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.