Loss of Spontaneity

A couple of years ago I started volunteering for a local theater group. Through that activity I met people who invited me to become an usher at our local Symphony Hall and at the historic Orpheum Theatre. As a Symphony Hall usher, I work for performances of the local Symphony, Ballet, and Opera companies. The Orpheum hosts small touring companies, concerts of various genres, and events sponsored by local arts, educational, and charitable organizations. I also am one of the docents who give tours of the theater. In the second half of 2015, I was offered the role of Usher Captain (oooooh!). I said ‘yes’, believing as I do, in most areas of life, there is no reason not to take money for something I was already doing for free. Besides, I get to wear a nifty, retro-looking, maroon blazer made of 100% virgin polyester. Everyone loves a man in uniform. The hours vary from week to week but tend to concentrate on evening and weekends.

In another spin-off of my skills as usher extraordinaire, last spring the City’s volunteer coordinator let me know the City was trying to hire “Venue Hosts” at the Convention Center. The hiring process to work for the City is more bureaucratic than I imagined possible but after a few months of processing and interviewing I was hired. The Venue Host gig is fun. Occasionally I will encounter a ‘friend of Dave’; a cranky senior citizen who just wants to complain and vent their sense of disappointed entitlement but most of the time conventions or expos are hectic but enjoyable. I help people find their events in the Center, and their cars afterward. I direct them to local restaurants, theaters, or other points of interest and act as resource for local information. I also get to work closely with the local Convention & Visitors Bureau. Many of the events are corporate but there are others as well. Both Ben Carson and ‘The Donald’ held rallies in the Center. The Salvation Army hosted its Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners there as well. The job is part-time. The schedule varies from week to week, depending on schedule of events in the Convention Center.

In addition to these two, I also volunteer with one of the local museums and three local theater companies.

These factors, plus the usual ebb & flow of life with its auto repairs, dentist/doctor appointments, cultural evenings, and social obligations, mean I seem to be forever updating my calendar and juggling things. I’m not complaining. Most of it is discretionary and I can thin out the calendar whenever I start to feel over-committed. But there is a loss of spontaneity and I am occasionally confronted by the density of it.

Harper’s Other Dad sent me a note last week about an invitation to meet another couple for coffee. The first gap in the calendar that would accommodate such a casual meeting was 21 days hence. Yesterday, H.O.D. learned a friend from the Midwest would be in town on Friday evening and hoped to connect. They had not seen each other in a long time. Arranging it was not a problem, really. I just moved his Symphony ticket from Friday night to Saturday night and adjusted the dog’s day care schedule. Sadly, I won’t be able to join them, however. My next uncommitted Friday evening is February 26th.

 

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Double Dose of Divas

Harper’s Other Dad and I spent much of Sunday finishing the process of getting Christmas packed away so, by the end of the day, we were both a bit tired. He retired into the blogosphere, as is his wont,  while I began scanning the television guide for some type of entertainment. And I hit the jackpot finding two gems of the 1970’s playing concurrently; 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues and 1975’s Funny Lady. Oh my, didn’t that little “Last” button on my remote, the one that allows me to bounce between two channels, get a workout over the succeeding couple of hours!

I’ll save for another time, maybe never, my thoughts on the relative merits of the two films as artistic expressions. One fact about which there can be no doubt, however, is both films were ‘star turns’ for major A-list divas of the era. I speak, of course, of Diana Ross in the former and Barbra Streisand in the latter.

Here are my favorite clips from each. Diana as Billie Holiday in the grips of addiction (apologies for the poor sound quality of the clip)…

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjODPpMVrjY%5D

 

And Barbra as Fanny Brice in the grips of a tantrum of self-pity…

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7NLx2iUXuU%5D

What a fun way to close out the holiday weekend!

Black-Eyed Peas 2016

I’ve written before about the custom of serving black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day. One does this to ensure health, happiness, and prosperity in the year ahead. Some people may call this ‘superstition’. I prefer ‘tradition’. You say tomato. I say tomahto….. When New Year’s Day arrives black-eyed peas have to be on the table lest my grandmother climb from her grave to haunt me.

This year my friends at Epicurious (love that app!) sent a suggested recipe. This was nice of them. I don’t know many ways to prepare black-eyed peas and have long since exhausted the known variations. Epicurious proposed combining them with pork tenderloin. The dish included combinations of ingredients I would never have imagined using. Coffee? Pickle purée? What is life without adventure!

