I wish people wouldn’t fool around with Latin endings when they don’t know what they’re doing.
BobK, Moderator of the ESL Forum at UsingEnglish.com, in a discussion about the plural ending for a noun of the fourth declension, the so-called u-stem nouns.
This is pretty typical of me. I’m always charmed by some actress or another. Always have been. Favorites going back include Kate Winslet and Aishwarya Rai. All-time favorites those two. More recently there’s been Romola Garai. Before that there was Sarah Polley. Of course let’s not forget Natalie Portman, for whom I even schlepped up to NYC once to see on Broadway. Actresses all, whose very presence in a movie is reason enough for me to see it.
Lately it’s one Shirley Henderson. We saw her in the Andrew Davies adaptation of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. Dawn’s been on a Trollope reading kick, much like me and Patrick O’Brian, I suppose. And she loves the British murder mysteries that they show on weekends on the Biography Channel, shows like Midsomer Murders and Poirot. Poirot stars the odd little man David Suchet as the fey little Belgian Hercule Poirot, and he’s the Augustus Melmotte character in The Way We Live Now. And so anyway, what with Dawn’s Trollope and Suchet proclivities lately, she put The Way We Live Now on the Netflix list and we watched it.
I watched it at first under some duress, but quickly fell hard for Shirley Henderson as Melmotte’s daughter Marie, pursued by all the useless young gentlemen of London society and especially pursued by the especially useless Felix Carbury. There’s this amazing moment early on when Felix first declares his intentions to Marie. He kisses her, and she pulls away for a moment, considering him and herself and the situation and what she should do versus what she wants. And then she grabs him and kisses him back with this ferocious intensity, this need and desire and lust and abandon. I suppose that moment, the man surprises the woman with a kiss, she gives it some consideration, and then she enthusiastically returns the kiss, it’s something of a cliche in movies, but Shirley Henderson here makes it utterly believable. It’s really intense.
And she’s really intense. She’s a little firecracker. Reminds me of my Dawn.
And then her best scene comes later in the story, when Felix’s sister Hetta has come to relay Felix’s reply to Marie’s message to him, after their plans to elope have all gone awry. And Felix, great big asshole that he is, has sent Hetta to throw Marie under a bus, tell her that he doesn’t love her and never has. (Not literally under a bus.) And Shirley Henderson has this awesome scene where she’s devastated and heartbroken and she’s weeping and lost and declares that she’ll never love again, that she’ll follow her father’s wishes and marry Lord Nidderdale but will be a curse to his entire life. Again, really intense and achingly wonderful.
Apparently Shirley Henderson was in both Bridget Jones movies, although I only saw the first one. Dawn remembers her, or the character anyway. She was also in Trainspotting — she’s originally from Scotland — and I do remember her in that, although Kelly Macdonald was of course the more noticed babe in that. Shirley Henderson played Spud’s girlfriend Gail. “Actually it’s a nightmare. I’ve been desperate for a shag but watching him suffer was just too much fun,” you might remember her saying. For those of you who are Harry Potter fans, you’ll have seen her as someone called Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. But of course everybody’s in the Harry Potter movies. I haven’t seen them, but Shirley Henderson is a reason to see at least one of them.
Dawn and I have a grand night out, dinner and the ballet.
We hardly ever go out to eat, not since we bought the house. When we rented in Adams Morgan, boy, we went out all the time. But now we’re so much more budget conscious. And of course the ballet subscriptions are a big expense, so we trade those few nights for all those nights out, I guess.
But we do enjoy some fine dining on ballet nights. Not too expensive, mind you. Tonight we go to our favorite Indian restaurant, Aroma. It’s on Eye Street Northwest. Dinner entrees there are generally in the ten dollar range. And a bottle of wine is twenty-six dollars. So we leave full of good food for not a lot money.
We see the American Ballet Theatre do Othello. We see the ABT every year, but this is my first time seeing Julie Kent herself. I don’t know why, but I think of her somehow like I think of Erin Mahoney-Du of the Washington Ballet. Maybe because they’re both tall? Although I have no idea how tall Julie Kent is, having never seen her. But she looks tall, judging by her headshot in the program. And she’s a local girl. Says she’s from Potomac MD.
I get all mixed up, however, reading the program beforehand, as to who is playing Iago. The program clearly says it’s Sascha Radetsky, but they don’t have a picture of him. Program says Herman Cornejo is playing Cassio. And they do have a picture of him. Clear as day.
And yet for some reason, after I close the program and the lights go down and the show begins, I’m waiting to see Herman Cornejo as Iago. And let me tell you, it’s a somewhat confusing first act, if you’ve got Iago and Cassio mixed up. I mean, this is ballet, folks. There’s no dialog, no talking, no speeches, nobody coming up and saying, “Hey, there, Cassio, buddy. How ya doing?”
So Iago and Desdemona have a nice little dance together, and I’m thinking that they’re actually getting along pretty well. Iago’s being really nice to her. I keep waiting for him to be mean, to show some reason why he’s going to do all the horrible things that we all know Iago ends up doing. But no sign of that. He seems to genuinely like her.
And then there’s the scene later where Cassio’s with Desdemona’s maid, being all crazy and angry. What’s that all about, I wonder. After that the act ends and I start to realize that I’m maybe a little mixed up here as to who’s playing whom. I flip open the program and see that I am.
But all of this is minor, really. I mean, we’re here to watch the women dance, not the men. I’m here to see Julie Kent, not some dude named Sascha.
