Happy Turkey Day, everyone!
I actually think I enjoy this holiday more than Christmas...less expectations, less pressure, and more laid-back. We always seem to have good Thanksgivings...whether we're the ones having the local orphans in or being the orphans and going to someone else's house (Orphans being those various show-biz friends who have no immediate family in town to celebrate with). In fact, celebrating with friends is guaranteed more fun than celebrating with family. We always feast royally, have great conversations, lots of laughs, play board or parlour games.
This year, however, the two of us are celebrating together alone. It was intended that way. We wanted some down time before the explosion of holiday parties and obligations. Our own holiday party is only a few weeks away, so today we will be decorating our wrought-iron Christmas tree (already up with a Fall motif...we went wrought-iron to spare us the annual ritual of the tree-stand argument..."it's not straight yet" and falling pine needles. We love it-- tree as Art).
We are also having a non-traditional meal. I'm having wienerschnitzel, hot slaw, spaetzel...all very Germanic and delicious. Later we will go out to a movie...one of those award contenders that I can get in to see free on my WGA card (since I'm not getting any screeners, Jack Valenti!) When it's just us, we often eschew the traditional...one dieting year I had a craving for pizza!
Several outstanding Thanksgivings come to mind, however.
One from back in college when we had to rehearse a play on Thanksgiving Day, THE NIGHT THOREAU SPENT IN JAIL opening the following week. So the cast and crew all had Thanksgiving together. We went out and got a stud turkey to serve a legion of hungry theatre folk (and we all know how actors eat), cooked it, had delicious side dishes, and a grand old time.
In the mid-nineties I was invited to the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort, Ky. to sign my novel of DRAGONHEART. This is a book-signing affair where ky. authors all come to sign their latest books. I sat next to my oldest and dearest friend from High School, Gerry Toner, who is a lawyer and an author of three books of wonderful Christmas stories (Amazon.com). Thanksgiving day was spent with our oldest and dearest friends from our college days in one of their houses...a beautiful log cabin out in farm country outside Lexington. Snow on the ground. Lots of laughs.
Probably the most memorable Thanksgiving was in 2001. We were in the doldrums of 9/11, a month later, our golden beauty, Humbug, a cocker foundling we had saved from death nine years before, passed away suddenly from a blood disease. We were miserable. Then Virgin Airways came up with an interesting offer...Premimun Economy tickets (their business class) for an Economy price. I told the lovely wife, Julieanne, "Terrorists be damned, how'd you like to spend Thanksgiving in London." She liked. We went...even though we had already our annual pilgrimage back in January. On our flight over we got upgraded to first. Seats that reclined into beds! Julieanne had a massage by their on-board masseuse!
I also had a mission...on this trip I would surpass having seen one hundred plays in London. And we saw some doozies: Private Lives with Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan; The Royal Family with Judi Dench; Humble Boy with Diana Rigg, Denis Quilley, and maybe the best actor working in London today, Simon Russell Beale; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Ned Beatty as a brilliant Big Daddy and Brendan Fraser as Brick; Homecoming with Ian Holm; Joe Egg with Clive Owen and Victoria Hamilton; The Play What I Wrote, and several others, about 11-12 plays. I saw my hundredth with a revival of the very first play I saw in London...Noises Off. We had a wonderful and less than traditional Thanksgiving meal...Julieanne had caviar and her usual array of odd delicacies; I had Indian which I adore...all washed down with copious amounts of champagne. I don't remember the specific play we saw that night, but I'm sure it was good. It was a totally satisfying Thanksgiving.