Ingredients

1. Redeye glaze:
   • 2 ounces country ham scraps or prosciutto
   • 1-2 teaspoons vegetable oil (optional)
   • 3 tablespoons shallots, coarsely chopped
   • 1/2 cup strong coffee or espresso
   • 2 cups pork stock or low-salt chicken broth
   • 3 tablespoons sorghum syrup or honey
   • 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
2. Black-eyed peas with spiced butter:
   • 7 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
   • 1 cup minced yellow onion
   • 1/4 cup minced garlic
   • 8 cups low-salt chicken broth
   • 2 cups dried black-eyed peas, soaked overnight, drained
   • 5 bay leaves, divided
   • Kosher salt
   • 1 tablespoon each crushed toasted coriander and fennel seeds
   • 1 1×3″ strip lemon peel, all white pith removed
   • 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
3. Tenderloin and assembly:
   • 1 tablespoon kosher salt
   • 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
   • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
   • 1/4 teaspoon (packed) light brown sugar
   • 2 1 1/4-pound trimmed pork tenderloins
   • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
   • 1 cup bread-and-butter pickles, blended to a coarse purée

 Preparation

1. For redeye glaze:
   1. Heat a medium heavy saucepan over medium heat. Add ham and sauté until golden brown, adding vegetable oil as needed if the ham scraps are lean. Add shallots and cook, stirring often, until they begin to soften, about 3 minutes. Stir in coffee, scraping up any browned bits.
   2. Add stock, sorghum syrup, and vinegar; bring to a simmer and cook until sauce coats the back of a spoon, about 20 minutes. Strain into a small bowl. DO AHEAD: Can be made 2 days ahead. Let cool completely; cover and chill. Rewarm before using.
2. For black-eyed peas with spiced butter:
   1. Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a large heavy pot over medium heat. Add onion and cook, stirring often, until softened, about 8 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 2 minutes. Add broth, peas, and 3 bay leaves. Bring to a boil; reduce heat to medium-low and cook, skimming the surface occasionally, until peas are tender, about 1 1/4 hours. Discard bay leaves.
   2. Strain peas, reserving broth. Transfer 2 cups strained peas to a medium bowl; mash into a paste. Return whole and mashed peas to pot, along with some of the broth to thin mixture. Season with salt. DO AHEAD: Can be made 2 days ahead.
   3. Melt remaining 4 tablespoons butter in small pan over medium heat. Simmer until browned bits form on bottom of pan, 5-6 minutes. Stir in coriander, fennel, lemon peel, cayenne, and remaining 2 bay leaves; cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Remove pan from heat. DO AHEAD: Can be made 2 hours ahead. Let stand at room temperature. Rewarm and discard bay leaves and lemon peel from spice butter before serving.
3. For tenderloin and assembly:
   1. Combine first 4 ingredients in a small bowl. Season pork with spice mixture; let stand for 1 hour.
   2. Preheat oven to 350°F. Heat oil in a large cast-iron skillet over high heat. Sear pork on all sides until deep golden brown, about 8 minutes total. Transfer skillet to oven. Roast pork, occasionally brushing with glaze, until an instant-read thermometer inserted into meat registers 140°F, about 15 minutes. Transfer meat to a carving board. Let rest, uncovered, for 10 minutes.
   3. Reheat peas and spice butter. Cut pork into 1/4″-1/2″-thick slices. Transfer to plates and spoon pickle purée over. Serve with peas drizzled with spoonfuls of spice butter.

I was pleased with the fruits of my labors. Should I make this dish again next year, however, I will pay more attention to the admonitions “DO AHEAD”. I’m not the stereotypical “a man, a can, and a pan” cook but doing this all at the same time took more time than I like to spend on a meal, even for good luck.

Mysterious Earworm or Creeping Dementia?

Earworm: noun. A tune or part of a song that repeats in one’s mind.

As someone who has a relatively low tolerance for silence, earworms are a fact of life. I’ll stumble across some tune or another, on the car radio, in an elevator, or on a television commercial, and it will bore into my consciousness and hang on long enough to be become annoying. Eventually it fades away or, more likely, it is replaced by another earworm, but not before becoming more than a little tiresome.

