beviad

A Garliky, Delicious Meal

2009-12-08T20:06:53Z

I cooked a wonderful meal last night that is both laughably simple to make and full of garlicky goodness. John just kept saying, "This is delicious!", something he doesn't always say to my cooking, which is spotty at best. He and I were practically licking our bowls by the time we finished it. It serves 4 and takes less than half an hour to make. Here it is:

TOMATO AND OLIVES PENNE

Ingredients:

1/2 tsp. salt and 1/4 tsp. pepper
1/2 box of penne or other short pasta
1/4 c. olive oil
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
2 cups of cherry tomatoes, haved or quartered
1 tsp tabasco sauce
1 tsp. dried oregano
1/4 cup Kalamata olives, pitted and sliced
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving at the table

Instructions:

1. Boil salted water in large pot, then add penne, cooking for about 13 minutes or until pasta is "al dente."
2. Drain penne and set aside until time to mix with the sauce.
3. Meanwhile, in a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat.
4. Add the garlic and cook, stirring until they are just golden.
5. Add the cherry tomatoes, oregano, tobasco, salt and pepper.
6. Reduce heat to low and cook, stirring, until tomato juices run, about 3 minutes.
7. Add the penne, olives, parsley and 1/4 cup Parmesan to the skillet and toss to combine.
8. Serve with crusty French or peasant bread of some type, with Parmesan.

Now, do all the above and I guarantee that you will be gobbling this up. If you have children who might not like the olives, add them after you have served the children.

"The Best Gift I Ever Reaseaved"

2009-12-07T15:21:53Z

This is the essay which my seven year old grand-daughter, Devon, sent in to a contest. The prize was to be playing Tiny Tim in two performances of A Christmas Carol. She, along with 15 other kids between 7 and 10, won, and will be performing on December 18th at 10 and then at 1. Needless to say, we are very proud of her. What I find charming is the combination of memorable spelling and memorable narrative ability and vocabulary. Her sentiments are right on, too, and charming.

"The best gift I ever reaseaved was my dollhouse. I had been asking my mom and dad for one sinnes I was three. I wanted one ever sinnes I saw the dollhouse that is in the Westmount librairy. I liked evreything about it. It was so real that I felt like I was in it, and I longed to have a dollhouse like that because it was wouden and old fashioned, and old fashion thinges seem mostearios and magical.

"Then, when I was six, my mom thout I was ready to have her old dollhouse because I was more muchur. When I was three I would have maybe brocken something, and the dollhouse means alot to my mother becaus my granpa made it for her when she was little.

"Near Chrismais I asked my mom sevrul times for a dollhouse, but she would alwase say, "Oh well, dollhouses are alot of money. There's a slite chance you might get one but don't get your hopes up." I knew that my mom once had a dollhouse, but she toled me that she could not find it.

"Then it was Chirismas morning. I went downstairs and saw a big, raped gift. My mom toled me that it was a work bench that she was going to give to my grandpa. So I thoght there was no chance I was getting a dollhouse. Then, when he was about to open the present, my grandpa asked if I could help him unrape it. So I opened it, but I didn't relly look at it because I usueamed it was a work bench. I terned around and said to my grandpa, "It is a work bench!" But my mom said to me "Look again! It is not a work bench and it is not for grandpa!" I looked again, and I was so suprised! Infocted my gaw droped!

"I saw a huige, woulden, old faishion dollhouse egsakley what I wanted. I was so amased I couldnent stop thanking my parents and my grandparents. I think my dollhouse is even more speshiul than the one at the librairy because it was my mom's and my grandpa made it. My dollhouse was the best gift I ever reaseaved and I look forward to giveing it to my children some day."

Devon LeBlanc

Each Leaf Looks Shot With a Bullet Hole or Two or Three...

2009-11-11T17:55:37Z

I know that it says "I count only the sunny hours" at the top of this LiveJournal, something I posted there to remind me not to complain here. However, I'm afraid I do have to rant a bit. It's the leaves, you see. They're almost all fallen, now, and every time I walk out into the garden to feed the squirrels and tread on those which have fallen overnight, I feel an ache in my heart. Every one of them looks as if it has been brought down by some giant gunman during some wild rampage, since each leaf looks shot with a bullet hole or two or three.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Gazette, asking why it was that the so many of the trees this year looked as if their leaves had shriveled on the tree, while still green. I had just been out to "leaf-peep", as the folks in Vermont call it, and had been anguished to see how muddy the colors of the trees were, and how some trees seemed to have been stricken with something like a hot wind before they could even turn color. Whole vistas that once took my breath away in autumn, were now dulled, as if seen through a dark lens. On coming home I had of course Googled what I had seen, and found information on a condition called 'maple wilt' that was fatal to sugar maples. Was this what I was seeing, I asked. It certainly sounded like it.

Someone from the paper phoned me to assure me that it wasn't. She had phoned the Montreal Arboretum and had been told that no, it was only the so-called 'tar spot' fungus which entered our area a few years ago, and was a condition which wasn't fatal and could in fact be cleared up if people placed all their raked up leaves into bags. If left on the ground all autumn, the leaves would send spores into the air in spring, infecting other trees, or re-infecting the same trees they had fallen from.

That was when I started noticing the black spots on the leaves of trees around me. Looking up at the wonderful maple in our neighbor's yard, which drops all its leaves on our yard, I could see the usual web of black-veined, yellow leaves, but now each one was bearing a ragged bullet hole. And now that they have fallen, I have a yard of such spotted leaves, the leaves pale and sickly, much paler than in past years, I swear.

I still wonder about 'maple melt', since many trees I saw did not have tar spots, but still looked sickly. Could it be that the Arboretum doesn't know about the arrival of this type of spore in our area? Am I the only one who is distressed by this? Do the trees in the distance look muddy simply because of the introduction of these black spots, which merging with their colors, darken them collectively---if you know what I mean? I don't know. All I know is that walking in the leaf-strewn sidewalks of the city does not thrill me this autumn as it used to, since I feel I am treading on the faces of the murdered leaves.

