A New York Movie Day

When you live, as we do, 90 miles from the greatest city in the world, you discover its more obvious virtues first: restaurants, live theater, museums, shopping. Then the next layer reveals itself: movies, small neighborhoods, water, islands. Ken and I are big movie people and we regularly go into New York for movie days. As we have very different taste in movies, we often see different movies, so we work the logistics of four movies in one day. Staying overnight permits a fifth and sixth movie, but we do not do that very often anymore (cue the 90 miles). We went in last Saturday (12/19/09) with a plan for four movies: The Messenger and Brothers for me and Avatar and Nine for Ken. Ever the flexible pair, we ended up instead with Crazy Heart for me, Avatar for Ken and Up in the Air for us both.

When you see two movies in one day, which I love to do, and when the movies you see reflect your taste, then there are certain correspondences that reveal themselves in the time after the movies are over. The combination of the two movies influences your opinion. (As a side note, I wonder if movie critics see more than one movie a day. ) So Crazy Heart and Up in the Air are cooking in my head. They are very similar movies: sober and somber and redemptive. Or at least about redemption of men by women. What a surprise. Both men - Jeff Bridges and George Clooney (talk about your A list) - are isolated in a lonely world. Both meet women who save them and leave them. Both movies end with the men in better shape - although the Bad Blake character is in fantasy better shape. Ryan Bingham ends on a more ambivalent note.

Up in the Air reflects our time more accurately. Both main characters have no financial worries, but Ryan Bingham's job is to fire people. The progression of talking heads is heart breaking, all the more so because they are real people, who really got fired (in Detroit, natch). The snowy, but definitely not picturesque, landscape of the parts of the movie is bleak.

Jeff Bridge's portrayal of a bad boy country singer is without vanity. We see his broad belly and his slack chin. We also see the fantastic body of a much younger woman who falls into bed with him. We can gaze, apparently without harm, on the overweight body of a 60 year old man, but can see only leggy, slim young women. Most movies are made by men, after all. It's their fantasy.

I would recommend both movies, but do not go see Up in the Air expecting a comedy. It's witty and has amusing parts, but it is ultimately a reflection of where we are as 2009 morphs into 2010.

Christmas Letter (!)

Happy holidays to you all! Another Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid al-Adha - holidays at the start of winter, the darkest time of the year. 2009 has seemed to be a dark year in general (This damned recession! These damned wars!), so I am fervently hoping for a bright, kind 2010. It is amazing that the first decade of the 21st century will be in our rear view mirror.

Ken and I have had an active fall. Few people get to have not one but two vacation experiences that involved climbing 4' into a bed, but we did. Our train trip west for Matt's 40th birthday in September involved 3 nights on Amtrak, and a climb into a bunk that flops down from the wall. Our trip south to the Sajay, Midge and Jay's 38' catamaran, involved a climb into a bed with the night sky in our eyes. We are lucky indeed to have had these experiences. The British Virgin Islands are beautiful and I got to do one of my most favorite things: throwing myself into the beautiful waters of the Caribbean. Wowza! We have pictures of both trips to share, but will not do so without your request.

Ken has been away much of the fall at his client outside of Pittsburgh. I spent two weekends there with him, one in June and one in November, and have really acquired an affection for Pittsburgh. What a great city! Very walkable. Great food. Great shopping. The Strip District. The campuses. The neighborhoods. A wonderful tea shop. Fabulous - really - bakeries. In talking to the young people I am privileged to associate with, I am saying, 'consider Pittsburgh'. It seems to be in decent shape in terms of the economy, and housing is interesting and somewhat affordable. And Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh - very cool. He is just about done with this client, and hopefully, done for a while with being gone 5 days a week. Lonely for Jackie!

Other fall highlights:

• Labor Day on the Jersey shore - what a concept! A boardwalk. Surf Taco. Ocean. Beach.
• Walkway over the Hudson - totally amazing. http://walkway.org/ Check it out! You'll rush to visit us to walk it.
• The World Series!!!!! Yes, I've become a rabid Yankee fan and it is SOOOOOOO much fun to win. Go Yanks!
• College football on the east coast: we saw Army beat VMI and Columbia lose miserably to Harvard. Next, it's college hockey at the Military Academy at West Point.
• Theater: Metamorphoses and The Red Masquerade at SUNY New Paltz and A Little Night Music on Broadway. The latter, which actually opens today, will be a hit, I'm sure.
• Two concerts by the Community-College Chorale: Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, Verleih uns Frieden by Mendelssohn, opera choruses, including The Witches' Chorus from MacBeth by Verdi. I loved most of the music, especially the Britten. Singing is fabulous.
• Opera - I went to the Met for the first time and saw From the House of the Dead by Janecek. Amazing, powerful, awesome. I went on a Monday night. How lucky we are to live so close to such excellence!

