Date Night

“John!” I hollered to the Hubs. “Get out your calendar. You’re busy next Wednesday night, OK? We’re going on a date!”

We have busy schedules and sometimes it’s hard to get just a little you-and-me time with Mr. Popularity. He’s been a little disappointed with the rugby pitch lately with people saying they were going to use it and not showing up. That sounds like a small thing until you realize that the Hubs waters the grass, mows the grass, arranges for trash pickup and porta-potties and makes sure the field is configured for whatever sport is using it at the moment. It’s a bit of work and more than that a bit of expense. So having events book the field and then evaporate without a trace is exasperating.

It ranks right up there with the group that used the field vigorously as planned and never paid, then sought to “rent” the field again. It ranks up there with the group who accidentally made off with the scoreboard controls only to have those same controls sold back to my dear husband. Yup, the same controls. Nope, that wasn’t a long time ago. Yup, just this week.

My husband is a gentle man and a gentleman. He seeks to remain friendly with the weasels and ne’er-do-wells who pull these stunts. He tries to soft-pedal these stories with me because he knows they upset me and he doesn’t want to have to deal with my annoyance too, even if it is clearly directed in defense of him and not against him. After all, he just wanted to have a place that was a positive venue of good fun for the community, one that gets bashed by its own residents as much as it does by people who feel they are too genteel to live here.

I’m not saying my own little town is suddenly a Garden Spot by any means. It is, however, no longer ranked as the 7th worst city in the USA. The city is no longer in bankruptcy, for instance. I make my own jokes, saying that we never did have martial law like everyone thinks. After all, we couldn’t afford it. But there are people out there who are making huge efforts for their communities all over, not just mine. I think they must be tired and discouraged the way my sweetums gets sometimes.

So, in the spirit of spontaneous entertainment, I took my friend Thalassa up on a suggestion to go to the California Shakespeare Theater’s production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. There’s supposed to be an umlaut or whatever we call those two little dots over a vowel in English over the e in Mr. Coward’s first name. If I find out how to do that here, I’ll fix it. Mr. Coward was a wonderfully talented dancer, actor, writer born in 1899 and died entirely too soon in my opinion. His acid wit is sweet as sour lemon drops for me.

Philippa Kelly writes in the program notes, “…he found wildly enthusiastic audiences for his lighthearted plays about shamelessly vain people, the proceedings edged with astringent social commentary….” Well, right up my alley, or more accurately perhaps, my front walk. People are always asking if I could have dinner with someone from history, living or dead, who would it be? Noel Coward would be on the list at least but only if he dominated the conversation!

John and I met well past our college days but we both majored in English literature, both having had some trouble settling on a major at all. John flirted with psychology and sociology, and even for a while engineering, while I had a math scholarship that I didn’t accept, selected English and nearly diverted to a geology degree at the last minute. We both like mystery and humor and find the combination of the two nearly irresistible. And then there’s my penchant for the metaphysical.

Up popped the notice about Blithe Spirit and my credit card sprang into action. Happily enough, there was also a discount “secret code” to enter to make the deal sweeter. Honey, I thought, we are so going to this play!

We gave up an evening of Olympic drama and baseball and trekked the easy distance to Orinda and the theatre. It’s right off Highway 24 with easy parking and, even better, easy access from the BART station. The theatre is outdoors, nestled in the dry summer hills, and there’s a shuttle that picks up the BART people and the lifetime members of the Knee Club (John and I are members). To solve the problem of what to do about dinner in the time between work and the theatre performance, there is a lovely picnic area under the trees.

We stopped in Orinda at the Europa Hoffbrau and picked up sandwiches for our picnic, then found out that sandwiches are available at the snack bar on the theatre grounds. No matter! Our sandwiches were wonderful and we shared a picnic table with a mother-daughter team who had brought an entire basket full of treats. I thought I was going to have to pull the Hubs out of our new friends' home-made guacamole.

The bells rang and we were off to our seats where it was still allowed to finish dinner if you hadn’t quite, as long as you don’t make noise to disturb the performance. Cell phones and pagers off and the magic began. Literally.

Tea Tarot
(c) Copyright 2011 Marcia McCord

Blithe Spirit starts out with a writer hosting a séance-dinner party with the ulterior motive of getting great descriptions and authentic jargon from the medium, Madame Arcati. Madame gives the host and his guests quite a show. We soon find out that a door has opened to allow the spirit of the host’s more-than-a-handful first wife to appear but only to the host, so it seems. Wit and physical comedy combine to show us that ghosts may be just as tired of haunting us as we are with putting up with them.

