Well, dear readers, I supped with the Jones people last night and it was a perfect way to spend an evening. She made her famous chicken breast with Ritz cracker coating, string beans, rice, and tomatoes with avocado first course, all great. It was my first “cheat” meal since doing the Keto thing and it was great, although the cheating could have been much worse. The chicken’s only carbs were the coating, and there wasn’t that much on it, frankly. The string beans were nothing, and neither were the tomatoes and avocado. The rice, however, was definitely NOT Keto friendly and neither was the slice of the homemade chocolate cake. So, today I’ll be extra special careful and good, and I should be fine. After dinner, we yakked for quite some time, which is always fun. We ended up talking about when Muse Margaret and I were young actors going out on lots of interviews and various TV shows and such and got to bemoaning the loss of local TV channels. That was, I must say, a sad day. TV was plain old fun from its beginnings up until the mid-80s when it all began to change. You could watch old movies in the middle of the night. Sometimes channels showed nothing, and later it became about infomercials. Best of all, for me, was channel thirteen, which aired local commercials for local restaurants and businesses – I loved them and the music that accompanied them and the announcer. It was the same music for decades and the same announcer, too. The well-known music would begin (oh, how I wish I could find whatever that was) and then a sign would come up for some local jernt and the announcer would say, “For ribs, try whatever the restaurant was.” And when did the test pattern stop? I loved the test pattern when I was a kid – I wrote about it in Benjamin Kritzer. I would stare at it for hours; I was mesmerized by it. Of course, today it would be cancelled because of the Indian in the middle. I found out that the woke have also cancelled “low man on the totem pole.” What a brave new world it is. I miss the local channels – here we had channel five, channel nine, channel eleven and channel thirteen. Now we have a million channels, more content than anyone could ever hope to watch in a lifetime – I mean, it’s ridiculous. Sometimes, simple is simply better. End of test pattern rant. Otherwise, I am sitting her like so much fish listening to Riccardo Muti do instrumental selections by Puccini, Catalani, Ponchielli. Of the latter, I knew zero, but after hearing his beautiful piece called Elegia, I want to hear more, for sure. It’s a nice album with excellent music, but there is something seriously wacky about the sound on this Sony CD. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s just weirdly muddy in a way I don’t recall having heard before. Muti is not one of my favorite conductors, but he’s okay in music like this. I also listened to a Julius Monk revue called Seven Comes Eleven, which he somehow got Columbia to release (it’s a live album). It was only released via Arkiv as a CD-R and it took a while to actually find a copy. It’s a typical Monk revue – witty, sophisticated, urbane, and delightful.
Yesterday, I got seven hours of sleep, she of the Evil Eye arrived, and I went to the theater to rehearse. The day had a bit of frustration because nothing went as planned at a rehearsal where we were supposed to set sound levels. That was supposed to happen at ten-thirty, then eleven, and, in fact, it never happened, and I was not a happy camper. Sound will now happen on Monday at eight and I informed everyone that if it didn’t that we would not play the preview – they can skip our show. I have to hear it, approve it, and it has to be set. We ran the show two or three times, I tightened up a few things and cleaned up some stuff – it’s pretty fun now.
After the rehearsal, I stopped at the mail place and picked up some packages, then came home. She of the Evil Eye was long gone, so I did some work on the computer, answered e-mails, and then watched about forty minutes of Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, a movie all Welles aficionados think is a masterpiece. I’ve never actually been able to get more than five minutes in before shutting it off. It’s well filmed, certainly, but I’m just not engaged by it, I’m afraid. I will try to finish it, though.
Then I shaved and showered and moseyed on over to the Jones house and the rest you know. And wouldn’t it be fun to post these here notes and then go watch the test pattern? Well, here’s the next best thing.
Ah, memories, like the corners of my mind. Today, I’ll be up when I’m up and I will damn well have a ME day. I’ll probably just have one of my salads – either a Gelson’s chicken Caesar or Stanley’s chopped salad, or maybe I’ll just make a big old wedge salad with bleu cheese crumbles, bacon, tomatoes, red onions, and perhaps either ranch dressing or bleu cheese dressing. We shall see. Otherwise, I’ll just watch, listen, and relax, and I don’t care who knows it.
Tomorrow, I’ll have the day free to work on the Kritzerland show – I’ve begun choosing songs – and then I’ll sup and do our complete sound check and run. The show’s only ten or eleven minutes and that’s really all it should take. Tuesday, if everything goes according to Hoyle, we’ll play a preview, and then we open our evening of plays on Thursday and then play on Saturday. Otherwise, it’s just choosing songs and gearing up for our little private reading of Nothing in Common.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, I will have a ME day, I will eat something VERY Keto friendly, then I’ll watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where I shall hopefully have a dream in which I watch the test pattern for the entirety of the dream.