I know. I'm weird. I wouldn't feel this way if maple leaves had a dark center, like the petals of the dogwood, and I had seen them this way every year of my life. But I am a lover of autumn, someone who has gloried in many years of changing leaves here in Montreal and down in Vermont, and it doesn't feel right to see things change like this, and not for the better. And I see nothing in the paper to suggest that people bag all their leaves to avoid this condition next year, either. It would seem that the horse is already out of the stable, and I will have to put up with future autumns with tar spotted leaves. I may even get used to them. But something beautiful has, as the poet says, gone out of this world. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Joyful in the Water

2009-11-03T21:22:56Z

   Perhaps because I spent my first nine years in Calgary, Alberta, far from an ocean or a large lake, I was one of those children who, when the time came to learn to swim, was afraid to put her face into the water. I drew away from the pool or the edge of the sea or pool with cat-like distaste and no desire to put even a toe in. Or, if actually persuaded by swim instructors (in the courses my mother kept signing me up for) to come in and immerse myself, I refused to try to do anything, and just stood there shivering. Since I especially hated the reek of chlorinated water, I would be afraid even of being splashed.

   By the time I was a teenager and lived in Vancouver, I liked going to the beach, but not to swim. Instead, I would lie in the sun for hours, unwittingly setting myself up for possible skin cancers later in life. When I got hot and bored, I would wade out to waist-deep water and paddle about, disliking the debris of corn cobs and condoms floating around me, then come back in to tan again.

Having children helped later, for one can't show fear to one's child over such a thing. On a vacation on a Greek island, I found the water so clean and wonderful that I not only went into it with my little one year old, but splashed around in it myself, too. Then, later, our babysitter lived in an apartment building with a beautiful penthouse pool that was only mildly chlorinated, in a room with windows from floor to ceiling. She invited us to come over once a week to enjoy it. The baby loved it, and the warm water made me feel confident about being in it up to my armpits, holding a squirming child. But I never got a chance to swim in that pool alone since I was busy with the baby.

Thus I have never learned to swim. Nor have I ever wanted to learn, really. The most I could ever do is dog-paddle a few yards to the shore if I were to fall overboard from a boat, if the shore were less than the width of a pool away. So until recently, I have never gone into a pool for pleasure.

   Instead, when vacationing in Maine, Vancouver, Cape Breton Island, and at various little Quebec lakes, I have preferred going out on a row boat or collecting shells or sitting, reading in a deck chair. As I've grow older, the thought of being seen in a swim suit in public kept me even from changing into shoreside clothes, so that invariably I was the most overdressed person on the beach or deck, sometimes even wearing a long skirt and a shawl, strolling on the shore like some demented gypsy.

   Last summer, after years away from anything resembling swimming or even wearing a swim suit, I heard that Aqua-fitness classes had started at the local Y. I thought that such a class might give me much needed exercise, but my dread of chlorinated water and publicly showing my body in a suit kept me from trying it out. Then this past July, after a week at a lake where I sat in my regular clothes once again while others swam, I decided to change. I knew that if I wanted to be more fit and lose weight, I needed to overcome my swimsuit anxiety and dislike of chlorinated water.

  So-- I bought a swim suit online, choosing it because it had a skirt that covered the upper part of my legs, but still winced at how I looked in the mirror once it arrived. Still, after finding out all the relevant info about the Aqua-fitness class, I steeled my nerve and turned up one day in August at the Y, clutching a bag full of swim gear and a towel.

There were no private changing rooms and there could have been no better way to get over my own fear of showing my body to others than suddenly being plunged into a room where some twenty women over sixty were trying modestly to get into swim suits. We all kept our eyes averted and down, but I couldn't help seeing other's lumpy legs, webbed with varicose veins, and other's overweight bodies. Most of the women were older than me and seemed to have come from the senior home across the street, which made me feel younger, at least in the face. I also felt a bit less embarrassed about my own body's flaws.

   Inching along the slippery deck tiles towards the end of the pool where people were gathering to await the instructor, I thought the other women and myself were like the pink hippos in tutus from Disney's "Fantasia", clumsily getting ready to dance. (I cringed when we passed the slim, young swim instructors sitting at the side of the pool chatting; the contrast was just too great between them and us.) But once the class began, I was amazed. Like the Disney hippos, we were amazingly agile when we began to do our exercises. And no one could see our bodies anymore; only arms and heads.

  I thought that we'd be instructed to make graceful moves in the water, doing a kind of yoga that was seemly for elderly women. I was wrong. The instructor almost immediately had us kicking like Rockettes to rock and roll and doing dance steps that were tricky. Unbelievably, I found I could do it. It was like moving in outer space might be, weightless and free. Even better, my aches and pains seemed to disappear. I thought I'd be wrecked when the class was over, but surprisingly I wasn't, although my legs were so exhausted that it was hard to lift myself up the ladder from the pool. The next morning I was a bit achy, but not unable to move, as I had feared. I decided that, wonder upon wonders, I could actually do this. So I went back. This time I found another room, almost private, with little compartments, to change in, with a good locker for my gear. And I had a new suit, a simple black Zeller's tank suit, since my other one had sopped up the water like a sponge, mainly because of that skirt I had hoped would hide the tops of my legs.

These days, I still hate the actual act of going to the pool. I still hate the stink of chlorine, the feel of the slimy tiles surrounding the pool that force me to walk as if on ice, the lukewarm water that always feels cold and unwelcoming as I slip into it. But once the music starts, I forget all these things. One of our instructors has a wonderful tape that includes such old gems as 'Blueberry HIll', 'Mac the Knife', 'Singin' in the Rain', and other Fifties songs. These pieces are so timeless and familiar that my body moves as easily to them as it once did on dance floors in my youth. And when it comes to the end, when we're doing relaxing exercises to wind down, 'Bali Hi' almost makes me tear up with its beauty.

Half way through the class I look around me. Although some, like me, are wearing a turban-type bathing cap, many women are wearing puffy plastic shower caps to avoid having to use one of those awful skintight rubber ones that squeeze one's ears. That should be comical, but somehow it isn't. Instead, the caps add a colorful note. Almost everyone, (except for that one grim woman who seems to be over-concentrating), is smiling up at the instructor. Their wrinkled faces--our wrinkled faces-- are a testament to the courage and determination of getting ourselves here. We are pleased at what we are doing because it is fun as well as good for us and because we are living in the moment, moving as if we were young again.

Suddenly, someone starts to sing along to an old Bing Crosby version of "Nothing Could be Finer than to Be in Carolina in the Morning", even the French and Asian women who I'd think might not know the lyrics. Feeling elated, I join them in singing. I suddenly think: It is 1:40 on an autumn day; I am happy and singing with others; and I am feeling very much alive and well and even fit.

How strange, then, when we get out of the pool. Suddenly we are all land-bound again and heavy in our bodies. One woman even has to use her walker when she heads for the changing room. However, the chemicals that flood the body when you exercise for any length of time give me a lift that lasts longer than the class, and that's enough to make me love what I'm doing. Even if it is in a chlorinated pool.