And Marcelo Gomes as Othello, I suppose. He’s got on dark makeup, which kinda surprises me. Like, in this day and age, if we’re all so used to color blind casting in the theare, why does the white guy playing Othello still have to be in blackface? And again with this being the ballet and all, and nobody’s going to actually say, like, something about Othello the Moor. We all know the story, but if we don’t, we can read the synopsis in the program. We’ve got suspension of disbelief going enough here to watch the story of Iago convincing Othello that Desdemona is cheating on him with Cassio, but it’s all happening on that stage right over there, with that orchestra playing music right down there, we can see the conductor, oh and nobody actually utters a single word, and there’s no real furniture or buildings, and they’re all dancing with each other. But somehow I’m not going to buy it because this one guy isn’t black?
And yet in spite of all this I just enjoy the hell out the whole performance. All of these things now that I’m writing about, they sound like complaints, maybe, but they really aren’t. (That whole bit about suspension of disbelief and blackface is all rather tongue in cheek.) All of these little things that I notice just seem to delight me. Like right at the beginning, as the lights come up ever so slowly, there’s this … lump … on stage. It slowly resolves itself into a person. Seems like the person’s bent over, way down low. Kinda looks like somebody praying to Mecca to me. Oh, yeah! Hey, Othello the Moor, right? Got it. And then immediately in comes everybody else for the wedding, the marriage of Othello and Desdemona, and there’s somebody carrying this enormous cross, really emphasizing then this immediate change from things Muslim to things Christian.
And later there’s this very obvious cross hanging around Desdemona’s neck when Othello murders her. But no real mention of anything remotely Islamic ever reappears, so it’s not like this is meant to be like this whole comment on Islam & Christianity. At least I don’t think it is. Unless it’s supposed to be like a motive for Iago. Which, again, I don’t think it is. And Iago never tells us what his motive is, unless we were supposed to figure it out from his expressionistic dance at the end of the first act. But I thought that was Cassio at the time, so I sure didn’t get it. Only thing I can figure is he was mad about the blackface.
I had noticed it yesterday, as I was nearing and then riding the street escalator at the Judiciary Square station.
Every Metro station has three levels, and the conveyance from the street to the middle level is denoted by the word street, as in street elevator or street escalator. The level of the trains themselves, and therefore the conveyances thereto, is called platform, as in platform elevator or platform escalator. That middle level is called the mezzanine. I wouldn’t have a fucking clue as to what a mezzanine was without knowing it from the Metro. I think maybe theaters, like on Broadway, have mezzanine levels, as opposed to orchestra or balcony.
And these elevators and escalators are usually not like single units. Of course there’s an up escalator and a down escalator, and many (most?) stations have a third escalator that switches from up to down in the morning or evening depending on where the foot traffic is flowing. And a lot of stations have more than one entrance/exit, e.g., Dupont Circle’s 19th Street side and the Q Street side. So in a lot of cases there’s more than one street escalator and there’s always more than one street escalator.
Well, except for Forest Glen station, which is so deep underground that they’ve only got elevators, six of them, going from the street to the mezzanine. I assume there are emergency stairs somewhere, but I’ve never seen them, and there’s for sure no escalator. And so anyway, I’m talking about the street escalator, the down escalator, on the Fourth Street side of the Judiciary Square station.
I had noticed yesterday that it was making a lot of noise. Some major groaning, it was doing. It was almost alarming. But it seemed like the groaning was more towards the top, whereas at the bottom it was really more sort of bleating. Kinda like the bleating of a saxaphone. And that was pretty cool to realize, that the escalator was playing jazz saxaphone.
Arriving at the station with Dawn this morning, I asked her, “Hear that?”
We were standing under a tree with a noisy little house sparrow singing away, so she asked, “The bird or that awful music?”
Exactly! I explained to her about the jazz saxaphone. Sadly, she was much less excited about it than I was.
But then also when I got to work today, I grabbed my big travel mug to go make a cup of coffee. We’ve got one of those individual serving coffee makers, one that uses coffee pods. As I was walking into the kitchen, I could hear that someone was making a cup already. And I really enjoy imitating the sound the coffee maker makes, kind of a low groaning grinding noise. So there was Nancy making coffee as I was walking in going “Aruuuurrrrrrr.”
But she asked me, “Are you imitating the coffee machine, or are you chanting om?”
She’s right! The cofee maker kinda sounds like that!
So that’s life today for me, where the escalator plays jazz saxaphone and the coffee maker chants om.
Once again I’m at work on a day when I had planned to not be at work. Last week it was Tuesday, on the National Day of Mourning for President Ford.
Oh, I forgot to mention that I sorta saw the funeral procession. Dawn was frantically calling me calling me around 10:30 a.m. or so, from work, as the motorcade had left the Capitol, where the President had been lying in state, to make its way to the National Cathedral, where would be the funeral.
I was busy and didn’t answer, until finally like the third call or whatever I finally picked up. Dawn told me that the procession would be coming up Twentieth Street, just a block away from me. I didn’t have any special reason to want to see President Ford driven by, but then somehow it seemed disrespectful to not walk all of one block. So off I set.
About halfway down the block on M Street I met up with Matt, my boss, who told me that I had just missed him. I could hear the sirens and see the police cars and the ambulance bringing up the rear of the motorcade, but I had missed the funeral procession proper. Matt said he’d seen the unmistakeable profile of the First Lady, Betty Ford, in one of the limos.
