fauxklore

After getting home from Boston, I had a couple of my usual activities.

Standing Meetings: Our Brothers Grimm discussion was about “The Blue Light,” which I was unfamiliar with until getting ready for our meeting. We had our usual good discussion about the relationships to other stories and the implications of different versions. I’m not sure if it’s a story I would tell or not.

My needles and crafts group was having one of our in-person meetings and I drove to darkest Maryland for that. There was the usual annoying roadwork on the Beltway, which made it take twice as long as it should have. On the plus side, there was lots of fall color in Bethesda.



Another plus was getting to meet our hostess’s new kitten, who is adorable. And so soft.

Museum of Failure: On Saturday, Cindy and I went to the Museum of Failure, which is a temporary installation in Georgetown. Cindy had a bit of a failure finding the entrance to the building and had to call me for directions.

There are several sections to the museum, but the exhibits all raise the question of just what makes something a failure. Some of the things they show were actually good products, but did not win out over their rivals commercially. For example, most experts would say the Betamax was technically superior to VHS, but it was more expensive and didn’t capture the market share.

Another example is this device, which was wildly successful in France. It was called the Minitel and was a terminal that enabled people to do things like check stock prices, make travel reservations, do their banking, and search for porn before the world wide web. It was very popular - and kept the French from getting onto the internet for about a decade.



One I would argue wasn’t a failure was the Iridium phone. This was the first system that was truly world-wide, enabling telephone access at latitudes out of reach of geosynchronous satellites. (Molniya orbits do allow northern polar access, but not southern.) I once volunteered on an archaeological dig in Fiji and one of the people on our team used his iridium phone all the time to call his family. Besides, they had the coolest ads ever, with a San tribesman in the Kalahari, dressed in a loincloth, and carrying his bow and a quiver of arrows in one hand and his iridium phone in the other.



There were lots of transportation related failures - the Edsel, the Delorian, the Segway (which is used a lot for tours and security staff), and grass skis. The reel of commercials for these things was a lot of fun.

Another section had lots of toys. We talked about ones we or our neighbors had had, like lawn darts. I also remember “growing up Skipper,” who grew boobs when you turned her arm. Which brings me to the porno room that included things like this magazine cover:



There was a whole section on food and drink. In addition to things like a wall of odd oreo flavors, there were familiar things like New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.



Other exhibits had to do with Donald Trump and with Washington, D.C. (including the failure of the Metro to have a station in Georgetown and the failures of the Washington Football Team.) There were also medical failures, e.g. thalidomide. Both of us also remembered Ayds candy (a diet aid), which was pretty successful until the AIDS epidemic.

My absolute favorite item was the hula chair. This was intended for you to be able to get exercise while sitting at work. You probably have to click through to flickr to watch the panic on my face as I try to figure out how to turn the damn thing off.



Overall, I thought it was a pretty entertaining morning.

Avenue Q: On Sunday I drove to Reston to see the Reston Community Players production of Avenue Q. A woman I know from storytelling circles was playing one of the Bad Idea Bears. Anyway, it’s a show I’ve seen before, and, while some aspects are a bit dated, it’s still very funny.

Halloween Show: Our spooky story show was Monday night and went well. My contribution was a Russian vampire story, collected by Aleksandr Afanasyev in the Tambov Oblast. Overall, there was a wide range of stories from the different tellers and, wow, there’s a lot of creepy stuff out there.

The Borscht Belt: On Tuesday, I went to a zoom lecture about the Jewish Catskills. What I hadn’t actually known was that what I think of as the Catskills were actually another mountain range called the Shawangunk Mountains. I also learned that the Hudson River actually flows for another 100 miles under the Atlantic after reaching New York City. There was a lot of somewhat random information about the development of the Jewish resorts, which were mostly founded in reaction to the segregated policies of the other existing resorts in the “real” Catskills. I was also reminded of the term “populuxe” for the style of architecture of the resorts. It was an interesting talk, but there were a lot of digressions from the primary subject and, while it had been advertised as an hour and a half, it ended up being almost two and a half hours.