Thoughts While Feeding the Squirrels

2009-10-25T20:47:47Z

When I go out my back door to feed the squirrels, as I do almost every morning, they run towards me, then pause to sit up and gaze at me with what looks like hope on their faces. Before I appear, they have been gleaning seeds from under the bird feeder. That must be a tedious job, for most of what they encounter will be discarded shells. How much better, then, it must be to get real, uneaten peanuts. No wonder they romp across the grass when they see me coming.

I have to be careful, though. In my city, it's illegal to feed the squirrels peanuts, in parks at least. There's a $500 penalty. And, as he gardens, a few of our neighbors have remarked to my husband, rather ominously, that someone is feeding the squirrels around here. They know this because they see squirrels burying peanuts in their yards. The law exists, presumably, to avoid any possible damage to children with peanut allergies. Nevertheless, since no one nearby has mentioned peanut allergies, I refuse to deny my squirrels, who are about the ninth generation of squirrels to be fed in my backyard, the joy of getting peanuts.

There are four of them now, and they are getting very fat and furry in preparation for winter. When they grab a peanut, they run off, as often as not, to bury it somewhere, frequently in one of the pots on the patio I use for flowers. In the summer, I find the soil all churned up in these pots, with the plant's roots exposed and a nut half in, half out of the dirt below it. Plants have died like that, when I didn't see them in time to replant them. However, I forgive the squirrels. They can't possibly know that they are bothering me. And I should really hang up the pots, anyway, although they are nimble in managing to use the hanging baskets as nut holders as well. Still, it must be very hard to have to scrabble constantly for food.

When I forget to feed them, I feel dreadful. Sometimes, in the summer, they come right up to the back door or kitchen window and look in to where I am reading the paper or doing the crosswords, their little faces resembling those of some Dickensian urchins--only with whiskers. They can also, after some practice, resort to shinnying down the wire to the bird feeder, upside down, or, worse still, go after my husband's prize tomato plants. In that case, my feeding them better resembles a preventative measure.

Sometimes, however, as I go out in autumn weather like today's with my bag of nuts, I fancifully think of the Children of Israel as they wandered in the Old Testament wilderness after leaving Egypt. Daily, we are told, they were fed by mana given to them by Yawah/Jehovah, their temperamental god. It lay like a wafer on the ground until the dew rose, we are told, and if if wasn't harvested immediately, it rotted. I wonder: do my squirrels, in their very furry little minds, think of me as godlike, since I provide their 'mana' daily? Or, to turn things the other way around (the more cynical way), were the Israelites like squirrels to some god figure who fed them, but only if they got up early?

Perhaps the history of religious belief has somewhat resembled my daily experience with the squirrels. People prayed to a god, or gods, for a successful harvest. If that didn't happen, they worried about what they had done to anger the gods and what they could do to bring back their favor. More prayers and even sacrifices would have followed. Eventually, things got better, and they thanked god. Or they didn't, and the people starved. And the priests, of course, were there to give them spiritual rules and laws to please their gods.

The Greeks, like many other cultures, worshipped many gods, which meant that determining which god or goddess had been angered was a difficult one, and one including interpreting of omens, examining animal innards and other such procedures. At least, however, having many gods did not put all the onus on one particular god for being angry, or seeming to have turned his face away from his people, or slept, during some some terrible event like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or the Holocaust.

I recall at least one Star Trek episode where a god-like figure seems to be working out his anger on the Enterprise. Kirk and his crew struggle to find out how to get rid of his involvement, only to find, near the end of the episode, that he is only a child god, playing with them as another child would play with toys. His parents, two adult gods, collect him up after a period of thunderstorms that represented their anger and his resistance. The series also boasts the tricky Q, a god who appears in several other episodes to bug the Enterprise.

Interesting to think of that: humans could be just the toys of the gods. That reminds me of a line from Shakespeare's play, 'Julius Caesar.' One character says to another:

"Like flies to wanton boys--
So are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport."

The Eighteenth Century philosophers in Europe considered the possibility of an absentee god, one who had created humans, then gone away. That idea tried to explain how there could have been a god who did such a great job on Creation but hadn't done much lately. Both Jews and Christians, of course, say that the state of human life is because Eve and Adam ate forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden; as a result, Yawah exiled them from Eden. Where once they had been in a garden full of fruits and vegetables (but with no eating of meat, apparently), now they and their descendants would forever have to till the soil to make a living on their own. And the animals of the world, who had lived in peace with them and each other in Eden, would now fear them because they'd become future dinners.

This story was offered as an explanation for why God can't just give us everything that we need every day; we must work hard, we are told, because of this ancient ancestral sin. And what better than a distant sin, committed at the beginning of Time, to explain how hard is was for humans to scrape a living from the earth? It's no stranger than a myth explaining why the elephant has a long trunk, or why the raven is black.

The trouble is, the whole story does rather unfortunately suggest a god who holds grudges forever, hardly something we expect in a god we are asked to love as well as worship. It would be as if I had told my squirrels that I would feed them daily, but only if they didn't attack my bird feeder. Then, when inevitably one did, if I cursed all future squirrels and refused to feed them any more, expecting them to forage for their food on their own. Doesn't sound like the behavior of a loving god, does it?

But then, the Israelites didn't think of Yawah as a loving god, did they. A shepherd, yes. A voice out of the whirlwind, chiding Job for having dared to complain, after the devil has taken away his home, his crops and his children--as well as plaguing him with boils--yes. A jealous god who doesn't want us to worship any other god, yes. (Doesn't that sound like a petulance suitable for the playground, somehow?)

It is only with the New Testament that we get the idea of a god who is a loving father in heaven. Even so, Old Testament scripture having been incorporated into the Christian Bible, the hellfire and brimstone of the old Yawah has been retained somehow, thereby creating the most complicated of deities, one who is a supposedly loving father but still punishes his children, we are told, for various reasons, leaving destruction in his path.

It took the Enlightenment and the development of Scientific thought to learn that Drought, Pestilence and Famine, for example, had causes that were preventable and had nothing to do with any deity's anger. And yet, we still tend at times to feel like playthings to the gods, especially when people have to suffer horrendous hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. Only now we call this god Weather or Natural Phenomena.

Feeding the squirrels also reminds me of the old Chinese saying that if you save a person's life, you are responsible for it from then on. Strange, isn't it? Not that the person should be grateful to you, but that the onus is on you to continue helping him or her. Now that I have been feeding the squirrels and they have come to depend on me, it is irresponsible of me to simply stop feeding them. Or so I feel. And I hope it won't cost me $500 in penalties for doing so.

