Hawleyblog

Seeing 9 to 5

Last Sunday, Paula and I went to see 9 to 5 on Broadway. We both love Dolly Parton. We appreciate her for her singing and songwriting abilities, of course. But Paula also loves how she looks: beautiful in a fake way, with the makeup, the wigs, and the work she's had done.* And we love that she managed to become such a huge success after growing up dirt poor in Appalachia. And that, by pretty much all accounts, she's an incredibly, genuinely nice person.

Before the show, which started at 3, we had lunch at Junior's. I enjoyed my burger and fries, but the best part was the selection of pickles, beets, and cole slaw that came out before our lunches. The cole slaw was especially good.

Our sweet waitress offered to take our picture after she saw me attempting to take one of the two of us using the extended-arm-with-backward-facing-iPhone trick.

 

The theater behind us is the one where I saw Next to Normal. The Washington Post's Peter Marks is the critic who called NTN "the future of American musicals." Actually, he didn't say precisely that. In mid-April, before 9 to 5 had opened on Broadway, he raved about NTN and said that Tony voters should declare it the best musical of the year to encourage more productions like it: "Yet it's not premature to suggest that for originality, ingenuity and sock-it-to-'em emotionality—not to mention the future of sophisticated American musicals—'Next to Normal' would be the box to check off on voters' ballots."

As for 9 to 5, Paula and I both enjoyed it a good deal. Allison Janney, Megan Hilty, and Stephanie J. Block were all terrific as Violet, Doralee, and Judy, respectively. Janney clearly isn't totally comfortable as a singer, and she seemed to speak the words more than sing them in some numbers. In others, she sounded more natural. Her acting was never less than amazing, though. And Hilty and Block were wonderful in the roles played by Parton and Jane Fonda in the movie.

I was disappointed to find the insert in the program announcing that Marc Kudisch, who was nominated for a Tony for his performance as the ladies' asshole boss, Mr. Hart, was off for the day. But Michael X. Martin did a fine job in that role.

My favorite parts of the show were the fantasy vignettes in which VD&J acted out their revenge on Mr. Hart and in which Violet imagined she was CEO. They were loads of fun.

On the negative side, the ending was mighty hokey, and a romantic subplot involving Violet and a younger accountant seemed out of place. None of Parton's new songs for the show really stayed with me, though they might on further listening if I buy the OCR.

Still, the show was definitely worth the cost of a half-price ticket, and I don't understand why it hasn't been able to attract a bigger audience. I'd have thought Dolly Parton's involvement and the popularity of the movie would have ensured a longer run than it's going to end up with. It's closing on Sept. 6 after what will have been 148 performances. A national tour starts later that month with a first stop in Nashville.

*I like how she looks too, but I'm not anywhere near as entranced by her as Paula, who has only two women on her A-list of people she'd most like to sleep with: Dolly and Loretta Young.

Another Fun Weekend in Cape May, Part II

On Saturday, Dan; Paul; Matt; his longtime squeeze, Heather; and I discussed plans for a going-away dinner party that night for Ed and A.P. They decided to have all of Ed's favorite foods: king crab legs, steaks, and macaroni and cheese from KFC. So we'd have something green, I would buy some zucchinis at Duckies farmstand. Heather also got an ice cream cake.

Somebody mentioned that the party would be a total sausage fest if it weren't for Heather. Matt said he and a friend had come up with a term for the female equivalent of a sausage fest: a box lunch. Hah!

D&P and I met E&A at the Cape May city beach. I've never seen the waves so calm there. The surfers were sitting on their boards, just chilling. The water's usually pretty rough at that beach.

I've noted on the blog before that Paul and I tend to have similar tastes. We were both checking out two dark, hairy, Greek-looking guys who were hanging out with a bunch of other, less-sexy people a short distance from us.

 

I usually go for somewhat beefier guys, but, you know, these guys would do in a pinch. ;-)

And speaking of sexy fellows, here's Dan striding across the beach.

And still speaking of sexy guys, here's a shot Dan took of me wearing my cheap-ass, beat-up sunglasses. Because people on the Internets have been clamoring for more photos of Bill Hawley shirtless. Hah! I swear I didn't put him up to taking it at this angle, but I dig it.

And still speaking of sexi- ... uh, here's a picture of Ed. :-) He's packing up on his last day at the Cape May beach, for at least a little while.

The dinner was a lot of fun. Ed dressed in an even more ill-advised-color-and-pattern-mixing way than he usually does and wore tall white socks with his sandals—but intentionally this time. Or so he claimed. :-)

Here are E&A digging into the king crab.

And M&H doing the same.

M&H have two awesome standard poodles, Cooper, a 4-year-old female, and Cody, who's about a year and a half old, if I remember correctly. Here's Cody with his mama.

People from the campground came and went throughout the evening to offer good wishes to E&A and to have some of the ice cream cake. Here's one of the kids standing tall with Cody.

As regular readers of Hawleyblog know, we're always busting on Ed for his bad taste—in clothes and other things. He has a tacky but irresistibly fun flamingo (also visible in the photo above) that dances to a tune Heather identified as "Teddy Bear Picnic." Dan can do a very good version of the flamingo dance. Cooper wasn't liking the flamingo one bit.

Ed also has a gizmo that looks like a small fire but is really a piece of flame-shaped fabric that's blown upward and lit up to make it look like it's a flickering blaze. We joked that it would be placed as an eternal flame on the lot where Ed's trailer stood as a never-ending reminder of the great man who'd once lived there. Eh, either that or it would end up in the back of someone's closet.