I’ve never observed much of a pattern to earworms. Some have lyrics and others not. Some are melodies I like, though usually I like them a little less by the time I shake them. Some are absolute groaners better forgotten but which won’t seem to stay away. What they usually have in common, however, is I can recognize some event that triggered their rise from the bowels of my subconscious to an annoying place of honor at top of mind. This is not the case with my current affliction. For the last week I find myself idling humming, or worse, actually singing, the theme song from the Little Audrey cartoons. I have no idea what brought it to mind but it seems to have staying power.

I vaguely recall there was a cartoon series featuring “Little Audrey”. I don’t recall any specific cartoons. Truth be told, I’d have only a 50/50 chance picking out the correct face in a photo array that included Little Lulu, but I know there were cartoons. They stopped making “Little Audrey” cartoons shortly after I was born but I’m sure they were frequently found on television in those thrilling days of yesteryear. Song lyrics always stick in my memory so I’m not surprised I recall the lyrics, even after decades. But I am fascinated by the quest to learn what prompted them to come to mind after all these years. I’m sure I’ll never know.

 

Wikipedia advises that Little Audrey was a lesser-known knockoff of Little Lulu. That may be true. but I don’t know the lyrics to Lulu’s theme song. And I don’t want to learn them now.

 

Unexpected

The 2015 – 2016 Symphony season began last weekend with a program that included Beethoven’s Symphony #9 as well as a relatively new piece by a contemporary American composer named Adam Schoenberg (not that Schoenberg!). Both pieces were well performed and well received. Both Friday and Saturday night’s performances were sold out, a little unusual for a Classics series concert.

Once again this year, I am ushering. Because of that, we are trying something new this year. In the past we have purchased two subscriptions to the Classic series and I would generally limit my ushering efforts to the Pops concerts. Occasionally I would usher a Classics concert but, when I did, I would be seeing the same concert a second time. With a nod to the budget, this year we purchased only one subscription, for Harper’s Other Dad, and I signed up to usher the same performances. We don’t get to sit together during the concert but it saved us more than $1000 so it was well worth it.

The theme for this season is “Symphony Unexpected”. I’m not entirely sure what that means, perhaps the combination standards with 21st-century pieces. Whatever the rationale, it is a significant improvement over last year’s theme, “It’s Tito Time” in honor of our then-new conductor. The season brochure shows a close-up of a tux but rather than the typical black tie, it is orange sequined. I guess that is the unexpected.

To continue that theme for opening weekend, Symphony Hall was decorated with orange bow ties on the glass doors and mirrors. And the ushers was asked (well, not really ‘asked’) to wear them. I didn’t mind. It was festive. I wish they’d told us before we arrived however so I would not have spent time tying a black bow tie before I left home.

Of course putting a large orange bow on the men’s room mirror creates a self opportunity too good to pass up. At least in my case, I’m not sure this can really be called “unexpected”.

“I’ve written a letter to daddy…”

Wicked and Miserable

I enjoy live theater. With the energy from the stage and the shared experience of being part of an audience, I think almost any live theater is worth seeing. Jukebox musicals and Neil Simon comedies test that theory, but I can usually find something interesting in whatever I see. The exceptionally good and the exceptionally bad stay with me. The rest fade from memory as pleasant evenings. Sometimes, for reasons unrelated to the production, events conspire to make a theater outing a night to remember, but not in a good way. Such was the case this weekend.

A few months ago a friend asked if Harper’s Other Dad and I would be interested in seeing Wicked. I’d seen the show before and enjoyed it but I’d not considered seeing it again on this tour. Still, it’s a good show and I have committed the Original Cast Recoding  to memory so, why not. It sounded like a nice way to spend a social evening with a friend. Thanks to a virtual cosmic convergence of unrelated events, however, it did not turn out that way.

I’d unwittingly gotten us off to a bad start by being cheap and buying seats in the upper balcony. Having seen the show before, I didn’t mind not having great seats. Being familiar with the venue, I knew it was better to stay toward the center and move higher rather than moving to the sides in the orchestra. I had never experienced the upper balcony however. The same design features that make it better to avoid the sides, also mean the balcony is very steep. Walking to our seats in the third row, when I diverted my gaze even slightly to the right, I was looking over the edge, past the lower balcony, and to the orchestra seats below. As someone with a touch of vertigo this was unsettling.

Our friend ended up with a family commitment in the afternoon so we were not able to meet him for dinner or drinks before the show. As it turned out, we never saw him.

