11 March
I made it! Almost didn't (as per usual), but I made it. And I even have time to tell you about it, hey whaddaya know about that!
So, on Thursday we had another tiresome day at work including a tiresome meeting that I rather think I will write about to my private list (if you want to join, ask) followed by going out to dinner with The Raccoon and a friend of ours from the California office who always takes us out when he's in town--usually to lunch, though.
Well, this time it was dinner, and we went to an amazing place called Churrascaria. That I have actually seen on TV! And I don't mean in a commercial, I mean on the Food Network! Pretty exciting for a girl who mostly eats at McDonald's.
Well, McDonald's and Westway and Vynl.
Anyway, Churrascaria is a Brazilian meat restaurant where, for one price, you can eat your weight in meat. The waiters come round with all these different meats on swords ("Pork?" "Lamb?" "Ribeye?" "Salmon?" "Sirloin?" "Flank steak?" "Chicken?" "Pork sausage?" "Yes yes yes no yes yes no yes please!") and they carve you off a square foot of it.
And you have this chip which is red on one side and green on the other, and when the red side is up it means "No thank you, no more meat just now," and the green side up means "Meat! Where is my meat! I must have more MEEEEEEEAT!!!"
And of course there are appetizers and little side dishes and yummy cheese bread, but they are all a distraction from the main attraction, which is the meat.
And there's a dessert cart, but we will draw a veil over it. After eating tiramisu, flan and carrot cake, that is.
Everything but the pork (dry) and the tiramisu (insipid) was delicious and we all ate much more than was good for us. The fact that we all had to back to work that evening was somewhat horrifying, and we staggered, gasping up the street, but it was worth it.
Anyway, I worked another five hours, until midnight (again) until I felt sufficiently virtuous to take the next day off and went home. To pack? To write my entry? To get ready in any way to come to Boston? Well, I did two loads of laundry, so it wasn't a complete waste of an evening until I went to bed at 2.30a.
Up at 7.45a, putter putter, rush rush, pack pack, bathe bathe, breakfast breakfast, race like a maniac out of the house at 9.40a for a 10.30a train. Which would have been a reasonable amount of time but for the fact that the van took a year and the taxi went down a VERY CROWDED street and my watch was slow so I thought I had five more minutes, and I didn't know that I could get a ticket on the train so I was fussing with the ticket machine, and I flew down the stairs and...
Made it! "Is this the Boston train?" "Yes. And you're lucky we had mechanical failure or we would have left already!" Phew! Good old mechanical failure. Unless, of course, we had ended up in one of those spectacular Amtrak crashes. Which we didn't.
The train ride was fairly uneventful, except for a short conversation with the slightly loony woman in the seat ahead of me who heard me typing and proceeded to ask me all about computers and tell me her entire life story.
There was a plug on the train, which I didn't expect. I thought I would only have my two hour battery, otherwise I would have brought my headphone and watched a movie. Instead, what did I do for the five hour ride? Cleared my inbox! No, really!
I wrote 77 emails going all the way back to 1 Jan, because that's the last time that I cleaned my inbox (not by answering everything, but by getting them out of the inbox and out of my sight, like sweeping dust under the rug). I started out by just answering them, then (I was working backwards) saying "Sorry I'm so late in answering", then I just started saying "(Standard Late Reply Excuse)" and finally, for the stuff from early January, "(Standard Astoundingly Late Reply Excuse)".
If you didn't get an email last night, then either you asked me a question about something that I needed to look up on the web before answering or there wasn't anything particularly to reply to in your email. Or you're Ginnie Kitchen, whose reply I cannot send out for some absurd reason.
Anyway, five hours of email later, I'm in Boston and I go to Robert's office at the ballet company.
It's so great! All of the dancers and rehearsals and classes all mixed up with the office drone rather than there being a boring wing and a thrilling wing and never the twain shall meet. It reminded me of Interlochen, watching classes and seeing people in practice clothes all the time. Robert says it's annoying, though, that the company has all of these beautiful male dancers, and they're all straight but one! And he's partnered up!
So, after he pretended to work for a little while longer, we went back to his house to dump my luggage and change, then went out to dinner at Jacob Wirth's, a fabulous German meat restaurant, where I somehow managed to have another meal of meat right after the first meal of meat, but this time it wasn't all the meat in all the land, just an order of corned beef.
Then we went to the ballet, which was fab. I haven't seen live ballet for ten years or so, Romeo and Juliet in London, and I don't know why, since I live in one of the great ballet cities for cryin' out loud.
This programme was called "The British Are Coming", consisting of two short ballets, Danses Concertantes and Winter Dreams, the former a storyless ballet choreographed by Michael Conder with music by Stravinsky, and the latter based on Chekhov's The Three Sisters, choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan with music by Tchaikovsky.
The first piece was very good indeed, but I was struggling against sleep since I have this dreadful habit of being happily lulled to sleep by the sound of orchestral music, no matter how peppy, especially if there isn't a story to engage my mind. The second piece was all piano and guitars and story, so it wasn't a problem.
Winter Dreams was just extraordinary. The choreography was very Chekhovian, with a repetition of themes, and there was a stunning trio with Irina, the youngest sister, and her two suitors Tusenbach and Solyonin that just rocked my world.
It was also interesting to see a balding ballet dancer with a moustache and sideburns dancing in a three piece suit and glasses. The trousers were made specially, I could tell, but the jacket and vest were off the rack, and must have taken some time to get used to dancing in.
I also loved a drunken solo bit with Chebutkin and a chair, not least of which because he did the one thing onstage that I can do, which is a variation on a backwards roll that is like a magic trick. You lie on your back, arms stretched out along the floor, throw your legs into the air, like you are going to do a bicycle until you are up on your shoulders and the side of your neck, balanced by your arms, then you let your legs come down the other side, twisting your head through, and you are lying on your stomach.
I can do that. I can't do anything else I saw on that stage, though after eleven years of ballet as a kid I knew what I was looking at. "Cabriole, pas de chat, tour jeté, battement, round de jambe" I would think. Can't do any of those anymore, but for the round de jambe, of course. Cause it's easy peasy, that's why.
Anyway, it was all great and fab and trif and swell and I got a pink pointe shoe notepad with a magnet on the back so you can hang it on your fridge. Who could ask for anything more?
Today's horoscope:
A day to be with people, to share ideas. Group activities may appeal, or the simple social stimulation of others. Communicate.
One year ago today:
I wonder how long we will manage to work with her without finding out?
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Last Updated Sat 11 March 12:10:09 2000