Oh, I've almost forgotten to write about the drink of the summer in Cape May this year. One is visible in the lower-right corner of the E&A photo. It's a mix of lemonade and sweet tea–flavored vodka and is commonly called a Firefly and lemonade, after the most popular brand of vodka that makes such a flavor. It's good shit.

Later that night, D&P, Matt, and I biked into town. We got there about midnight and first went to Carney's. Which was STILL ASKING FOR A COVER CHARGE ONE HOUR BEFORE CLOSING. We blinded them with our collective behinds and went over to Cabanas. A hard-rock trio went on for their last set not long after we arrived. The band wasn't bad, but we weren't liking the vibe of the place. Just a shit-ton of drunken college kids. And none of those drunken guys would take me up on my offer of a hand job. That, AAMOF, could possibly be upgraded to another kind of job if he played his cards right. OMG. JK. 4COL.*

The next day, while E&A cleaned out and cleaned up their trailer, D&P and I took Missy and Claire to Higbee Beach, where we met up with M&H and their dogs. Cody had been a little leery of me on Saturday, but he must have decided I was kosher because he would bring me his fuzzy stick to throw into the water for him to retrieve. And Cooper, who's a fantastic swimmer, would bring me her ball. M&H said that that day was the first time Cody had ventured pretty far into the water.

I gotta say, Paul has quite an arm on him. He could get the ball out a good deal farther than I could. He told me I needed to throw from my shoulder instead of my elbow, or something. I tried to do that, and I got it out a little farther some of the time but I couldn't do it like he did.

Here are Dan and the Gunslinger.

And Claire in the sand.

At one point when the poodles were running and swimming around and retrieving things in the water, Missy acted like she was going to head out into the surf and show them how it was done but then she must have thought better of it and turned around to come back under the umbrella.

Toward the end of our stay at the beach, a small pleasure boat threw down its anchor directly in front of us. There were plenty of places all up and down the largely empty beach where they could have settled, so D&P were annoyed that they decided to go right there. A young boy from the boat wanted to pet first Missy and then Claire, and a young woman who was with that group said he had to ask first, which he did. Later, Claire went over and lay on these people's blanket, and when we left, she didn't want to get up and go with us. Apparently my Emme isn't the only pooch with the nerve to act like she wants to defect to another family.

We got cleaned up back at D&P's trailer, and they did their usual end-of-the-weekend chores. I took a couple pictures of things in the trailer.

Their beach passes from over the years.

And a photo of D&P in their first trailer 11 or 12 summers ago.

On the way back to Trenton, we followed E&A to Ed's home in Swedesboro that he has on the market. Ed needed our help—well, mostly Dan's—in getting a mirror down from the ceiling in a certain room of the house so he could relocate it in the ceiling of the same room of his new house. There was horrible traffic on a back route Ed took, and we stopped to eat at a diner along the way. We said our goodbyes after the job was done and raced off to see whether I'd be able to catch the 11:02 in Trenton. Just outside Trenton, we knew we'd miss it, so we went to the next station up the track, in Hamilton. We missed the train there by a couple of minutes, so Dan drove us back to Trenton and dropped me off at the station there. I got home around 2, but it was totally worth the lost sleep for another great weekend in Cape May.

*That little bit of "comedy" was inspired by Dan's fondness for jokingly saying, like a teenage girl, "OMG. TSNF." I didn't want to look unhip, but I finally had to ask him what TSNF meant. "That's so not fair." At some point during the weekend, I said, "Slob my (or your) knob"—I can't remember the context—and Dan cracked up. He'd never heard that expression before.

Another Fun Weekend in Cape May, Part I

The weekend before last, I got in another Cape May visit with Dan and Paul. I put the woofers in the kennel this time and took the train to Trenton that Friday. The 3:01 Northeast Corridor express sat on the tracks for a few minutes before one of the conductors announced that the train was experiencing mechanical problems. After about 20 minutes, we were told to get on a new train across the platform. The delay meant that Paul would be home from work by the time I got into the Capital City, so D&P picked me up at the station in Dan's truck and we went directly to Cape May from there. (Rather than Dan picking me up and taking me back to their home, where we'd await Paul.) I sat in the sideways-facing seat behind Paul, and D&P's woofers, Missy and Claire, rode in the back, under the cap, with our crap.

That morning, I'd baked Chocolate Mint Brownies using the recipe for Chocolate Brownies from The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook as the starting point. I left out the espresso powder, chocolate chips, and walnuts. Two nights earlier, I'd infused the two sticks of butter called for in the recipe with chocolate mint—two bunches from the farmers market and a few sprigs from the plant in my alleyway "garden." I'd taken the mint leaves and stems out of the melted butter and had put it in the fridge in a covered metal bowl to re-solidify. When it came time to make the brownies, I melted the green-tinged butter and the unsweetened chocolate together. I added a little bit more plain butter to make up for the amount I guesstimated must have stuck to the mint and couldn't be pressed out.

I'd bought eggs at the same time I'd gotten the mint. The only farmstand I found that had eggs for sale at that late time in the day was selling them for $7 a half dozen. A sign indicated they were the fancy, colorful ones from Araucana chickens and some other breeds I hadn't heard of and don't recall now. I told the gal who was standing closest to the eggs that I was baking something that called for six large eggs and asked her how many of these smaller eggs she thought I'd need to use to get the equivalent of that amount of egginess. She said nine. Later, when I looked in the cookbook, I realized I'd misremembered the recipe; it calls for only five large eggs. Either way, five or six, I'd have needed more than a half dozen. Rather than walk away from the woman empty-handed, I bit the bullet and actually paid $14 for a dozen eggs. I feel rather silly admitting that. I'm all about buying fresh and local and supporting small farmers because I know how hard the work is and it's better for the environment if we don't buy eggs that have been trucked across the country, but I think I should have drawn the line at $14 eggs.

