No, Thursday's Out....

I was on a Zoom call today, meeting two twenty-somethings who are going to inherit some volunteer work my friend Alison and I now do with high schoolers. I liked the twenty-somethings, and I think it will be nice for future high-schoolers to have people who are closer to their age than Alison (mid–to-late forties?) and me (mid-sixties). It was a good call. Alison was thanking them for volunteering, and she said she’d been afraid that only an older person would offer to take over, since retired people have time for such things, and I started to laugh because I’m retired, and poor Alison was trying to extricate herself, and she said, “You know what I mean!” I said it was okay if she wanted to just say she didn’t want someone old taking over, and she said - by way of ameliorating things - “You are a warm-hearted person who is somewhat with it!” So there you go: a warm-hearted person who is somewhat with it! I am very tempted to swap out my planned headstone inscription (“She Did T...

My mom has swum into my head in the past few days, not in a teary, "I miss her at Christmas" sort of way, but in a head-shaking "my mom was a character" way that makes me laugh.  For instance: Mom liked to pick the last tomatoes off the vine, green, and put them on a towel in a cool spot, and let them slowly ripen til Thanksgiving. And I do the same.  Except Thanksgiving was too easy! This morning, four days before Christmas, I'm finally using the very last tiny nubbins. Are they good, you ask? Better taste than storebought, but thick skins. However! They were neither wasted, nor heartlessly thrown in the compost bin. They are rescue tomatoes, as it were. I think the rescue bit was as important to her as the thrift. Poor little tomatoes, born late.... She had a soft spot for waifs and strays. Hi, Mom! Thinking of you! Another instance: at one point, Mom took a shine to a particular clothing company, and started ordering Christmas presents from their catalog. The...

The “let your car tell you it needs service” story intersects with the high school musical story in a “what was I thinking” story. The Mustang died at the intersection of Highway 224 and … yes, Lake the road that ran past the high school (old Clackamas, not the snazzy new one). I was on my way to auditions. Big day, auditions! Somehow, I knew the car would never run again (I was right: timing chain). I felt that relief you get when a tortured relationship finally ends. I also felt that the dead car was a minor problem which could not interfere with starting auditions on time. (Prioritization glitch. Sometimes I suffer severe prioritization glitching.) The show must go on.   So I got my boombox out, and my dance bag, and I left the dead car unlocked in the intersection, right in the middle of 224 (no cell phones yet).  And I raced to the school and to the auditorium, and when I walked in, there were some boys waiting to audition, kids I’d worked with the year before. An...

Last night, I saw the new Spielberg version of West Side Story. It was lovely in itself, and it kicked off a wonderful memory festival. In the thirty years that I choreographed high school musicals, I got to do West Side Story twice, and Fiddler on the Roof – also choreographed by Jerome Robbins – three times.  The rehearsals were a workout. (Sorry about the photos. A friend took them for me, because I wanted to remember the show, and they were blurry to begin with, and have been fading for decades.) The kids learned every note, every beat (you have to, especially in the Prologue, the Rumble, and the rape scene (called "The Taunt" in the score, sigh) - because the rhythm changes constantly).  There were performances so fine I had my customary performing-arts-person “please take me right now” experience, wanting to just evaporate on the spot, seeing as we all have to go sometime. I love one thing about Jerome Robbins, a story I know from reading biographies, and from doing...

Favorite headline of the week:   Jill Biden’s White House Christmas LooksVery … Normal. Also newsworthy, to the writer of this article: Dr. Biden wears some of her fetching (American-made!) frocks on more than one occasion.   Which is normal for most of us, but not normal for recent First Ladies, who burned through outfits at a great clip,   but closer to normal than the fashion stylings of the unusually thrifty (possibly even frumpy) Rosalind Carter. Maybe it’s only the ellipsis in that headline that I … like. You know what else is normal? My bank no longer has huge plywood panels (tagged) over every window. The people inside can see daylight again. And we went downtown to see a play last night, and are going to spend a day doing downtown things today – art museum, lunch, shopping – because we do that now and then.   The trees downtown are wrapped in white lights at night, which is normal for the season, and lovely.   Also, four hummingbirds were workin...