SHOTS

I came home on my last day of work, which was August 31, 2018, after having been out for a celebratory happy hour with some friends from work.  Playing out on the apartment complex’s lawn were my next door neighbors, Mike and Ramona and their two boys, Andy and Dylan.  I announced that it was my last day, something they had known was coming up, but none of us knew exactly when—it could have been any time during that summer.

I said to them, “Well I am now officially retired!” and Mike said, well you are now officially invited to come right upstairs for some shots!”  This is not something we had done before, but I was certainly game. So we adults went upstairs to their apartment while the boys continued to play outside.

Mike ceremoniously brought out three shot glasses, filled them with tequila, cut three slices from a lemon, put the lemon slices across the top of each glass, and then handed us our shots.

I took my lemon slice and squeezed lemon juice into the tequila and Mike looked shocked and said, “Is that how you do it?  You do it like she does,” indicating Ramona, who had also squeezed her lemon juice into her tequila.

This comment was pretty close, if not actually there, to a comment like “You throw like a girl,” but I said, “How do you do it?”  So he demonstrated, quickly gulping down the whole shot at once and then mashing the squeezed, dripping lemon all over his tongue and lips.  Somewhere along the line he had forgotten the part of licking salt from the top of the web of his hand, either before the shot or after, I forget which is supposed to be the order of these steps in the complete tequila ritual.

I said to him, “Well, that’s how you drink it when the tequila is rot-gut, to just get drunk and mask the awful taste, but I know from that bottle of tequila that you gave me last Christmas, you don’t drink rot-gut.”  And it was true, he had given me a damn fine bottle of tequila that had somehow inspired me to do an actual taste test which I had never thought to do before.  Surprisingly (to me), that tequila, just by itself, tasted quite good, no need to mask anything.

Up until Mike’s gift that Christmas, I hadn’t had much experience with tequila at home.  I don’t think my father, who more or less maintained a full bar (having liquor by the case delivered to our house from a liquor store called Beltramos, where he had an account), had even one bottle of tequila in the house.  I am sure for him that whatever experience tequila would have given to him, he would have gotten a better experience, from, say, bourbon or scotch, and maybe gin.  My mother was strictly a vodka person.  My brother, Dave. whose go-to drink is a long island iced tea, eliminates tequila from the formula of four different liquors, doubling, instead, one of the other three, the vodka, I think.  He and his wife love to go out drinking in Las Vegas where they live and it is a trip for me to go into a bar with them, seemingly any bar, and have the bartender see Dave and say, “One ‘Dave’s Tea’ coming up,” which means that he remembers on sight Dave and Dave’s “no tequila” long island tea recipe.

So I had had no experience with tequila at home, but sure, I had had numerous experiences with tequila via the cocktails of margaritas I had had in restaurants!  I don’t think one can live in Southern California very long and go out to Mexican restaurants without having at least one margarita (if not scores of margaritas over the many years), and probably tried even some of the various other fruits, such as strawberry, mango, and who knows what else margaritas, it’s practically de rigueur. Heck, I even had a margarita in Mexico and then suffered through two weeks of one of the worst cases of Montezuma’s Revenge thanks to the chopped-block of ice in my drink.  At any rate, with all these margaritas nobody was having to suck lemon juice in their mouth and lick salt off their hand in order the mask the taste.  The “taste-masking” was baked in the cake, or I should say, in the cocktail.

Which, when I think about it, reverses my attitude about having salt on the rim of the margarita glass. I didn’t particularly care about it one way or the other, but I would most often choose to have the salt because I had assumed that that was the way you were supposed to do it…that to refuse the salt was somehow asking to not have the genuine margarita.  But now that I have realized that the salt feature historically comes from having to get yourself though the task of drinking rot-gut, having salt on the rim of a margarita is actually kind of stupid.  Supposedly in the case of the cocktail, you want the taste!

As an off-topic aside, in my just previous blog entry I discussed Chinese food and how I struggled through eating all that goodness with an inefficient combination of chopsticks and a wide, fat “spoon”.  Chopsticks and that spoon are considered to be the “authentic” way to eat Chinese food and therefore if you are sophisticated and presumably apt enough, you will eat your meal with chopsticks.  However, a couple of years ago, I read that chopsticks are actually an ancient example of Chinese “gun control”—before there were guns.  It wasn’t that the Chinese were so technologically limited that the only eating utensils they could come up with were two sticks and a spoon too wide to fit into your mouth.  Instead, it was that a very unpopular emperor had banned metallic and sometimes quite sharp culinary utensils (such as knives) because they could be used as weapons and for his own safety, he made it a capital offence for the people to eat with anything but impotent devices, namely two weak sticks and a fat spoon. Funny what the ancient derivations are for various habits, and I think it is fun to unpack them.  So, having salt on the rim of a margarita glass is in the same “now useless” category as eating Chinese food with chopsticks.  One can justifiably avoid either one.

A margarita is really one of the easiest drinks to make and to make it even easier, suppose you have a craving for one right now, you might actually already have all the ingredients on hand if you have some minimum kind of a bar. Having the right ingredients for something I want to make always seems to be a problem for me…like I can’t just have something right now, but I have to write out a shopping list and go the grocery store to get the missing ingredients which usually means I can’t have the thing until tomorrow, when nine times out of ten, I won’t even want to have it tomorrow.

For example, I wanted to make some bread yesterday (with my bread maker), and while I actually did have everything I needed for a pretty basic, pedestrian loaf of 100% whole wheat bread, much of what I preferred to have I couldn’t make because I don’t keep on hand evaporated milk or oat bran or corn meal to add to the flour, or any of a variety of other things.  For this, I actually did have all that I needed…except that it ended up that the packet of yeast I had been counting on to use had a “best by date” of…2003.  Sigh. Well, I just didn’t happen to feel like driving to the grocery story just to buy a fresh packet of yeast, and the package didn’t actually say you couldn’t use it after that date, it just cautioned that it might take longer for the dough to rise.

So I went ahead and tried it, and, well, being a bread maker, meaning a machine that has certain timings already programmed in, I don’t think it understood that it should wait around for half a day for the dough to fully rise, so it allowed it to rise about halfway up and then it went on ahead and baked it.  It actually smelled just as wonderful as ever being baked, and it really tasted okay, was just a bit “heavier” than normal, but I had two nice slices of toast this morning with breakfast, so I think it came out okay.  Added to my shopping list, though…more packages of yeast!

But back to our subject, tequila, you probably already know all about this (I’m not trying to present myself as any kind of an expert, but am having fun sharing things that I have recently learned), a margarita is just about the most doable drink there is (short of a martini wherein all you really need is some gin and some olive brine—although if you are a martini drinker or have friends who are, you ought to go ahead and stock a bottle of dry vermouth).  I was surprised to see that all a margarita is (despite all the hoopla of blenders and salt on the rim yes or no or different fruit flavorings and extra shots of Cointreau or Grand Marnier—I’m talking to you, El Torito, but don’t worry, I really love you and even ate there last night, but surprised you by getting a draft Dos XXs dark instead of a margarita) these few things, and what makes it so doable is that there are so many possible substitutions, based on what you like or what you may happen to have on hand at the moment:

2 ounces of tequila (if you don’t have this, then you aren’t going to have a margarita—but any tequila will do)

1 ounce of Triple Sec OR Cointreau OR Grand Marnier (if lacking any of these, in a pinch you could use orange juice and probably add an additional half ounce of tequila)

1 ounce of lime juice (OR lemon juice)

Shake vigorously the above ingredients with cracked ice and pour into a chilled glass.  Probably the easiest way to chill the glass is to swirl the cracked ice in the glass and then put the cracked ice into the cocktail shaker.  You could use a blender instead of the cocktail shaker if you like that way better.

