Author: JWF

Tidy Tidbits: Concerts & Cooking

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VOCAL MUSIC

Other than friends, the two things I miss most about San Francisco are the restaurant scene and Bay Area Cabaret. Our good friends, David and Sean, introduced us to that cabaret series.  It’s held in the historic Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel, and we had the treat of seeing and hearing Chita Rivera, Judy Collins, Tommy Tune, Christine Ebersole, and others. Next month we get to see Ebersole and Patti Lupone in a new musical on Broadway entitled, War Paint.

This past week, Music Monday introduced us to the singing Callaway sisters, Liz Callaway and Ann Hampton Callaway. A delightful pair who have fun ribbing each other, they have separate careers, but occasionally team up to present Sibling Revelry. They did some humorous tunes, but also had us almost in tears with their rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” 

On Sunday, we enjoyed a rollicking performance by AMICCO (Anna Maria Island Concert Chorus and Orchestra) with the Three Tenors. These men were fun and talented and it was the perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Lots of Italian arias including some old favorites like “O Sole Mio” and “Funicula, Funiculi.” The tenors also gave their version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

NEW RESIDENT

We have a new live-in resident. She’s been with us several weeks now and is low maintenance and even has her own box. She requires little; in fact, she can sit ignored, or she can be the source of new pleasures. Overall, she has added a new dimension to our lives. Her name is “Jewel” and while she spells it differently I think of her this way. She is the focus of a lot of the Chief Penguin’s time and attention and has given him a new project.

Jewel, or Joule, her official name, is not a puppy or kitten or even a parakeet, but rather the latest, hottest sous vide device. She comes with an iPhone app which means you can be sitting on your patio and get an alert that the water batch in which you’ve immersed her has now reached temperature. Sous vide, cooking food sealed in a vacuum bag immersed in water at a constant temperature, was introduced by chefs a few years ago and is now the trendy way to cook at home.

Several devices are on the market, and once my sister and then our son got them for Christmas, you know who here just had to have one. Being a gadget lover, he thinks we have the coolest one!  

Since Joule arrived, we (I say this loosely since it’s really the C.P.) have cooked spare ribs, grouper, shrimp, barbecued chicken, and even potatoes using her. One of the beauties of sous vide is that you can choose ahead of time the degree of doneness you want and the food item will never get cooked beyond that point. What you are actually selecting is the temperature at which the water is maintained. For shrimp, which are notoriously easy to overcook to a rubbery state, Joule is ideal. Just a few degrees difference in temperature, 139 F. or 140 or even 142, determines how soft or firm the shrimp are.

The time in the water bath varies from short (30 minutes for a vegetable) to long (12 to 24 hours) for ribs or steaks or chicken. You can season the item with herbs or barbecue sauce before bagging it. Once it’s in the bag in the water, you can ignore it. When the food comes out of the bag, finishing it (steak, for example) on a gas grill or even in the oven, will provide the attractive browning and finishing. Never again do you risk having barbecued chicken that is blackened on the outside, but not fully cooked on the inside. You might think I’d be jealous of Jewel, but I’m not. C.P. has taken on more of the cooking and the results are fabulous!

 

 

Credits: Callaway sisters (Ann & Liz) (www.paulinlondon.com) by Darren Bell; Joule ©JWFarrington

Tidy Tidbits: Books & More

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This week was devoted to two little girls, one almost five and the other just turned one, and it was a delightful romp of activity.  From sifting sand at the beach to trying out the pool, from mixing blueberry pancakes with Grandma to icing cupcakes with Grandpa, to arts and crafts with Dad, and island walks with Mom, to stacking blocks, playing game after game and visiting with Snooty the Manatee, it was nonstop until bedtime.    Now the house is quiet (almost too quiet), the blocks and dollhouse gone, and the counters clear.  What a week it was!

TERRIFYING AND POWERFUL

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult. 

Jodi Picoult’s past novels have dealt with conflict and social issues that are not easily resolved and end up in the courtroom.  Most would consider them to be women’s fiction; albeit women’s fiction with a moral underpinning and an examination of what constitutes justice.   This, her latest novel, received positive reviews and a lot of critical acclaim, and, in my opinion, takes her work to a whole new level.

I read it over the course of a day and a half and was totally swept up in this case of black labor and delivery nurse, Ruth Jefferson, who is accused of causing the death of a baby on her ward.  Ruth is a widow with a seventeen year old son.  The father of the deceased infant is a white supremacist and the scenes describing his wilding rampages and his beliefs gave me chills.  Ruth’s chief advocate in court is a white female public defender named Kennedy McQuarrie, and this is her first big case.

