at her noisy opening. "He's gonna kill me," she joked.

There are various ways to tell that we're smack in the middle of the summer - the absence of VCU students, the ease of parking - but none so clear cut as being in a half-full restaurant that is usually slammed every night they're open. I know, I know, everyone's at the ocean or the river, but for now we had to settle for eating from those places.

Beginning with Ruby Salt oysters and cucumber soup, we moved on to white anchovies made obscene with the richness of fourme d'ambert, pine nuts, grilled radicchio and romaine in a creamy garlic dressing. Beloved orders them every single time we go to Acacia and Holmes and I benefit by getting a taste or two out of her.

Neither of them could resist the siren song of Acaia's specialty, sauteed velvet softshells from Urbanna, served with asparagus, cream corn polenta and tomato bacon gravy, while I tucked into grilled mahi mahi accompanied by a mesclun salad loaded with heirloom tomatoes and goat cheese.

Over desserts of chocolate cremeaux with sea salt caramel ice cream and pound cake, they regaled me with highlights and photographs of their recent trip to Solomon's Island to celebrate Beloved's birthday. Just looking at the pictures, I could see how relaxed and happy they'd been to get away.

When we finally headed back to Holmes' hideaway, it was still early enough for a full-blown record listening party. Laying on the bar from a former evening was a square of paper with a handwritten message: "Scream now!" Neither Holmes nor Beloved recalled why it had been necessary to write such a message.

But he did make sure we knew that it was national tequila day before dropping the needle on Todd Rundgren's 1973 album, "A Wizard, A True Star." I love me some Todd.

When we do these listening parties, the starting artist is inevitably decided during the phone call between Holmes and me to set up the evening. In this case, when I called him, he answered the phone by saying, "This is Holmes," to which I responded, "Hello, it's me." Right away, we both know Todd Rundgren would launch the listening festivities.

We were soon far down a rabbit hole because on this album, he does a medley of Curtis Mayfield's "I'm So Proud," Smokey Robinson's "Ooh, Baby, Baby," the Delphonics' "La La Means I Love You" and "Cool Jerk," a song they knew but couldn't recall who'd originally done it. Don't look at me, I only knew the GoGos version from 1982's "Vacation"

Now that Holmes has softened his position on cell phones, Beloved is allowed to look things up if he deems it worthy of research. Turns out that a band called the Capitols had released it in 1966  on the - wait for it - Karen Records label. Who knew?

As much as we enjoyed Todd, where Holmes really bowled us over was with an album I hadn't even heard of: Joni Mitchell's "Miles of Aisle," a double live album from 1974 recorded when she toured behind "Court and Spark" (although there's only one C&S song on it) with the L.A. Express. Her voice was exquisite, not yet ruined by cigarettes, whiled the live versions offered new takes on classic songs. I wouldn't have thought I could like "Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" better live, but I was wrong.

"And this is just the songs that she'd written by 1974!" Holmes said incredulously.

I never owned any Joni Mitchell until a few years ago for the simple reason that I didn't need to. Everyone had Joni Mitchell when I was young and she got played a lot everywhere. What an innocent petunia I was. Only now do I realize that I must own all the Joni Mitchell.

Because sometimes I'm the one hosting the listening parties. And should you come across a note here or there, I can assure you it won't say, "Scream now!" Talk now?