As my chocolate-and-butter mixture was cooling slightly, I beat the eggs—I used eight of them—and 3 1/2 cups of sugar in my mixer on high speed for 10 minutes. I've never seen this combo get whipped as high as it did this time, which leads me to believe I should have maybe used only seven eggs. The resulting brownies turned out just fine, though, and the mint flavor came through nicely without being overpowering.

On the way down to the shore, we talked about a whole bunch of stuff, including our families. P&D mentioned that in Oklahoma, where Paul is from, people sometimes say "Y'all" when addressing one person. To make it clear that they're talking to a bunch of people, they'll actually say "All y'all." To which I say, *sigh y'sigh*. Later in the weekend, we got to talking about Okies again, and I said, "We kicked out the Indians for this?" And P&D reminded me that the Indians were forced to move from their native lands in the Deep South to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears. I then delivered my stupid fallback joke: "I'd cry too if I knew I was going to end up in Oklahoma."

When we arrived at the campground, D&P found out from Ed that it was going to be his and A.P.'s last weekend at The Depot. They were moving to Delaware, to a town not far outside Rehobeth, so they wouldn't be needing a place in Cape May anymore. Ed was having trouble finding a buyer for his trailer. He'd decided to have a guy who was going to sell the trailer on consignment for him pick it up that Monday because the guy had said he was currently selling two trailers a day whereas in October, at the end of the camping season, he might sell two a week.

The five of us went to dinner that night at Rio Station in the Rio Grande section of Middle Township. I decided to treat everyone. Dan almost never lets anyone pay for anything, but he let me do it that night. The cheap bastard. Hah!

I made fun of everyone for getting fruity drinks—even though the fruity-esque Blue Moon beer with a slice of orange that I got wasn't exactly going to put more hair on my chest. I tried a sip, actually a gulp, of Paul's Huckleberry Lemonade, which consisted of 4 ounces of 44 North Mountain Huckleberry Vodka and 6 ounces of lemonade, served on the rocks. Man, was it good. So I got one of those for my next drink. But I asked that it be put in a dirty glass. And I slapped the waitress on the ass, spit on the floor, and scratched my balls all at once after she brought it to me.

We ate at a table in the bar area because we'd have had a 20-minute wait for a spot in the dining room. That gave us a chance to hear Terry O'Brien of Terry-Oke sing a few numbers. No one in the bar was singing, so Paul and I hounded Dan, who usually enjoys singing karaoke, to get up there and give Terry a rest. He finally gave in and sang "Little Deuce Coupe," which I learned includes the lyrics "she's stroked and bored." Well, I suppose she might be bored with stroking, depending on who's doing it. Hah!

Ed drove us back to the campground, and after a little while, Dan and I biked into Cape May to do some bar-hopping. At Carney's, we saw a band named Famous by Monday that Dan hated and I enjoyed. They did a mix of oldies and recent rock hits to appeal to both the older people who typically frequent that place and the college kids who hadn't yet gone back to school. Dan had more fun checking out a hot guy with magnificent biceps who he assumed was in the Coast Guard. He and his almost-as-attractive friend who also looked like Coast Guard material seemed more interested in each other than they were in the two chicks who were hanging out with them.

I think it was around midnight when Dan and I moved on to Cabanas, where an R&B group called Sensational Soul Cruisers was performing. SSC had four singers who took turns doing lead vocals while the others sang backup. The brothers could sing! And SC's horn section was really good too. My favorite song they performed was "Turn Your Love Around." That Monday, I bought the George Benson original, which was released in 1981, on iTunes.*

Matt, a friend of P&D's from the campground, met up with us at Cabanas. I continued to hit the gin and tonics pretty hard, but they must have been pretty weak because I didn't feel the least bit woozy. And Dan said he encountered a different kind of "cruiser" in the bathroom: a guy who showed Dan his pecker.

*I was planning to make fun of the number of times Benson sang "turn your love around" in this song, but after counting them, I realized it wasn't that terribly many after all. What's gotten into me in this post? I've dissed Okies, tried to get a laugh out of a joke about the forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral homes that resulted in the death of thousands of them, and now I'm wanting to mock a revered jazz/R&B artist for his supposedly repetitive lyrics that he didn't even write? Actually, I don't feel the slightest tinge of regret about making fun of people from Oklahoma. They've foisted two of the most backwards and brain-dead U.S. senators, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe, onto the rest of the country. So fuck all 'em'all.

Alice Ripley. She's Fierce. In Next to Normal

A week ago Thursday, Missy, Joyce, and I went to see Next to Normal. Nate didn't want to see it because of its rather heavy subject matter: The main female character, Diana, who's played by Alice Ripley, struggles with bipolar disorder and other mental and emotional problems. Before the show, I told Missy that in order to get Nate to go, she should tell him that everyone's calling NTN "the feel-good musical of the year!" She said he wouldn't buy that.

(SPOILER ALERT: Plot developments are revealed starting two paragraphs down.)