So, lovely readers - I hope your holiday is the best!

Now, the end of summer!

Classes at SUNY New Paltz begin tomorrow; so ends the summer. The same sensation each year at this time: OMG, it's here and I'm not ready.

Our kitchen is done! The formerly honey-toned cupboards are now a creamy vanilla, with new pulls and hinges. I'm telling you - it looks good. We processed 19 pints of salsa yesterday in it, and it works as well. The stove fan is a revelation - clean, for one thing. Light is brighter; fan is quieter. Pictures to come.

Because memory fades, here is a list of what we did:

1. Moved all the furniture from the downstairs room into the garage.
2. Picked up the Pergo-like flooring, then flipped, gouged, pounded on the asphalt tile underneath.
3. Took out the old, paltry, puny closet, complete with the pathetic folding door. Jeez, what an excuse for a door.
4. Filled in cracks in the cement floor, then spread a product called Dry-Locks (or Dry Lox), which provides another barrier to water (hopefully).
5. Talked about and then bought the tile at the local big box store. I'm sorry about that, but this year price was a bigger consideration.
6. Laid the tile. What an innocent little phrase for such a big job. Ken did 75% of the work, but I did the other quarter and let me tell you, tile layers deserve the money they get.
7. Grouted the tile and did the other stuff you have to do to make the floor look good. That includes more hands and knees work to scrub the grout residue off. More fun.
8. Made a closet. Yes, fellow DYIers, that involves drywall and all the pleasant tasks that accompany.
9. Made a stairway. Ken took out the existing, ratty-looking stairs and replaced them with a slightly more gentler slope. He had never created a stairway before and I'm here to tell you that it works. Involved staining and polyurethaning.
10. Painted walls and ceiling.
11. Hung art and a new hook set/coat rack, inspired by a similar set in Midge and Jay's house on Ashley in Ann Arbor. Put in new switch plates.
12. Worked on two doors - moved the door from the upstairs bathroom to the new closet and installed a new door in the upstairs bathroom. That means our work touched all three floors of our little house. That also means more stain and polyurethane.
13. Shampooed the rug, bought on rock bottom clearance from ABC Carpets several years ago in one of my most enjoyable shopping experiences in New York.
14. Switched to the kitchen.
15. Dissembled the kitchen - all stuff on every flat surface in the room. Rendered the kitchen basically inoperable for 3-4 days.
16. Palm-sanded all the cupboard doors. Applied a product called Styx. Sanded. Palm-sanded all the cupboards themselves, in and out. Applied Styx.
17. Painted.
18. Sanded a little.
19. Painted again.
20. Remounted doors. New hinges. Again, two words but such a big difference. These 1959 cupboards were held together by copper, mottled external hinges that may have been attractive to some people at one time, but no more. The new hinges match the pulls we bought last year in a brushed nickel.
21. Put stuff back in cupboards.
22. Admired.

Last year, we had a 'staycation' and painted the upstairs rooms and the metal doors. This year, our projects were much more complex and demanding and instead of taking the front half of 4 pleasant days to complete, it took us many hours over a month. But now, both projects are 99.9% complete and we move on.

More salsa today and peaches to freeze.

Finally, Summer!

Summer has finally arrived in New Paltz. Since Friday, it has been sunny and warm and there is no rain in the forecast until Wednesday. The weather has been improving steadily for weeks now, and the rain and gloom is temporarily in our rear view mirror. Our garden may not recover, and tomatoes may be in short supply throughout the area, however. What we do have: jalapeno peppers, eggplant, cukes, onions, and now, red peppers. We have some tomatoes, but are concerned about blight. We'll see. Ken has hot packed 8 pints of pickles.

We had our work/play week off in honor of our 29th wedding anniversary. We worked HARD on Saturday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday; played on Sunday and left for New York City mid-morning on Thursday. The renovation and total transformation of our downstairs room is 99% complete. It is amazing. It has gone from dark and musty, to light and airy. The closet Ken built is the biggest in the house and gives us some wiggle storage room. No more crammed winter clothes. We are now 1/3-1/2 way into the kitchen cabinet painting project. We are going from 1950's era honey stain to a vanilla paint, plus a new stove exhaust fan. Next year, we plan to put in a new stove top, countertops and a sink. That will be our kitchen renovation on the 'cheap'.

For right now, the kitchen is laid out on the table and counters and in the living room, so it's off to the Bistro for breakfast and a full day of sanding and painting. We'll send pictures! More to come!

