November 26, 2005

10:39 a.m.

Of Food and Company

*sigh*

The apartment is chilly -- 56 degrees when I woke up. Funny how 56 would feel so warm outside right now, but in here it's robe, scarf and hat weather. It's also hot cereal for breakfast weather, and I love that. I make my own "house blend" hot cereals. Today's menu features yerba mate tea with soymilk, and a mix of multigrain with flax seed and buckwheat cereals, with a few raisins and craisins added, and a little yogurt. Could use some brown sugar but I don't feel like venturing back out into the cold kitchen again.

Besides which, I've had enough sugar this week to flatten a horse.

I said to Dar on the phone, "It's just not fair that I can't sit and eat an entire pecan pie at one sitting." We tried to imagine how many calories are actually in a pecan pie. We then envisaged a scenario where one actually does this, and dies from sugar shock or some such thing, after which one's final words are inscribed on the gravestone: "At least I died before I got fat."

Yes, that was careless, and I'm sorry.

Speaking of things culinary, Thanksgiving was an even greater, grander debauchery than in past years. More people (including my bandmates, who hadn't been able to come before), more food, more fun. These folks do a regular turkey and a "barbequed" turkey, which up til this year I've avoided, since who wants barbecue sauce on Thanksgiving? But I tried it this year and realized what I'd been missing. It's not a saucy type of thing. It's more a smoked-on-the-grill flavor, and it was amazing. And they do every kind of orange or white potato or root vegetable/apple dish, and there's this one that's a butternut squash casserole topped with pecans and brown sugar and it bakes on all crunchy and sweet. We sat near our hosts' older son and a couple of his young friends (around 14), putting together "the ideal bite" from our plates. Will it be turkey, in-bird stuffing, cranberry sauce and peas? Sweet potatoes and turnips, cornbread stuffing with fruit, creamed onions and mashed potatoes? Or just a big hunk of squash casserole with pecans?

Since we were all three there, we played and sang a few songs before dessert. Everyone was delighted! Most of them had heard about me as a musician, either from our hosts or from Rose, but hadn't any idea what I really did. We chose a short, eclectic program: a brisk, a cappella English traditional, arranged brilliantly by me, about a woman who disguises herself as a robber and robs her true love on the plain, to see if he'll give up the gold ring she gave him. He refuses, and the next day she returns his watch and his gold, telling him that if he'd given up the ring she'd have shot him dead! Then we did a song by me called, "Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Love I Learned from My Dog," hee hee, then a new ballad Carol wrote for Chris's mom, who turns 90 TODAY (and they're at her house in South Carolina, singing it), and we closed with a Cheryl Wheeler song called "Potato" which is based on the Mexican Hat Dance and is kind of a tongue twister. (This is a favorite with kids, and there were several present.) They insisted on an encore, so we did another a cappella piece I arranged based on Frank Loesser's "Inch Worm, Inch Worm," only it turns into this diatribe on gardening and all that can go wrong with it (bugs... slugs... sunburn... allergies... poison ivy... a peeping tom) and has bits of various classical pieces intonated throughout... ending with a part that sounds suspiciously like the opening number in Oklahoma!. (Can you detect the P.D.Q. Bach influence?) We were famous in that house, for several hours.

Traditional at this gathering is a huge hike in between dinner and dessert. It's just short of 2 hours and goes through some beautiful woods and up by a dam. They take McLean, the larger dog (he's shaped like a golden retriever but he's black), and he runs up and down the trails, putting his muzzle in our swinging hands, passing us by, finding things to smell and occasionally roll in (McLean! NO!), and he takes a dip in the cold water of the reservoir. I didn't wear quite the right socks combination with my hiking boots, so I was slightly debilitated by the time we got back, but it was a great hike nonetheless. We'd had a couple of inches of snow the night before, and parts of the trail were slippery, but the woods were beautiful and it wasn't too cold. Just a three-kleenex walk, if you carefully use each one twice.

Then we felt all justified in eating four desserts.

Oh, there were more than four. There was pumpkin pie, pecan pie, apple raisin pie, pear tart pie, black forest cake, strawberry shortcake cake. I may have missed one. We all did smorgasbord.

Finally we departed, with leftovers. C&C were sent away with enough sandwich ingredients (including homemade bread) to make three huge sandwiches for our supper at last night's gig. This is really a highlight, because at my first T'giving visit there, I had to leave directly after dinner to begin a gig drive which would take two days. I met the rest of the band at a hotel in Maryland or somewhere, and I'd been given a big sandwich for the road. I saved half of it for my mates and they were so blown away they've been talking about it for three years now! So we finally got the leftovers sandwiches of our dreams.

...which we ate in Morristown, NJ, last night, half before the gig and half on the way home. It was such a great gig. 110 people came and filled the room, and we had an opening act that actually was pretty compatible with us, a rare occurrence. A fan wrote us this morning and said, "The show was great. You guys are not only tremendous musicians but your stage presence is funny as hell." That means a lot to me, as funniness contributes so much to a show and we love it when audiences make us funny. Anyway nothing untoward happened (as in the night the bass fell), it was a very congenial night, and I made the three hour drive home without falling asleep. Fortunately by then there wasn't a whole lot of traffic either. I got to bed at 3am.

********

By 9:00 I was awake, after a very peculiar dream about "settling" for mere sex with Carol because she didn't want a real relationship, and then finding out she was blowing me off (whoops, pun, heh) even of that, because when I got to her door her parents had taken my poster down and put up some other musical groups instead, like I wasn't even appearing any more. Then she wanted to take me somewhere and I stepped knee deep in some slush trying to cross a busy street, and though I was very pissed and ready to tell her to forget the whole thing because I didn't need to be dissed this way, I was laughing at the ludicrousness of having gotten stuck by the road.

I'm not taking it personally. I think Carol was stepping in for someone or for an iconic person, so I don't hold the dream against her. We haven't been intimate for about ten years now, and that's fine. But, you know, getting mired in the breakdown lane is the kind of obvious dream symbolism that I like, because it gives me something to work with.

Anyway, I've puttered the morning away in my chilly apartment, and later tonight I'll have a late supper with Dar. We were going to see Harry Potter but he's rehearsing until at least 8:00, and with his overfull schedule right now we just can't go see a 10:00 movie. So I'll meet him in Worcester at the theatre, about an hour away, and he promised to take me to a fancy restaurant. We'll try to see the movie in the next week or so.

He's not enjoying the show. It's a new version of A Christmas Carol, as I've mentioned, and the music is apparently pretty lame. Also they open next week and the show is in pretty poor shape. Partly due to the fact that they're not given enough time to rehearse (less than two weeks I believe), and the writers keep making script changes. He's played Scrooge for a number of years at this theatre, and this is the first time I've seen him drag his heels to rehearsal. He may or may not let me come see it.

That's it. I'm done. Off to some further interesting and unproductive activities. I hope you all had lots of love and company this week.