life — Page 155

On Monday

December 10, 2018 at 10:49 am by Claudia

The vase and the match striker needed to be placed elsewhere while the Christmas tree is up. They don’t look half bad on this little desk.

The pansies needed to be brought inside because I missed the fact that we’d had a very cold night and they were almost gone. To be honest, even though they’re better now, they’re still wobbly. I can’t ignore a plant in need. It must be in my DNA. Never say die until it’s truly gone. And they’ve been so valiant that I want to keep them going as long as I can.

We ended up going to another restaurant yesterday – one that’s known for serving breakfast. It’s my favorite local breakfast place but I hadn’t been there in a long time. On any given day, especially when the university is in session, there are long lines of people waiting to get a table. We went a bit later in the day yesterday and there was still a line, but we got a table pretty quickly. Oh my heavens, was breakfast tasty! We were running out of time, so we just made a flying visit to the bookstore and then headed back to the little theater. It’s a really nice black box space that’s made to be flexible according to the needs of the production. I’ve spent hundreds of hours in my teaching and coaching life in black box theaters. I know them well.

The production was interesting – a new play by a young playwright. A young director. A young, relatively new-to-the profession cast. Don tells me that the first play in the season had a couple of older, more experienced actors. But this script was about young millennials, so the actors had to be young as well.

It was okay – but just okay. Halfway through, I realized that it was like hundreds of acting projects I’d seen when I was teaching on an undergraduate level in Boston. I felt like I was back in Boston at a time when I was seeing countless projects on a weekly basis. The students at BU were very talented (many of them work professionally today and are names you would know) and they were always interesting to watch, but they were still students and it showed. That’s what this cast was like, even though they aren’t students any longer.

Since the theater is new and can’t afford to pay much to the actors, that level of actor is what they’re going to get until they can pay more and, hopefully, that will come with time. The play needs work, but it is imaginative and has promise. We’ll keep supporting what they’re doing but, having taught for so many years, I felt like I was back in the SFA building on Commonwealth Avenue watching an interesting student project, so I was a bit disappointed.

Then we came home, had dinner and finished watching Season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Heavens, I love that show. The first few episodes left us worried that they were going in a strange direction, but after hanging in there, we saw what the overall arc was and it all came together. Brilliant writing, acting, direction, art direction, and costume design. The best thing since sliced bread.

Now we’re going to watch it all over again, cause that’s how we roll.

Very cold out there but sunny. Something tells me this is going to be a very cold winter and it isn’t even winter yet!

Happy Monday.

Gravel and Slow Cookers

December 4, 2018 at 9:34 am by Claudia

Our work with Item 4 yesterday took longer than we thought it would, but isn’t that always the way? Don rented a pickup truck, drove to the place that carries the gravel, had it dumped in the truck, drove home and then proceeded to shovel it out into a small wheelbarrow that we have (which is now ruined for garden work, of course). Then I dumped the gravel, while Don shoveled some more. My job was to spread it and carve out some sort of path from the driveway to the kitchen. We have some left over, which is being stored in said wheelbarrow under a tarp. If we need more to fill in here and there, we know we have some on hand.

Anyway. It took a long time. I was tuckered out. Don, who had to take the truck to a car wash and power wash it before he returned it, was even more tired. I’m glad we did it, though.

So no updates on the green mini tree.

This morning we spent an hour researching slow cookers – Don has been wanting to get one. Now, this is the thing about our kitchen: it may look spacious, but we have very little cupboard space. Hardly any. So, while Don was gung ho on a larger cooker, I, being the practical one (and often the downer because of that) kept insisting that we had to make sure we had a place to store it. And that meant we had to have the dimensions of the cooker. I balked at storing it on top of the refrigerator. I don’t like seeing too many small appliances out on the counters. In our case, we have to have the microwave and the stand mixer on the counter. But more? Nope. I drew a line in the sand. Since our kitchen and living room are essentially one big room, I’m very careful about it not looking too kitchen-y, something we could get away with if it was a separate room.

Would it fit in our dishwasher that we use for storage? No. And all the other cupboards were at capacity.

Finally, I thought of the china cabinet that we have in the kitchen. It will take some rearranging but we can do it – ONLY if we buy the 4 quart version and not the 6 quart. Besides, we don’t have kids, it’s just the two of us, so we don’t really need a big old 6 quart slow cooker.

