DINING OUT
We’ve enjoyed food from the Lazy Lobster on Longboat Key several times, so it was a pleasure to dine again in their light-filled airy dining room. There is outside seating too, but it was already taken on this bright Sunday afternoon. Service was attentive, but leisurely given the crowd. We, like others, took advantage of their early dining menu, which offered several salad and entrée choices at very good prices. We were not disappointed. The shrimp scampi over linguini was very tasty! The shrimp were cooked just to doneness atop a generous bed of pasta seasoned with garlic, herbs, oil and diced tomato and onion. Their Caesar salad was also a pleasing rendition with enough garlic to make it sing, but not overblown. My dining companions sampled and were delighted with the fish and chips, and we all tasted the key lime pie which was nicely tangy.
OUTSTANDING THEATER
Roe, a drama by Lisa Loomer, and part of Asolo Repertory Theatre’s current season, is one of the most powerful plays I’ve ever seen! By the end, I was exhausted. Superbly acted and staged, it shows the history leading up to the 1970’s Supreme Court’s decision on abortion in Roe vs. Wade. Lawyer Sarah Weddington, who argued the case at the tender age of 26, and single pregnant addicted 21-year old Norma McCorvey, aka Jane Roe, are the central characters. Act I ends with the historic ruling by the high court. Act II shows how life plays out for the hapless Norma and her partner Connie and for Weddington up to the present day. Operation Rescue is on the scene and their message is given air time as Norma changes her views and joins them. Especially poignant is modern-day student Roxanne, pregnant, who outlines all the delays and obstacles she’s encountering in her quest for a legal abortion.
While I certainly knew some of the history behind the ruling, I hadn’t realized or remembered that it all started with a case in Texas. This is hard-hitting, thought provoking drama and definitely worth seeing. It runs through April 15.
RECENT READING: CHANNELING HENRY JAMES
Mrs. Osmond by John Banville. I loved this novel, but I’m not sure everyone would. Using Henry James’, The Portrait of a Lady, as a jumping off point, Banville presents Isabel Archer Osmond roughly six years after her marriage to Gilbert Osmond. The marriage is at the breaking point as Isabel has learned of the intimate relationship between Gilbert and Madame Merle and that Serena Merle is his daughter Pansy’s mother. She also realizes she’s been duped and married for her fortune. Disillusioned and fed up, Isabel flees Rome, against Gilbert’s wishes, to be at her dying cousin Ralph’s bedside. When the novel opens, she is in London where she seeks out her old friend Harriet Stackpole, an acerbic journalist. She also visits Miss Janeway, a suffragette, for her advice on what to do. Recognizing that she needs to return to Osmond for a showdown of some sort, but first determining what her course of action will be, Isabel nonetheless lingers in London and Paris. In Paris she runs into Madame Merle at a party and makes her a proposition. Then she goes on to Florence to see her Aunt Lydia and discovers that Osmond is there too. The Osmonds’ get-together is a tour de force as a newly self-assured Isabel flexes her figurative muscle and penetrates through Gilbert’s savoir faire.
Like James, Banville writes wonderfully long descriptive sentences about the weather, the interiors the characters inhabit, and the city streets. John Bayley writing about a different novel by Banville even commented “that the author ‘does not quite coordinate pace with expectation in the reader’s mind; his felicities are apt to hold him up, so that the reader wants to read faster than the author is doing the writing.'” Nonetheless, the language is marvelously rich, and action is at a minimum. You could summarize the plot of Mrs. Osmond in about two sentences, yet that would be a shallow statement of Isabel’s growth in self-awareness and her efforts in resolving her dilemma. Winding and deliberate though Banville’s prose is, there are flashes of wit, and the occasional directness in conversation that is contemporary in a way that the sedate, indirect, ambiguous James wasn’t. (~JWFarrington)
Note: Header image from the New York Times and is attributed to 26Eugenides. Mandala colored by the author.
