Wino Wednesday

Beer's here! I finally got to pick up the beer that was brewed for me over the summer. I took all of your suggestions into account and named it Stone Ridge Stout. The tasting notes describe this brew as such: "Chocolate malt and roasted barley provide deep rich flavors, combined with cocoa and raspberry."

We're cracking it open tonight after work. I'll let you know how amazing it is!

This is very unceremonial...

...for my 100th post.

But, blogger tells me that I've come back to this site 99 times and actually stuck with something. I should be proud of myself, I suppose. I'm the queen of ideas, but sort of suck at the follow through sometimes. That happens when you're ridiculously busy.

At any rate, I wanted to do something cool for my 100th post. To be honest with you, though, I've been in a really funky mood all week, and I don't really have the energy to be creative right now. I'll do something to celebrate next week.

For now, however, I will leave you with my weekend plans.

*I'll be putting the bloggy box in the mail to Pennsylvania.
*I'll have my nose in this literary gem
*I plan to do a whole lot of this:

*And I have big plans to go to Weber's Farm and spend some quality time with this cutie:


And with any luck, by the time Monday rolls around, I'll be 100% less a neurotic bundle of nerves.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Bloggy Box

So, Kristin over at Give Me A Minute, I'll Think of Something had this brilliant idea a few weeks back. She proposed that some bloggers get to know each other a little better and brighten each others' days by engaging in an exchange of stuff. Stuff being books, treats, pictures, trinkets... whatever.

She wrote this post proposing this awesome idea on a day when I was completely stalking my Google reader, and the second the post went up, I read it and got super excited and e-mailed her right away that I wanted in. Since I was the first person to e-mail her, I got the lucky advantage of being the first lady on the list to get the box. In the last few weeks, we've all e-mailed each other about ourselves... and they all probably think I'm crazy now. They all seem pretty cool, though, and I look forward to seeing what everyone gets. I'm almost done packing the box up again and sending it back to New York, but in the meantime, I figured I'd share with y'all what Kristin was nice enough to send my way down to Baltimore.

Here's the bloggy box sitting on my dining room table.


And the bloggy box when I first opened it. Phew... not a bomb... just lots of goodies!


So Kristin totally hooked me up. In the box, she packed for me:
--A bag of Smartfood popcorn
--Chocolate-drizzled caramel covered popcorn
--Minty hot chocolate
--Halloween shot glasses "for the Maestro and I"
--Gum and some 100 Grand bars
--A bottle of wine (because clearly from reading my blog, she knows my life priorities)
--Two books: I'm starting with reading Queen of Babble in the Big City because I need some levity in my life right about now but I'm getting to the Anna Quindlen title shortly.
--A pumpkin-scented candle
--A notepad of stickies

Here's all of the loot laid out


I've already indulged in the chocolate and caramel popcorn, we enjoyed the wine with some dinner guests last night (who loved it, by the way), and I am knee-deep in the silly Queen of Babble saga. I can't wait to get into everything else, and I'm thoroughly enjoying tooling around Baltimore getting the most fun stuff to ship back up to New York. Thanks again, Kristin, for a fantastic idea that added sunshine to my weekend. Check back here for some more posts about the loot Kristin sent my way and the box's journey across the rest of the country.

October 15 - Blog Action Day does Poverty

Today should be Wino Wednesday, right? Not today. Today is Blog Action Day-- a day in which almost 11,000 bloggers the world over each commit to bring attention to a selective cause to their individual audiences. The topic for 2008 is poverty, and I'm not going to lie... this topic didn't hit as close to home for me as it should. I go out to lunch with my work girlfriends and eat in fun restaurants all the time. I don't know what it's like to go to bed hungry because I don't have money. And honestly, I don't spend enough time thinking about those who do and resolving to help my fellow man. It's easy to think about poverty as some obscure epidemic that only touches the developing world, but I know better. I know that poverty is lurking in my back yard while I sleep comfortably with a full stomach in my little patch of suburbia.

So I felt like this would be as good a time as any to educate myself about just how poverty touches the world around me.