A soggy June

We are between trips to Michigan, celebrating graduations and cruising down memory lane in a wet, cool climate. Jess, Erica's oldest daughter, graduated from Hartland High School last weekend and Nicole, Karen's oldest daughter, will graduate from the University of Phoenix in a ceremony at Detroit's Ford Field next Saturday.

We drove last weekend, as I was at the AIRPO meeting in Buffalo. I took the train with my colleagues Lisa and Laurel and Ken, after flying in from Pittsburgh on an inevitably late plane, got up early and steered our green girl VW Bug west. We left Buffalo about 1:00, crossed over the Peace Bridge and took the QEW, 403, 402 and 401 to the Ambassador Bridge over the Detroit River. We stopped at the retirement party of Linda C, who, after 40 years of teaching at the Redford Union High School that both Linda and Ken attended, is retiring amid her family, friends, former students and loved one. It was Ken's past, spread throughout a room at the Idle Wild Golf Course in Livonia where he and I attended a party in 1979. We saw Bobby, Linda's older brother; Nancy, weak from radium treatments; Shawnie, her oldest daughter, and Jay and Jackie, her younger children. We say Mikey, Linda's pip of a son, who is now 31 and a fellow teacher at RUHS. We saw Pat V, who was a brief dream for Ken. Saturday held more memories, as we spent more time in the Detroit suburbs than we have in years. We toured two college campuses that nurtured us both: Schoolcraft College, where Ken attended in 1967 and 1968, its 2nd and 3rd years of being; and Washtenaw Community College, where I worked from 1984 to 1999 and where we both served, attended classes, taught classes, danced, sang and provided ice cream. After breakfast with Kathy at Beezey's in Ypsilanti, she, still a daughter of WCC, took us on an insider tour. What an amazing place! The citizens of SE Michigan should be proud of this gem.

We then had a small celebration of Jess' graduation, with lunch in Novi for Erica, Jess, Chelsea, Jennifer, Karen, Mike and Jody. It was lovely.

We moved to Midge and Jay. We stayed at their house on Ashley in Ann Arbor, had dinner and hatched a trip to the British Virgin Islands for Thanksgiving. The SaJay is moored there and we'll have clear water, warm skies and fish in late November. Seeing as we have had no summer yet, the thought is enticing.

We met Tony, Erica's friend, at breakfast on Sunday, then went to an ice rink in Northville (not sure exactly what suburb it was in). Graduation is a major positive ceremony in a life, so here assembled a father, a step father, a mother, a grandfather, a step grandfather, a grandmother, two step grandmothers, a stepfather, two half sisters, and a panoply of relationships that needs a chalk board and a diagram.

Then Ken and I got in the car and drove east. First north to the Blue Water Bridge, then straight east across the NY Throughway. We left the lot of that ice rink at 3:30 p.m. and pulled into our driveway at 2:30 a.m. For some people, 2:30 is an alert time - for us, it's about as dead of night as it gets.

So we have a weekend at home. On Friday, we get on a plane for Detroit Metro and build more memories.

Ken has been very busy in the past few months. We are happy, because with the economy, the viability of a small, family owned business could be worrisome. Yet he has been on planes that have been more late than on time and lousy weather and long days and the use of planes, trains and automobiles that sounds unbelievable when recounted. Ken is an excellent, patient traveler who knows how to work transportation systems. He is amazing.

This Saturday at home means a 5K for me, the Rhinebeck Arts and Crafts Fair, a Roosevelt lecture at the Roosevelt Library. For Ken, it means gardening between the expected rain and a look at what is under the floating floor in the ground floor in prep for a ceramic tile installation. Father's Day is tomorrow and I hope I can honor Ken enough. He is the most wonderful father and he has the most wonderful father.

I hope, dear reader, that your day is sunny and dry.

Happy Mother's Day

To the mothers in my life and everywhere:  this is your day.  Have chocolate, eat eggs and potatoes, watch hockey and baseball, have a nap, do something you've really wanted to do all week.  

My mothers:  Adair, gone so long; Veda, mother of the fantastic Ken; Fran, Midge, Barbara, Kathy, Jean, Linda, Shelly, Mary Beth, Bern, Jackie, Jill, Judith, Cathy, Mary Ann, Lucy, Lisa, Julie, Erica, Jennifer, Karen, Millie, Marilyn, Nancy, Jane, Linda, Eileen, Maryann, Jane, Marda, Linda, Candace, Yvonne, Barbara, Denise, Jan.  

A word about Ken.  As you know, he is the best.  He's given us fresh evidence today.  A lovely MD card, complete with his 'faces'.  And a gift card to Studio One, my hair cutting place, just down the street in Cherry Hill Plaza, across from the True Value Hardware.  I have an appointment for a cut/color on Thursday and Ken did what we have long wanted men to do:  he listened to me and took action based on what he heard.  It is awesome.  He is awesome.  I'm actually not sure I deserve this, but I appreciate him totally today and, hopefully, every day.   