Notice that I left off the salt on the rim, as I explained above (you’re not trying to kill a rot-gut taste). But certainly if you want it, you can have it…for sure you will have salt on hand (right?), and you can pour some out on a plate and then moisten the rim of the glass with the citrus juice and dip the glass upside down onto the plate of salt.  If you wish, you could also go wild and mix into the plate of salt some other things such as sugar, ground pepper, and various other spices, but all that is up to you and your interest in experimentation.

The basic formula is (1) tequila, (2) a sweet orange taste, and (3) a sour taste.  You might have seen that a margarita mix is described as a “sweet and sour” mix.  But a dedicated mix for a particular drink or two is not something that you are apt to have on hand unless you drink a ton of margaritas or are having a large party. Instead of the sweet and sour mix, just get the Triple Sec and always have on hand lime juice.  Both Triple Sec and lime juice are useful mixers for lots of other drinks.

However, it doesn’t have to be Triple Sec…it could be Cointreau, instead, or it could be Grand Marnier. All of those are orange flavored liqueurs (and there are others, as well).  The least expensive of the three is Triple Sec, next comes Cointreau, and most expensive is Grand Marnier.  I have always happened to have on hand Grand Marnier, because I have had friends who especially like that so I made sure I had it on hand for them.  Triple Sec and Cointreau are pretty much the same thing, and either of them is lighter than Grand Marnier, probably more useful for a variety of other cocktail mixing.  Cointreau is a Triple Sec, but has a certain cachet. Since appearances matter and especially with cocktails, I think I would just go with the Cointreau if I were specifically stocking up for margaritas.

The Triple Secs (such as Cointreau) and Grand Marnier aren’t made the same way.  The Triple Secs start out as a sugar beet alcohol that is mixed with sweet and bitter oranges, whereas Grand Marnier is made with cognac and aged with bitter oranges.  I came across a recipe by which a person could make their own triple sec, involving drying cut up sections of oranges and rind and aging them in vodka (shows you how vodka is just a plain distillation of alcohol) and heating it later as part of the process, but as I like the look of liquor bottles, I’d rather have the commercial brands on my bar shelves than have my own homemade concoction in my refrigerator.

All three of these mentioned liqueurs are made in France, which makes me wonder how they got involved in what we think of as a Mexican drink.  Maybe a margarita isn’t the least bit Mexican at all, but the cocktail has hijacked their national liquor!  I know the Mexicans take tequila very seriously (and its not legal to be made at all except in certain approved areas of Mexico)…maybe that’s why the bartender at that otherwise elegant restaurant overlooking a gorgeous view in San Miguel Allende chose to make my margarita with chipped block ice (read, ice that was frozen sewer water) instead of using purified water ice cubes as one would expect…he was punishing the ignorant gringo who was besmirching the reputation of the national liquor.

And the thing is, as much as I like margaritas, there is no reason to drink tequila that way.  You don’t have to mask it, it is pretty amazing all by its lonesome.

I had mentioned way up at the beginning of this piece that Mike’s gift of a fine bottle of tequila led me to have a taste test.  I had been thinking for a while…I am not sure that my thinking is correct…but I believe that cocktails became a “thing” thanks to Prohibition.  I am not sure that prior to Prohibition people generally mixed up their various liquors with various other ingredients the way we do now.  I mean, I am sure that the moonshiners up in Appalachian coves worked to make their product pure and of a certain acceptable taste, and weren’t mixing into it fruit juices and garnishing with a cherry and a paper umbrella. Or think of the British sailors with their half a pint of rum as a daily ration, referred to by Winston Churchill when he said, “The only traditions of the British Navy were run, sodomy, and the lash”, and yes, of course, Churchill didn’t actually say that, but wished he had…but I think the goal must be to not be the person who says things, but be the one whom everybody says said them.   A daily ration of a half pint of rum, that’s a whole eight ounces of pure liquor, I can imagine that that could lead to quite a bit of loss of inhibitions, refusing to work, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or slipping into your male neighbor’s bunk at night, perhaps none too gently, could definitely lead to the over-use of the lash, which itself could be administered by some heavily drunken sailor.  I can imagine in such a scene as all that, those tankards of rum weren’t mixed with grenadine, pineapple juice, and orange juice as if they were Bahama Mamas, those sailors drank that rum straight and damn well liked it.  (Okay, to be clear, fruit juices actually were in later years introduced into the rum, but not for the purpose of creating a dainty cocktail, but to lessen the ration somewhat—leading to less lashing!--and as a vitamin-C providing medicine to help combat scurvy, which had become a serious problem for sailors.)

My point is that I am pretty sure various alcohols were meant to be drunk straight as they were, but when the U.S. banned alcohol for thirteen years and it was being made illegally in some gangster’s hidden speakeasy, quality standards were splattered to all hell as if shot by a tommy gun.

One of my grandmothers would regularly give large cocktail parties and her butler was a bartender of such renown in their city that my grandmother was pleased to let him off to mix drinks at the parties of her friends and therefore earn for himself some well-earned additional income, but neither my grandmother nor my grandfather touched a drop of liquor, themselves.  One day I asked her why she never drank any alcohol and she said, “I tasted gin, once, and ewe,” she then made the most nasty, screwed up face, “it was the foulest thing I ever put in my mouth!  I could never understand how anybody could stand to drink such nasty stuff, but so many seem to like it, so I am happy to serve it to them.”  The way she said the word “gin” made me sure that what she had tasted was bathtub gin and it would be so foul that a person couldn’t really stand it without masking the alcohol with various other flavors.  Thus, the cocktail.

But Prohibition is long gone and liquor distillers are able to sell their finest, best tasting wares. I always think of something like scotch, where you can enjoy the variable individual pleasures of independent distillers, such as Glinfiddich, or for those who have their favorite flavor that they want to be reliable, there are the blended brands, such as Chevas Regal.  I saw an amazing documentary once that showed how each year a blended Scotch brand is mixed.  The produce of many different single malts are lined up in a row (there could be something like 20 of them) and a taste expert in the employment of the blended Scotch company will taste each one of the single malts and fashion in his head the correct mixture that will yield the reliable flavor of the blended brand. The formula ratio might be something like five drops of this single malt and one drop of this one and twelve drops of this one and a pint of this one and none of this one, all the way down the line of all 20 or so single malts.  The single malt tastes will vary from year to year, the way wine does in France, or even milk does in England, as I was surprised to discover on the narrow-boating canal boat trip I put together for some family and friends many decades ago.  As we travelled through England and Wales on the canals, the milk in each location tasted different, because it was like the single malt scotch, pure from the individual cows, not all homogenized.

