Summer – Why I Still Like It

There's been a lot of complaining about the heat this week prompting questions of "What do you hate more, NY summers or NY winters? So, it's been hotter than hell day after day (even at the eastern end of LI). Summer is better than winter. I will never get over my childhood crush on this time of year.
You can lie in bed in the morning for what seems like hours and when you get up it's still before 8:00 o'clock.
The local produce and fish are outstanding.
I actually drink less alcohol but enjoy it more.
I rarely, if ever, get sick in the summer.
Swimming in the ocean is theraputic.
Outdoor showers - the best.
It's often daylight when Mactech-husband returns from work.
Going out in the city on summer nights is always fun.
Air-conditioning makes sleeping possible.
The break in everyone's routine allows an amnesia to cover the fact of how bad that routine can become and make you believe things could change for the better.

Birthday Number 80

My mom turns 80 tomorrow. I threw a small party last Saturday night to commemorate the event. It was the first time my brothers and I were all together since our father's death in 1998. Two or three of us – frequently, but rarely all four of us.
With all of my air-conditioners cranked up to the limit the house was comfortably cool and it was pleasant enough to eat out on the deck once the sun went down. Mom-Mactech is notoriously heat-sensitive but she didn't complain once.
The menu:
Filet mignon and sirloin steak, green salad, tomatoes & mozzarella with basil, a surprisingly good watermelon and mint concoction, my own special potato salad, and a fabulous coconut angel food cake from The Two Little Red Hens Bakery.
We had purchased the meat (huge quantities) at the new Fairway in Red Hook, a couple of nights before. My first time in the store and I was pretty impressed. We filled the cart in no time. Luckily we have an extra fridge in our basement where these bulky items could be stored until needed.
About twenty-four hours after the Fairway shop I took a FreshDirect delivery of more food stuff (you can never have too much food stuff at a party) and began hauling it down to the basement where I discovered that the refrigerator door had not been properly closed the night before. The motor was panting and the inside of the thing was sweating bullets. It did not feel the least bit cold in there either. Yikes! All that meat! I closed it tight and immediately called Tech-husband at work, not being willing to shoulder this distressing news by myself (and after all he was the one who put all that meat in there and then didn't shut the door)
"Let's just throw it all out and start over tonight with another trip to Fairway." I announced with resignation.
"Shit." he exclaimed.
MachTech husband was not going to take this lying down. He immediately called the owner of a rather celebrated restaurant in the Slope, a finicky guy who knows and loves food, and explained the turn of events. He brought the chef out of the kitchen to consult.
The verdict was this: The refrigerator would not have "lost its cool" for several hours and in fact was still running and reducing the temperature of itself and the area around it. The meat, due to its size would not warm that quickly to the core. We would be cooking it to 127 degrees, killing off - whatever - I don't want to think about that. And anyway that kind of bacteria only affects small children and old people. (did we mention it was an 80th birthday party with a 2 year old in attendance?)
End of story. We cooked and ate the meat. It was delicious. Everyone was fine.

The Terror Target List

Soon after September 11th, when we were constantly being warned that we were on Orange Alert in NYC, mactech-husband mentioned that we should air-drop (on potential terrorist countries in the mideast) maps of possible targets in the midsection of the US. "They only seem to know about places on the coasts. It's a big country."
Apparently he was on to something. Today's Times has a front page article on the National Asset Database. (This is the "data" by the way, by which Homeland Security divvies up their zillion dollars worth of antiterrorism grants).
According to the list of resources that could be potential sites of "terror," Indiana, with 8,591 posible targets, has more than any other state. New York has 5,687, California, 3,212.
I'm sure glad the Times is getting this news out. Leave us and the left coast out of the terror-planning, you terrorists. We're small potatoes.
Amish Country Popcorn (on the list), in Berne, Indiana - watch your back.

Away

I'm liking the new head of BCS. The first e-mail I ever send to him? mind you, he doesn't know me from a hole in the BCS wall - is a request to take Wednesday, Thursday and Friday off this week, you know, to make it a whole week away from school. Technically, I'm on duty all of July and off in August, but since I probably will need to work a good part of August too, it didn't seem a far-fetched request. Coming off of a couple of years where we all seemed to be challenged to compete for the title of who can work the most - I was a bit skittish about asking.
His response -"if you say it works, it works for me, enjoy the time with your family."
We drove out to Quogue, Saturday morning. The house has had some improvements over the winter and we're loving the new outdoor shower. Baby Mactech was up at six today so an early trip (open at 8:00) to Target was in order. His B-day is this week so whatever he hauled off the shelves went into the basket.
"Buy it. Buy it."
What a red-blooded American boy.
The picture below represents the first celebrity sighting of the season. Adrian Grenier (Entourage) was at the beach.