Today, we begin prep in earnest for our Dutch artists, who arrive May 25 and leave June 14.  We will be housing them in the Larson/Stadtfeld wing, with us in an outpost on the ground floor.  Ken will be gone during the week pretty consistently, and actually we will be gone on all but one of the weekends they are here.  They are making a movie that will be part of the 400th Hudson up the River anniversary celebration in the fall.  Having them here will be very interesting and I am looking forward to it.  But today, we think very concretely about having people in the house and how we can allow them a space.  

We played yesterday, going down to the USMA in West Point for a Patriot League baseball playoff.  Army beat their opponent Holy Cross soundly the first game, but lost on errors and pitching in the second.  The rubber game is today and it will go on without us.  As a lifelong peacenik, my affection for the USMA is a little surprising, but the campus moves me in ways I cannot articulate.  That we live so close and that it is so accessible is but one of the many pleasures of the Hudson Valley.   

A last word about B & H Dairy, on 2nd Avenue between 7th and 6th Street in Manhattan's East Village:  go for breakfast, go for lunch, go for dinner, go for a snack, go for soup, go for eggs and potatoes (a theme here?), just go.  We were in town for The Public's production of "The Singing Forest," ended up staying the night on Friday and ate dinner, then breakfast at the restaurant (a grand word for it).  We would have gone back for lunch on Saturday, but it seemed a little excessive.  Their Lima bean soup inspired Ken to make a pretty good facsimile (let's hear it for fresh dill), and we had toasted cheese sandwiches based on their model.  

Enjoy the day. 

In celebration of Brahms

Not long ago, Brahms was just another name in a list of distant, uninteresting composers whose music appealed to many, but not to me.  Ah, but things change, and the Brahms German Requiem is now among my all time favorites.  I mean all time, and I have spent a fair amount of time on this earth.  The concert April 26 has taken its place among the high points of my long-ish life along with the commencement at Hill Auditorium in 1983, our wedding in the Arboretum on 08/08/80 and the day I got a job offer from Steve Poskanzer in June, 2006.  

Ken, my good friend Kathleen from Michigan and my good friend Dr. Marsha from Delhi were in the full house (well, church) who enjoyed (I hope and think) the concert, which featured a large orchestra (maybe 8 violins, led by the talented Carole Cowan), and the combined Community College Chorale and the Concert Choir.  The GR has 7 movements, and is about the human condition.  It is based in the Bible, but has lessons for us all:  "Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras (For all flesh is like the grass)."  I started out loving movement 1, which we sang in the fall, but then moved to enormous enthusiasm about movement 6, the climax ("Tod, wo ist dein Stachel," "Death, where is your sting?"), then came to an appreciation of 2, with its sequentially soft and blasting statements about Fleisch.  Movement 5 also resonated, with its line "...wie einen seine Mutter trostet," "...as one whose mother comforts him."  

I think I knew this piece better than I have in the past, because enjoying performing is all about knowing whatever you are performing.  I focused on Ed Lundergan, our enormously talented conductor.  I listened to Kate, the most talented alto.  I opened my mouth and sang and smiled and loved each of the 90 or so minutes the whole concert took.  At one point, inverting the saying 'from God's mouth to my ear', the sentence appeared full blown in my mind:  I am the luckiest person on this (transitory) earth.  

I hope you all 'rabbit, rabbit-ed' this morning.  Happy May.  The end of the semester and the 2008-2009 academic year.  

There's a place for us...

We saw West Side Story yesterday, in a rainy, chilly, but crowded New York.  Among the huge throng of people whose lives were affected by the 1961 movie, and for whom in 1957, when the original was on Broadway we were in the outposts of Michigan and Wisconsin, we were very excited.  Thanks to Barbara's Christmas gift, we had pretty good seats - a 2nd balcony center - a good vantage point to witness the best part of the production (and of the movie for that matter) - the dancing.  The dancing was glorious, riveting, moving.  To watch the Jerome Robbins' choreography brought to life was wonderful.  However, I found the overall production to be only intermittently wonderful.  The dancing was great.  The music, with a big orchestra, was immediate and fresh.  But the set was only a C+.  We have been spoiled rotten with unbelievably great sets.  The great weakness of the movie was Tony and Maria - Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood.  In spite of the reviews to the contrary, I did not see that this production corrected that flaw.  The two young people who played Tony and Maria were somewhat more vivid than the vanilla players of the movie, but not much.  There was medium chemistry between them.  They made the problems with the book more obvious.  And the actors who played Riff and Bernardo:  where are you Russ Tamblyn and George Chakiris?  So I'd say the production was a B-.  Ken would give it a B.  This is compared to South Pacific, which for me was a big fat A+!  

