Monday, September 11, 2006
In Lieu of Anything Interesting, Everything Mundane
This was a pretty intense weekend. I’ll stick with the high points:
We went to an engagement party on Saturday in Petaluma, where cold foggy winds caught me by surprise in my sheer nipple-chilling singlet. The party featured a keg of good red beer from a local brewery I’ve known of for years but never visited, as well as a big tank of truly chuggable sangria. I don’t remember much of the ride home (I was not driving, needless to say). Key phrases worth remembering from this event: we took a very rural winding back road to get from superhighway 101 to the edge of Petaluma town, and at one point I overshot a left turn and had to turn around in a farmer’s driveway where a sign was posted which read: “No Trespassing (/) Violators will be Shot (/) Survivors will be Shot Again.” Usually I’m okay being offered a double shot but this time I just put it in reverse and rolled out. Also, the engaged couple was honored with two delicious cakes. The chocolate cake read, “Congratulations on your Bar Mitzvah;” the lemon cake read “2006 Kiwanis Canasta Champions.” I think canasta is a card game, or a dance, or some combination of the two. Shuffle, deal, do-si-do. Needless to say, queens are wild. And I think the Kiwanis season is now officially open in the farmer’s driveway down the hill.
Sunday we met another family that adopted from Korea - just last month. Their little 5-month-old boy was very sweet but basically a fashion accessory; their three year old daughter, on the other hand, was full of energy and curiosity, and it was fun to meet them all. We didn’t hear any particularly funny lines worth sharing during our outing but we did have one hell of a lot of dim sum for about $5 each. God bless Clement street, where the terrorists have already been co-opted and are buying cute bathroom baskets and live eels in bulk.
Sunday night we watched Akeela and the Bee, which was fun, if somewhat cloying and stereotypical. I was glad to see that the LA school system contributes 3/4 of the finalists in the national spelling bee. I also liked seeing Lawrence Fishburn communing silently with Neo while actually pretending to act in a different movie altogether. The movie featured a girl who used the repetitive rhythms of skipping rope to learn and regurgitate spellings of obscure words. I’d have liked to see the real life story on which it was based, in which she used a combination of tribal dance and a slip-n-slide. Now that’s entertainment.
Final news note: NPR had a story recently (okay, more than a month ago but it’s new to you, right?) about a recently-uncovered 12th century Tuscan fresco featuring a tree surrounded by women who reach up to pick its fruit, which is dicks. That’s right, this is a phallus tree. The news story discussed the controversy as to whether it was a holdover of pagan traditions (wherein I suppose fables of the weinerbush abound), or if it was in fact a political cartoon describing the superiority of the ruling Guelphs over the upstart Ghibellines. The story concluded that, pending resolution of this thorny issue, the townspeople will continue to refer to the monumental mural, not as the “Gulphic Superiority Mural,” but as the Fertility Tree. Kelly suggested that they just call it “Old Woody” and be done with it. And so I shall. Catch you later on, my friends. If you’re out in the bush gathering fruits, watch that you don’t get pricked.