Ah well. I kinda sorta saw it. The tail end of it anyway.
So today, Monday, Dawn and I had planned to take the day off to recover from the two days of Christmas celebration, and get done all the chores around the house that we didn’t have time to do. But we got some stuff done, especially on Saturday, and I’ve got the meeting with the consultants tomorrow that I need to finish up some stuff for, so I go into work while Dawn stays home.
It is indeed, by official proclamation of the President, a National Day of Mourning, for the recently departed President Ford. As in:
As a further mark of respect to the memory of Gerald R. Ford, the thirty-eighth President of the United States, NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, in honor and tribute to the memory of Gerald R. Ford, and as an expression of public sorrow, do appoint Tuesday, January 2, 2007, as a National Day of Mourning throughout the United States. I call on the American people to assemble on that day in their respective places of worship, there to pay homage to the memory of President Ford. I invite the people of the world who share our grief to join us in this solemn observance.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty eighth day of December in the year of our Lord two thousand six, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-first.
GEORGE W. BUSH
I go to work. My office is officially closed, since the federal government is likewise closed and we follow them in these matters. But I’ve got tons to do and a big meeting tomorrow morning.
I do split early, however, and then drive to Home Depot for some good old Henry 208. Then I make it home in time to patch the suspect seam before it gets dark.
We went out the theater to see exactly zero movies this year. That’s gotta be a first for me since like I was three years old. Like since my parents started dressing us in our jammies to take us to the drive-in in the big old Buick station wagon.
Dawn and I watched thirty movies on DVD. Well, we finished twenty-eight of them. Crash and Napoleon Dynamite sucked so bad that we couldn’t finish them.
My favorite of the year was probably The Third Man. The Enron and Al Gore documentaries were thoroughly compelling. I’m sorry to say that I liked Master and Commander more the first time I saw it, before I had read any of the books, although it was still completely enjoyable. And I’m also sorry to say that I pretty much missed the charm of Little Miss Sunshine.
Probably watched more TV on DVD than movies, and most of that British.
Series of made-for-TV movies:
Classic books made into mini-series:
British television series proper:
American television series proper that we only watched a couple of episodes:
American television series proper that we watched all episodes:
Dawn thinks Ioan Griffud is yummy. I don’t think we saw enough Audrey Tautou this year. Best discovery was Prime Suspect. Helen Mirren is the best.
First few books of the year:
Horatio Hornblower books by C.S. Forester:
Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian:
Couple of other Royal Navy books:
Wow. Thirty-five books this year. That’s a lot more than in recent years, probably the most since like the late eighties.
Finished the terrific Nicolson book on Nelson and Trafalgar.
Nelson, of course, though victorious in the battle, was also killed, struck by a musket shot. He took a couple of hours to die, so he was able to hear the cheering of the English sailors as the French and Spanish ships struck their colors. He knew that the battle had been won.
See this painting by Arthur William Devis. Notice how there are a couple of lamps shedding some dim light on the scene, but mostly the light seems to emanate from Nelson himself. Notice also the Christ-like imagery, the obvious similarity to any number of depictions of Christ being taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb.
And but so Nelson’s death, his sacrifice, only heightened his greatness, only added to his legend. Only added to the romance of his legend. And that’s where Nicolson quickly takes us through the rest of the war, to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and through the rest of the nineteenth century.
The romantic notion of war continued into the twentieth century, only to be wiped away by the First World War. And so then, again being a man after my own heart, Nicolson ends with Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est.
At some point on our walk to work, I remember that today is Boxing Day. And I have no idea why it’s called Boxing Day. So I ask Dawn, who does, after all, hold a master’s degree in English along with another in medieval studies. Who better to ask?
“Do they call it Boxing Day because of someone somewhere originally having to put something or some things in boxes?” I ask her. “Like servants having to put away all the Christmas decorations in boxes?”
I’m immediately suspicious when Dawn simply just agrees. I ask her if she knows or is just humoring me. She doesn’t know, but that’s as good an explanation as any, she says. Later Wikipedia and Snopes research tells me that nobody especially or definitively knows the origin of the name.
We sleep in late, til 8:15, before finally rolling out of bed. We had each opened one gift from each other last night, things to wear to church, the skirt for Dawn and the sweater for me. This morning we make mimosas and have a nice sit by the tree together and open the rest.
We have brunch, our usual weekend breakfast of omelette and toast, but with Dawn’s special cheese grits. And more mimosas.
We take a short walk mid-morning, before it starts raining. When we get back, I start reading a book that Dawn gave me, Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar, by Adam Nicolson. I have a fun epiphany reading the preface, where Nicolson describes the British concept of the hero, inherited from ancient Greece (e.g., Homer’s Achilles) and ancient Rome (e.g., Virgil’s Aeneas). He writes,
That twin inheritance, the Virgilian and the Homeric, are both in play at Trafalgar and both are fused there with the contemporary passion for a burning apocalyptic fire.
And, as it happens, after having seen the British Romantic exhibit on Saturday, I spent yesterday morning reading the first few chapters of Peter Ackroyd’s biography of William Blake, and this sentence immediately brings Blake to my mind. And apparently to Nicolson’s as well, as the very same paragraph continues:
It is not usually done, either by naval or literary scholars, to put William Blake and Nelson in the same bracket … but to do so, and to understand their shared relationship to the visions and desires of contemporary England, is to understand both why Nelson was the object of so much love and hope in England … and why the men of the fleet he commanded fought and killed with such unbridled intensity and passion.