What makes this novel so powerful is how Picoult, in shifting the point of view among the principals, lays out the background and life experiences of these three individuals and their families and demonstrates how racism affects and infects us all.  In an unexpectedly candid note to the reader at the end, Picoult details how she came to write this novel, whom she interviewed, and why the process was a game changer for how she viewed herself and her own attitudes towards race.  A very timely, thought-provoking book!

A LA NINETEENTH CENTURY FICTION

Stone’s Fall by Ian Pears.

This tome of a novel (almost 600 pages) ranges back in time and place from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 to Venice in 1867.  Financier, industrialist and baron, John Stone falls out of a window and dies.  Was it an accident or murder?  His attractive young widow hires a journalist to locate the unknown child who is the inheritor of his estate.  And thus begins a multi-layered, convoluted, and yet fascinating search into the baron’s past, his career and his relationships with a couple of intriguing women.  Not much is what it seems.  This novel cannot be read quickly and, although, I found it sometimes hard to keep straight one for two of the male characters, I was captivated enough to persevere even though it took me several weeks to complete.  

The book was published in 2009, and Pears states in his Author’s Note that he wanted to write a novel about a financier or industrialist in which the man’s professional life and his personal life were intertwined and he was not a monster.  Pears was once a financial journalist and was surprised when the headlines in the news about the 2008 banking crisis closely resembled events he was writing about in a 19th century context.

FAMILY FARE

After several years of reading about Pier 22 in Bradenton, including its latest rating as the most popular restaurant in our area, we finally got there.  It was lunch with our granddaughters and we sat outside on the terrace overlooking the Manatee River with a view of the Green Bridge.  The menu is quite extensive, includes sushi, and the food much better than I expected.  The blackened grouper sandwiches were pronounced delicious and the chicken nuggets from the children’s menu tastier than the norm.  For those of us with smaller appetites, the lunch pairings are just the right size and bargain-priced at $9.00.  You can order a cup of chowder with a small salad or a salad and half a sandwich.  The house salad was good; the tuna salad on a croissant undistinguished.

Credits:  Photo of Ian Pears (By SylviaStanley – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42515709); Pier 22 (Pier22dining.com)

Tidy Tidbits: Friends & Family

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Being socially engaged with others is a key to good health and perhaps a longer life.  We entertained very good friends recently and I spent several days inhabiting J. D. Vance’s head in his disturbing and engrossing memoir of growing up in Appalachia.

FRIENDS

As is certainly evident in Vance’s memoir (noted below), we don’t get to to choose our parents or our grandparents.  Some of us are luckier than others.  But, we are able to select our friends.  One of the greatest pleasures of retirement is the gift of time and with that the opportunity to spend more time with good friends Last week our good friends, Mary and Joe, came for an overnight visit.  We’ve known them probably twenty years and, although we hadn’t seen them since the end of last summer, we picked up where we left off and had an easy, delightful time.  We’ve met and are acquainted with each other’s children and grandchildren and we share a common interest in good food, good books, and being by the water.  Conversation flowed effortlessly, and we parted knowing more time together awaits us come summer.

FAMILY

Hillbilly Elegy:  A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J. D. Vance

This is a remarkable book.  Remarkable for its unflinching candor and remarkable for the story it tells.  How J.D. Vance was able to escape from his family’s cycle of poverty, violence, and instability is amazing and riveting.  He describes hillbilly culture:  its mores, values, and attitudes, and both defends it and then holds it accountable for the ongoing problems experienced by this segment of society in Appalachia.  What enabled him to succeed at all was the relative stability provided by his grandparents.  They were strict and, to some of us, would come across as mean, but they loved him and, his grandmother in particular, instilled in him the value of education.  Also key to his survival (and he was surviving rather than thriving) was the protection his older sister Lindsay offered.  For a long time, they were a team, and Lindsay more the adult than his drug-addicted mother with her series of live-in boyfriends and, eventually, five husbands.  

Studies have demonstrated and Vance is evidence that constant disruption in childhood and daily exposure to loud arguments and violence leave scars that carry over into adulthood.  Vance was not only socially and culturally out of step when he went to college, but he lacked the necessary skills for developing a loving, long-term relationship.  He occasionally cites from the literature on poverty, but it offers few solutions.  Ultimately, he believes the answer lies not with the government, but with hillbillies themselves re-evaluating their conduct and facing the fact that it is harmful to their children.  His is a success story fueled by resentment and anger, but success none the less.  He had advantages many children from Jackson, Kentucky and Middletown, Ohio do not.