Well, it turns out that tequila has its own special status and treatment, not something to swig down in a hurry in order to just get high on the spirits.  The beginning of the awareness of that for me was a restaurant on West Third Street in Los Angeles, called El Carmen.  I would go to see Rio’s son, Kai, and his daughter, Piper, who would perform in the productions of YADA, Youth Academy of the Dramatic Arts, on West 3^rdStreet, and I would have dinner beforehand at one of the nearby restaurants.  El Carmen is on the same block as the theater, across the street (they have valet parking which is about the only way you are going to do it).  El Carmen’s menu, the vast majority of which is a tequila menu, was something I had never even imagined. I can’t easily reproduce it here, but it is better for you to see it directly, it is well worth looking at:  http://elcarmenla.com/tequilas--el-carmen.html  I won’t count them all, but there are probably more than 400 different bottles of tequila listed there, at prices as low as “$7.00” to as high as “$850.00”, and I have to assume that is the “by the glass” price.  I don’t even know how a person could choose one…just “eeny meenie mine moe”?  To do it intelligently, well, that would have to involve a whole lot of taste testing (a lifetime of it).  

And what’s all this “Blanco”, “Reposado”, “Anejo”, and “Muy Anejo” business?  Well, roughly translated from Spanish to English, those terms mean:

“Blanco” is White, or sometimes called Silver, or Platinum.  This is like the “vodka” of tequila, the pure distilled spirit of the agave plant.  It is not aged.

“Reposado” is Rested or Aged; this is the “blanco” aged in wooden caskets for two to eleven months. During the “time of repose”, the liquor will be getting smoother and picking up flavors from the wood, adding to the complexity of the taste.

“Anejo” is Old or Extra Aged; this is the “blanco” aged in wooden caskets for at least a year.

“Muy Anejo” is Very Old or Ultra Aged; this is aged for more than three years.

The caskets used for aging are usually American or French Oak, and sometimes used bourbon or other whiskey, cognac, or wine caskets are used for the resting, caskets that have themselves taken on flavors from their previous use which are then imparted to the tequila.

As I understand it, beyond the aging issue and how long the liquor was actually aged (eleven months instead of two), filtering has an affect on the quality, smoothness, and taste of the tequila, to the extent that there may be a finer Blanco tequila compared to a Reposado, but in general, one may assume that the quality and the price of the tequila rises from Blanco to Reposado to Anejo to Muy Anejo, although I have noticed some brands that have priced at least their Blanco offerings and their Reposado offerings the same, meaning that in that case it is just a matter of taste, does the drinker prefer the “cleaner” flavor of the Blanco or does the drinker prefer the flavors picked up from the wooden casket while in repose.

All of this is to say that tequila deserves to be enjoyed just by itself, not in a cocktail, but if you want to have a cocktail, how do you handle the blanco, reposado, anejo business?  Using just a margarita as an example, some writers have recommended mixing a blanco tequila with Triple Sec, a reposado tequila with Cointreau, and an anejo tequila with Grand Marnier.  This makes some kind of sense, I guess, but on the other hand, back to the concept that cocktails were designed to mask the harsh flavor of the liquor, why waste money using a reposado or anejo when you would then mask the flavors that those tequilas are featuring?  Shouldn’t you just use the “pure” blanco?

And that’s my actual feeling.  The tequila that Mike had given me for Christmas, now two years ago, was a good quality Blanco, and when I taste-tested all the different kinds of straight liquor I had in the house, which were, in alphabetical order, Bourbon, Gin, Irish Whiskey, Rum, Scotch, Tequila, and Vodka, my order of favorite to least favorite were, very surprising to me, (1) Irish Whiskey, (2) Tequila, (3) Gin, (4) Scotch (5) Bourbon, (6) Rum, (7) Vodka. (I wish I had some Canadian Whiskey to try, too, but I just didn’t.)

What were the surprises? Well, I had always assumed that straight tequila was pure undrinkable except in a cocktail, and this whole blog entry is meant is prove that that is wrong.  To have that come in second best instead of close to last was a surprise. Another surprise, Irish Whiskey coming in at number one.  I had always read, which goes to show that is somebody else’s opinion and one needs to make up their own, that there was no use for Irish Whiskey at all, that there was a race for the bottom as to which was the worst, Irish or Canadian, the writer much preferring Scotch and Bourbon. Well, it turns out that I happened to like Irish the very best of all.  And it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that I would place Canadian somewhere near the top, too.

Gin, well, I always kept thinking of my prohibition-era grandmother and the nasty case that she made at gin.  She should have tried it again after the repeal of Prohibition.  Or got something really good smuggled in from Great Britain.

But you know, the most popular drink in America is the martini, and most martini drinkers are essentially drinking their gin straight.  Oh sure, there may be a touch of dry vermouth, which doesn’t offer very much, and it seems that most martini drinkers pretty much get away with the least amount of vermouth that they can.  The olive, which is supposed to be a garnish, does bring along with it a brine that has a flavor affect, but basically, martinis are pure gin.

On my “recent” cruise (it was now nine months ago, but it was the last trip I took), I spoke for an hour with a charming couple from Switzerland who were both doctors and both aged over 100, they told me!  They were sitting in the bar I liked the best on the ship, the one that had the band playing Brazilian music and had as their singer one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.  I swear, I could have married her in a second based on her appearance and talent alone (and truth to tell, I was having fun fantasizing about it), but she was a good 45 years younger than I am, so all I could do was clap loudly and appreciatively at her sets and then when took a break, tell each one in the band, including her, how great they were (but I don’t think she knew English).  Anyway, I was doing better with the centenarians.

They were sitting there drinking martinis, so I ordered one for myself and sat down with them to tell them a funny story about my previous experience with martinis when I was in college that had prevented me from drinking them until just recently.  It had to do with a girlfriend of mine and I sitting on my bed in the dorm trying to figure out the correct formula for a martini by trying various amounts of vermouth in the gin.  Every one of our attempts led to failure and we both decided that we simply didn't like martinis.  So all these years I had avoided martinis, but finally about a week before I went on this cruise, I looked up the recipe and found out that our problem had been that we kept putting in too much vermouth and the secret of it was to use very little.  The over a hundred year old woman said, "No, don't put any vermouth in the gin, just a little olive brine, that's the way to do it!"   Anyway, in my taste test, gin was my third favorite.

Scotch I always think of as a “by itself” drink, anyway, as there are virtually no cocktails for it. There is the rusty nail, which is two parts scotch, one part Drambuie, which comes in a very handsome bottle. But Drambuie, itself, is scotch and honey, so you may as well just drink the Drambuie by itself, like nowadays they have these Honey Bourbons, of which I love the Wild Turkey American Honey, but for some reason dislike the Jack Daniels Honey Whiskey (it is all about personal taste).

I scored Scotch higher than I thought it would be, but Bourbon was lower than I had expected. The big surprise was rum, coming in at second to last.  I would have said that rum was my favorite hard liquor, but that is because I like the various rum cocktails best of all cocktails, such as, for example, the Bahama Mamas that I would guzzle down when I was safely in my hotel's bar in Exuma, and therefore not going to be driving anywhere on my rented motor scooter.  So sure, that is rum, but there are also quite a lot of sugar and sweet things.  Rum all by itself, I think I would have given my daily ration to somebody else if I were in somebody’s Navy.  Rum alone was like my grandmother’s feeling of gin…nasty.