I think I’m going to really like this book.
Oh, and I should maybe say that I’m also reading it because I’ve run out of Patrick O’Brian books. At least the Aubrey-Maturin series. I finished all twenty. (There’s kind of a twenty-first, called simply 21, but it’s (a) apparently just three chapters written, whereupon O’Brian died, and (b) available only in hardback, and that hard to find as well.) Boy, they were so good. I picked the first one back up and re-started it after finishing the twentieth, and it was a real kick to read and think of all that was going to happen to these same people, to see them all meeting for the first time. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, of course, but also Pullings and Mowett and Killick. Oh, and Lord Keith and Queenie. Great fun.
I make another pie in the afternoon, much more successful than the one I made yesterday. Yesterday I tried mixing the dry ingredients first, but maybe shouldn’t have included brown sugar as a dry ingredient. And then I chilled the ball of dough for about forty minutes before rolling it out. And so anyway yesterday’s pie didn’t seem to be done enough on the inside, even though the crust around the edges was getting ready almost to burn. Today’s pie seems to finish crust and custard both around the same time, what with a less chilled crust and a maybe better mixed custard.
For dinner I chop the obligatory onion and Dawn makes a wonderful mushroom risotto, with sautéed fresh spinach. And we watch the very un-Christmasy Prime Suspect 3.
Dawn’s office was closing early, so we had planned to go Friday afternoon to the National Gallery to see the British Romantics exhibit. But she ended up working late, and it was supposed to rain, so we go on Saturday instead.
I have no idea who the British Romantics are, when or what they did, but still I’m excited that we’re seeing something. We haven’t been to the Gallery in a while, I think. Not since the Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit with Mother Dillon? And the Thomas Gainsborough before that?
We have a little trouble finding the works themselves, though. All Dawn knows is that they’re on the ground floor. We wander around a little before we find a desk with maps and a listing of current exhibitions. There’s a brass quintet playing upstairs, we can hear. Playing Christmas music. But we’re heading down to the west end to galleries C23 to C25.
And when we get there I’m delighted, first to learn that the period covered is late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, which period includes my recent obsession of Britain during the Napoleanic Wars, and secondly that included are William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And in general, the exhibition is all of like sixty-nine works, so it’s sort of perfectly sized. Not too big, not too small.
First up are some romantic landscapes. Think like Elysian Fields, or better yet, think pastoral. Like farm workers viewed from a great distance, surrounded by beautiful scenery, and the distance making their work look idyllic. Romantic.
But then also apparently a theme of this romanticism is a kind of macabre grotesqueries. Included in this are the works by Blake. There’s an etching, two paintings, and two bound volumes. (The bound volumes are under glass, so we can just see a page or two; we can’t turn the pages and peruse.) The one I assume is most familiar is The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea, which I guess is the one that Francis Dolarhyde eats in Red Dragon. (Alas. Wrong. That turns out to be The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. That’s at the Brooklyn Museum, still there, not really eaten of course, but anyway not here.)
And then, just for kicks, the Pre-Raphaelites are here. What a treat. First up is Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, (most famous for The Beguiling of Merlin, also not here), with an Ariadne and a Saint Barbara. Ariadne’s face doesn’t seem to be finished, although I’d swear that’s Jane Morris under there, whereas Saint Barbara is apparently egg tempera, maybe, so says the ID information, with a question mark.
Then there’s Rossetti, with two chalk treatments of Desdemona, and an honest to God actual work (pen, though, not painted) of she herself, named for her even, the impossibly beautiful Jane Morris. We used to, Cathy and I, have a poster of Rossetti’s Proserpine on our living room wall, in our apartment on Barton Street. That’s my favorite Jane Morris of all. Oh did I love that face.
A grand little exhibit. They’ve got it until March 18, 2007. Go see it.
We got Tivo recently. Well, almost Tivo. The DirecTV DVR version. DirecTV used to have a deal with actual Tivo, but they went out on their own a year or so back.
But anyway the point is that I got this certificate in the mail, kind of a rebate or something, for ordering the DirecTV DVR and service, for fifty free downloads at eMusic. After signing on to, and signing up for, eMusic, I found that the normal two-week trial to emusic affords one thirty free downloads, so I guess I got twenty free downloads from DirecTV. Whatever.
But then the problem was that emusic isn’t iTunes. They don’t have any of the usual mainstream stuff. Which is okay, I guess. I’m hopelessly out of touch as far as mainstream pop music goes nowadays. Not to say that I’m some sort of indie hipster either, though. More accurate to say that I’m hopelessly out of touch altogether.
I ended up downloading two records, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Furnace Room Lullaby, by Neko Case, and then Peddlin’ Dreams by Maria McKee, and Your Country by Graham Parker. Oh, and with three songs left over, I grabbed Marieke, from the recent off-Broadway revival of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, sung by Gay Marshall. And then I found a recording of Jacques Brel himself singing it. And lastly The Day After Tomorrow by Tom Waits, from a record or two ago.
I couldn’t find any Wilco records, or anything by Sarah Harmer. Would probably have gotten something from one or both.
But, all in all, so far, I’m really really digging Fox Confessor. By turns exhilerating and disturbing, Neko Case is like some strange combination of Patty Griffin and Liz Phair, if you can imagine. Great singing chops and bizarre lyrics, maybe, is the key to the combo.
