Quote of the Day

That was when we were colleagues. Then I left Dublin, and I didn't see Seamus again until a James Joyce conference in Paris a few years later. He barely spoke to me. Leslie Fiedler and his wife looked at me as Seamus innocently waved at us in a café and walked past to join others. "Well, our lives have moved on," I said, and that was of course all that had happened. "We don't even live in the same country any more[.]"--Nuala O'Faolain, Are you somebody?

More fun than folly

Saturday was a full day, what with monshu pulling out everything in the "Closet From Hell" into the middle of the living room and ruthlessly discarding anything inessential. Around 9 a.m., the sweet little geek bear boy from his work came by to cherry pick the records. The three of us ending up chatting for over an hour, and despite my proclamations of disregard for current popular culture, I was quietly pleased to find that I had so many likes in common with an intelligent 25 year-old. At one point, monshu mentioned buying a roll of bubble wrap for packing, and I instantly responded with "Spend my nights with a roll of bubble wrap /POP POP / Hope no one sees me / Get freaky". GBB smiled and sang about half the song with me before saying, "That's pretty much my life." But when your father writes for Image, you're more-or-less doomed from the start, aren't you?

Then we lunched and ran errands, which included stopping by monshu's local bank branch to deposit a check. There was a sign by the teller saying "歡迎,我說中文." So when we sat down together to open an account, I asked her about her surname. When she said it was "Cai", I tried to write it but forget the grass radical. "You forgot something," she told me. "Actually, this is not a good character." The misspelling turns to be 祭, which I only know from the compound 祭祀 "ancestor sacrifice ceremony". So it seems pretty auspicious to me, but I'm just a foreign ghost; what do I really know?

A couple hours later, I met up with Nuphy at the Gage, an Irish-owned gastropub downtown. monshu had a meal on my dime here two weeks ago which we was less than impressed with, but judging from my experience, he simply didn't order the right thing. My soft-shelled crab ("First of the season, flown in from the Chesapeake" our waitress told us; Nuphy said my eyes lit up) was good, but what really got my attention was the wilted frisée salad with bacon and black pudding. Absolutely delicious. Nuphy treated himself to the most perfectly poured pint of Guinness I've seen in my life ("Taste the foam...it's like whipped cream!"), but I was feeling under the weather and so limited myself to a half glass of Hoegaarden.

To my surprise and delight, my hint of infirmity was no barrier to enjoying Handel's Orlando at COT. In fact, I felt more sprightly after three hours of baroque music than I did before taking my seat. All the usual flaws of that era are there: The plot is thin (and insultingly simple-minded at times, featuring perhaps the biggest cop-out ending in all of opera) and the characters even more slender, and the ensembles are few and far between (while being so achingly beautiful to make you wonder what kind of fool composer would be so damn stingy with them). The big male alto arias, which must have been showstoppers back in the day, are something for competent countertenors to get through without disgracing themselves rather than rip up and mop the stage with. On top of that, the staging--while being beautiful and clever in some respects--was some of the most senseless I've seen. (Orlando is tearing around the woods like a madman and you have him pause to rearrange scenery?)

But the magic of great music is that it can transcend almost any limitation. When the first intermission struck, I turned to Nuphy and said, "Has an hour gone by already?" This is me, who under normal conditions almost always dozes off during the Act One love duet! Act Two was a bit weaker, but Act Three made up for it, with Dorinda's "Love Bites" aria proving Nuphy's favourite. For once, it was the sopranos I understood easily and the male voices that baffled me more often than not, and ironically my least-favourite voice was the bass. (Not that he was bad, but I wanted someone to shake the pillars of the set with his timbre.) He also had the stupidest role, the string-pulling thaumaturge (stupidly costumed as a military officer) who is such a deus ex machina that we nicknamed him "General McGuffin".

This all left me a little worn out come Sunday morning, but I'd already promised monshu a trip to the Container Store, where I found enough solutions to my clutter problems to merit a return. An hour implementing them was as much as I could stand before coming over to his place for barbecued pork on the deck with neighbear Diego. It was nippy, so we retired to his place for drag queen pecan pie with ice cream. Without the moderating presence of Uncle Betty, the banter turned quite salacious indeed; I don't think monshu will ever live down some of the slanderous aspersions on his adolescent life in the country.