* As of 2007, the poverty rate for the entire US was 12.5%, remaining the same from 2006. (source)
* As of 2006, of the 631,366 living in Baltimore City, 21.5% were living below the povery line. That's around 116,800 people. (source)
* Over 1,000 people will die just this hour the world over from hunger (source)
* Maryland is apparently the least impoverished state in the union, but 100,000 people is still too many (source)
* Each week, over 50,000 people rely on free food from soup kitchens, pantries, and shelters in Maryland alone (source)

I found a few things to do help the hungry at home and abroad

* Print a letter to send to W. asking him to honor the agreement he signed at the 2002 Monterrey Conference and Johannesburg Summit to "make concrete efforts towards giving 0.7% of our national income in aid to poor contries." Most countries have reached that goal already, or have at least made a schedule to have it accomplished on our before the year 2015. Those that have yet to even schedule that goal are Switzerland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and our fine US of A.
* Support local businesses and employers who pay a living wage
* Donate goods to pantries or your time to an organization dedicated to feeding the hungry in order to ensure that the impoverished are being helped year round. Two of those in Baltimore include Moveable Feast and the Maryland Food Bank.
* Throw a party. Seriously. How many parties do I go to in a month for the sole purpose of benefiting the people in attendance? I'm sure you could hold a party with the secondary purpose of feeding the hungry and invite all of your friends to bring food items and money to donate to food banks. In fact, that's definitely going to be the theme for my fall harvest beer-tasting party coming up in a few months. I would encourage you to do the same.

Check out any of the resources that I've linked in this post. That's just a start, but with the advent of the internet came more information on any one topic than we ever wanted to know. That knowledge is power, though. Use it to help those in need around you. And check out the Blog Action Day website. They have links to all of the Blog Action Day posts around the web. I'm sure most people are far more articulate than I am when it comes to talking about poverty. Support and learn from them as well.

A Brief Monologue from My Mother

Setting: On the phone
Time: Yesterday

Madre Downbeats: Are you working today?
Me: Yes.
Madre Downbeats: Well, did you know it's Columbus Day?
Me: I did.
Madre Downbeats: The banks are closed.
Me: Yup, they sure are.
Madre Downbeats: I stopped by the bank, and I thought that my branch had closed down. It wasn't until I got to another branch that I realized that everything was closed yesterday.

God bless her... take her out of civil service for even a few years and she forgets all of those random Federal-ish holidays.

For me, Columbus Day was just a slap in the face. I didn't get any mail, couldn't go to the bank, but still had to go to work and cover three different jobs for yet another Jewish holiday.

You can get a smaller waist line by way of chocolate

There are a lot of things that are at least slightly atypical about the life of the Downbeat and the Maestro. I could bore you with a laundry list, but I won't. Atypical thing #837 that stuck out to me this morning as I woke up is that we're friends with wide array of people from all generations, occupations, walks of life, etc. It makes me feel less out of touch. I like having friends both older and younger than I am to give me better perspective on how others live. And I feel like I learn a lot from having friends that run the gamut of life experiences.

I came to this point of introspection by way last night's social outing. We're friends with a family from Kent Island. Said family is comprised of an almost-21-year-old male and his parents. We're pretty equally comfortable with both generations in this family. They invited us over for crabs (an annual October tradition we seem to have with them) and to see the new (beautiful) house that they're almost finished building. We ate crabs outside on the deck (they have to remind me every hear how to eat crabs with a sharp knife rather than a mallet), then we drank coffee and sang hymns and O Brother Where Art Thou inside.

The evening's hostess reminded me of her favorite (and very magical) dessert. I may be wrong, but somehow I think I would never have procured this recipe from someone in the same demographic as my own.

The Diet Coke Cake

Ingredients:
*A box of chocolate cake mix
*A 12-oz can of Diet Coke
*Cool Whip

Directions:
Empty box of cake mix into bowl. Empty can of Diet Coke into same bowl. Mix with spatula. Spread into a cake pan. Follow heating and baking directions on box (usually 30 minutes at 350-degrees or something like that). Remove, allow to cool, and cut into squares. Apply liberal dollop of Cool Whip.

If you prefer Caucasian cake, you can substitute angel food cake mix and Diet Sprite.

A slice of that bad boy will only hit you up 200 calories. Is that not the most magical thing in the world? No eggs, no butter... just a can of diet soda. It also happens to be the moistest slice of cake I've had. Ever.