Harper’s Other Day was beginning to feel the effects of food poisoning, he thinks from a bad avocado at lunch. We got to our seats but he fled to the men’s room before the lights went down. I was able to watch Act I from our seats. Poor guy, he was able to see some of it on the lobby monitor when not skipping to the loo. At intermission, I cautiously crept my way down the row to the lobby to check on him. He was feeling worse. I was not thrilled about making the pilgrimage back to the seats in the center of vertigo row so we left before Act II. There was more fun yet to come.

Because the show was sold-out, parking would have been challenging. This, plus my dislike for driving in the city of Tempe, even in good conditions, gave me the idea it would be better to park remotely and take the light rail. The train stop is only about seven blocks from the theater. It worked out fine on the way to the theater. Decorum mandates I withhold details but, owing to the food poisoning, the seven-block walk back to the train featured several impromptu stops. Happily, the wait on the platform was not long. I cannot say the same for the train ride back to the car.

Sitting beside someone trying mightily, and with only limited success, to retch quietly into a plastic cup is not a pleasant, even less so for him. Neither is the experience enhanced by the presence of a group of malodorous folks who were using the air-conditioned train as a much-needed respite from the triple-digit heat. None of my five senses was spared assault. Eventually, we reached our car. I drove home in silence while H.O.D. dozed uncomfortably in the back seat.

But the sun also rises. The next morning Harper’s Other Dad was weak but recovering after a long night spent up-close & personal with porcelain. We’d purchased season tickets with our missed friend so, if we don’t connect with him before. we will see him in a few weeks at The Book of Mormon. The only lingering effect of the evening is there is now a vague association in my mind between “Defying Gravity” and projectile vomiting. I wonder how long that will last.

Hysteria

The local 2015-16 entertainment season started, at least for me, with Southwest Shakespeare Company’s production of Terry Johnson’s Hysteria. The play premiered in London in 1993 with the formidable title; “Hysteria: Or Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessive Neurosis” As such, it joins Brad Fraser’s “Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love” (1989) and Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures” (2009) in a three-way tie for most awkward title of a contemporary play that I’ve seen and enjoyed. Honorable mention goes to Edward Albee’s “The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?”. It appears the subtitle was dropped when Hysteria was published in 1995.

The play is a fictionalized account of a real-life meeting between psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and surrealist artist Salvador Dali. They met in 1938 in England where the Jewish Freud was living, having fled his home in Vienna ahead of the ‘Anschluss‘ between Austria and Nazi Germany. Afternoon tea shared by an analyst who plumbs the depths of the human subconscious and a painter whose work captures the stuff of dreams seems a natural inspiration for drama but an unlikely springboard for farce. In playwright Johnson’s hands it is both. Most of Act I is laugh-out-loud funny as Johnson employs every cliché of farce; scantily clad women, rapidly opening & closing doors, panicked attempts at misdirection, and a break-neck pace are all in evidence. There is so much more. The word hysterical has more than one meaning. Not all are funny.

The conflict of the play presents itself in the character of “Jessica”, a mysterious young woman determined to speak with Freud by any means necessary. Her presence, in various states of undress, fuels the farce but, as the reasons for her, seemingly obsessive, need to talk to Freud are revealed, the play becomes dark. It is not dark in the ‘dark comedy’ sense. The play becomes dramatically, viscerally, almost painfully dark. There are still elements of farcical humor but for much of Act II the audience must decide what is real and what is not and neither is particularly humorous.

Jessica’s revelations present layers of memory. Are Freud’s recollections of a his sessions with a past analysand real, or are they a self-serving rewrite of his personal history? Are the events that surface in the previous session notes recovered memories of horrific childhood trauma, or are they figments of the analysand’s imagination rooted deep in her psyche? There is no reliable narrator and the mantel of audience surrogate changes hands more often than Jessica’s scanties. The audience is challenged to make these decisions and the outcome affects how we interpret the actions of the characters on stage.

At times Hysteria is riotously funny. For those with even a passing familiarity with Freud and Jung it is also witty. The audience is left to create its own punchline about ‘Freudian slips’ as Jessica’s delicates change hands but the playwright is not above utilizing an obvious pun or double entendre when the opportunity arises. That said, Hysteria is not a play for the faint of heart. The themes explored are complex and incidents of trauma, while not depicted, are described in most graphic detail.

Another local company, sadly now defunct, described their productions as “talk provoking”. That description fits Hysteria perfectly. We talked about the play all the way home… and the more we talked about it, the more I liked it.