Traveling the Dream-Like World of Google Streets

2009-10-21T16:32:35Z

So-- I have discovered Google Streets.

It was hard to find, but I stumbled upon it after many tries, suddenly finding myself on St. Catherine Street in Montreal, in 3D, no less. It's one thing to trace a route on a map with your finger in a car as you travel in a strange city, or even find a map of a city online, but to find yourself able to glide through the streets of your home town, stopping to look at store fronts as you go, is a very strange sensation. It has a dream-like quality, especially since the photos that make up this technical miracle seem to have been taken in early morning, when few people are on the sidewalks and few cars are on the roads.

My mouse is my avatar here, driving me with the aid of a white arrow that points in various directions, offering me many ways I could go. I can swivel slowly, awkwardly, as if wrestling with a steering wheel, to see both sides of the street if I want. I can speed up too, but if I do, the buildings blur as if I have suddenly stepped on the gas in a very fast car. Only there is no sound of an engine, or of the usual city sounds, and no feeling of tires going the many pot holes I know are on St. Catherine's Street.

Surely Google would only have done this in the downtown area, I think. And maybe around the local landmarks as part of a tourism effort-- Mount Royal, the waterfront, the Olympic Stadium, that kind of thing. But no. Google seems to be letting me leave the shops and restaurants of the center of the city behind me. I head for Westmount, tentatively, expecting any moment to reach an end to this experience because I am no longer anywhere important. Yet the road continues, past the old Forum, past Alexis Nihon shopping plaza, and on into more residential areas.

Now that I am in a more heavily treed part of town, I suddenly realize that the soundlessness I am floating in excludes the twittering of birds and the rustling of leaves. Then I notice that there are, in fact, no leaves on the trees. And no green grass or bushes or flowers, either. Can I turn onto my street? My pulse speeds up, as if I am nearing some exotic locale, rather than going to the familiarity of my own turf. House by house, I near my home. And then there it is, looking very barren, for the lilac tree by the porch is bare, the front garden shows only a few shoots of early plants, and the hedge consists only of ugly twigs. So, this must be March, or April, I think, and not of this past year, either, since our hedge is much higher than that at present. Maybe two years ago?

It occurs to me that I am, in effect, like a time-traveller. On some past day in early spring, I am hovering several feet above the pavement on my street, early in the morning. I see no sign of life. And no sign of our car, either. Maybe this is before we got our car, in summer of 2008? How odd it all is. What if I could see myself coming out the front door, to pick up the paper, for example?

How is this different from watching a film that took me to my city, my street, my home, I wonder. That would be weird, too, I imagine. But in that case I would be unable to swivel around. My apparent dexterity is what gives this experience such a dream-like quality.

Hastily, I switch to Vancouver, and travel along East Hastings towards Burnaby North. As I become more adept at this, I type in the intersection of the spot on Capitol Hill where I lived for six or seven years, as a troubled teenager, back in the Sixties. It lurches into view, a bit askew, as if I have been dropped there by parachute. Or as if I am a ghost, visiting my past haunts, and have just willed myself there. Yet my tall old white house is not there. Instead, a ghastly new house, with red trim and red trimmed metal fence stands there, as gaudy as something in the Swiss Alps. I check the street names. Yes, this is where it was. I guess my house has been torn down. But why? It wasn't decrepit, just old; it had beautiful hardwood floors and a lovely bay window, and a garden with a cherry tree out back. And a tall hedge, behind which I had my first kiss, at age sixteen.

As I slowly move up Grosvenor Avenue, I see that Japanese cherry trees are blooming in many front gardens here. But I recognize nothing. Surely I must have walked these streets during those years? Didn't we have neighbors? It wasn't a very friendly place, I recall; we only really knew the neighbors across the street (whose house also has disappeared.) Still, something must be familiar somewhere. I go to where the corner store used to stand, on Dundas. It's gone. The ugly new split-level house we first lived in, when we first moved to Capitol Hill, three houses from the corner, is gone, too. I'm not surprised at that; it wasn't worth saving.

But the beautiful old house that used to stand next to ours in the center of three city lots, all of them gardens, old Mrs. William's place, where I used to play Swallows and Amazons with my sister Barbara (now dead, dead at 26 years old, in a car accident) when I was about eleven and she was six, using the grape arbor as a place to creep away like pirates or Indians or explorers, unseen, and the various sheltered seats (little follies, I guess they'd be called,) as forts or fairy dwellings--it's gone, too. And it was lovely, with the nicest little inglenood around the fireplace inside, where Mrs. Williams served me tea once she called me in to ask me what we were playing in her garden. There are only new houses here now, looking rather raw without the softening effect of shrubs.

What about my grandmother's house in Kitsilino? I type in the address, even though I know that when her house was sold, over ten years ago, the new owners tore it down and built what was then called a 'monster house.' (These were the houses being built by Hong Kong Chinese, coming to Vancouver and buying real estate. Their houses were so large that they filled an entire lot and dwarfed the compact houses around them.)

I overshoot the spot, then mouse my way back, looking for the weeping willow that grew at the edge of my grandparents' property. I recall that when I was five and my mother and I came to live with my grandparents while my mother gave birth to Barbara, that tree was so short that I was able to creep under it and watch people pass from behind the trailing branches that covered me like a veil. There it is. And yes, my grandparents' brown-shingled bungalow is gone.

It is strange to see where familiar houses once stood and realize they are gone. It's like feeling the place in your mouth where a tooth has been pulled. There is a faint sense of shock, as if your system is recoiling at having to readjust its mental images of something important. When I went to see where my grandparents' house had been, about ten years ago while visiting in Vancouver, I felt faint as I gazed at where it had been. I just couldn't adjust to the fact that something else stood there. It's even stranger to hover here, ghost-like, on a computer screen, with no relatives near me to talk to, looking at it, and remembering what used to be.

I lived with my grandparents for a year after my father died, while my poor mother was tying up legal matters and sell the house back in Winnipeg, where we had been living at the time of his death. It was a sad, strange year, as I recall, but their house was cozy and my grandmother was a great cook, or so I thought at the time. Every Wednesday night they took me to the double feature at a nearby movie theater, where Tupperware items were given as door prizes during the intermission.Then, on Saturdays, I went alone to see another double bill, usually a western and something else. I recall seeing 'Singing in the Rain', and coming home singing and dancing into the gutters of this very street, filled with the light-heartedness that Gene Kelly's dancing could inspire.