I heard Tom Waits sing Day After Tomorrow on the Daily Show, of all places. They don’t generally have musical acts, not performing anyway. The rest of the album from which the song comes seems like more normal Tom Waits barrelhouse raucous bluesy kinda stuff with weird clanging percussion, but Day After Tomorrow is just a real slow sad dirge. It’s very much like his Fall of Troy from the Dead Man Walking soundtrack, actually, which song I also love love love.
And Marieke, actually, I like a lot better sung by Gay Marshall rather than Brel himself. It’s easily my favorite song from Alive and Well. I didn’t see the recent revival off-Broadway. I saw it, actually, way way way off Broadway, in the basement of Kelly’s Irish Times in DC back in the mid-nineties. Went with the woman whom I dated soon (too soon, really) after my first marriage blew up. Said woman knew the producer of the show, had had like a one-night stand with him in college. Or just a few minutes up against a Pepsi machine affair, really. But anyway he was a really cool guy. Good-looking fellow. And I don’t know what he did in his day job, but he produced this excellent show.
And something about the song and the way that the woman sang it, and how she really emoted, or maybe over emoted but in a way that really worked anyway, it just really got to me. And part of it maybe is the lyrics in Flemish or Dutch or whatever they are, part of the song in this sad different language. It all just really sank in, stuck with me.
The way Jacques Brel himself sings it should probably be the definitive, right? But for me it just fits so much better with a woman’s voice, and Gay Marshall just does it right.
My best friend Gordon turns 43 today.
I first met Gordon in August of 1983. He worked at Crown Books, at store #828, in Bradlick Shopping Center. That’s in Springfield, or maybe Annandale. It’s at the intersection of Braddock and Backlick roads.
Eileen was his boss, the manager of the store, and Gordon was her assistant manager. And Eileen was … well …. my friend, I guess. Boy, is that a long and complicated story. Long and complicated to me, anyway. Maybe not so interesting to you, though.
So anyway I went to see Eileen at her store, I think to talk to her about Mark Buckley, maybe. And while I was there I met some of her staff and co-workers, Gordon being one of them.
Oh, and I bought a porn magazine, a copy of Swank, while I was there. And Gordon rang up the purchase. I seem to remember now that he maybe asked to see my ID, I think to see how old I was. Since Eileen was older he thought that I was older too, but then learned that I was a few months younger than he was.
Swank had bought some pictures of John and Yoko naked, that somebody had found in the trash at the Dakota, is the only reason why I was buying the issue. I mean, hey, don’t get me wrong: I loves me my porn. But Swank? Not really my particular cup of tea. Way too outre for my tastes.
And but anyway, so then I had a passing acquaintance with Gordon, more so when Eileen moved over to Crown #807 and took Gordon with her. And I saw more and more of Eileen over fall and winter 1983 and 1984. And then Gordon and Babs and I all got dumped by our respective dating partners all around February and March of 1984, and all started hanging out together. Lots of dinners at the Pizza Hut across Beauregard Street, playing Back on the Chain Gang on the jukebox.
I used to call Gordon Dad for many years. It came mostly from Daddy Gordon (or maybe Daddy Gordo), what his girlfriend’s daughter called him. And I think it partly related to the Our Speaker Today episode of the Good Neighbors, where Richard Briers refers to the young Robert Lindsay as son, so Robert Lindsay kinda testily then calls Richard Briers dad. But still, calling Gordon Dad. That seems kind of weird and significant, now that I think about it, twenty years later.
And now Gordon is a dad, of course. He and Babs finally got married, and then they had Ally, who’ll be eleven next March. Goodness, how time flies.
Happy Birthday!
It’s a holiday season tradition, seeing the Washington Ballet perform The Nutcracker at the Warner Theatre. We meet Becky beforehand at Red Sage around the corner, have dinner, and then head over for the show.
Artistic Director Septime Webre reimagined the whole thing a couple of years ago, giving it a Washington setting and flavor: Clara living in a big house in Georgetown, the land of the Sugar Plum Fairy springtime under the cherry blossoms, that sort of thing. We had originally heard that there’d be some sort of George Washington Nutcracker battling a Mouse King George III – awful, dreadful, yuck – but thankfully it doesn’t go that far. True, the Russian dance is transformed into a frontiersman and women, but it’s okay. And the Arabian dance is Anacostia Indians, but that’s a really good touch. I’m underwhelmed by the Clara shrinking/Christmas tree growing special effect, but that’s a very minor point.
We have fun trying to figure out which dancers are dancing which parts. We had expected some sort of an announcement, at least for like Clara’s parents and the Sugar Plum Fairy. But, no, nothing.
Looks like Sona Kharatian and Erin Mahoney-Du switch off with each other on different nights, one playing Clara’s mother and the other in the Spanish Dance. Sadly this is Erin Mahoney-Du’s night to be Clara’s mother. Much less dancing, but at least she is completely lovely in a gorgeous deep rich red gown. My other favorite, Elizabeth Gaither, is the Snow Queen this year. Last year, or maybe it was the year before, she was the Sugar Plum Fairy. This year the SPF is Maki Onuki, and Dawn announces, correctly it turns out, that Jonathan Jordan will be her Cavalier.