Wedding Season

Molly's Wedding click for some more pictures.

We had a family wedding this weekend. The Weasel Wedding Chronicles were so enjoyable that I wanted to post one myself. Think of it as a sequel to Weasel-Wedding.

The bride and the weather were gorgeous all weekend. Festivities began on Friday night with a rehearsal dinner for a huge number of people. The church wedding, on Saturday afternoon was beautiful. The highlight was when the family's long-time housekeeper got up on the altar and sang an a cappella gospel number. She got the whole church swinging and clapping with her and went into one of those fainting collapses at its conclusion. The reception party at her parents home, was smashing. The food, toasts, music and dancing -it was just so much fun. Mactech had many memorable (yes I remember them) cocktails at this great celebration.
We left the after-party to the younger generation and headed to our hotel when the kegs were being rolled down to the boat house and people were jumping naked into the pool. Mactech-son reported that the good time lasted well into the early morning. We returned to the scene of the crime for brunch on Sunday and to hear the happy recap.

One mishap - The bride and groom arrived at their wedding night hotel to find that their bridal suite reservation had somehow been "lost." After much yelling and sobbing the hotel went to work finding them a room somewhere. They arrived at the second hotel and were given a room but when they opened the door, there was a naked couple in the bed doing what you might expect a naked couple to be doing.
The exhausted bride and groom returned to her parents' home and slept on a cot. The house, big though it is was, packed with overnight guests.
Well, it'll be a good story to tell the grand-kids someday.
Now it's off to Africa for three weeks of safari-ing. Then back to the news beat at NY 1.

Tasty Leftovers

Leftover Stories to Tell is a tribute to the late, depressed, anxious, dyslexic and brilliant Spalding Gray. Daily writing was his most effective therapy, and it was through his writing that he came to know himself most fully.
When he died, by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry into New York Harbor, in 2004, he had been suffering for three years from the effects of a car accident in Ireland in 2001.
He left a young family behind. His wife, Kathie Russo, worked with Lucy Sexton, a performance artist based at PS 122, to craft this series of readings from known and unpublished pieces, including a recording he left for her before his death. They were read by the above cast, joined by guest readers each night of the performance. I was lucky enough to catch Aidan Quinn and Steve Buscemi reading for Friday night's show.
The familiar parts were wonderful reminders of how he could make us laugh. The pieces from his journals and diaries were riveting. Small nuggets of raw truth about a life full of both psychic pain and pure joy.
He would have turned 65 on June 5.

Where Have You Gone Joe DiMaggio..?

I spent the weekend with old friends from college. One couple provided the beach house. Others bought and prepared the food and alcohol. A few have those pinpoint memories and quick wits and so provide the running commentary - old stories connected to new stories. I listen. I laugh. I provide the soundtrack. I plugged my iPod into a stereo system that piped music into each room, at my direction, and at the volume I chose. My goal was to set a mood reminiscent of our youth, but not totally of our youth, by carefully mixing old music with new music gleaned from the mixes of my young friends and children.

Which brings me to the picture above. It was 1967. I was a freshman in college. I was going to the movies to see The Graduate. Someone snapped this picture as I was getting into a car to go on an actual date. It is fitting that the "driver" is cut out of the picture because I can't remember who it was. I do remember going to Dorrian's Red Hand afterwards – a place where it was exceedingly easy for the under-aged to be served liquor. Though I was 18, and the drinking age was 18 at the time, this picture makes it painfully obvious – it was a while before I looked my age. And while the date was not memorable, the movie certainly was.

I know that movies had soundtracks before 1967. There were Elvis movies, which were more like full-out musicals, and The Beatles movies – essentially music videos, but I don't remember movies having anything like the soundtrack in this movie. This was different. The songs that wafted through this movie were already familiar to the general public of a certain age. They had not actually been written for the movie, the movie was cleverly screen-played around these songs by Buck Henry at the direction of Mike Nichols. The movie was an expression of the "emoto-moods" already evoked by those songs.

Maybe you had to be there, but The Graduate, which is at the top of my top movies, perfectly captured the perfectly off-base feeling of being in college or just out of college in the late sixties. There just wasn't a lot of direction, self or otherwise. Kids with money didn't have to think about the war. They only had to think about themselves. And they did, without relief, and it made them slightly sick.

After this, movies with soundtracks would change radically. Pop music would become an essential element of pop movies. And now, the almighty iTunes has made it simple to score the movie of our lives that is constantly playing in our heads. And so we do, backwards and forwards.