Published in June 2016, Vance’s memoir has been singled out as describing individuals most likely to be Trump supporters; read with that in mind, it offers an up-close look at lives most of us have little familiarity with.  The book jacket states that after law school, Vance became a principal at an investment firm in Silicon Valley and lived in San Francisco.  I thought this was one of the unlikeliest milieus for him and was puzzled.  My wonderment was partially answered by his op-ed piece in the March 16 New York Times in which he writes about deciding to move back to Ohio, but Columbus, not Middletown.

DIVIDED LOYALTIES

On the small screen, I just finished watching the five-part Netflix series, Rebellion.  Set in Dublin, it focuses on the Easter Rising of 1916 and three women who are caught up in the Irish rebels’ fight against the British government.  While these young women, a government employee, a doctor in training, and an activist, are all involved, two brothers are fighting on opposite sides while an upper class husband and wife have sharply different views on how they should participate or not.  I found it totally engrossing and well done and hope that there will be a second season.

Notes:  Header photo and coloring ©JW Farrington; downtown Middletown, Ohio from Pinterest.

Culture Notes: Music, Politics, Movies

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What follows are paeans to lively performers and great theater (Born Yesterday and The Originalist) along with comments on two challenging films.

MUSICAL RICHES

I swear you’d think we live in a big city given all the musical offerings we have!  In the last two weeks, we had the return of handsome baritone John Brancy (this time with pianist Peter Dugan); an exceptional orchestra concert, Estonian Voices, with the award-winning Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir performing the Mozart Requiem; and then a Monday morning brightened by New York based organist and conductor, Kent Tritle.  On the faculty of both the Manhattan School of Music and Juillard, Mr. Tritle is also organist and director of cathedral music at Cathedral of St. John the Divine.  He was bubbly and delightful in conversation and bounced from his seat down to play the impressive digital organ (we learned a lot about the latest digital organs and how the stops operate) at the Church of the Palms in Sarasota.  Demonstrating his musicality, he played works by J. S. Bach, Franck, and a very familiar sanctuary-filling postlude by Widor  It was a most memorable morning!

SUPERB THEATER

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, we are blessed with fabulous live theater locally.  Recently, we saw the 1946 play, Born Yesterday, presented by the Asolo Repertory Theatre.   Set in Washington, D.C. it’s about politics and wheeler-dealing, but more significantly about the transformation of junk dealer Harry Brock’s mistress Billie from a so-called dumb blonde to a self-confident assertive young woman.  It starts out a bit slow, but then catches fire and Billie (Christina DeCicco) is wonderful and her evolution both hilarious and poignant to watch.    Beautiful set, great cast—everyone from the leads to those playing maids and doormen was top notch—with a story line that faintly echoes some of the political concerns of today.

Next up was the third of the political plays this season, The Originalist, a three-character drama focusing on Antonin Scalia and two of his law clerks.  Scalia engages in an ongoing sparring match with one of them, Cat, a liberal black lesbian, which is occasionally enlivened by a competitive card game.   Edward Gero has the look and walk of Scalia and when he first takes the stage I felt for sure we were seeing Scalia himself.  This is great drama that is even more relevant as we await the hearings on Judge Gorsuch.

THOUGHT-PROVOKING FILMS 

We didn’t see them in the theater so we watched two notable films at home on our biggish small screen.  One was Jackie.  Natalie Portman (nominated for best actress) is most convincing as Jackie Kennedy, but for those who idolized the woman, this film will not necessarily endear her to you.  Contained, reserved, and always smoking, this Jackie is unto herself ever mindful of her image and that of her now late husband.  The film focuses on the short period of time right after Kennedy’s assassination when Jackie gives a key interview and re-lives the events of that horrible day.  If you accept, as I do, writer Barbara Leaming’s theory that Jackie was suffering from PTSD (something not yet identified in 1963), then her behavior is more understandable.  Not an easy film to watch.  

Moonlight won best picture—much to the surprise of everyone, especially the creators of La La Land who were winners for an instant—and we felt we ought to see it.  It is a raw and powerful film that I think I kept on appreciating after it was over.  Chiron’s story is the maturing of a poor black boy wondering about his sexuality.  It unfolds in three chapters from his grade school years as he is bullied for his difference, to his teen years and his fragile friendship with Kevin, to his adult life alone working the mean streets of Atlanta.

His mother is a drug user and mostly unavailable to him.  As a kid, Chiron is rescued by Juan, a drug dealer.  Juan and his partner, Theresa, offer Chiron warmth and stability and regular meals.  The interactions between these three individuals are some of the brightest spots in the film.  Years later, Kevin surfaces and prods Chiron into a bit of reflective conversation.  For more on what this intimate film achieves, I highly recommend this review in The New Yorker by Hilton Als.

Notes:  Header photo from Asolo Repertory Theatre; Moonlight image from www.indiewire.com