I suddenly notice that the house that stood next to theirs, the old one always in need of paint, where I rented a suite much later, as a university student, is still there. Still there! I almost feel like weeping. But the willow is now so tall that I can't see much of its front, and can't go around to the side of the house, of course, where the door to my little three room apartment was located. I was so proud of that place! It was my first real home away from home, on my own, without a room mate. I hung red burlap curtains, painted the walls pure white, and almost made it attractive, despite the battered old furniture the place came with.

It was there that John (now my husband) and I sat chastely on a sagging sofa, sharing the libretto and listening to Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle operas as they played on heavy records. We had come across quotations from these operas in 'The Waste Land', the T.S. Eliot poem we were studying in our Modern British English course, and had found that the University of B. C. had Wagner records we could take out, like library books, to listen at home. As we shared the libretto, our hands and thighs occasionally touched. It was very beautiful and scary, falling in love while listening to opera, especially Wagner's mythic ones; his music became the sound track of our early love affair.

I turn off Google, suddenly overwhelmed with memories, and wondering at Google's ability to take me back even further than that day in spring, probably in 2007 or 2008, when that street was filmed. As the Beatles expressed it so well,

"There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain.
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living,
In my lie I've loved them all."

And, to echo one of Stephan Pastis' cartoon characters in "Pearls Before Swine", "All Praise to the Google!" for taking me there.

Of Mozart, "Elvira Madigan", 1968, and Love.

2009-09-28T14:55:02Z

Ah, the beauty of Mozart's music! Especially the Andante of Piano Concerto # 21, the "Elvira Madigan" theme music, which is playing now on the radio beside me, as I sit here typing on a gray day near the end of September. Some readers may not know of this music, or of the movie by that name, but to me it is part of the many-tuned theme music of the Sixties, or at least, of the part of the Sixties that I loved, the last few years of that decade, when I was happy, young, beautiful, and in love.

What I remember of the film "Elvira Madigan" are scenes of a nineteenth century, long-haired, blonde Swedish girl in flowing white dress and straw hat, twirling slowly and dreamily in a field of flowers under warm sunlight, while Mozart's slow movement plays and her lover, a Napoleonic war soldier, watches fondly from under a nearby tree where they have been picnicking. It is a scene celebrating summer, freedom, youth, beauty and happiness in love, and because I was also in love, I identified with the characters in the film when I saw it in the spring of 1968. My life, which had had many years of unhappiness, now seemed to be blossoming in sunlight, and although I wasn't actually twirling in a field of flowers, my spirit was.

In the fall of 1967, my boyfriend, John, and I had decided to leave Vancouver for Montreal to study for our PhDs at McGill University. He had been given a teaching fellowship that would support him while he studied. I hadn't, but I went with him anyway in a real leap of faith. I had no idea how I would support myself in Montreal while I studied, since I had no money and my French wasn't good enough for me to do restaurant work, which had financed my studies at the University of B.C. I followed my heart rather than my head, which told me to go to the University of Toronto, where I could work easily.

And, when we arrived in Montreal and went to McGill, it was as if my good fairies had worked some kind of magic, for I was lucky enough to be offered a teaching fellowship someone else had just declined. Yet we still didn't, individually, have enough money to rent apartments; we were only being paid $150 each a month, and apartments were relatively expensive. Again, we had been lucky; my boyfriend and I had found a large, ground floor apartment within walking distance of the university, for $65 a month, heated, and had decided to share it. This was still considered immoral at that time; for example, we had told our landlord we were married, and hadn't told our parents what we were doing. My boyfriend's father had a bad heart and he felt he'd have another heart attack if he found out.

Now, in the spring of 1968, the temperature was already like summer, even while the snow was still melting. Unlike those of rainy Vancouver, there had been many cold, sunny days in that lovely long winter, days where I had been happy to walk the snowy streets to campus wearing my new, sexy, high, leather boots (which I had to lie on my back on the bed to pull up), a long, waist-hugging, khaki Women's Army coat (with buttons showing the head of Athena) which I had bought at the Salvation Army, and a very long scarf. People said I looked like Lara in the movie "Dr. Jivago," and I felt beautiful for the first time since childhood. In Vancouver my hair had always been limp from the heavy moisture that in the air, and my face had broken out too easily. Here, my hair crackled with electric static when I brushed it, and my face was wondrously clear in the dry air. The winter sun had lifted my spirits, too, out of their usual melancholy. Best of all, we had had a very good winter together. We now felt triumphant, as if we had run a gauntlet together and survived. All our worries about sharing, trusting, rubbing against each other in close proximity, being able to study and work under the same roof, had been dispelled. Our relationship had never been stronger.

Having just hosted Expo 67, which had brought tourists from all over the world to its streets, Montreal was an exciting place to live at that time. On the streets downtown, we kept meeting other young people we knew from Vancouver, many of whom had been guides to Expo and were staying on to go to McGill. It was as if everyone had come to Montreal, as if it was the place to be. As the weather warmed, bistros suddenly had tables out on the sidewalk filled with French students drinking coffee and smoking Gallois cigarettes; boutiques we passed had rock music blaring and young people flowing out of them. The pubs, too, when we visited them, were overflowing with students in a way the Vancouver pubs never were, for there, the campus was far away from the downtown area. In fact, Montreal, with its many universities, both French and English, seemed alive with college students, which gave it a lively, 'happening' atmosphere, despite the habited nuns also occasionally encountered on the streets, in twos, or spied in the yards of the many Catholic schools, or the gardens of the many convents.

In Vancouver, the fashion for the young had been long, hippie skirts and sandals, influenced by California. Here, everywhere, girls were wearing mini-skirts and knee-high boots, influenced by the Carnaby Street look from England. I wore minis and boots, too, even to teach at McGill, and enjoyed a certain attention from the profs there, both young and old, stodgy and 'hip'. They were trying to get used to the Youth Culture, which affected them all quite differently, for this was a time of intellectual change, too. It was all quite different from U.B.C., where the profs had been very old and stodgy and had viewed any pretty female student as a nuisance, an unwelcome distraction in their classes. (Although in our last years there, we had experienced a transfusion of modernity when American profs in loafers, open-necked shirts and slacks arrived; they had slouched at their desks up front rather than standing at the podium, and had held classes at their homes where beer was served, and had generally brought the beatnik movement to try to shake up all the Scottish and British profs of the Englsh department)

In Montreal, although one of my thesis advisers, when I first arrived at his office to meet him, looked with distaste at me and said, "I always feel I'm wasting my time advising pretty girl students, since they're just going to drop out and get married," most profs treated me well. (Some openly flirted with me, which was gratifying, but also discouraging at times, for I wanted to be taken seriously.)
I was not just a pretty girl in a mini skirt and boots. In fact, I worked hard to prove I wasn't . My teaching was going very well. So were my own doctoral classes, many of which were very stimulating. For a change, I felt unafraid to offer my opinions in seminars, and often felt I was being listened to with respect. I was getting good grades. I also had been asked to chair a student-faculty committee dedicated to changing the PhD reading exam to something students could actually pass. I was proud of that, and felt that it was worth the long hours of arguing with students and faculty members about just how much power the latter would give to the former, just to have the credibility of being considered something other than frivolous or not political.