Did You Know?: If you eat a Reese’s White Chocolate Peanut Butter Ghost while drinking coffee, your coffee will taste like marshmallow. This was an accidental discovery yesterday morning and it took me a minute to realize what had happened since it was coffee from a different roaster the my usual one. I assume this works with non-ghost shaped white chocolate peanut butter cups, too. (I had the ghost shaped ones because I’d bought them for Halloween, but didn’t get any trick or treaters. So, obviously, I had no choice but to eat them myself.) Not that I’m sure why one would want one’s coffee to taste like marshmallow. One of my biggest rules in life is that coffee IS a flavor and should, therefore, not come in flavors.

About the only thing I really accomplished today was mailing some holiday cards and going grocery shopping. The latter required four stops because a few things on my list were hard to find. In a brief fit of insanity a few weeks ago, I signed up for a cookie exchange. I decided to make two types of cookies - lemon and rosewater and pistachio. Giant in Vienna did not have unsalted shelled pistachios, which would save some effort. Nor did they have dried rose petals, which I don’t technically need, but would pretty things up. So I tried Fresh Market, which also had neither of those, though they did have unsweetened dried coconut, which I didn’t immediately need but is something I normally keep on hand. There’s a small Indian market in the same shopping center, but they were out of dried rose petals. Finally, I tried Whole Foods, which didn’t have any of the things I needed either.

There are three Iranian markets near me and I think it would be worth trying the largest of those. And I am fairly sure Trader Joe’s usually has the pistachios. TJ’s is also next to Staples, which would be a good source for the mailing boxes I need for the cookies. But, really, grocery shopping shouldn’t take me almost three hours.

Lest this sound whiny, I do remember grocery shopping while I was overlanding in Africa and how it took us three days before we could find eggs to buy in Malawi. I am grateful to have options.

Now that I’ve gotten through what I intended on my DC guide, I can do some catching up. I’ll have other posts to write, too - one on the May prompts and one on my trip to Philadelphia last week. But I am traveling again this week (and next week) so it may take a little while.

Two Local Art Installations: A couple of weeks ago, I went with a friend to see two local art installations. Prismatic was at Ballston Quarter (a shopping mall in the Ballston neighborhood of Arlington) and consisted of a number of colored prisms. We thought there was supposed to be a way of turning them and maybe there was supposed to be music, but we couldn’t get those aspects to work. It was pretty enough, but not very exciting. From there, we went to Georgetown, where we had dinner at Tony and Joe’s at Washington Harbor, followed by a steep uphill walk to see an installation called Glow. My back was aching and the walk was difficult, as a result. Anyway, there were 5 light sculptures to see. My favorite one was called Madness Method, where you had to stand in a marked circle to make a bunch of flickering lights converge. Overall, I was disappointed in both installations, but I’m glad I went to see them.

Cookout: My chavurah had a cookout on Memorial Day. I brought Asian cole slaw, which was successful. Overall, it was a nice afternoon, of good food and good conversation. There was also just the right amount of cicadas - enough to see a few, but not so many to drown everything out.

Other Recent Cooking: I finally made the Polish pickle soup recipe I had heard about a while back. The combination of potatoes, onions, sour cream, and pickles had sounded somewhat weird and, alas, it was, indeed, too weird for me. I won’t be making that again.

Viva Vienna: This is an annual festival in downtown Vienna on Memorial Day weekend. There were some crafts vendors and some politicians (e.g. my delegate to the state legislature), but mostly a lot of home improvement companies, which aren’t relevant to a condo dweller. I did buy a couple of cheap masks and a selection of nut snacks from Boso Kitchens. I’ve now sampled all of the latter and the definite winner was the honey chipotle peanuts.

BaltiCon: This science fiction convention was again on-line (and free), so I went to a few talks, mostly from their history and folklore track. There was a panel on Traditional Storytelling and Genre Fiction, which is pretty much right up my alley. Anne E.G. Nydam had an interesting presentation on bestiaries, including her own book. I was quite amused by one of her fantastic beasts - the umbrellaphant whose ears are like umbrellas and provide protection from the rain for other creatures. There was a panel on Jewish Science Fiction and Fantasy, that was worth listening to, but didn’t really tell me about any books I hadn’t already heard of. One of the best presentations was a short film called “Space Torah,” about astronaut Jeff Hoffman who brought a small Torah scroll on the space shuttle and read from it while in orbit on Shabbat. (There was a Q&A with him a few days later, which I’d intended to go to, but I got sucked into something else.) Finally, there was a talk on The Heroine’s Journey, which was interesting, but was too short to really cover the material. I should also note that three of these presentations included Valerie Frankel and I need to seek out some of her work.