I'd been wanting to see the show partly because Jeff and Hunter of Title of Show are fans of Ripley. In the number "An Original Musical," when Hunter, playing a trash-talking blank piece of paper,* says Jeff can forget about going to Broadway with an original musical "unless you got some stars in mind," Jeff replies: "Well, we'd love to have Alice Ripley. She's fierce. Hey, that's the first time I ever said the word fierce. That's the second." The day of the show, I kept saying those lines to Missy and Joyce, and when Nate met us outside the theater after the show, he said them too. Nate and I should have put our fists together and said, "Broadway nerd powers, activate!"

I enjoyed the show, as did Joyce and Missy. Like Hair, it was chock full of songs, and while I found many of them to be good or quite good, I'd have preferred more book. When every plot development has its own song, the really dramatic moments don't stand out as much to me as I'd like them to.

I bought the cast recording of the show on iTunes,** and I'm appreciating the songs—and the emotional payoffs they provide—more and more after repeated listening. There's a nice mix of rock songs with those that are more orchestral in nature. Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (lyrics) won the Tony for best original score. And kudos to musical director Charlie Alterman for his piano playing.

One of my favorite songs is "A Light in the Dark," in which Diana's husband Dan, played by J. Robert Spencer, convinces her to give electroconvulsive therapy a chance. And I like "I Miss the Mountains" so much I'm willing to overlook the terribly trite lyric "cuts you like a knife," which should never appear in another song ever again. Other standouts are "Just Another Day," the up-tempo opening number that's used in the show's TV commercials; "My Psychopharmacologist and I"; "Song of Forgetting"; "The Break"; and "Maybe (Next to Normal)."

Joyce was disappointed in the ending; she was hoping for something more uplifting. I would have liked it better if Diana's parents had been mentioned at some point in the show so that it didn't feel like a leap of faith was required to find her decision to move in with them credible. (If they were mentioned, it was so fast it didn't register with me.)

Joyce said she thought it might turn out that Diana was responsible for Gabriel's death. I thought, in a bigger twist, it might turn out that Dan was responsible. That wouldn't have made as much sense, but it sure would have been a big surprise. Except for me, who would have seen it coming! I'm glad neither of those scenarios played out.

I thought the entire cast was terrific. We got all of the actors to sign our Playbills except for Jennifer Damiano (Natalie), who didn't stick around. Aaron Tveit, who originated the role of Gabriel, has been temporarily replaced by the very able Kyle Dean Massey. Tveit was in a Seattle run of Catch Me If You Can, a show that may make its way to Broadway, and will return to NTN on Sept. 7, according to his Wikipedia page.

The three-level set by Mark Wendland was really impressive. He was nominated for a Tony but lost to the dude who did the scenic design for Billy Elliot. So did Kevin Adams, who was the lighting designer.

Before the show, Joyce, Missy, and I had dinner at Becco. I got the Maiale Rista: pulled pork slow roasted in Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and served with mashed potatoes, matchsticks of Granny Smith apple, and an herb salsa verde. The pork tasted great and was extremely tender. There was so much of it that I just couldn't eat it all, even with a little help from M&J.

 

*What a range that cutie pie has. He plays, basically, himself and a sheet of paper. :-)

**It was $30 at the theater. I balked at that—even though it turns out it's got 37 songs on it. But I feel ripped off paying $20 for a CD after the show, let alone $30. On iTunes, it was $16.99.

UPDATE on Aug. 27: I've been trying to figure out how to describe Ripley's voice. It definitely has a rock-star quality to it at times in the show. Which makes sense given that she sings and plays guitar in and writes songs for a band called Ripley. I googled "Alice Ripley's voice" to see what other people have said about it. I came across Web sites where some bitchy theater queens were arguing her voice is nowhere near as good as it was when she was in Side Show. Some commenters argued that her voice shouldn't be perfect in NTN given the ordeals her character goes through. Some of the theater queens said they loved her voice, of course, and I'm in the latter camp. Today, it occurred to me that her singing voice reminds me of Anita Gillette's speaking voice. For what that's worth. And I read somewhere on the Web, though I haven't been able to find it again, the opinion that no one conveys emotions in a song like Alice Ripley. She certainly was fantastic at doing that in this show.

More Flowers of Summer

At the Union Square Greenmarket yesterday, I was going to buy these gorgeous red-and-yellow sunflowers from The River Garden of Catskill, New York.

Until I realized I'd never seen such gorgous multicolored marigolds—in all kinds of yellows, oranges, and reds—and so I had to buy them instead.

On the way to the subway, the lisianthus at another farmstand caught my eye, but I didn't buy them too.

On Wednesday of the previous week, I went a little crazy over the sunflowers that Oak Grove Plantation of Pittsgrove, New Jersey, had brought to the Union Square market. The bunches were $10 apiece or three for $27. I don't know why, but that sounded like a deal I couldn't turn down. I got one lemon-yellow bunch and two with all different kinds of yellow and gold ones.

I put together a nice arrangement in my big clear-glass vase and gave the rest to Bob and Jen.

The week before that, I got cosmos from my usual flower peeps at the Grand Army Plaza market on Saturday. In my bunch, there were some pink ones that looked distressed with white, like a worn pair of jeans.

And a white one that had the most subtle hints of pink.

Here's the whole bouquet.

And finally, the Saturday before that, I got a bunch of red dahlias and a bunch of green zinnias.

And I made a Christmasy-looking arrangement that Rudy poked his nose toward as I was taking a picture.