Mostly, however, I remember being with John, and in love. Exchanging raised eyebrows and private grins in classes, waiting to get home to our cozy, apartment, which was furnished with only a bed, a restaurant booth for the kitchen, only one desk, for John (I studied on the bed), and a stereo set. I, who had never cooked, used a new book called "The I Hate to Cook Book' to make things like baked potatoes filled with hamburger, mushrooms and mushroom soup. I also baked banana or tomato soup bread, following my grandmother's recipes (I often felt like I was auditioning for the role of wife); John and I both made spaghetti or chili and many, many cups of tea, and we lay in each other's arms when we should have been studying or marking students' papers. John was very considerate (he brought me tea in bed in the mornings, or left it, covered, by my side of the bed if he had to leave early to teach a class); he was very funny and witty and charming, full of puns and Monty Python imitations, and I loved him very much. And, amazingly, he seemed to love me. He also had a neat beard and a great head of shoulder-length hair and was very handsome; we were always being told what a cute couple we were by our friends, or even strangers.

But our teaching fellowships were coming to an end at the end of the spring term, so we had to give up our apartment and go back to Vancouver. We couldn't face going back to live with our parents, or in separate apartments. If we got married, we could be together wherever we lived. My only worry was that we would ruin a great relationship by getting married, for marriage was an institution under attack at that time, and almost no one we knew, except those in our parents' generation, were married; people even asked us why we were marrying, and we felt we had to shape an answer: we wanted to share an old-fashioned commitment, we said. Still, we didn't want all the expensive trappings of a traditional wedding. We figured that we could drive across Canada for our honeymoon; a drive-a-car agency was willing to give us a car for free to deliver to Calgary, and we could take a train from there. That would solve the problem of getting home, plus it gave us an excuse to marry in Montreal without our parents, whom we felt would ruin things.

In a Unitarian ceremony we wrote ourselves, at McGill chapel, we were married in June. We had twelve guests, no attendants, and no one to 'give me away': John and I walked hand in hand down the aisle. I wore a white, off-the rack, $25 dress with a short, belled skirt that floated about me when I whirled, and a straw hat with shasta daisies woven around the brim. I looked almost like Elvira Madigan. John wore his first suit, a charcoal black one with bell-bottomed cuffs, a purple shirt and red tie. Our black and white wedding pictures, taken by one of the guests in the back yard of another friend, where we had the reception, resemble out-takes from that film, with us embracing, laughing, under trees and amid grasses. (In reality, there was also a picnic table in that back yard, a BBQ and a lot of weeds, but that's the wonderful thing about photos, they isolate a moment, omitting all other details than those focused upon, so we might as well have been in a meadow, alone.) In the world outside, there were French-English problems in the city; Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was inciting Trudeau Mania in Canada (he was what my girlfriends and I had discussed at a wedding shower we were determined to make different from the usual); in the States, there was resistance to the Vietnam War. For us, these were distant horns blowing. All that mattered was the moment, our moment.

Forty-one years later, I sit here reminiscing. I am still married, happily, to my wonderful husband, who still has a fairly good head of hair, is still charming, and still leaves me my morning drink-- these days coffee-- at my place at the kitchen table, when he goes off to teach in the mornings. It takes only the sound of Mozart's 'Elvira Madigan' music to make me remember that year, that place, that girl I used to be. It is a beautiful memory, as beautiful as the music itself, and I feel no bitterness at no longer being young and beautiful. I had my day, my time in the sun. I was lucky. I still am.

"After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost

2009-09-23T19:15:44Z

My family and friends have all been apple picking lately. Usually my husband and I have gone with them, in October, but this time they set out early, and said that although the orchards were crowded with people, the apples--at least the Macs--didn't look red yet. They brought me some, and I can attest to the fact that they are still delicious. Maybe they will go back with me later. In any case, I began thinking of poems about apples. Here's one of my favorites.

"After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Stratford's "Midsummer Night's Dream"--A Vision of the Cosmos Out of Its Proper Order?

2009-09-21T15:15:13Z

I have just returned from Stratford, Ontario's Shakespeare Festival, where I saw two plays that were excellent, although as different as night and day. The first was "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum", and was very funny. The second has left me wondering why directors create art that jars unnecessarily, or when the same point could have been made with a minimum of cacophony and ugliness, especially when the playwright has given no such instructions on such a way to have the play interpreted on stage.

I have seen jarring theatre before. Everything from "Marat-Sade", with its mentally ill patients lolling around the stage, drooling on audience members in the front row and throwing carrots at them (I know; it was one of the few times in my life that I had snagged first row seats, and I regretted it) to "King Lear", with a wind howling loudly, old men being beaten and someone's eyes being gouged out. I have understood, in those case, a need to disturb the audience, to wake up its members, and/or to elicit pity and compassion. Such rude awakenings are sometimes necessary for tragedy, or even satire, to be effective.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream," isn't a tragedy: it ends with a happy ending complete with weddings, as classic comedies do. But it was light years in difference from "Forum," with a darkness better suited for a tragedy. As the title suggests, most of the action of the play occurs at night. Yet the production I saw presented us with a darkness that extended into all its corners, even during day scenes. There may have been a method to it, but there was too much madness for me to feel any love for it, for it contains nothing soft or beautiful or magical to lift either spirit or mind.

Upon first taking my seat, I saw that the stage was disappointingly bare--even barren. The stage designs I have seen in the past have always contained at least the suggestion of some kind of garden or forest, even for its early scenes in Athens, if only to indicate that this city is a fruitful place. The Forest of Arden, with its trees and flowers, where most of the action of the play will take place, should be right around the corner, swung into place, perhaps, by stage hands as the Athenian lovers meet there, where the fairies will cause them to spend a night of confusion.