Cleaning out the cabinet will involve getting rid of the juicer, another one of Don’s big passions that hasn’t been used for years. In fact, he forgot we still had it. I hope we’re more successful with the slow cooker. Don does most of the cooking and he wants to vary our menus a bit more and I’m all for that.

Riveting, right?

Maybe, maybe, after I’m done rearranging that cabinet, I’ll get to work on my mini Christmas tree.

Wish me luck!

Happy Tuesday.

Deer and Dialects

November 28, 2018 at 10:22 am by Claudia

This morning, as I raised the blind in the kitchen, I saw a beautiful buck just a few feet from the window. I rarely, if ever, see bucks on our property and have never seen one this close! Unfortunately, I didn’t have my phone with me, so the perfect shot eluded me. However, he stayed in the yard for a long time, eating the brush, safely camouflaged from human predators. We must have stood there for 10 minutes watching him. Don took a video, which is on his IG account (@donsroadtrip).

Look closely. You can see him.

We think he’s an older buck. He was walking slowly and bit stiffly – sort of like us – but goodness, was he beautiful!

I said to him “Stay here on this side of the road. You’re safe here.” He is, as all of the surrounding property is privately owned by our neighbors.

A beautiful way to start our morning. Almost like a private viewing, just for us. He didn’t seem at all concerned that we were standing on the other side of the window. I’m not even sure he noticed us. Normally, when we see deer right outside the kitchen, they notice us, freeze for a moment, and move on. Not this guy. And we’re grateful for that.

It’s gray, windy and cold out there today. Not my favorite weather.

This is what it looked like around here in the late afternoon yesterday. I had walked down the driveway to get the mail (including the newest Louise Penny) and turned back toward the house. I didn’t try to lighten this photo because I wanted you to see it as taken. As I said on IG, I love our house, but I find this particular barren view depressing.

Sigh.

I think I’ll put up the porch Christmas lights today simply to have some cheery lights out there. We need that.

We watched Florence Foster Jenkins last night. What a wonderful movie, with the incomparable Meryl Streep, who I am convinced can do anything, Hugh Grant, and Simon Helberg. As I was watching, knowing nothing about the actual filming whatsoever, I became convinced that it was filmed, at least in part, in England. I believed that more than a few of the actors who were playing American characters were British. There’s a ‘tell’ in the way they do an American accent – a sort of flatness, a bit of nasality, a change in inflection – that I can spot a mile away. (It is, after all, what I do for living.) There are some British actors who do American dialects flawlessly. But, I have to say, most of them don’t. It sort of drives me crazy.

Sure enough, much of it was filmed in England. And the actors I was suspicious of? British.

My theory – and it’s just a theory – is that to Brits, the American accent sounds flatter, more nasal, less melodious. After all, one of the things I love about British dialects as a rule is their use of much more melody and range than we tend to use. So the actors, and their coaches, tend to concentrate on the nasality they think they’re hearing and the comparatively flatter, less rounded vowel sounds that we use, and the sound becomes a wash of those qualities, which are part of, but by no means all of the qualities in the way we speak. We have our own melodies that we use when speaking. They’re just different than a British dialect.

I suppose Brits would say the same thing about Americans using British accents, though I do think, generally, we’re a bit better at it. When I was acting, I was often pulled aside by audience members who were British and were convinced that I was also British. Obviously, I wasn’t.

This is daily life around here when you have two actors living in a cottage, one of them a vocal coach. We constantly comment about actors emphasizing the wrong word in a line, or stressing pronouns when it’s not at all appropriate, or not articulating clearly, or, in this case, not quite sounding American. We can’t help it. On the other hand, we far more often praise actors’ work, knowing everything that goes into making a role come alive, and just how tough that is. Acting is hard work and exemplary acting? Amazing. Rare. Meryl Streep? One of the rarest.

I’ve also started The Comforts of Home, Susan Hill’s newest Simon Serailler mystery. It’s excellent.

I had a couple of comments from readers concerning On Tyranny, which I recommended yesterday. It’s on sale on Amazon for $6.39 in paperback and the Kindle version is $3.99. Go for it!

Happy Wednesday.

On Monday

Gravel and Slow Cookers

Deer and Dialects

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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