I'd like to welcome my sister Fran to the online world.  She got hooked to the Internet this past week.  I know once she gets familiar with it, she will love it.  I'm waiting to give her a tour of my favorite websites.  

Ken managed to drop himself flat on his back in the creek that lies between our house and the campus this week.  He was walking to see the exhibit at the Dorsky Museum and thought the path through the woods was too boring. Ever the Sacajawea, entered the woods at the wide part.  It was wet, but he's creative.  Then he came to the creek, which is much wider at that point than at the path.  He found a branch that he thought he'd use to pole vault over it.  Of course, it broke, and down he went, feet and arms akimbo.  He was wet through and through, although he saved his phone and was close enough to home to get dry clothes.  He then came back to campus too late to see the exhibit, which closed that day.  He came up to my office laughing about his adventure, but I was ever the scold and only envisioned what could have happened and thankfully did not.  As he says, I was never a boy. 

April is a busy month at a college and this April is no exception.  There is the bad kind of busy - the endless conversation and documentation about our financial crisis and the decisions we have made to weather it.  And then there is the good kind of busy - the wrapping up of the semester by students with performances.  I am lucky enough to be involved in two kinds of student performances.  I am one of two dramaturgs with the Theater Department's production of Blood Wedding, the Frederico Garcia Lorca play about a very bad wedding day.  I actually made my TV debut on the local On Campus show, talking with the talented director Anita Gonzalez.  I am also organizing and will moderate a panel of faculty and a student about the play before the production on April 19.  I am among the altos in the Community College Chorale's performance of the Brahms' German Requiem on April 26 at St. Joseph's Church in New Paltz.  This is BIG, MAJOR choral music and I am loving singing it.  To say that I am lucky to have these opportunities is about the biggest understatement of all times.  If you are a New York reader, get thee to one of these occasions.  Kathy is coming in from Michigan for the German Requiem.  

To cycle back to New York City, I must say a word about B & H Dairy.  It is a restaurant in the East Village that we found through our research into vegetarian places.  It is vegetarian/vegan, with the addition of a few fish items.  It was Jewish, I'm sure, but now its staffers, at least, are the New York polyglot of Latino and eastern European, all lively and visibly hard working.  It is a long skinny place with a counter and one four top table and maybe five tables for two.  The distance between the counter and the grill/working spaces may be enough for a man to stand sidewise, but probably not.  I cannot move along the back of the customers at the counter without banging into them.  It is cheap and very tasty, with 5 vegetarian soups, the most fabulous potatoes.  We've eaten mostly breakfast there and lunch yesterday:  two bowls of soup, a serving of mac and cheese and the biggest egg salad sandwich you have ever seen and a glass of freshly brewed iced tea.  The bill:  $15.  No joke.  I want to come back again and again to eat everything on the menu, which includes veggies in cabbage leaves.  It's a place that my sisters Fran and Midge would love.  

So Happy Easter to all of you.  I hope the bunny is good to you.

New Paltz in the News

Dear reader - go to the SUNY New Paltz url - www.newpaltz.edu - for a link to the New York Times front page story about public colleges.  Pictures and everything!  

It's 8 degrees out there this morning.  Brrrr!

Rabbit, rabbit

Happy March!  Wonderful, lovely, March.  Ours will come in like a lion, but hey, it's March!  

A shameless plug

I met Sally and Mark last night at Ulster Community College for a free showing of a lovely little film, "Gospel Hill."  Look here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_Hill.  It offered Giancarlo Esposito, long a favorite of mine, up close and personal!  We talked with him and admired his sweet, good natured movie.   The movie is available on Amazon.  Ask for it at your local Blockbuster's or wherever you get your videos.  It reminded me of of bits and pieces of some of my favorite flicks:  Frozen River, Sunshine State, Gran Torino.  It was my first visit to UCC, which is seriously in the country.  This campus materializes out of a dark country night.  Sally and Mark live in Rosendale, just around the corner.  They are movie lovers too, and are game for a late invitation.  How cool.  

Ken has been away most of this week, which is unusual lately.  Good in that it means the business is doing well; bad in that I've gotten used to having him home and it's desolate without him.  But we are flexible and can roll with whatever comes our way.  

Have a great Friday and weekend.