This stage, however, was not just minimalist in style, but actually painted a dark grey, with harsh lighting and not so much as a chair or a tree to signify some sort of location. It could have been the stage set for "Waiting for Godot." Autumn leaves, scattered at its edges, were the only indication that it was going to be used for a play at all. But autumn leaves?? The play is set in summer! Midsummer, to be exact! The buzz around me suggested that the set had the audience puzzled from the start about the director's intentions.

The only other 'prop' was a metallic, modern-looking balcony high and ugly against the wall, jutting out over the stage. Soon after the play began--in a shower of machine gun fire, with soldiers rampelling down the side of the theatre wall as if we were being hijacked by Somalian pirates---- this balcony fell, with a jarring thud, onto the stage, to form an ugly vee-shaped wreck. My heart sank as well. This was not going to be a play about love and poetry and fairy magic; it was going to be modernized into something else. Something ugly.

The balcony remained on the stage throughout the play like the landscape after a terrorist attack. The actors climbed all over it, or perched, nervously, on it, or lurked or hid behind it. It kept the atmosphere edgy and as uncomfortable as they no doubt were, and made me ache just to look at it for two or more hours.

This was designed, one imagined, to fit in with the fact that at the start of the play, Theseus, King of Athens, has just fought a war against and conquered the Amazons, has stolen their queen, Hippolyta, and has brought her home to Athens with him to marry her. The setting and initial gunfire make the start of their relationship fraught with violence, ugliness and uneasiness, which is reflected in the their dialogue. However, as the lights lift, and Theseus introduces Hippolyta to Athens, there is absolutely nothing on stage in lighting or props to suggest they have left the battle zone.

The actor playing Hippolyta gave her the proper reluctant air. She is understandably skeptical about Theseus' stated intention to woo her and win her heart, despite the fact that he has captured her violently and brought her here against her will. And who can blame her? Athens doesn't seem any different from a battlefield. And in this productiion, Theseus still acts as if he's leading troups, with a sharp, bullying tone that is far from that of a lover--or even of a man trying to morph into one now that war has ended.

The fact that Theseus was wearing riding boots, jodpers and a hunting jacket and that his Amazon queen is also in modern dress--a 1950s evening gown-- also gave me a sinking feeling. I much prefer plays that keep their costumes to the century in which they are set. Of course, "Dream" is a bit of a muddle already when it comes to its whereabouts and era. The Forest of Arden, for example, is not a Greek wood outside of Athens, full of dryads and nymphs, but is a very English forest full of fairies with names like Cobweb and Mustardseed. It's always as if the two Athenian couples, with their Greek names, have been transported to some area near Shakespeare's own Stratford, perhaps in Shakespeare's own era, for a night of confusion that goes beyond that of mistaken identity and into the realm of time travel. Given this ambiguity of time and place, either Renaissance clothing or that of ancient Greek works well for the townspeople; the fairies can wear any era's styles; it's just their names and actions that make them weird and out of step with the court of Theseus. However, the suggestion is that they are nature spirits, so colors usually range in forest or garden colors.

Modern clothing, however, is always jarring for this play, for the action on the stage is totally un-modern, at least for Western society. A warrior queen has been captured and brought back to be a wife for King Theseus, her conquerer; a girl, Helena, pleads to that same king to free her from her father's anger and his plan to kill her if she doesn't marry the man of his choice; considering Theseus' attitude to women's choices, it's not surprising that she is told that she must do so, or will be forced to become a devotee of Diana, a perpetual virgin. These are situations that clash when they are presented by actors in modern dress, unless there is some subtext to the play to suggest why this era is comparable to the original one.

On that note, I would have accepted Helena as a girl in a burkha, since that would have been indicative of the fact that we still live in a world where, in some places, women still have no choices in their lives. But please, not while dressed in a 1950s crinoline, styletto heels and long white gloves. Been there, done that. And although I didn't have the freedom I have today, I certainly wasn't in danger of being forced into an unwanted marriage. So what, if anything, is the idea behind the director's choice of costuming here? Why the Fifties? Is it chosen because of its social rigidity, as a contrast to the fairies' more lawless world? Perhaps. But then, wouldn't the fairy world be one of hippies, to show the counter cultural shift?

I'll admit it: I'm a Romantic. I was first attracted to this play when I was in the girlhood stage of wanting to believe in fairies--around nine years old. Somehow, I saw Arthur Rackham's art work depicting scenes of fairies amongst blossoms and trees; of a Puck dressed in green tights and tunic, like Peter Pan; of a Titania and Oberon, Queen and King of the Fairies, dressed in feathery garments of such intense white and black that they could only be symbols of Day and Night, Light and Darkness, even Female and Male powers. I have always loved this symbolism, and the flowery language that described it. Even as a girl, I memorized some of the speeches such as that of Puck, Oberon's mischievous assistant, when he tells Oberon where Titania can be found:

"I know a bank where the wild Thyme blows
Where Oxblood and the pretty Daisy grows....
There sleeps Titania, sometimes of a night..
And there the serpent, sheds its enamel skin
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in."

(Something like that; my memory fails on the rest.) But the general impression the words give is of flowers and Nature's bounty, of fairies that could be small enough to be able to sit on a petal, or tall enough to love a human, as Titania is forced to do.

The idea of the fairies as Night and Day was expanded on in the black and white Hollywood movie of the thirties. Oberon arrives in full regalia, coming into the bright, flowery meadow where Titania, his queen, is sitting with her tiny attendant fairies, all in white, gauzy garments full of sunlight. He and his attendants are dressed in black, and he trails a black cape behind him that is large enough to swallow the woods with darkness; the star designs on his cape become the night's stars. It is a movingly beautiful moment, especially when accompanied by Mendelsohn's music for this play, which has a long passage of horns to announce this arrival. Such setting, costuming and lighting clues us to the fact that Oberon and Titania are Nature spirits as essential as night and day. The fact that they are quarreling suggests a real rift in the Natural world.

Strangely enough, although Shakespeare's fairies talk of how their quarrel has caused Nature to be unlike its normal self, even in its weather, this rift is seldom shown on stage or in film versions of the play. Yes, the Athenian lovers get a confused night as Puck mixes up magic potions and leads them on through a ridiculous series of romantic mistaken identity crises. But the Forest of Arden and Athens are usually portrayed as whole, unbroken or unchanged, despite this rift the fairies have brought about. I can see how a director might decide to show this rift in the staging.

I think the director of the production I saw wanted to suggest by the broken, fallen balcony that proper love, of the "Romeo and Juliet"- balcony- scene sort cannot exist in a world where such a cosmic disruption has occurred. As the fairies have stated, even the weather has been disrupted, hence the autumn leaves--and subsequent snow--at midsummer. (Like Global Warming?) And, lo and behold, when the fairy king and queen make up, near the end of the play, the fallen, ugly balcony suddenly lifts itself, magically, and is whole again--quite a wonderfully theatrical moment. Now, if only there had been magic elsewhere in the play!