Dead last, and I knew it would be last, was vodka.  I guess I would make a terrible Russian.  Yeah, they say it “has no taste”, but I think that is the problem, to me, it just tastes like pure alcohol so it makes me feel like I will go blind or something. Also, it reminds me too much of shot medicine, like in my childhood when I would have to en masse get my polio shots at school in the auditorium filled with screaming, crying children, getting their shots from vicious nurses. The scene was like a cattle slaughter house and the whole room would smell like shot medicine.  All the other kids were good and got a lollypop at the end, but I’d either faint or vomit in the wastebasket, so I never got the lollypop.  Around registering for the draft age, I lost my fear of shots, but the reaction to the smell of shot medicine never left me.

Although both tequila and vodka are supposed to be these “pure” alcohols, I guess tequila doesn’t have the shot medicine smell to me.  Taste testing both Blanco and Reposado by themselves, and then mixed with just Triple Sec, I found that the Triple Sec muted out the flavor of each and seemed to ride nicer with the Blanco.  I didn’t particularly care for the taste of the Reposado when mixed with the Triple Sec; it was like the two tastes interfered with each other instead of merging smoothly the way the Triple Sec did with the Blanco.  So my feeling is that the best idea is to drink by itself any rested tequila that you find that you like, but for mixing, use only a good Blanco.  Anything else is wasting money, I think.

After that one shot with Mike and Ramona, the boys came upstairs from playing and it was time for the boys to have their bath and for Ramona to put them to bed.  So I hung around with Mike for a short time after, and then went home to my apartment next door.

But that wasn’t the end of tequila shots with my next door neighbors, not by a long shot.  A Saturday or two ago, Mike excitedly was banging on my front door, hoping I was home.  I opened the door and he said he wanted me to come over for a tequila shot right now.  He explained that today was his 40^th birthday (kind of an aging crisis) and Ramona had gotten him as a present a $100 bottle of tequila, and other than Ramona, the only other person he wanted to share it with was me. So I was honored, and summoned.  

The hundred dollar bottle was tall and thin and I attempted to read the label so that I could remember what it was, but all I can say is that it must be one of a potential 400 or 500 or more various unique labels of tequila and one priced at a point that I would never spend, myself. I couldn’t even decipher from the label whether it was a reposado or an anejo or what, and anyway, Mike didn’t have the patience for me reading the label, he wanted to pour the shots.

Which he did, just the liquor, no lemon slices or any other flavor masking ritual, he knew this was going to be a delicious shot of tequila.  And boy was it!  Remarkably delicious, and smooth, and complex, and fascinating, all the attributes that are supposed to go along with this level of tequila, which was something you definitely would not use to make a margarita with.  And we did not gulp this down, but sipped and savored it very carefully.

I thought one shot should be enough, but the conversation among the three of us was quite alluring and intimately personal.  Greased or shoe-horned out of the deeper recesses of our individual psyches, we were talking about things, particularly Mike and his life since it was a celebration of his birthday, that people might not normally let themselves talk about, and yet we would think that people should talk about.  This certainly wasn’t a time for stopping the conversation, so after our sipping our first shot, Mike and Ramona poured another shot for themselves and seriously urged me to have another, I went along with them and accepted the second shot.  (They didn’t have to twist my arm.)

The second one seemed to enhance even the affects of the first one, taking us into an even deeper layer of our psyches and removing even at this deeper level any conversational inhibitions and I began to wonder if we continued on and plumbed the next level after that, we would find ourselves in a Carlos Casteneta realm.  What was this we were drinking, liquid peyote?

Both Ramona and I said to Mike that he should not pour a third shot of this $100 bottle of tequila, but for him to keep it for some other important occasion.  So Mike screwed shut the $100 bottle and put it away and poured himself and Ramona a third shot, this time from some “other” bottle.  I said to him that I did not want a third shot, do not give me any more, but he said he wanted us to keep on talking in the vein we had been and so he poured me a third shot anyway.

This third shot, coming from a bottle that definitely was not the $100 one, was not the worst thing I had ever put in my mouth, but pretty darn close.  The difference between this one and the $100 one was immensely evident.  I don’t even think any cocktail or slam-bam ritual with salt and lemon slices could mask the bad taste of this tequila.  I didn’t even go beyond the first couple of sips, saying to Mike that I had said I didn’t want it and now that I have it, I can’t stand to drink it.  After all, our inhibitions were all way down, so I didn’t mind telling him I couldn’t drink this one, he should just pour it out.

Mike was fine with that, and somehow he was able to continue to drink his, but I had by now developed such a hangover, and I don’t get hangovers ever, that I had to go back to my apartment.  I don’t think it was the first two shots that did this, it was just the few sips of the third shot that pushed the whole thing around the corner.  I couldn’t go back to the writing that I had been doing before Mike knocked on my door.  Those two foul sips of that third shot really ruined the rest of the day for me.  

But what we talked about, that was worth it.   We three had really been pulled down into a deeper conversational realm, one very rarely accessed.  This experience left all three of us feeling closer to each other and I have an enhanced respect for the struggles that Mike and Ramona have and what kind of admirable people they really are in how they handle these struggles.  That was not an affect from a bottle of tequila that I ever would have expected!

I expect that my tequila shot days with my neighbors are not over.  I am just going to have to avoid the hangovers, though.  From bliss to killer, it is amazing what kind of journey one can take just by what liquid we sip into our mouth.  For the time being, for me that is going to be strictly water!

HOT POT, MOONLIGHT FOREST MAGICAL LANTERN ART FESTIVAL

I am not arrogant enough to believe that I have a comprehensive understanding of all the cuisines of the world.  I hardly even have a comprehensive understanding of the cuisine of the food that I do know.  For instance, Mexican food.  I love Mexican food, it is one of my favorites, I would never turn it down, and yet, Mexican food to me is pretty much what I will almost always order: chips and salsa, an enchilada, a tamale, a chili relleno, a taco, Mexican rice, and refried beans (or sometimes black beans).  Certainly there is a whole lot more to Mexican food than that (despite how much I like it), and I read somewhere than Mexican food is considered to be one of the world’s greatest cuisines, and why not, especially when you consider that it would develop from the confluence of two quite alien cultures, the Aztec and the Spanish.  Just the cultural exchange of plants and animals between the Americas and Europe was momentous. 

Here are some examples of what came from Europe to the Americas:  bananas, barley, cabbages, chickens, coffee, cows, horses, lemons, lettuce, olives, oranges, peaches, pears, pigs, rice, sheep, sugarcane, and wheat. Think about that for a moment, especially the animals:  prior to 1492, the Americas did not have chickens, cows, horses, pigs, and sheep.  Rice is on this list…yet for us to have Mexican rice in our Mexican food, it originally had to come from Europe (and presumably, from the Far East to Europe, which, of course, was another momentous cultural exchange).

And some examples of what were brought back to Europe from the Americas:  avocados, beans, bell peppers, cocao (for chocolate), chili peppers, corn, cotton, papayas, peanuts, pineapples, potatoes, pumpkins, rubber, squashes, sweet potatoes, tobacco, tomatoes, turkeys, and vanilla beans. Really, no potatoes before that time?  Yet years later, potatoes became so important that Ireland suffered greatly from a potato famine.  And no tomatoes?  We can hardly imagine Italian food without tomato sauce…but that, too, hadn’t existed in Europe prior to 1492.  Oh, and chocolate…some historians postulate that it was chocolate that ultimately killed Queen Elizabeth I.  Chocolate was such a rare and expensive delicacy that really only the Queen of England could have as much of it as she wanted, and she wanted it so much that all her teeth became black with rot and the resulting oral infections poisoned her. Hmmm.