Food Obsessions

As a foodie, although that's way too benign a word for my lifelong relationship with food, I have had one food obsession after another.  There is a new one heading my way:  sushi.  My standard saying about sushi has been along the lines of "Oh, I don't eat food like that - in little bites.  Too, fussy."  What I really meant was "not enough food."   But at SUNY New Paltz, my favorite colleagues Shelly and Mary Beth eat sushi and it's so pretty!  So neat.  And another of my long term food obsessions is with ginger, and look, there's little ribbons of ginger (pickled?  cooked?) with sushi.  And then there is the chop stick thing.  We have been, "oh, could we have silverware" people at various Asian restaurants (too old for chop sticks, I guess), and it wasn't until our lovely afternoon of eating in Flushing last August that I committed myself to chop sticks.  No more forks for me!  So I'm looking for reasons to use chop sticks.  (Another parenthetical statement - in every chop stick opportunity, I start out well and my physical skill disintegrates.  What's up with that?)  

We were in Grand Haven for Ken's birthday and were having a day with a late breakfast and an early dinner.  No way was there not going to be lunch, so in Meijer's, I find packages of sushi and it's perfect!  Real food, so I do not feel deprived, but small bites of food - and good food.  Rice (another long term obsession), veggies, and an opportunity to use chop sticks.  What a deal!  

Since February 6, I have had opportunity to eat sushi 3 more times.  Have you noticed that sushi has become like pizza - originally quite exotic, now so much in the culture that you forget it was not invented right here in America?  I had sushi on Monday night, after the WONK meeting and before the first read-through of Blood Wedding.  I had sushi for lunch on Friday, eating it at the brown bag open forum for budget ideas.  Yesterday, I ate sushi at the Whole Foods in Columbus Circle - brown rice, veggies and a yummy soy-based ginger sauce.  Here we have it, a food obsession coming my way.  Will it be enduring or short-lived?  Full-blown or partial?  Stay tuned, dear readers.

We saw The American Plan yesterday at the Friedman Theater on 47th Street.  We bought tickets (relatively) cheaply, and were in the front row!  I mean we could see pores in faces.  Written by Richard Greenberg, it stars Mercedes Ruehl and Lily Rabe as well as some others I had not heard of.  Very, very interesting.  We saw Becky Shaw a few weeks ago, and those two in conjunctions are rattling around in my brain.  Both very American stories.  Both about love and deceit.  Mercedes Ruehl came out and answered questions for a half hour after the performance.  She is amazing.  We then went to a new restaurant that I can see becoming part of our standard group - Ali Baba on 34th between 3rd and 2nd.  It's Turkish and, unusually so, it has a vegetarian section.  Fabulous bread, another of my long, long, enduring obsessions.  

New York was wonderful as ever.  We saw three people we knew!  Itty from the Art Department and Patricia, who teaches Spanish and is a fellow Blood Wedding dramaturg, on the train and Kim from the Community College chorale in Whole Foods.  What does it mean that we run into people we know in New York?  

It's snowing now (no, no, no more snow!) and we'll head up to Hudson to have lunch with Maggie and Vince, then to an Oscar party with Maryann and Glenn.  

Life is good; and March is in our sights.

  

Great Houses on the Hudson

Olana is pretty amazing.  We drove to Hudson, via 103 and 9G, on a sunny winter day, stopping by Winter Sun and the New Paltz Farmer's Market.  Oh, I love living in a small town, where everyone you see at the Farmer's Market looks familiar and you chat with the guy who sells freshly milled flour.  There seemed to be less snow on the east side of the river.  We are on a mission to see all the big houses on the Hudson.  We have visited Springwood, the Roosevelt house, three or four times in the years since we have been in New York.  We saw the Vanderbilt house a few weeks ago and, yesterday, Olana, Frederick Church's magnificant, Moorish-ish house.  Who knew art was so lucrative, even in the Civil War years?  Of course, he started out on 3rd base, money-wise.  I was also struck with the difference in the tour styles.  The Vanderbilt house is run by the National Parks Service, with a uniformed, very informed ranger, and a limited, roam-on-your-own style.  You tour Olana with a volunteer docent - like my chum Maggie Moehringer - who knows lots of details and controls the movements of the group tightly.  So we have finished off 3 of about 15.  Happy Sunday.

