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!