It was a lovely end to a crazy busy weekend.

In other news, I've been not-so-officially conserving calories (mostly by being too busy to eat regularly, but cutting out most of the junk when I do), but I feel heads and tails better. If I maintain my lack-of-muffin-top and go to the gym at least twice this week, I'm rewarding myself with a new pair of skinny jeans on Friday. I'll let you know how it goes. And who knows, maybe I'll actually make my oven earn its keep Chez Downbeats and make some Diet Coke cake myself. Every girl needs her chocolate fix after all.

Meme... not to be confused with même

I got tagged in a meme by Angela. Since I'm such an un-cool blogger and haven't been tagged before (as far as I know), I had to Wiki-search meme. Unsurprisingly, that article didn't help me. Well, it taught me how to IPA it, but that's about it. I'm guessing that this thing is just like a survey and I'll do what Angela did and hope that I haven't screwed anything up.

So apparently I'm supposed to say 6 random things about myself that I've never shared with y'all before. Here goes nothing.

1. I have this frivolous desire to be a socialite. Not to go out to clubs and be one of the cool kids, but to be invited to important events with influential people and have my engagement announcement in the society pages of the newspaper. Fortunately for me, no institution like that exists in Baltimore, so I can blame my geography for my silly dream never being realized.

2. I don't like women. With a few exceptions, I didn't have close female friendships until a few years ago. I still find myself forging closer relationships with men and having to be intentional about maintaining friendships with women.

3. I'm a closet music nerd. Like legitimate "classical" music of the Western Heritage. I feel like heaven rings with compositions by Debussy like these two.

4. I can't wait to have babies. Lots of them. I was an only child, so I want an obnoxiously large family. I'm also pretty sure that babysitting for a family with five children (or even three) for an extended period of time could easily reverse that notion.

5. People assume that I have a bad relationship with my father because I never talk about him. Really, I have a great relationship with him. He's just dead, and I don't like pouring salt into open wounds.

6. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I weren't busy. When I have down time at home, all I can manage to accomplish is a load or two of laundry before falling asleep.

Alrighty... now apparently I'm supposed to tag people.

-Rocketwife
-ExSchutz
-Kristin
-The Spotted Ottoman
-Kyla Bea
-Miss Musical

Meme away, peeps. Unless you don't want to. Fear not... I won't take it personally.

Wino Wednesday Back in Business!

Wherein I pretend to know something about wine to justify my affinity for all things alcoholic

Hey there, ladies and gents!

For this installment, I was going to blog all about how last night whilst sitting on the couch and watching the debate with Troy, I took a swig of Yeungling Porter every time McCain addressed the audience and country-at-large as "my friends." I then realized that clearly I'm probably the only one who thinks that's funny.

So instead, I'm going to tell you all how living in Baltimore is so conducive to my love of all things wine. Maryland has some really fun local wineries, and even though none of them can really make a California Pinot, I take a special pride in my city every time I sip a glass of locally-produced wine.

My favorite place to go, Boordy Vineyards, is a hop-skip-jump from Baltimore city. Nestled in the hills in of Baltimore County on a historic farm, Boordy is one of Maryland's oldest wineries. They offer tours and tastings on-site daily and have a stocked wine shop. I love that I can walk into any wine store around the area and pick up a bottle if that's what pleases me.

My favorite Boordy wines are the ones that don't take themselves seriously at all. They call them "Just for Fun" wines, and I give them with reckless abandon as hostess gifts. As the weather is getting cooler, I will undoubtedly pick up a bottle or two of Spiced Wassail every month. This sweet, spiced red wine gets me in the mood for fall-- especially if warmed on the stove with a few cinnamon sticks.

Go here to check out stores in Maryland that carry Boordy wines. And the grounds of the vineyard itself are great to come and visit regardless of where you call home.

The hardest my brain has had to work since a MUSC 302 exam

I opened A Chorus Line this past weekend, and I must say that I'm so relieved to have opening night over and done with. It's been an extremely rewarding experience, but it's also been an exhausting one.

I work for a small theatre company, and as a result, everyone on staff wears a lot of hats. For the past two or three weeks especially, there have been a few of us running around like chickens with their heads cut off. And that's doing administrative business. Then comes showtime.