My favorite performance was Rebekah Brockman’s Edith, whose harried and hurried maid makes you certain that it is difficult to get good help these days. Her hypnosis sequence was snort-your-drink funny. Domenique Lozano’s Madame Arcati was ectoplasmic in her physical comedy and properly sonorous in her delivery, a medium with a mission. Kudos, too, to the set designer Annie Smart whose vision of the Condomine home had its own kind of frighteningly accurate echoes of the sort of interior decoration favored by my mother with those little unexpected special effects.

If you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay Area between now and September 2 and find yourself at loose ends for an evening’s entertainment, this is just the thing for date night, the night with the girls or any other 3 of Cups frivolity, say an extra evening available during the SF BATS, the Bay Area Tarot Symposium, perhaps. A word to the wise, if the day is scorching hot, the evening’s performance is likely to be comfortable with a light wrap. If the day is bearably mild, bring blankets and bundle up.

For more information go here: http://www.calshakes.org/

Best wishes!

PS - That secret code is "seance"...Go! Enjoy!

Getting Together with the Goddesses

“Nothing is more exhausting than cheerful companions,” said Sandra Boynton in her Recycled Paper Products cartoons, fluffy little cats holding paws, dancing in a chorus line, with one of the cats taking a misstep. I love that cartoon. The heck with keeping up with the Joneses! Just keeping up with my small troupe of girlfriends for a weekend is a challenge. There’s enough energy there to be captured and used for other purposes.

B.G., Kaye, Ronda, Julie, Lisa and I started hanging out together about [ed., date removed to protect the innocent] when we all decided that a Big Girls’ Slumber Party sounded like a great idea. We started our get-togethers at Ronda’s house, sleeping in sleeping bags on her living room floor. Over time we’ve gotten more sophisticated in our “Goddess Weekends,” extending our frequency of flings from once a year to twice a year. In order to save any one of us from the trials of being hostess, we moved to a couple of alternative sites, had a bad experience at a local hotel and settled in on a long string of good times in wonderful places, like Stinson Beach and the Russian River. Hard times hit us all, so while we were not interested in giving up the frequency of fun, we went back to home-hosted fun and the occasional “scholarship.”

It’s such a restorative for all of us. Oh, sure, there’s always the usual banter about who snores the loudest. (Hey, I think of it as my own personal White Noise. I even brought earplugs for everyone one time although we never distributed them.) We share our stories of What’s Happening in Our Lives. We’ve been through a divorce, family illnesses, family deaths, personal illnesses, job losses and gains, kids graduating from high school and college, kids going to war, kids coming home from war, kids starting their own businesses, Little Sisters and errant rugby players, saying goodbye to beloved pets and hello to new pets. We’ve included a guest or two from time to time as we think the guest and our core group can stand it. Sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn’t. We’ve battled dangerous wildlife, like a big fat scorpion on the kitchen ceiling. We’ve compared the various features of automobiles, men, real estate, corporations, musical performers, television. We once watched first in eager anticipation, then with growing dismay and finally with a chorus of screams of derision and flung popcorn as a highly touted Chick Flick turned into a case of emotional dreck and idiocy. We’ve had guest psychics and a massage therapist join us for entertainment. Once, quite by accident, we were entertained completely by a fireman who came to our rescue when one of us sustained a kitchen injury that was a bit more than a band-aid in severity.

We usually do something creative, too. We’ve beaded bracelets, painted flowerpots, been our own manicurists, and even tried and pretty much failed at karaoke. (Kaye, I thought we did pretty well, actually.) We’ve gone on nature hikes, tried a little canoeing and walked beaches. I once got us nearly completely lost looking for a wonderful rose nursery nestled among vineyards; we did find it, eventually. I think I’ve been forgiven for most of that. And I did buy the most luscious and fragrant climbing rose there in just the perfect shade. This year we read to each other, either from our own writings or from fascinating reading we’ve found. One item was a transcript of a deposition from years ago, a clear character study of the deposed coming through.

I usually do a tarot reading for everyone and this year was no exception. Family, jobs, romance, finance and health were prevailing themes. We even read my cards together since I seldom get to read for myself. It said I need to get out more. This is a good thing.