I have a marvelous cookbook called The New World Wide Cook Book…I love how it is called “the new” world wide cookbook, because it was published in 1939!  But some of these old cookbooks are best, because they really do open one up to a world that is sometimes quite different from the “modern”.  As an example, I have another cookbook that I like a lot, it is a cookbook from England (published in 1963) called “500 Recipes For Cooking For One” (which, since I am “one”, that is really pretty cool…no days and days of leftovers or else wracking my brain to cut down the quantities of ingredients for a recipe intended for a family of six).  (Prior to Christmas, I wanted to make my own eggnog instead of buying it at the store, but all the recipes I found were for, say 30 people at a party. That, I confess, involved using a calculator.  Well, the recipe had a surprisingly numerous list of ingredients…and lots of separately whippingegg whites and egg yokes.  The result was worth it, but thank goodness for the calculator!) 

One fascinating feature in this “cooking for one” cookbook is that it is not only catered to a single person, but to a single person living in what they call a “bed sitter”, which essentially means living in one room (like a bedroom) and not having a private bathroom or kitchen.  In this book written in 1963, the bedsitter would not have a refrigerator, but for cooking, might have a gas ring or a hotplate.

I actually did live like this once for about three days (I was very young at the time), staying in a pretty frightening hotel in Manhattan that was down the street from the 42^ndStreet Port Authority Bus Terminal.  I had planned to live there for month until I found an apartment of my own, and the fact that it had a hotplate was supposed to be the extra feature that would make it livable.  (The more modern, and much better version of all that would be a hotel room with a small refrigerator and a microwave).  Everything was painted a very sickly green.  I quickly got depressed hearing people in adjoining rooms crying all night…but at least there wasn’t shouting and violence, which was how it all looked.  Don’t worry, I soon enough found an apartment subleasing agency where I found and rented what became one my favorite places I ever lived, with, of course, a bathroom and kitchen (although still very small).

But it is pretty useful to have recipes that are delicious, easy to prepare without a lot of equipment, and that you can eat all at once, since there would be no refrigerator to keep leftovers in.

But back to the World Wide cookbook, they feature comprehensive and detailed menus and recipes for 75 different country cuisines. Wow…if I actually wanted to try them all, I don’t think I would live long enough.  Although I would like to take a stab at it.

Just for fun, I will list all the countries whose cuisines are in this cookbook (feel free to skip this part if you want!)—how many of these have you ever had?  Me—a shockingly small amount of them when I see such a comprehensive list—well, I’ve had a third of them.  I am going to italicize the ones I have had:

England, Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, Switzerland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Belgium, Holland, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Roumania (that’s how they spelled it), Yugoslavia (when there was that country), Arabia, Armenia, Iran, Syria, Turkey, China,Japan, Korea, Philippine Islands (again, that is how they denoted that one), India, Indo-China, Netherlands East Indies (what is that now?), Siam(what they called it then, but now we would recognize it as Thailand), The Straits Settlements (this one intrigues me), Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, North Africa, Egypt, British Equatorial and West Africa (and now is?), Congo, Madagascar and Senegal, Union of South Africa, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico (those last three were identified as United States Territories, Alaska and Hawaii weren’t states then and Puerto Rico still isn’t), Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Equador, Paraguay, Peru, Uraguay, Venezuela, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Haiti, The Lesser Antilles.  I have had food from Belize, but that wasn’t in the book, and if it had been, they would have called in British Honduras.

All of this was to bring us around to Chinese food.  I would guess that Chinese food is probably the most frequent and common international food in the United States.  I remember growing up that we must have had Chinese take-out, or else Chinese delivered to the house, as frequently as once every two weeks. There were some Chinese take-out places I feel like our family was solely responsible for keeping in business…at least, they were business-savvy enough to make us think so!

There was one Chinese take out in Menlo Park, called Yueng Yung, that when we first started getting food from them, it was strictly take-out, no eating there.  I was around twelve years old at the time.  As time went on, they became more successful and got so that they had three tables in there, then after some more time, had a small dining room.

By the time I was college age, they took over a space that had been a movie theater and turned it into an elegant and highly rated restaurant.  One summer, I took an accounting course at the College of San Mateo and recognized the son of Yueng Yung’s owner also taking that same class. He, too, was now grown up!  He told me that he was preparing to take over the running of the restaurant, as his parents wanted to retire.  Many years after I had graduated from U.C. Berkeley and was working as a computer systems analyst at the Stanford University Medical Center, I was a frequent diner at Yueng Yung and my friend who had learned accounting with me was always excited to see me.  One time I even had a big party there in their private dining room. Sadly, I just now looked it up and while Yelp still does a listing for them, it has one of those “permanently closed” notices, so now I have seen them gone full circle. 

While Chinese take-out was a common staple for our family, one of my parent’s top favorite restaurants was another Chinese restaurant called Ming’s, located in Palo Alto. Ming’s was for some of our special occasion dinners, and sometimes when my parents had out of town guests, they would take them to Ming’s.  I had my first alcoholic beverage at Ming’s; the family had gone there to celebrate my 21^stbirthday.  Having achieved that age now, I had earned the privilege of drinking alcohol.  I loved, and enjoyed, how importantly my parents had treated that, and it meant something to me, as well.

All this is to say that I feel like I have Chinese food flowing in my blood, so it surprised me to discover that there was a whole different branch of Chinese cuisine that I had never heard of.

The Hot Pot.  

And I think it is well worth knowing about!  Nick and Carmen introduced me to it the night we were going to see the Chinese Moonlight Forest Lantern Festival at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia.  Carmen said that we had to have Chinese food, of course, to stay with the theme of the evening!

Nick chose the restaurant, it is called “Boiling Point”, located at 206 S. First Avenue, Arcadia, CA 91006, convenient two-hour street parking in the neighborhood, but if you plan to go there (and I think you should, because it is really good), plan to wait outside for a while to get seated, since it is extremely popular.

Essentially what a hot pot is, is a large, wide bowl filled with an Asian soup stock which is in turn filled with apparently anything you can imagine—meats, vegetables, etc., all cooking on your personal flaming cooking stove, what they call “a mini wok on a box”.  What I chose to have was combination number 6, called “Milk Cream Curry”, along with a side of white rice.  Beyond the “curry” and the “milk cream” (whatever that is, maybe both milk and cream?) what the menu said was in my hot pot were napa cabbage, fermicelli, sliced pork, enoki mushroom, imitation crab stick, fish ball, fried tofu skin, corn, tempura, jicama, Chinese string bean, and sea salt cream.  I chose for it to be medium spicy.  All this is cooking as you are eating it, so I said to Nick, “I guess the ‘hot’ of the ‘hot pot’ is because of the stove, not the spices,” but he said, “No, I think it refers to both,” and I think he was right, because I now see on the menu that the choice of spice levels are “none”, “mild”, “medium”, “very spicy”, and “flaming spicy”.  If you are someone who wants to avoid “spicy”, don’t let this concept of “hot” turn you away, because you could choose to have no spice at all if that is what you want.