Most amazing are the Anacostia Indians, Laura Urgelles and … we’re not sure who. He’s wearing a mask. The program says that it’s one of: Chip Coleman, Runqiao Du, Alvaro Palau, Tyler Savoie, Luis Torres. We can tell that it’s definitely not Chip Coleman or Runqiao Du. I’m reasonably sure that it’s not Luis Torres. Dawn’s sure that it’s not Alvaro Palau. (The next day’s review in the Post will say that it’s Alvaro Palau. Dawn stands by her determination.) Whoever it is, though, mightily and quite impressively lifts and holds Laura Urgelles straight up on one arm. Wow.
Mother Ginger in this production is called Mother Barnum, and she (although played by either Jason Hartley or Luis Torres) is a big merry-go-round. I like that a whole lot better than productions where she’s this giant and the kids (clowns, or, technically, Polichinelles) get like creepily birthed out from under her skirt.
It’s cold and windy when we get out, and we catch a cab home, the one day of the year that Dawn will take a taxi. And he’s just about the fastest craziest cab driver in the city, this guy is.
We drive from Washington to Atlanta. Well, to Newnan, somewhat south of Atlanta. We drive all day.
For some reason, on road trips, Dawn likes to drive first. And that’s just fine with me, because we’re up early and I’d just as soon snooze in the passenger seat as much as possible. She fires up the first CD of the day, the soundtrack to Zeferelli’s Romeo and Juliet. We listen to it through like four or five times, for a couple of hours. I’ll fire up something more rocking after lunch.
At some point Dawn plays some Philip Glass. It sounds to me like … insanity.
We leave just after seven in the morning and finally arrive at the Dillon farm around eight-thirty p.m. Long drive.
So we’ve got Armed Forces Day, which is for current members of the military. And we’ve got Memorial Day, which is for past dead members of the military. And today is Veterans Day, which is for past living members of the military.
Happy Veterans Day, guys. Especially my father and brother.
Of course was originally Armistace Day, commemorating the end of World War I. And that’s a day worthy of Owen’s most famous poem.
Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum EstBent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The usual Saturday morning, with yoga at Tranquil Space. On the drive there I see a woman, hailing a cab at Eleventh and Mass, who looks like the new temp in the Education & Training department at work. A cab next to us makes a really crazy move to get to her, making at least two and maybe three illegal turns.
Later, after lunch, we pack up the car for the demi-annual household hazardous waste collection. I go up Fifteenth, confusedly thinking I’m going to Bladensburg or Brentwood Road, when in fact we’re going to Benning Road. Luckily we have to actually cross Benning Road, at which time Dawn reels me back from the abyss and sets me in the right direction.
We have the address of the transfer station where we’re going, but even better there are lots of signs on the way for the collection today. We turn in and join a long line of cars waiting. We’ve been listening like the last week or two to some classical CD of Dawn’s, and we finally tire of it and I pop in one of mine. One of my all-time favorites, the Housmartins The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death. Dawn doesn’t like it so much.
We have only paint and varnish and oily rags and the like, but we see they’re also collecting electronics. We see a man whom we only know as Tiger’s Dad dropping off some computers. We wave at him but he doesn’t recognize us, is only crabby so that we don’t cut in front of him.
Back home we pick up and clean and vacuum and all that,getting ready for dinner. Becky’s coming over. I don’t so much like doing house chores, but I sure do love the house when it’s all sparkly clean.
Then we’re off to the Kennedy Center for the Washington Ballet. First up is a piece called In the Night by Jerome Robbins, music by Chopin. I think it’s wonderful. Next is something called oui/non. It’s choreographed by Washington Ballet’s Artistic Director Septime Weber. And that’s the good news. The music is Karen Akers singing Edith Piaf. The best that can be said is that it’s live music, that Karen Akers is actually up there on stage singing. I always prefer actual live music to recordings. And hey, who doesn’t love Edit Piaf, right?
At intermission we see Dr. Claudia from St. Matt’s. We joke about Jason Hartley hurling himself around on stage.
Last up is In the Upper Room, which I positively hate. I hate the music, by Phillip Glass, and I hate even more the choreography, by Twyla Tharp. It’s all modern jogging around.
But, still, Erin Mahoney is so very tall, and I really like Elizabeth Gaither, despite Dawn’s complaints about her gawky floppy hands. And that Luis Torres is one strong man, able to toss Brianne Bland like way high in the air. Dawn moons over guest artist Sean Stewart.
I get stuck at work and don’t make it to the game until 6:20 p.m., twenty minutes after start time. I hope there were enough guys there to field a team without me, without having to forfeit.
Turns out the A-Bomb Kids had only seven players show, so they were the ones to forfeit. But the teams are playing anyway, just for fun, scrimmage. It does seem a smidgen unfair that we field the full complement of eleven against them, while they’ve only got seven. But we’re not like that good either, so we need all hands we can get.
I jump in and play catcher and emcee for one half inning, then am the first up to kick on offense when that’s over and we change. I kick the first ball high into right field, and it’s promptly caught. And surprisingly that ends the game. Apparently the scrimmage agreement was to play only until six-thirty.
And that ends our season as well. Our record of 3-9-1 puts us fourteenth out of the sixteen teams in our division.
For no good reason, the article of the day in Wikipedia today is about 0.999…, meaning a zero followed by a decimal point followed by an infinite series of nines. So far so good, as we’re all used to seeing, for example, one-third represented by both a fraction (e.g., 1/3) and as a similar decimally notated number (e.g., 0.333…) or some other representation, like having a bar over the last three.