A Long Overdue Current Events Post With (Most) Stories Clustered in Categories, Part II

George Tiller Was a Lifesaver for Women Whose Pregnancies Took a Horrific Turn, But the Fascists Wanted Him Murdered, So Now He's Dead

Bill O'Reilly painted Wichita, Kansas, abortion provider George Tiller as a monster who killed babies for the fun of it. The reality, of course, is that he provided a much-needed service to women (and, of course, their partners) who faced horrible complications from, in many cases, wanted pregnancies. The New York Times's parenting blog shares stories from Tiller's patients.

"Pro-lifers" called for Tiller to be murdered, yet they want us to believe his being shot and killed in church was the act of a lone extremist. Fuck that noise.

In Esquire, John H. Richardson profiles Warren Hern, whom the article says is the last remaining provider of late-term abortions in the U.S. The best part of the story is when Hern recalled the 14-year-old girl who told him he should be killed for providing abortions. While she was in his office to have her fetus aborted. Because, she said, she was too young to have a baby. He asked her whether he should be killed before or after he did her abortion. Before, she told him. "He told her to leave," Richardson writes. "Her mother was very upset. But he isn't an abortion-dispensing machine. He's a physician. He's a person."

It's Goldman Sachs's World; We're Allowed to Live in It

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone: Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression.

One nugget from New York magazine's recent cover story on Goldman: The bank had triple the number of representatives of other Wall Street players at Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner's meeting to discuss the collapse of AIG.

Robert Reich says Goldman and JPMorgan Chase should undergo anti-trust investigations and possibly be broken up.

Goldman may have paid back the $10 billion taxpayers gave it, but we'll never see the $12.9 billion it got from taxpayers in the AIG bailout.

A Quick Question

How many of the brave souls risking their lives to protest the corrupt election in Iran would John McCain have killed by bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-ing Iran?

The Coup in Honduras

In the Independent, Hugh O'Shaughnessy writes about the U.S. right-wingers behind the coup in Honduras. One of them is an adviser to Hillary Clinton.

And Mark Weisbrot has more, on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page. 

O'Shaughnessy's piece says pharmaceutical or telecom companies may have helped fund the coup. "Parallels are being made with ITT, the U.S. telecommunications company that offered the Nixon government funds for the successful overthrow of President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973," he writes. I was sickened to read that. But I shouldn't have been surprised. The oil industry (and Cheney, Bush, and James Baker are lumped into that group) wanted—and got—an American invasion to remove Saddam Hussein from power and seize Iraq's oilfields.

The C Street House

A revolving-door of wacko, right-wing, so-called-Christian, Republican politicians—including two embroiled in recent sex-outside-their-marriage scandals, Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina and U.S. Senator John Ensign of Nevada—have shared a house on Washington's C Street over the years and received spiritual guidance from a man named Doug Coe, who has some way-out-there beliefs. He told one of the Christianist residents of the house, who are known collectively as The Fellowship or The Family, that if he heard the man had raped a 4-year-old girl he wouldn't consider him to be a monster because "You're chosen by God for leadership. And so the normal rules don't apply."

These creeps believe that whatever they do is fine because God likes them better than everyone else and that Christianity should be about building more power for the already powerful. And they have loads of power in Washington and state capitals!

Rachel Maddow interviewed Jeff Sharlet, the author of a book about The Fellowship, and Joe. My. God. has the video. And here's more from Maddow via Think Progress on C Streeter Chip Pickering, a former U.S. representative from Mississippi who lambasted Bill Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinski and fought to preserve the institution of marriage from the queers. His soon-to-be-ex-wife has sued Pickering's former mistress for "alienation of affection." Maddow interviews Sharlet again, and they talk about how the members of the "fundamentalist frat house" considered each other to be more important than their own, actual families; their belief that morality is a "secular construct" that applies only to the little people; and their ability to get lobbying jobs with the help of The Family. I've got to get that book.

A Long Overdue Current Events Post With Stories Clustered in Categories

Because I've been meaning to write one of these suckers for a while, I've got some oldish news mixed in with the really recent stuff. And there's a lot of stuff. So much stuff that I categorized the stuff. (And that I'll most likely do a Part II.) But it's all good. And by "all good," I mean "more reasons to despair." *sigh* So enjoy! :-)

Health Care Reform Is So Fucked Up and Seemingly So Doomed, I Want to Cry

The Blue Dog Democrats are getting paid off by health care companies to destroy any shot at meaningful change.

But Rahm Emanuel and even Barack Obama himself are telling liberal groups to back off from targeting conservative Democrats on their health-care-reform positions.

Obama supported a conservative Dem last year when he—Rep. John Barrow of Georgia—was challenged by a progressive Democrat, an African-American woman named Robin Thomas. In backing Barrow, Obama said the congressman would "help ... provide access to affordable health care for every American." Barrow won the primary and re-election to the House, and he sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee that held a vote, on July 31, on health care legislation that included several concessions to make the Blue Dogs happy. This Think Progress post tells you how Barrow voted on that already-watered-down-specifically-for-corporate-controlled-assholes-like-him legislation, but I'm sure you've already guessed how this story played out.

In the Los Angeles Times, a Canadian doctor writes about the advantages his country's health care system has over the U.S. one.

Some kind of "reform" will happen so Obama doesn't look like he couldn't get something done, but the industry people seem to be the most important people at the negotiating table. The White House is now claiming it's not going to honor a drug-industry deal the L.A. Times wrote about in a story the Norman Solomon post above linked to. Bob sent me a New York Times link this morning about the reversal of that agreement to not negotiate lower drug prices. "Billy Tauzin is clearly counting on the Senate Finance Committee to give him what he wants despite what the White House wants," I replied. "And it's not at all clear the WH knows what it wants. Or what it's agreed to."