My own historical experience with hot spice probably began in the very first Indian restaurant I had ever been in, in Hollywood sometime in the late 1970s.  I don’t believe that in those days people were generally asked what level of “spice” they wanted…either that, or else the people who were treating me to that particular Indian meal were keeping me ignorant of that option.  I had never experienced anything so hot in my life as that first Indian meal.  This was “turn my whole face into a sauna bath” hot. I am surprised that I still had a tongue left after that meal. And yet, I loved it, even though I was head to toe sopping wet by the time I finished that dinner.

Years later, I learned how to do quite a bit of Indian cooking myself, and I learned how to moderate the amount of the spice.  After that, I then had the courage to attempt going to Indian restaurants again, but also by then, the restaurants had learned that they better find out from the diners how much spice they could tolerate.  I have always been a “medium” since then.

Thai food seemed to be all the rage in the 1980s, and, again, the kind of Thai food that I was exposed to was similar to that first experience with Indian food.  Just pure unadulterated HOT was my summation of it, so I carefully avoided going to a Thai restaurant for the longest time.

However, somewhere along the line, Thai restaurants toned it down to the point where now I want to learn how to cook Thai food myself (I wrote about that in my just previous blog entry).  

My experience with the Hot Pot was kind of funny because while I was really enjoying the flavors, I was also waiting for it to cool down to where I thought I would enjoy it more, until, duh, I remembered that there was a stove burning away right under my plate!  It seems that I hardly had that awareness when our waitress came over and asked me if I would like to have the flame turned off.  Wow, she read my mind!  But then Nick said that others in the room were having their flames turned off, so presumably one could ask for that at any time in the process. 

So, after that, I began to like the Hot Pot so much that I found myself craving it the next day. I have not actually had it again, but I told my sister about it and she said she had seen a Hot Pot in the town where she lives, but hadn’t really known exactly what it was.  She plans to check that out, now.

I have noticed then, that it seems that the foods I have been the most impressed by, namely Indian (in the past), Thai (recently), and now this Hot Pot, are also foods where the hotness of spice is a feature, so it makes we wonder if I ought to ramp it up a bit, that I am being too much of a baby by sticking with “medium”.   Yes, I do believe that I will need to try these foods a notch hotter and see how I feel about it.  Time for me to be, if not “more adult”, at least “more authentic”.

After our much-enjoyed meal at the Hot Pot restaurant, Carmen, Nick, and I then went to the Moonlight Forest Magical Lantern Art Festival and it was spectacular.  I describe these as being various dioramas made of cloth and colored lights, and some of them huge, such as the very large and long dragon or the three-building pagoda:

Probably the most spectacular one for me was a complicated high wall ocean scene that involved several dolphins and other sea life leaping over each other in the waves, again, all shaped by cloth sculptures and lights.  But each and every thing was worth seeing, such as various zoo animals:

 and forests and baby pandas cavorting on a children’s playground:

 and a myriad other creative things such as this underwater pass-through with a cool octopus:

Something about all this made me think of Rose Bowl Parade floats, although these dioramas weren’t moving down the street.  It certainly had taken an immense amount of time and skill to fashion these and it took us probably two hours to see them all, so it was quite extensive.

In addition to the dioramas, there was a stage where groups of male acrobats alternated with female dancers.  I particularly marveled at the acrobats who did all sorts of group leaps and somersaults in and out and around hoops and performed complicated juggling with hats and later with several juggling pins thrown back and forth among them all and even doing that standing up on each other three guys high, I can’t even understand how they are able to get up on each other like that.  Each one was young, small, and slight, yet quick and strong and controlled and certainly extremely practiced and rehearsed.  So many of us in the audience (me) felt just the opposite, heavy and weak and wondered what it would be like to reverse that ratio, all useful, able, responsive, lean body mass and virtually no fat at all. Anyway, it was entertaining and amazing as well as somewhat inspiring!

It did become a very cold night though, to the extent that all three of our cell phones that we had been using as cameras began to fold up.  At first it looked like the batteries had been used up, but if you put your phone back in a pocket for a while, it seemed to “thaw out” for a bit.  It was odd in that once I was home and had downloaded the photos I took onto my computer, near the end there were a few blanks where a picture had supposedly been taken, but no image showed up. Despite there being no visible image, the phone kept the blank space as if it had in it a picture.  Well, I just deleted those blank spaces.  I wonder if for cold nights it would be beneficial to have some of a “jacket” for the phones?

Once we were all back home, Carmen, Nick, and I shared among each other all the photos that were taken and they were really beautiful.  It had been a great evening.  I am thankful for Carmen having thought of it in the first place and for Nick to have found the Hot Pot restaurant.  I now have been much culturally enriched!  Now I think I need to get busy with some of those 75 international cuisines.  There is still so much to explore! 

The Depth of the Nows

I feel like I have been complaining and moaning and fearing, lately, but despite myself, these past few days have been pretty wonderful.  Fearing, you say?  Well, I think it is a typical thing.  Makes my think of my friend Jim, who told me way back when I was a freshman in college living in the same dorm (that’s where I met him), that he planned his whole life out—that he was going to get a government job and retire early with a big pension.  And, as it turned out, he actually did do that, got a job with the County of San Francisco, and then retired with a pension when he was 50.  And he bragged about it, it seemed that way to me, anyway, but after a while of such retirement, he started to complain that now he couldn’t do things like he used to.

He said he used to go to the opera, and he used to go out to dinners in elegant San Francisco restaurants (of which there are an infinite supply), and he would travel to Europe, but now he couldn’t.  Why not, I asked?  He said, “Because I don’t have the same amount of money I used to.”

I figure that maybe the pension he was receiving after having worked about fifteen years less than the “normal” pattern (or, comparing him with me, now, he worked twenty years less), I didn’t really feel all that sorry for him, thinking (admittedly unkindly), Well if you need more money, maybe you should get a job!  I didn’t say that to him, of course, that would have been rude and actually none of my business.  And anyway, he does deserve points for planning his life and actually sticking to it, and I don’t think he can be blamed if he later discovered that some of the details ended up being different from what he had expected.  That is life, right?  That happens to all of us.  Any anyway, he still remains a brilliant, talented, and hilarious guy that I always liked.

But for me, lately, in what has now been my three months of retirement, I have now finally experienced and understood Jim’s feelings.  It isn’t whether you have the money or not, but it is that you can’t be quite sure that it is enough.  If you are actually living on your pension, or, in my case, on your retirement fund and various investments, while that may be sufficient for maintaining your previous lifestyle, it isn’t really the same as having a regular paycheck come ringing into your bank account.  I would love in when I would be working on my computer and there would be a signaling “ding” and on the lower right hand side of the screen would be a notice from Wells Fargo saying that a direct deposit had been deposited in my checking account and it would tell me my new balance.  Twice a month.  And I knew that that would come to a stop and I would surely miss it, but that didn’t mean that I was now going to be destitute.  And I absolutely am not.  And my licensed financial adviser underscores that.  And it is not that I am not planning on generating an income from hoped for published books, monetized YouTube travel videos (once they get way better than they are now!) and other ideas.  It’s just that none of those are as secure as a regular paycheck.