February in Grand Haven

Ken turned 60 a week ago, and we went to Grand Haven to celebrate with his family.  We left Albany on the 6 a.m. flight, leaving the house in New Paltz at 3:30.  The flight was flawless (unlike the terrible tragedy in Buffalo this morning - an evil twin airplane story to that landing on the Hudson).  If you leave Albany at 6 a.m. on a non-stop to Detroit, you are there by 7:30, with the whole day ahead of you.  Our one Ann Arbor stop was breakfast at Angelo's, which smelled the same, tasted the same and had some of the same wait and other staff as all those years ago!  If you recall, Ken and I chose our wedding date around the fact that Angelo's was closed in July.  We picked the first Friday in August, so we could have breakfast the next morning.  Thus, 08/08/80. We then drove west, grateful for the weather and admiring again the flat-as-a-dinner-plate landscape.  We got to Grand Haven and went to Ray and Veda's house, where Ray had the most amazing video on his screen:  the very first Washtenaw Community College chorus, under the direction of Ron Fracker, in 1991.  The very same concert where Barbara met David, a fix-up courtesy of Mary Ann Carnegie.  I watched the whole concert, gazing at my 17-year-younger self singing pop music and an adaptation of "I Want To Go Back to Michigan," and thinking of Ron, who would have loved the New Paltz Community-College Chorale and who would have been very approving of the Brahms' German Requiem.  We stayed at the Khardomeh Lodge (http://www.khardomahlodge.com/).      Wonderful.  As was seeing Erica, her three great girls Jessica, Chelsea and Jennifer; Karen and Mike and their two great young women Nicole and Jody; meeting Jeff, Nicole's friend; and of course Nicole's two dogs, whom I met very briefly.  We ate, we laughed, we properly celebrated this zero birthday. Ken is one of the great men of the universe and it is my great luck and pleasure to be his partner.  

We've had a warm-up here, as elsewhere, and the snow is greatly diminished.  Today is supposed to be in the high 30's and with bright sunshine.  Ah, as my sister Fran would say, "there is nothing lovelier than a northern spring."  This may not be spring, but it definitely is a prelude to.  My week has been busy, as has yours I'm sure.  A highlight was a meeting with staff members of the Composition Board, as I am going to teach a composition course in the fall.  Better writing ahead!  For my students, I hope, and for me, definitely.   

Post Inauguration (spelled right this time)

How embarrassing!  I've written 'inauguration' many times in the last week, and have managed to misspell it in a variety of ways.  Sorry.

Stay warm!

Post Inaguration

Surface (yes, frivolous) thoughts on Inauguration Day:  I loved Michelle Obama's ball dress!  Wow, does she have great arms or what?  In general, didn't the women look better than the men?  Not just dress-wise, but totality-wise?  Men were leaning on canes and being wheeled in chairs, but the women, in their high heels and bare heads (fantastic exception - Aretha Franklin), were out there in the cold smiling and smiling.  And the pictures of the balls - do they emphasize mature love that is somehow young or what?  Those dances, with adoring looks and snuggles.  And Jill Biden - a community college administrator and teacher!  And Hillary Clinton in pants!  I love her.  

More to come.  

Anticipating it all...

Here we are on a Friday morning - with days of wonder and delight ahead.  While it's cold outside, baby, it's warm with anticipation.  Ken has gone on to Queens, and I'll meet him later in the City.  I'll walk to work, then will come home for lunch (the new austerity) and bring the car back to campus.  I'll catch the 4:33 or the 5:01 Metro North and we'll stay down by the Brooklyn Bridge at a Hampton.  On Saturday morning, we'll catch the 6 to 125th St., then the M60 bus to meet Barbara at LaGuardia at 9:42!  Oh, how lovely!  We'll see Speed the Plow at a matinee, then have dinner at Chola.  Depending on the weather, we'll either roam the rest of the night or catch a movie.  Sunday is delightfully free and we'll pick things from this week's New Yorker or Friday's New York Times, or, if we need an infusion of spring (hey, it's even cold in Tampa), we'll catch the Harlem Metro North line to the Botanical Garden.  And we'll eat and walk, of course, although a movie is not without possibility.  Barbara takes off early evening, back to her Tom and her strawberries.  We go to Lincoln Center to see Stephen Sondheim being interviewed by Frank Rich.  How much more wonder can you get?  We will spend the night at the Metropolitan on Lex and 50th, and Ken will head back to Queens on Monday.  I have the day in the City - buying gifts for Ken's big 0 birthday and visiting some of my favorite spots.  The Strand for, at the very least, a book by Francine Prose to check out for One Book/One New Paltz purposes.  I'll take the train home Monday night, and then, almost the best of all, I have Tuesday off to celebrate the inauguration!  Reality is way too much with us - war, waterboarding (yes, it is torture), the economy - but I want one more day of amazement and delight over the election of Barack Obama.  One more day is not too much to ask.  Then we get to watch him either realize his potential or not.  

2009 so far has been filled with winter, work, birthdays (both Ray and Veda have birthdays the first two weeks of the new year) and no-chocolate.  The news about the US Airways jet landing on the Hudson yesterday is beyond description.  As Governor Patterson said it, "the miracle on the Hudson."  The pictures are just amazing.  

I am wondering where global warming went, but as I read recently, I guess it's the snow's turn.  

Peace.

 

Music & miscellany...

This is as much for us as for you, dear reader.  Here are the miscellaneous adventures.  Shows our range.