Dday at Hullabaloo had a good roundup of commentary on the six senators on that committee who are having a jolly good time hashing out a wonderful bipartisan solution to all of our health care problems. One that will surely suck Max Baucus's scrotum.

Ezra Klein says the committee recently shit out quite possibly the worst health-care-reform idea yet.

I believe Matt Taibbi when he says: "The reason a real health-care bill is not going to get passed is simple: because nobody in Washington really wants it. ... Our government doesn't exist to protect voters from interests; it exists to protect interests from voters. ... This whole business, it was a litmus test for whether or not we even have a functioning government. Here we had a political majority in congress and a popular president armed with oodles of political capital and backed by the overwhelming sentiment of perhaps 150 million Americans, and this government could not bring itself to offend 10,000 insurance men in order to pass a bill that addresses an urgent emergency."

And let's not forget about the terrific health care Congress enjoys: Legislators have a choice of several insurance plans, and they can't be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition.

Hopey-Changey Presto-Change-o Obama Isn't So Much About the Changey-Changey

His "Justice" Department argues that Dick Cheney's statements to Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who investigated the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, should be kept secret because they might become the subject of jokes on The Daily Show. Seriously.

And his "Justice" Department defended Bill Clinton's execrable Defense of Marriage Act even though candidate Obama said he wanted to repeal it. Of course, what did we really expect from someone who also said as a candidate: "I believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, [marriage] is also a sacred union. God's in the mix"? If the media ever wanted to see any issue from, say, an atheist black lesbian's perspective instead of from that of a straight, white, General Electric–stock-owning male, a logical follow-up question at some point would have been, "So, Senator Obama, are you saying that only marriages between a Christian man and a Christian woman should be recognized in this country?"

And he issues Bush-style signing statements outlining provisions of laws he intends to ignore.

And his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, is threatening to withhold potentially life-saving intelligence from the U.K. if the British High Court releases evidence of the U.S. torture program. Just like the Bushies did!

If the Dems Had Any Balls ...

They'd be yelling bloody murder about the insane, violence-promoting, fear-mongering nonsense the right-wingers are spewing about Obama's health care and global warming plans. Of course, as noted above, the White House seems far more concerned with winning over conservatives than it does noting that a good number of them have gone out of their minds. And those in the MSM play dumb about the nature of the corporate-backed mobs shouting down and threatening legislators at town hall meetings. Or in the case of CNN's Lou Dobbs and other gold-plated wingnuts, openly declare themselves to be against reform. 

Even as these people are going crazy and threatening violence against them for even considering "Obama Care" (which is even scarier than "Hillary Care" because at least she was a loathsome WHITE "liberal"), the Democrats still see progressives—who want to make Obama and the Democratically controlled Congress follow through on what they promised us they'd do—as the real enemy.

Glenn Beck is the worst of all. I wonder whether Diane Sawyer regrets aiding his career on Good Morning America and pretending he was a reasonable commentator. Would she ever chastise him for saying not-nice things about this president? Hah. 

Amazon's Tiananmen

Many nonviolent indigenous protesters who were blockading road and river traffic were massacred by Peruvian police in June.

About sixty Indians were killed, and many more went missing. Human rights groups say security forces removed bodies to hide the extent of the killing.

In a wonderful victory for the Indians, the two land laws they were protesting—which had been enacted to support a free-trade agreement with the U.S. and which opened up indigenous land to mining and fossil fuel exploration—were repealed.

A Food Post With Sumac, Succotash, and Soup

I made some sumac tea—aka sumac lemonade—last weekend, and it's good stuff. I bought a box of gorgeous red sumac fruits—which I've since learned are specifically from the staghorn sumac tree—for 3 bucks at the Union Square Greenmarket last Friday. The guy who took my money said that you need to make the beverage with cold water or it'll be bitter.

I immersed only half of the fruit clusters that came in the box into a little over a gallon of water. It took many hours before the water turned pink, and in subsequent reading on the Internets, I've learned that the tea is made more quickly if you crush the berries or at least worry them a little.

The farmstand was selling the tea combined with apple cider to counteract its tartness. I mixed about 5 teaspoons of honey into my tea, which, to me, tasted subtly of lemon and cranberry.

I'll soak the remaining staghorns in only a half gallon of water. I should have thrown them all in the first time, and if it had tasted too strong, I could have diluted it with more water.

Here's the final product in my plastic tea jug:

***

When I talked to my Mom on Sunday, she said that people in her old-folks building were complaining about the price of lima beans at a nearby farmstand: $27 for a small basket. Maybe a peck, Mom guessed. That does seem like a lot of money to "shell" out for limas, but I bet you get a whole peck* heck of a lot of them in such a basket.

My Mom said her grandfather, John Bradway, my Nanny's father, grew 1,000 poles of lima beans on his farm. Mom said she could see him in his straw hat and long-sleeved shirt and long pants to protect himself from the sun. He also grew quite a lot of watermelon and cantaloupe and a little bit of sweet corn. When Mom would go into the hen house to collect eggs, she'd ask him to go in with her; she didn't trust the chickens. This was in Friesburg, New Jersey, in Salem County. At one point, the family moved to Deerfield, in Cumberland County, which is where my Mom grew up.

In addition to being a farmer, John was also a holy-roller type of preacher. My Mom remembers him leaping over the altar railing during a church service in a demonstration of religious fervor.