But the point of the article is not to simply note that such a recurring decimal exists, but rather to also say that it is equal to one. As in:
0.999… = 1
Not that they’re just similar, or like really really close. No, not just that. But that they are in fact absolutely equal. They are two ways of representing the same number.
So at first I’m amused by such a silly notion. Then I’m a little distressed when they offer a number of mathematical proofs. (The simplest of which is starting with that 1/3 = 0.333… and then multiplying both sides by 3. Gets you there, don’t it?) So then I actually start to get slightly pissed off about it.
The article goes on to discuss the stress that math students feel about this particular concept and its proofs, so I’m not unique or anything in my reactions. But still, it’s like the stages of grief, you know, having to deal with this new fact that I really could’ve done without knowing.
And so then the only thing to do now is to burden you with it.
Sorry.
(And yet I’m still hoping that this is some sort of MIT or CalTech version of an April Fool’s joke.)
Dawn and I are walking up Mass Ave in the morning, walking to work. At some point we’re talking about tall and short or something about height anyway, and Dawn mentions that, compared to me, she’s closer to the ground.
It makes me think of, and so I immediately start singing to her, the wonderful song Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground. It was written by Willie Nelson, but I’ve never actually heard any version that he’s done. I know the Bob Dylan version. I think it was a b-side of some single in the early to mid eighties. I had a 7-inch of it, and I must have played it to death in my room that I rented in Fairfax when I was going to George Mason University. I think it was 1985.
And I had it around the time that Francois Truffaut died. It always makes me think of him. And the single that I had was misprinted, or erroneous, in that it listed the songwriting credit as Dylan himself, rather than Willie Nelson.
(Some Googling shows that Truffaut died in October of 1984. Harder to track down the song. Probably the b-side to Union Sundown, and a European release apparently. Most likely I bought it at Yesterday and Today Records in Rockville, to which we made frequent pilgrimages in those days.)
Harper’s whole monologue:
Night flight to San Francisco; chase the moon across America. God, it’s been years since I was on a plane. When we hit 35,000 feet we’ll have reached the tropopause, the great belt of calm air, as close as I’ll ever get to the ozone.
I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them and was repaired.
Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.
We’re up early to drive to New Jersey. Main and Erin are throwing a graduation party for John. Supposedly.
Rumors have been flying about this party all summer. I’m so dense I wouldn’t have figured it out for myself, but Rob & Carol decide that it’s going to be a wedding rather than a graduation party. I initially dismiss such talk as silly, but the closer we get to the actual event the more I’m convinced that they’re really getting married.
So we get to the Madison Hotel in Morristown NJ, all of like fifteen minutes before the official start time of one p.m. I’m a little panicky, really not wanting to be late for a wedding, in case it is a wedding, right?
And first thing I see is the sign directing various folks to the various functions being held in the hotel, and the item of note says Lawler/Melick Surprise Party. Now, this was billed as a simple graduation party. No surprise. Yup, must be a wedding.
I quickly change in the spacious restroom, and when I come out I find Dawn. Then we find Main and John. I see John’s in a suit, and Main’s, yup, in a white dress. It’s a wedding.
But there’s cocktails from one to two, so needn’t have worried about being late. Who is late, however, is Annmarie. We chat with her son Patrick and his wife Valerie, who have been in cell phone contact with her, but don’t want to tell her why she should hurry.
Happily Annmarie shows up in plenty of time, whereupon Main assures her that she wouldn’t have started without her, and Annmarie bursts into great sobbing tears anyway.
The bride is lovely and the groom is especially spiffy. Erin is spectacularly dazzling. A Catholic priest good-naturedly performs the civil ceremony. Main and John touchingly recite their own vows.
And Erin later gives her own touching speech for a toast to the happy couple.
What grand fun.
We lost last night, but we feel pretty good actually. We lost ten to nine, so we feel like we acquitted ourselves well. And it was fun, something rare this season.
My mother was stuck in Mexico, having been scheduled to fly back later on the day of the attacks. My father’s girlfriend Sharon was actually in the air, coming back from Germany, and got diverted to Canada. Dad later drove to Detroit to get her.
I wasn’t sure the next day whether to go to work. Whether the office was open. Whether the city was open. And we were all pretty keyed up for like a whole month after that, where any emergency vehicle siren was upsetting, where guys were stationed on every street corner on top of Humvees and holding machine guns. National Airport didn’t open for more than a month.
I remember rallying behind President Bush. Heck, we all did. And Le Monde saying, Nous sommes tous Américains, remember? Where did that go?
I didn’t especially relish the idea of invading Afghanistan, but I didn’t especially oppose it either. I mean, the President certainly gave the Taliban every opportunity to give up Bin Laden. (Although I suppose that Bin Laden pretty muched owned the Taliban, so it’s not like they very much could do anything. But live by the sword, you know?)
Busy, busy day, starting with yoga, of course. It’s Purvi’s last day assisting Carol’s Saturday 9:15 class. She apparently is graduating and moving on to teaching on her own.
Then after lunch we’re off to pick up Dawn’s parents, Mother Dillon and Papa Joe, from the airport. We watch a plane taxi to gate seventeen, but the screen has told us that their flight is arriving at gate nineteen. So it’s something of a surprise when they walk up to us as we’re just sitting there, like we were too lazy to go wait right outside security for them. We’re a bit embarrassed.