Show	Location	Comments
Ainadamar	Carnegie Hall	Jackie only – opera, not theater – amazing, fantastic, moving, powerful – there are not enough adjectives!
Garden of Earthly Delights	Minetta Lane Theater	Ken only – dance – naked bodies flying
Christmas Show	Radio City Music Hall	Bern gave us tix – 10:00 on a Saturday morning – quite amazing and fun
Beethovan Mass in C	Tanglewood	Amazing
Pilobolus	Joyce	With Matt – usual fantastic, gorgeous bodies
College football	United States Military Academy at West Point	Saw Army defeat Eastern Michigan University – homecoming – oh the pagentry!
College football	Saw Columbia defeat Cornell	Really fun!
Professional baseball	Saw the Yankees lose	With Mert and his friend
Professional baseball	Saw a rainout at Shea Stadium	With Linda – got a miniature of the stadium
Times Talks	Michael Pollen	Too cool for school
Times Talks	Governor David Patterson	Very impressive

Here is the theater...

You can tell our hearts are with live theater.  We are so DARN lucky!

Show	Location	Comments
Uncle Vanya	Bard – Fisher Center	Peter Dinklage as Vanya – powerful
Of Thee I Sing	Bard – Fisher Center	Wonderful
Curtains	Broadway	Ken only
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof	Broadway	Jackie only – Not a very good production; led me to “Blood Wedding”
Wicked	Broadway	With Matt, Erica, Jennifer, Jessica, Chelsea and Jody – amazing
In the Heights	Broadway	With Linda – saw the day it won all the Tony's – great
Young Frankenstein	Broadway	Freebie tix; little commitment; left at intermission; loud
Sunday in the Park with George	Broadway	With Kurt and Hillary; technology amazing; liked production at Kennedy Center better
August: Osage County	Broadway	Amazing
Doubt	Capital Rep – Albany	Jackie only – with Julie; nicely done
M Butterfly	Capital Rep – Albany	Jackie only – with AIRPO bunch; quite powerful, if too long
If You See Something, Say Something	Joe's Pub – The Public	Mike Daisy one man show – jeez
South Pacific	Lincoln Center	Transcendent
Camelot	Lincoln Center	Really bad seats – left at intermission
Good Boys and True	Second Stage – Off Broadway	Irritating & interesting
Some Americans Abroad	Second Stage – Off Broadway	OK
Boy's Life	Second Stage – Off Broadway	Irritating
Next to Normal	Second Stage – Off Broadway	A musical about bi-polar disease – powerful and ridiculous at the same time
The Promise Keepers	SUNY New Paltz	Not a very interesting play nor production
Company	SUNY New Paltz	Nice production
Our Town	SUNY New Paltz	Very sweet
Road Show	The Public Theater – Off Broadway	Later Sondheim – quite good – money makes the world go around
Kicking a Dead Horse	The Public Theater – Off Broadway	Stephen Rea – with Shelly, Shelly's Mom, Pat and Ray – short and odd
Drunk Enough to Say I Love You	The Public Theater – Off Broadway	A couch rises in NoHo
Taking Over	The Public Theater – Off Broadway	Stung a bit
Hair	The Public Theater – Off Broadway – Delacorte Theater in Central Park	Anniversary – fantastic, wonderful, moving, wowza
Nero	Vassar Powerhouse Theater	New musical by composer/lyricist of “Spring Awakening” - Idina Menzel
Finks	Vassar Powerhouse Theater	Jackie only – Wonderful

2008 in review

Although the Barack Obama story dominated 2008, the Andrews were frying other fish, or rather, paying attention to movies, theater, music, sports, etc.  

Can I slice in a list from Excel?  Here are the movies.

Movies	Notes
Wall-E	Wonderful, fantastic
Milk	Ditto
Slumdog Millionaire	Colorful, exciting, shocking
Burn After Reading	Blah
The Bank Job
W	Jackie only – interesting
Quantum of Solace	Oh my gawd
Rachel Getting Married	Jackie only – fascinating
The Visitor	Parts were wonderful
Man on Wire	Wonderful, fantastic
Frozen River	Jackie only – Upstate Films; director and star there answering questions. A wonderful movie
Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist	Oh please tell me teenagers do not live this life.
I've Loved You So Long	Jackie only – pulled its punches at the end
Cadillac Records	Music out of sight
Sex and the City	Jackie only – loved it
Then She Found Me	Jackie only – book much better
Soul Men	Ken only
The Power of Song	Jackie only – cried like a baby
I'm Not There	Somewhat weird
Donovan	Woodstock Film Festival – so so
The Secret of Roan Inish	Woodstock Film Festival – quite lovely
Synecdoche, NY	Jackie only – walked out of