I know a lot of people aren't terribly fond of lima beans, but I'm a fan of them, thanks to my Nanny's wonderful succotash. Mom said Nanny put salt pork in the beans (which she would sometimes cook by themselves, without the corn), and I'm betting she put some sugar in the pot. And a boatload of butter.

In other food-related Mom news, she said she'd tried gelato and a panini for the first time the previous week at a new Italian place in town. (Things get to Cumberland County very sloooowly.) Mom really enjoyed the sandwich (not sure what was in it), but she said the banana gelato didn't taste enough like banana for her.

I reminded Mom that I'd made my own version of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream once. This has been several years ago now. I remember it turning out well, but Mom didn't remember having had it. I'm almost certain I took some down to Millville for her because I know she's a big fan of banana ice cream. And I think I made some without nuts or chocolate chips for my Pop, who would have had a tough time chewing them, especially after they were frozen. And I remember making banana frozen yogurt years before that, using a recipe that didn't require an ice cream maker. It wasn't so good. The texture was especially poor.

***

I made one of my regular summer staples, Chicken Corn Chowder, on Sunday. I started with a whole mess of red plum and red and yellow beefsteak-style tomatoes I got at the Saturday Greenmarket. I guesstimate the "whole mess" weighed about 5 pounds. I also bought two dozen ears of sweet corn from the usual suspect, Kernan Farms (where I also got about half of the tomatoes), and two, large, sweet red peppers; three, big purple onions; and some opal basil from other farmers.

On Sunday, I went to the 5th Avenue farmers market in the pouring rain and bought some pale-green Italian peppers and half a dozen ears of irresistible red-husked corn. I chatted a little while with the farmer couple who were selling the corn; their property is pretty far out on Long Island. The male half of the couple said that the ears with pretty-much-uniform dark-red husks would have pretty-much-uniform reddish-purple kernels. The ones with less red on the husks should have some red kernels mixed in with the yellow and white ones. All of the ones he opened up for me that looked like they should have had a mixture of colors turned out to have all white and yellow kernels. Among the ones I bought, the ear that's third from the top in this photo ...

... had a few pale-pink kernels.

Here are a couple of the larger ears of corn before I husked them:

Anyhow, we talked about farming and, in particular, goats. He said he used to have a Nigerian dwarf goat that he milked every day, and I told him about Steve and I milking a small herd of dairy goats so Steve could make cheese. We agreed that raising livestock is the hardest aspect of farming.

When I made the soup, I first cut all of the tomatoes into chunks and processed all of them in my tomato press. I then ran the "waste" through the press again and managed to extract a good deal more pulp and juice.

This was a first run-through of about a quarter of the tomatoes:

And this was a second run-through of the leftover tomato mush:

I'd say I got about a third as much of the good stuff as I did in the previous press, which definitely made the extra effort worth it.

I set aside all of the accumulated tomato goodness in my smallest soup pot and cooked up my peppers and onions in olive oil and a pinch of salt in my largest pot. Meanwhile, I roasted six split chicken breasts and a package of chicken thighs with many cloves of garlic tucked under the skin and seasoned with ground coriander and tarragon and salt and pepper. I added the tomato pulp and juice to the big soup pot as well as three containers of chicken broth, six ears of corn kernels I'd cut off the cobs, the chopped basil, and salt. Since I had so much corn, I'd decided to purée some of the corn into the soup to give it a little extra dash of sweetness. After a couple of minutes, I used my immersion blender to purée everything I'd added to the pot thus far. After the cooked chicken had cooled enough, I took the meat off the bones and added that to the pot along with the rest of the corn kernels. After a couple more minutes to allow the corn to get tender and the chicken to get heated through, I had me some soup.

I liked how it turned out, though I think the texture has seemed a little off as I've been eating it after that first meal on Sunday. It may be my imagination, but I think the corn I added has made the broth a little bit gummy, like it had okra in it.

***

On Wednesday, Bob and Jen had me over for Veal Parmigiana. Bob also made Eggplant Parmigiana, but I focused on the veal. Since Bob had finally gotten around to making the top-tier parm. :-)

I don't recall the last time I ate veal. I gave it up in college after learning how veal calves are treated, confined in cramped veal-fattening pens. (Not that I had many opportunities to eat veal as a money-challenged college student.) I didn't have it again until Steve and I became regulars at a fantastic restaurant in Trenton called Blue Danube.** The Wiener schnitzel was out of this world, and I'm ashamed to say that I threw my conviction against animal cruelty out the window and had the veal the majority of the times we went there. The meat was so tender and the breading so crispy without even a trace of greasiness.

Bob's veal parm was very good; he is the King of Parms after all. B&J were somewhat disappointed in the quality of the meat; it could have been a little more tender.

Bob gave me some Eggplant Parm to bring home with me. I'll probably have that for lunch and then our usual Siciliana pizza tonight for dinner.

***

Last week for pizza night, I made a different version of my Citrus Vinaigrette. This one incorporated all of the common citrus fruits: two oranges, two lemons, two limes, and one pink grapefruit. The debris left over was kinda purty:

 

*I'm sorry. I'm apparently in bad-pun mode this morning.