First to arrive to the party are Gordon and Ally, who arrive early as they have to leave early. Babs is running in some sort of 9/11 5K, and they have to go cheer for her. They’ve brought their salsa, which Dawn specifically emphatically repeatedly requested. Many other family, friends, and neighbors start flowing in not too much later: Dad, Rob & Carol, Kevin & Clare, Renee & Jim, Kara. I hope I’m not forgetting anyone. Most everyone brings a bottle of wine with them. Dawn gets pleasantly drunk. I eat too much, so I’m too full to drink too much.
We have two kinds of pie in lieu of cake, both pies that I’ve in fact made myself. The one is a pumpkin-gingerbread pie in a baking dish, the easier of the two as it’s made with canned pumpkin and gingerbread mix. The other is a more personal statement, a maple walnut pie, for which I’ve made the crust. I’m pretty proud of my pie crusts.
We have two candles, one a big wax four and the other a zero, instead of actually having forty candles. We sing Happy Birthday, then Sarah remembers that she wants a picture of this, but needs to go upstairs to get her camera. So while we’re waiting we sing again, then add my Dad’s May the dear Lord bless you verse. Finally Sarah returns and gets her picture.
There’s a lot of dishes to do, even though we used paper plates and plastic cups and whatnot as much as we could. There’s a ton of leftovers too, that we’ll be eating for days.
I work only half the day, or maybe a little more. Dawn’s at home all day getting the place ready for her parents’ visit and tomorrow’s party. I’m hoping to dash just after noon, but then Arthinia needs to finish entering some booth orders so that I can run an exhibitor list for her. I leave sometime around one-thirty.
I get home and work through my list of chores that Dawn has thoughtfully drawn up for me. The biggest is cleaning off the workbench, and then moving it to the center of the workshop/dining room so that we can use it as a buffet table for the party. Man, it’s really heavy. I originally built it so as to be portable, too, is the thing. So as to be able to dis-assemble it for storage and to re-assemble it as needed. But that was before we decided to turn the dining room into the workshop. Before I added the hardboard back to lessen the already minor racking of the base assembly.
We play the team called Kick This, the light blue team, which team actually I’ve met, since I reffed one of their games a couple weeks ago. I reffed quite poorly, and maybe even they lost because of my poor skills. I felt pretty bad.
They don’t play so well, but we play abominably, although the final score of 4 to 1 doesn’t really do our horror show any justice. There’s the one point where we’re on defense, and at one moment they’ve got two runners on third. Cole, our third baseman, is screaming for the ball, alas, to no avail. The runners have time to chat, plot some strategy even, before deciding that maybe the best thing to do is to try for home. They both make it.
Kevin drives me home and we both agree that we’re not having any fun playing on the team.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me.
Says I, But Joe, you’re ten years dead.
I never died, said he,
I never died, said he.In Salt Lake, Joe, says I to him,
him standing by my bed,
They framed you on a murder charge,
Says Joe, But I ain’t dead,
Says Joe, But I ain’t dead.The Copper Bosses killed you Joe,
they shot you Joe, says I.
Takes more than guns to kill a man,
Says Joe, I didn’t die.
Says Joe, I didn’t die.And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes,
Says Joe, What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize.From San Diego up to Maine,
in every mine and mill,
where working-men defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I, But Joe, you’re ten years dead
I never died said he,
I never died said he.— Alfred Hayes, c. 1930
Tommy Wells, candidate for city council, rings the doorbell, with him a woman with an SEIU sticker on her shirt. Tommy says that he’s appropriately campaigning with a member of organized labor today on Labor Day.
I tell them that I’ve been thinking about the great Flint Sit-Down Strike today. I greet the woman cheerfully, telling her that I know SEIU stands for the Service Employees International Union. And that they just celebrated their one-hundredth birthday in 2003. Happy birthday, I tell her.
Later research will show me that I’m terribly confused, that I’m actually thinking of the Laborers’ International Union of North America. They are kind, however, and ignore my mistake.
I tell Mr. Wells that, although I like him and appreciate him coming by, I am not a registered Democrat and thus cannot help him on September 12. I’m happy to support him in the general election in November, but for now he needs to speak to the missus.
Handily, she’s just coming around to the front from the back yard. Mr. Wells and Dawn chat for a while.
(A couple days later Dawn will receive in the mail a nice hand-written note from Tommy thanking her for her time and asking for her vote.)
As I’m getting out of the shower, drying off, Dawn asks me if I’ve heard about a Lassie moving coming out. I haven’t, actually. She tells me that Peter O’Toole is in it.
Isn’t he dead? Is this a new movie? Dawn doesn’t think that he’s dead. She says it’s a new movie.
I tell her that I met Peter O’Toole once, and she asks me what he was like. Drunk, is what I remember. And I tell her that he was trying to nail Babs. Dawn observes that this simply proves that Peter O’Toole has good taste.
Babs was wearing a provocative red dress, I also remember.
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
It’s a sonnet, of course, one of my favorites, another that I can recite from memory, although it’s been a while, so you may have to give me a minute to remember it all. But it’s another one that’s beautiful and yet also delicious mouth candy.
I love how the “sink and rise and sink and rise and sink” is almost like cheating, kinda repeating for lack of anything else to fill the line. But then it’s also just sorta going along with the old saw about going down for the third time. But by far my favorite part is the somewhat timidly hesitant, yet ultimately emphatic last line. Just so.