Instead, the fairies are portrayed as goths and punks, in black leather, torn black lace and torn black net stockings. Clearly the Forest of Arden is a good forty years ahead of Athens in styles. Or maybe the fairies are meant to be as disruptive to human society as bikers and punks sometimes are. Something like that. They are certainly members of a counter culture. But they were also dreary to look at as they sprawled across the steps to the stage, smoking pot pipes, stretching into ugly shapes, making sexually crude gestures, tripping major characters, pinching them and so on. Puck even went around doing such pranks as pouring a watering tin's contents down the front pants of a sleeping Athenian lover.

Puck! Oh, how far he had come from being like Peter Pan! He looked, instead, like Neil Gaiman's Dream, from his animated series, only without the sense of heroic melancholy Gaiman gives that character. He was very skinny, in tight pants, black ragged clothing and scarf, with wild, black hair and a face to scare children with. A face that was deathly pale, thin, scarred (or tattooed into scar-like defacement), and with eyes looking like dark bullet holes. He was not mischievous so much as vicious and cynical, making his description of the harmless pranks he pulls seem out of place. This Puck wouldn't just spoil the milk, I thought; he'd poison it, then laugh as you drank it and went into spasms.

As it is, he makes the Athenian maids and men frantic, desperate, crawling on hands and knees and clasping each other's legs while enchanted and wrongly pursuing one another. They even tear the clothing off one another, which injects some unscripted laughs as the Athenian men jump around in their jockey shorts, but no sense of cosmic humor at their plight, which is an exaggeration of what Love makes all lovers do. It is all rough and raw and awful to watch. And the music is discordant. If not Mendelsohn, we could at least have had psychedelic rock for the forest.

Oberon was no better than Puck in temperment. Played by a black actor in tight leather pants and lots of black frills, he pranced and posed like Michael Jackson; all he lacked was a sequined glove. He could have come across as elegant, or even glamorous. Instead, he came across as meaner than he should be. Yes, in the original, Oberon tricks his queen by making her fall in love with Bottom, a rustic would-be actor and working class man from Athens who has been magicked into an ass's head. But Oberon usually is shown doing this as a prank, not as a mean-spirited curse laid on his stubborn queen. But this Oberon ranted on, angrily, without a sign of love or tenderness as he tricked her, and showed little gentleness when he later awoke his queen from her spell and supposedly made up with her.

The restoration of the balcony was a nice touch. However, I would love to have seen something on the stage to suggest that the world in general had been made whole again after the fairies have mended their quarrel. Flowers would have been nice. ( I still remember how my heart lifted when, in the movie "Excalibur', the trees burst into bloom as the Knights of King Arthur rode out to defend their kingdom one last time after the spell was broken and the Waste Land was healed.) Mendelsohn's music would have been wonderful, something to lift the spirit. Instead, the Athenian couples appeared in 1950s wedding clothing, as did Theseus and Hippolyta. They still seemed edgy. The stage lights were brighter, but no softer or warmer, and although the leaves had been swept away, I have no memory of there being flowers, or any color, for that matter, on stage.

With the rustics' presenting of their creaky, comical play, instead of there being a mood of gentle mockery by the wedding couples of the lower class men's acting and speaking, there was a real, snarky sniping at the poor players, who were visibly disconcerted by it. It made you dislike the play in general, for this scene should be full of fun, and one should feel that Theseus has been softened somewhat by Hippolyta's presence, and should be showing more of a loving, easy manner towards her. But the vicious mood of nightmare (not dream) when lost in the Forest of Arden has not really dispersed with the daylight or the lovers' move back to Athens. Theseus is no more loving in his manner with Hippolyta than earlier in the play, even though his words might suggest he has changed. The newly-weds bicker unpleasantly over the play they're watching. Are we to believe that their marriage can never be right, since it started with violence and confusion? Or that marriage as a state is no dream? If so, then the play has been turned to a tragedy.

Later, the fairies' 'blessing' of the house, which has been presented quite beautifully in other productions, was here like the swarming of a motorcycle gang over an elegant dinner party: not pretty or wholesome or healing. And certainly not indicative of a Nature once again whole, ready to enrich and bring about healing and progeny to the couples sleeping there on stage. In short, the director seems to have sacrificed a true mood of resolution, created by staging and accompanying music, for the sake of edginess and avant garde posing.

Amish Chilly Day Soup

2009-09-15T13:30:57Z

Ah, how I love this time of year! The sky so blue that it looks like cobalt lacquer, the trees glowing gold as the sun shines through their leaves, little eddies of dead leaves underfoot, blown by the slightly brisk wind that reminds us gently that colder weather is coming.
Here is a soup recipe I found that is more than just a chicken soup; it’s a cream of chicken soup, but one very much unlike the tinned type. It’s comfort food, like chicken pot pie, or mac and cheese, filled with carbs to make you feel really full and happy. And the entire house is redolant with the aroma for 24 hours later.
As you cook it, you may think at first, "This is ridiculous! Why should a soup need rice and pasta and potatoes!” But do it anyway. You think, later, as it simmers in front of you, “Why should I put cream in at this point? It looks like such a nice chicken soup, and cream is rich and full of fat.” But do it anyway. The soup is so much better for it.

Ingredients:

2 large onions, chopped very fine
1 large potato, peeled and cubed
1 carrot, peeled and diced into coins
1 stalk of celery OR 1 parsnip, diced
1/2 cup rice
1/2 cup macaroni
3 cups chicken stock (a whole carton of pkgd. soup stock)
1 raw chicken breast OR 250mg. cooked chicken, cubed
1 cup heavy cream OR half and half
salt and pepper to taste
thyme and oregano to taste (optional)

Method:

1. Place all the vegs in a large saucepan as you cut them up.
2. Add rice and macaroni.
3. Add chicken broth/stock.
4. Add uncooked chicken at this point.
5. Bring to a boil and then simmer until the potato (and carrots and parsnips) are tender (about 30-40 minutes).
6. Add thyme and oregano.
7. Add precooked chicken at this point.
8. Stir in the cream and reheat gently, but do not boil.
9. Add salt and pepper to taste.

This soup is great with fresh many-grained bread and butter. It’s a one-pot meal, and although it takes 45 minutes to 60 minutes to cook, it’s not labor intensive, once you’ve cut up the vegs.