**I can't believe I've never written about Blue Danube on the blog. But I haven't. Unless the Google is failing me.

UPDATE on Sept. 6:

For a while now, since mid-August, I've been meaning to post an e-mail my Dad sent me about this post. Since they're long divorced, my Dad was reluctant to comment here himself about my Mom's side of the family. But I enjoyed what he had to say, and it seems as though either Mom got the location of the farm wrong or I misunderstood what she said. I knew Mom's grandpop preached in Haleyville at one point, and that's where some of the Bradways are buried. I think it's fun that a place named Haleyville played an important role in my Mom's young life and then she ended up marrying a guy named Hawley. :-)

Hi, Son. I was reading your blog and had some comments. Your Nanny grew up in Haleyville, which is near Port Norris in Cumberland Co. Your Mom and I were down to Mr. Bradway's place several times, and your Aunt Marian [my Nanny's sister] and her husband had a garden there after he passed away. There is a picture of him in that album Tracey made for Pop [my Dad's father]. He did continue to plant a lot of lima beans into his nineties. And his second wife used to say that he was still chasing her around for sex in his nineties as well. I guess it was those lima beans. I remember the story of him jumping over the altar rail. The Garrisons lived in Deerfield. Chick [my Mom's father, who passed away not long after Tracey was born] and Virginia [my Nanny] lived with Chick's parents most of their married life. They got the house in Deerfield where your mother was raised after they [Nanny's in-laws] passed away. The Garrisons may have come from Salem Co. at one time. I'm not trying to correct your Mom; I'm just telling what I know.

Love, Dad

A Woofer Post With Some Cartoon Flashbacks

The morning of the Pride Parade, I ran into the main doctor at the veterinarians' office where I take the pooches while I was walking Emme and Rudy. Dr. Silverman was walking his two little white dogs on Prospect Park West, and Rudy was excited to see everyone. Dr. Silverman said a 4-month-old bloodhound was being boarded at the office that weekend and this dog already had bigger ears than Rudy's. I should have told him, "Prove it, doc! I'll be there at 9 with Rudy and a tape measure."

***

Rudy's favorite walking buddy, Cleo, a female English cocker spaniel, has moved to New Orleans. Vinny—my main dog walker while my usual dog walker, Gary, is away for several months—would sometimes bring Cleo and a sweet black lab named Birdie (or Bertie?) to walk with my kids. Vinny said Rudy likes Birdie but he loooved Cleo. I asked Vinny—who told me about Cleo when he mistakenly showed up to walk the woofers on a day I didn't have to work—whether Cleo was into Rudy as much as he was into her. He said that Cleo really liked him. He said she's 8 years old and a very high energy dog. Have fun in the Big Easy, girlfriend!

***

I still haven't gotten a muzzle for Emme, even though in my last all-dogs post, I said I should just do it already. I looked for one at the closest pet store to my apartment, and they didn't have the right size. And then I started thinking about how Emme is the dog equivalent of an old lady and I pictured my Granny in a Hannibal Lecter mask and I chickened out.

***

Fred is the coolest basset hound in the reader photos posted at nytimes.com. And Napolean wins the prize for the top Pembroke Welsh corgi.

***

Joyce told me I had to check out these pictures of bulldog puppy Mack with his kitten friends on The Daily Puppy. I told her the photos reminded me of that bulldog in the Warner Bros. cartoon who loved that black-and-white kitten and let it sleep on his back. But first the kitten would dig into the dog's back with her claws while it was fluffing up her furry bed. The bulldog would wince and flinch until the kitty got settled in, and then he'd get this look of perfect contentment.

I tried to find that video on YouTube, but it's been removed due to the usual legal issues. Good ol' Wikipedia relays that the dog's name is Marc Antony (or Marc Anthony) and that the kitten is named Pussyfoot (or sometimes Kitty or Cleo). They appeared in three cartoons together in which Marc Antony dotes on Pussyfoot while protecting her from harm. The article also reminded me that in the first cartoon in which the animals appeared together, Marc Antony's female owner demanded he not bring anything else into the house, "not one single solitary thing!" So he spent the rest of the cartoon, called "Feed the Kitty," trying to hide Pussyfoot from his owner while rescuing the kitten from a series of mishaps.

Joyce then reminded me of the cartoon duck, Yakky Doodle, whose best friend is a bulldog named Chopper. And how Yakky Doodle saying Chopper's name is pretty much the cutest-sounding thing ever. Check out the first cartoon in which the two appeared—"Out of Luck Duck"—here.

***

New nicknames for Rudy: Mr. B and Slick

New nickname for Emme: Princess Honey Bear

***

Rudy dozing between the living room radiator and Emme's food dish

And Emme on the other side of my cheapo Ikea coffee table

UPDATE later on Aug. 2: I forgot to mention that on Friday, the female half of a straight couple with a cute little girl (though the husband was the cutest one of the three of them; woof!) told me that Rudy was "the cutest dog we've ever seen." Suck on that, all of you 11-biscuit-receiving puppies on TDP! :-)

***

My slothful dogs on my rumpled bed this morning

Puppetry of the *Bleep*

NY1 has been bleeping out the word penis when airing commercials for Puppetry of the Penis, which is in town for a limited run this month. Penis appears on the screen in the full name of the show, but the announcer mustn't be allowed to say it. And when there's a spot noting that part of the news is being paid for by the POTP advertisement, it's the same deal: "Weather on the 1s is sponsored by 'Puppetry of the *bleep*.'" How amazingly silly is that? It's a biological term, people! I want to call up the station and say, "Penis! Penis! Penis! Penis! Penis!" Instead, I e-mailed the advertising department through NY1.com: 

I'm curious to know why NY1 bleeps out the word "penis" when airing commercials for "Puppetry of the Penis." It's a biological term, so I can't understand why it would be considered offensive.

I'll update this post with any response I receive.