So now I am “Mr. Conserve”, running around turning lights off (my father would be proud), only having on the ones in the actual room that I am in, not going out to eat as much as I had been, and cooking at home, instead, and not even taking any major trips (not yet) until my retirement finances are all fully set up (my advisor, Cheryl, tells me that will be somewhere in the middle of January). (P.S., Carmen, if you are reading this, “I am not Cheryl’s only client!”)  But we had a very productive day yesterday, a two-hour phone call discussing my “risk profile” that was generated from a 25-question questionnaire that I had done last week (sweating bullets while doing it).  That was amazingly useful, and essential according to Cheryl.  Based on how you answer the questions, you end up with a “risk tolerance” score, and then Cheryl goes over each question with you to find out why you chose each choice so that she can get a better understanding of your emotions and also set up the most appropriate plan.

The risk tolerance score goes from 1 to 100; a 1 would be a person who was so afraid of risk that they would hide every penny and dollar they owned under a mattress, not even feeling safe with having their money in a bank.  A rating of 100 would be the kind of person who would take their entire retirement fund, all $500,000 or a million or whatever it is, and maybe even borrow money, and go to Las Vegas and put it all on one number on a roulette wheel.  Me, I scored a 55, which means that I am in the risk tolerance band of anywhere between 50 and 60.  I am to make a decision as to exactly which number to apply to myself in that range.  What that will mean will be, suppose I choose 60, then that means that Cheryl will create my portfolio so that 60% of all that I have will be invested in a variety of equities, and 40% in a variety of fixed income investments.  Fixed income investments are those that pay a definite amount, such as 2.5% percent a year (or decades ago, 10% a year), whereas equities can grow in value (or diminish), the typical stock performance of going up or going down, fluctuating the whole time based on market forces and so on.  I think we all know about that.

There’s way more to it than that, though, and that is Cheryl’s software has all the performance histories of types of investments from 1970 onward.  I liked the use of that particular date (which is scientifically based, I am guessing based on that being the year that Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and cycles started to change dramatically; another type of benchmark might happen to be when the Federal Reserve system was begun), but I like that date of 1970 because that was the year I graduated and suddenly felt that I had stepped out into the real adult world, which meant I was no longer in college and supported by my parents.  It was from 1970 and on when I more or less now had to be earning money to live on.

That wasn’t the beginning of my getting a job or earning money—I had been doing that since I was 17, at first having a “taking your trash to dump” in my pick-up truck service, for which there was an immense demand in the neighborhood where I lived, and I really gave them their money’s worth by filling the bed of that truck sky high with stuff.  One summer, I was paid by my parents to paint our house (and boy were they demanding professional quality…and go it), but they were also cool about it and allowed my girlfriend, Becky, to come be with me while I painted.  I got so tan in the sun that summer that I can hardly believe it (I know Becky liked the shirtless view; ah, how nice to be teenager) and apparently I worked much better (and quicker) when I had someone wonderful like Becky to talk and joke and sing, etc., with. Her presence wasn’t a distraction but an energizer.

While in college, I got a job working in the dishwasher area of the dorm, and my friend, Jim (mentioned above) worked by my side.  He was stationed at the window where the students would put their finished trays and dishes.  Jim would scrape off in the garbage the left over food and hand each plate to me, where I would give them a good rinse and hand them to the guy on my left who would put them into the conveyor belt of the dishwashing machine.  It was noisy enough in there that Jim and I could hear each other, but nobody else could hear us, so we had wonderful conversations and hilarious jokes (he could choke you with laughter) and sing songs and dream our future lives.  On Sundays, the dorm dining room was closed, so I worked in the snack bar cooked hamburgers and hot dogs, serving chili, frying French fries, and whipping up milkshakes.  So I already had my so-called “McDonald’s” job when I was in college.  I loved all this, because it was filling my pockets with money and it was all mine to do whatever I wanted to with it.  That money was total gravy, not like once you are out of college and now you have to make a living.

So, Cheryl matches the historical investment performances with her client’s risk profiles and comes up via a multivariate analysis what investment vehicles would get the most money based on a client’s tolerance for the risk of getting that level of growth. 

So having that conference got me feeling a whole lot better yesterday!

That evening, I was going out with a friend I’ve known since high school, Ted, to see at the Lemmle Movie Center in Santa Monica a movie of the recent London play of The King and I.  I actually had never seen the Deborah Kerr, Yule Brenner movie, so this story was new for me.  And it was glorious.  Never before had I seen such a beautifully put together film of what was really being performed on stage.

It’s interesting, because I am currently studying a book written by a movie maker named Steve Stockman, entitled How To Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck”, and Steven Pressfield, who wrote the The Legend of Bagger Vance, a book and then subsequent movie that made me wish I had taken up golf, said Stockman’s book was “like two years of film school in 248 pages”.  One thing Steve Stockman stresses (and stresses and stresses and stresses) is that you plan your video!   Don’t be like the goofball man who goes to an elementary school concert and stands there the whole time and simply videos the whole chorus by going back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, back and forth over and over again, not even thinking to focus in on his daughter.  Or, what I definitely am guilty of, don’t just randomly video things you see while on vacation trips and expect strangers, or even friends, to sit down and watch more than four seconds of that very boring material.  I sort of get the idea from him (so far) that “vacation videos” are the worst, and yet I somehow expect to make money from posting YouTube videos on just that kind of video.  Well, some amazing people are making tons of money doing just that, and there are several of them whose videos I watch every day as do tens of thousands of other people, so there is still some hope.

So watching that London Palladium film of the play of The King and I was clearly film utterly planned out, perfectly.  Clearly, the filmmakers had to watch that play many times in order to do such a great job.  They couldn’t possibly just arrive one day and figure they could sit down and film that.  You just know that it would be absolutely horrible.  They would have to know when they needed to do wide shots and when they needed to zero in on one particular performer, “et cetera et cetera et cetera”, so they wouldn’t miss anything that would be essential to catch.  Otherwise, they would always be getting to the good scenes after they happened, not before.

I imagine that everybody reading this has already seen the movie of the King and I, but I was like what I think of (affectionately) as “the country bumpkin”, what I often do like to be, which is a sort of “hey, maw, would you look at that!” feeling I get which lets me be flabbergasted by something really wonderful that so many others are already bored with by now.  Kind of like, “Yeah, we actually do have automobiles, now, people just don’t get around with a horse and buggy any more.”  “Well golly!”  Okay, admit it, if you, are sometimes one of those bumpkins, reflect upon how great it is to experience something wonderful for the first time.

So, the singing…people don’t seem to sing like this anymore.  How beautiful that was.  And it was enlightening to know so much of the music, but to have had no idea that this was where it came from. Even a more obscure song (that I hadn’t heard in about forty years), “My Lord and Master”, but also better known songs, such as “Hello, Young Lovers” and “I Have Dreamed”, I didn’t know they were from The King and I. 

There were so many wonderful songs, and I kept thinking to myself, Well, yeah, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and you like Stephen Sondheim so much, you know Oscar Hammerstein was Sondheim’s mentor.  Okay, I am so glad that Ted is way more sophisticated than I am, it was his idea that we go see this, I doubt I would have on my own.