So when I got this gig at the good ol' Bawlmer thee-yater, I had a fair amount of experience as a musician, and a fair amount of experience as a theatre performer, but not really much as a music director. I'd watched people conduct before, but I hadn't really done much of it myself. For the past two years, I've been in a music directing trial-by-fire and have finally started getting kind of relatively decent at it. I've also worked with relatively the same personnel, so we've gotten to know each others' styles, strengths and weaknesses.

I'm not sure if I'm a glutton for punishment or just like a challenge, but apparently I waited until this show to pull out all of the stops. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I decided to conduct from the piano while playing 1st keyboard. Let me explain a little something to you that you might not know about good old Downbeats. My degree is in voice. I'm a singer who happened to take piano lessons for 14 years and then major in voice because I realized that I hated practicing piano for hours on end. My skills fell by the wayside in college, and started to get a little better of the past few years as I've been sitting behind a piano rehearsing theatre and teaching private voice lessons. I'm still by no means anywhere near as good as the pianists I hire.

Imagine just waking up in the morning with mittens on your hands and a raging hangover. That's how I play the piano in my most lucid of moments. Somehow, though, high school jazz band taught me to fake my complete unwillingness to play all of the notes on the page, and I can actually manage to play most of the score well enough to get by. That would be all fine and good if I wasn't CONDUCTING. AT. THE. SAME. TIME. I no haz that kind of hand-eye coordination. So this past week, working with new musicians and trying to land a plane while playing the piano drunk and making last minute fixes to the cast, my brain has completely short circuited.

As a result, I don't want to see words or music in print again until Friday. By then, hopefully the grey matter will have returned to semi normal. This will be all of the exercise my head needs from the atrophy it's experiencing not being in school for five years at least.... seriously.

Guess what happens tonight...

We open!

I wasn't sure it was going to happen. We put a show with original Broadway choreography on stage in 6 weeks on five 3-hour rehearsals a week. Earlier in the week, it was looking really rough earlier in the week, but stuff really came together last night at our final dress rehearsal. And now we are ready to open a show for which i'm extremely proud ot have been an integral part of.

And jjust think... once we get this baby opened, I can return to the world of the blogosphere.

An Awkward Encounter

So as I've mentioned, I'm knee deep in tech week for my latest show. We have our final (and open) dress rehearsal tonight. Needless to say, this week in every production, tensions run high. I've been surprisingly not too stressed, but I haven't really seen anyone (Maestro included) outside of the office and the production this week.

So of course, I'm all about running out as soon as we get out at 11:15 pm last night to hit our weekly Wednesday night haunt so that I can see somebody... ANYBODY... who is not associated with this show for even five minutes. By the time I got there, my food was cold and The Maestro and Troy were ready to go home. They obliged me... let me eat my cold calamari and gulp down a beer, and then we stood outside for awhile as we were saying goodbye. Just as we were all about to go our separate ways, a large, inebriated man approached our cluster of friends and stood in the middle of us. For 45 seconds, he just stood in front of Troy, not looking at anyone, acting like he was supposed to be there. When he finally broke his freeze, he did it to move with a purpose right towards me. He kept coming forward... I took a step back and held the Maestro's hand a little tighter.

And then he looked at me and said, "The thing is..."

Me: The thing is what?
Weird man: Can I ask you something?
Me: Alright...
Weird Man: Can I smell your hair?
....awkward silence....
Me: No.
Weird Man: Come on! Why not. Not just the ends over here...?
He takes a step closer and reaches out toward me. I step back.
Me: NO!

Then Weird Man proceeded to look behind him to the woman who had just snuck out of the bar to grab a smoke (sidebar... OH HOW I LOVE SMOKE-FREE BARS IN BALTIMORE!) and said, "I would ask her, but white girls just don't got that smell." And with that he hobbled off.

I really don't know how to handle that situation... still... almost 12 hours later. But white girls, apparently you don't have that smell. Whatever that smell may be.

Short story long, this is my plea to Sheila Dixon to clear the riff-raff out of Fells Point. If you do, Mayor Dixon, you could consider it the best Christmas present ever. Thanks bunches!