Food is certainly something that we’re constantly improving on. We usually err on the side of caution. After all, what IF we were stranded in the weekend house for, oh, say, a couple of months? You’d need all of what we bring. We’ve had our share of food emergencies, learning what foods are relatives of the nightshade family and what foods are chemically related to poison ivy. We’ve set the smoke alarm off and been unable to clear it in the middle of the night, all due to a simple pizza. We’ve vowed to go out to dinner and then found we just had too much food and too little initiative to leave the house. We had lots of fruit this year and excellent breakfasts, salads and sandwiches for dinners. We even squeezed in visits to wineries and had lunch at the Korbel Cellars deli under the redwoods. The thinner ones have complained that they’ve gained. The less-thin have vowed to walk it off. Soon.

What’s most important is that even if we rant, laugh, squabble, tease and embarrass each other, we share a bond of friendship that has lasted many years. That friendship is like family for us, sometimes better. We had our 3 of Cups times two for a great time with six of us. We celebrated a birthday. We bought hats. We cooked, we cleaned, we performed a miracle of parking. We considered going to the Fireman's BBQ but decided against it when we reasoned they weren't really going to barbecue a fireman.  We tasted the wine. We smelled the flowers. We celebrated life together. And we can’t wait to do it again. Ladies, here’s to looking forward to the fall!

Best wishes.

When Two Become Three

Baby Lulu made her first grand entrance on January 28. While I can’t possibly be as thrilled as her proud parents, I am so excited to see such a lovely little creature enter our lives. Lulu has intelligent eyes, a rosebud mouth, strong hands, capable lungs and the cutest little almost-eyebrows. What great fortune she has to be born to parents who want her, love her, can afford her and welcome her as much as any child can be. So many children are not so warmly greeted.

Her maternal family members are dear friends of ours and her paternal family members are warm and generous. For years we have been treated like family, invited to family functions happy and sad. I couldn’t feel closer if I had been legally adopted instead of our own mutual agreement of informal adoption of friendship and love.

Lulu is the luckiest baby I know right now. She has great-grandmas. One of them is one of my best friends. Even though Gerry is closer to my mom’s age than mine, we are more like co-conspirators than mother-daughter. We have been known to dash off to the department store to purchase a refrigerator on a whim, try our luck at the slot machines and even get into trouble giggling in the back row in church. Gerry cooks a fabulous stuffed flank steak and treats us to major holiday dinners to die for and in some cases from but only from quantity. The quality has always been dreamy. Her mock ravioli and “green slime” jello salad are legendary. If it’s a holiday, Gerry’s house is where the action is.

Gerry and I have a lot in common. We both can talk a blue streak and have a million crazy stories from our lives. Gerry writes a daily letter to God and I, well, I blog of course. We both think St Therese The Little Flower is the bee’s knees and are admirers of the Little Way. We both like to try new ideas out and try new things. We both like the idea of “spontaneous.” We both like our extraordinary ordinary lives and the amazing things and people in it. We both like chocolate, although I have never felt the need to confess that as a sin and therefore differ from Gerry on that topic. And we both think my husband is a saint in the making. Basically, he has to be to put up with both of us.

Gerry’s daughters who are the new Grandma and Great Aunt are also dear to us. Maureen is like the eye of the storm. Nancy will make sure that storm is a work of art. And the new Great Uncle Bob is a gentle, peaceful artist and artisan, a lover of dachshunds and deserts, wise counselor and handyman. The in-laws are unique and interesting too. I’m sure the new Grandpa will be bursting with pride when we see him in a couple of weeks, another lovely lady to adore the former surfer and former mayor. And if Facebook posts are any indication, the new Aunt is utterly smitten too.

Almost as wonderful as seeing this new little princess today was watching her parents. I’ve watched her mother grow from high school “Broadway” performer to capable professional to giddy bride to fiercely protective and graciously tender mother. While cradling her firstborn, she can still speak out on the issue of health care in our modern world. And Lulu’s stunned and entranced father is a wonder to behold. As I watched him hold his own miracle in his arms, I saw suddenly he is now a man with a purpose, awed by the perfection, in love with his wife and his daughter, vital in his life.

Watching these new parents who just a few short weeks ago had been two and are now three, I could almost see the glow around them of light and love, of history and future, of stories and adventures, of life. In the tarot, when we move from the 2 of Cups to the 3 of Cups, the two entwined become a celebration of life. Love moves beyond intimate one-on-one bonding to a dance of joy in everyone’s life touched by that love. And today, that love is Lulu. Welcome, Baby.

Best wishes!