The song I actually liked the best was “Getting to Know You” and I swear that if I were a teacher, I would sometime in the first trimester sing this song with the students and have them learn it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTvnGaZRpj8  I remember when I was in elementary school, all the teachers sang (remember the little note or tone whistle thing, whatever that was called) whether they considered themselves to be good signers or not.  The point is to do it and have fun with it, you don’t have to be Barbra Streisand or Frank Sinatra.

So, the play was great, but also was the dinner we had before hand.  We chose a Thai restaurant, Thai Dishes on Broadway, only a couple of blocks away from the Laemmle.  I really loved it.  They had a nice outdoor patio, but we ate inside.  The service was excellent.  The waitress came up to ask us for what we wanted to drink but first saying that they had something new, “Ice milk green tea”.  I have lately been reading how beneficial green tea actually is (to the extent that people are recommended to drink a cup of it at all three daily meals), so I decided to have that.  I said to the waitress that I normally would order a Thai iced tea, and she explained that this was like that but with green tea.  It was out of this word delicious, surprisingly so.  Up to now, I had felt that green tea didn’t really have any kind of a taste, but wow, something about that combination with the milk absolutely ramped the green tea taste up to utter fresh goodness.  So that was truly a hit with me.

To eat, I had a yellow curry (chicken, carrots, onions, and potatoes in a yellow curry sauce) along with white rice, and the curry dish came in a heated bowl.  Again, a total winner, I kept thinking about how amazingly delicious it was.  Ted had some complicated-looking bowl full of various kinds of seafood and vegetables, which was a lot of food, but he certainly ate it all.  After we finished eating, we still had half an hour before time to go to the theater, so I asked the waitress if we could stay a bit and she said, “Of course”, so I ordered a coffee drink but I can’t say what it was called…it seemed to be like a chai tea but with coffee instead of tea, and had a sense of chocolate involved.  Anyway, it was yet another winner.  I walked out of that restaurant really happy and planning on going back there again very soon.

As we walked to the theater, I saw a couple of other restaurants that I would also like to try out.  I may be making my way down to Santa Monica quite a bit more.  Ted suggests taking the Metro to get there, but that would be about a two-hour one way trip from Tarzana.  He likes to avoid paying the high price to park in Santa Monica.  To get to this movie theater, he parked at the Metro station at Bundy and Olympic for $3.00 and took the train down to the last stop in Santa Monica.  I had parked in the city garage right across the street from the Laemmle and since the movie was three hours long and we had met down there two hours ahead so that we could have a leisurely dinner, we were there a total of five hours and that cost me $14.00 to park.  Oh well, it is all very convenient, though, and I like how when you come down the elevator and get out to the street, there is a crosswalk right there in the middle of the street takes you right to the Laemmle.

Oh, to to ad the magic of that evening, after I crossed on that crosswalk, who should I see waiting there at the theater but a man I hadn’t seen for 20 years, a man whom I had met doing extra work on movies and television, and who lived in the same apartment building in Hollywood where I lived before I moved to Tarzana.  He was there to see a movie that was starting in a few minutes, so we couldn’t visit with each other very long.  But I take those kinds of chance meetings to be “good omens” of some kind.

One more thing before I post this blog entry.  I said that I had been doing more cooking for myself instead of eating out.  For years, I had been trying so many various diets, none of which seemed to really work all that well.  What worked best was fasting for seven days with only water…but then the weight still quickly came back on afterward.  The eating out was not due to laziness, but because nothing I cooked really tasted very good due to all these diets with what you can eat and what you can’t, which mostly is all you want of what you don’t really care for (or get sick of) and nothing of what you really like.  So I would go out to eat just to actually eat something that I wanted and that tasted good.

But now that I am retired and really wanting to eat more at home, that has made me take off the shelf some of my cook books and do a different kind of “reset”…why not eat things that I want to and actually taste good, but just greatly reduced portions.  Usually the way this has worked out is that I end up having only one, and sometimes two, meals in a day, which ends up being a kind of modified fast by default, and all the food tastes really good.  I don’t yet really know how well this will work “diet wise”, but it sure does make me happy and that seems to be much more important at the time being.

I have been playing around with a marvelous cookbook set that is the Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Cooking, in 12 volumes, 2,000 pages, 1,500 colored illustrations, 8,500 recipes!  Printed in 1966, the year I graduated from high school and then started college.  I don’t know if that had been my mother’s, or one of my Uncle Ham’s (I have books from both of their collections).  Both of them were wonderful cooks.  I will always crave my mother’s cooking, as well as the cooking of both of my grandmothers.  In the latter years of his life, my Uncle Ham would write about cooking for various European magazines.  He would devise menus for various parties and occasions and then make gorgeous photographs of the dishes in amazing settings, such as an Italian feast photographed in a lay out on the Rialto Bridge in Venice with the Grand Canal flowing underneath.

So with this book series, when they say encyclopedia, they mean it.  It isn’t just a book of recipes, but it teaches about food like you just can’t believe, but also includes poetry and essays about food.  Where I will be going Christmas, while it isn’t a pot luck, they do like if you bring a dish.  So I looked up in the encyclopedia under the entry “Christmas” to see what I might want to make.  I’m not sure, yet, but I got entranced by some of the essays regarding food and the Christmas season.

One woman, named Jean Hersey, I don’t know if she was a famous writer back in 1966, or a person who worked on the staff of Women’s Day, wrote an essay entitled, “Twelve Days Before Christmas” which was about how every year she makes a loaf of bread every day of the twelve days before Christmas.  Some of the loaves she and her family will eat, others they will give to visitors during the Holiday season.  And can she make the idea of baking bread appealing!  Now, I have a bread-making machine, that I like to use (so easy!), and I can make bread that is healthy because I can choose the ingredients, but of course Jean Hersey would make her twelve days of bread by hand.  I am tempted to make at least one loaf of bread her way.  Here’s something that she wrote:  There is something so solidly satisfying to me about making bread. Is it perhaps, because, after all, yeast is a plant and it is always good to feel any plant grow in your hands?

Or this, The baking time is when the fragrance reaches its peak of delight.  Ask a friend over for tea just to sit there beside your glowing fire, with the bread baking.  Simple pleasure, but oh so delightful.  I can understand now how I so often feel that I have completely missed the feeling of a particular holiday.  One has to really get into it in whatever way strikes you.  This woman, essentially anonymous writer who nevertheless used her skill that inspires a person 52 years in the future, puts a whole different perspective on the meaning and power of a life.  It’s the depths of the nows that matter.  One of the things that I am learning from retirement is to stop the habit of rushing forward, and instead, experiencing each particular moment as being the whole thing.  It certainly gets rid of the complaining, moaning, and fearing.

I swear, one could even be hanging off a cliff 2,000 feet above a rocky gorge, holding onto a tree root for dear life, scared to death and thinking that in a few moments you will be falling to your death and you just can’t hold on any longer, when suddenly you will notice the awesomeness of your surroundings and be amazed that you are there to witness such spectacular beauty.  I will bet that at the very next moment, you will happen to see a previously undetected toehold that is enough for you to use to get yourself back up to the safety of the ledge above you.  That’s not a miracle, it’s that the answer is right there right in front of your nose, if only you will stop long enough to be able to see it.