Annoyances: I have gotten repeated phone calls from a charity solicitor for some National Police Association, which i almost certainly a scam. They are all from the same guy, who calls himself Lee. I finally was annoyed enough, that I cussed him out. I then took a nap and had a dream in which he called me and shouted, “I can’t believe what you did.” Not only is this scammer invading my phone, but he is invading my dreams.

Speaking of Telephones: My land line rang at 8:30 in the morning last Saturday. I was irritated at a call that early - until I answered and it turned out to be the gentleman with whom I conducted the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling. He lives in London and thinks of me as getting up early, so it was okay for him to call at that hour. (Aside from which, I still pretty much melt at his voice.) Anyway, we had a nice conversation about the state of the world. He was a bit surprised at how much things have been opening up for me. Apparently, everything is still much more locked down in London.

Mammogram: I finally had my mammogram a week ago Thursday. (It had been delayed because you are supposed to wait at least 6 weeks after your second COVID vaccination, due to potential lymph node swelling). The interesting thing is that I got the results back in less than an hour! No signs of any issues.

An Evening With Rockwell: I went to an event at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial on Thursday night with a couple of friends. The focus was on a drawing by Norman Rockwell, which was used to cast part of a monument in New Hampshire. There was time to look around at current exhibits in the memorial, followed by a brief talk and slide show. They also served drinks (including wine) and had snack boxes (either fruit and cheese or a Mediterranean selection). Overall, it was a nice evening out and it was nice to see the people I went with.

Usually, I am traveling on Christmas. I've been to various unlikely places, ranging from an Antarctic cruise to Vietnam to Oman to Las Vegas. Asia is a particularly good bet, since everything is likely to be open.

If I am home, I usually do the stereotypical Jewish Christmas of Chinese food and a movie. That seemed inappropriate this year, partly because of the pandemic and partly because today was the Tenth of Tevet on the Jewish calendar, which is a fast day. It's a minor fast (sunrise to sunset) and commemorates the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Not that I actually observe minor fasts, but still...


Also, the best of the very nearby Chinese restaurants has closed.


So I spent the day trying to catch up on reading newspapers and magazines and doing crosswords. I could have made a stir-fry for supper, but I am trying to use up some things in the freezer to create room for a couple of casseroles and a lot of soup, so cooked fish and chips instead. Maybe tomorrow.

But first, here’s a funny tidbit I left out of my last entry. During the 1992 L.A. riots, my mother called me. She asked if my brother was okay. I asked her why she didn’t ask if I was okay and she said, "I know you can take care of yourself."


Anyway, on to what I have been up to (aside from work).

The Great Big Jewish Food Fest: I mentioned David Sax’s interviews on the state of the deli. I listened to / watched several other talks of this event, which finished May 27th. (I also donated some money to their food relief efforts).

Ben Katchor did a session related to his new book, The Dairy Rrestaurant, which is in my to-read pile. Most of those institutions are long gone, but I know I used to have a cookbook from Ratner’s, which was one of the most famous. I love lots of Jewish dairy dishes – blintzes, pierogi, and especially borscht. I have probably told the story before of my mother buying 12 cases of borscht, 24 bottles per case, at a public TV auction. Katchor wasn’t the most fluent speaker, but was still interesting. My favorite thing of what he said was about lactose intolerance, which is common among Jews. His response was “pain was part of eating.” (In truth, fermented dairy products, notably sour cream and yogurt, are more digestible. I am still glad for lactaid.)


Another interesting session was one by Rachel Gross and Jordan Rosenblum on what Jewish food means. They pointed out that the only specifically Jewish food is matzoh, while other foods are more widespread. That said, I don’t know non-Jews who love gefilte fish with horseradish the way I do. They also talked about the growing dominance of middle Eastern food, after years of what they called Ashkenormativity. That is, when people think of Jewish food, they think of things like pastrami on rye, not, say, malawach (Yemenite pancakes) or a Moroccan tagine. Hummus and falafel and shakshouka have somewhat taken off, recently, however. Anyway, it was an entertaining talk.


One of the talks I was most looking forward to was with Joan Nathan and Ruth Reichl. Their conversation was pretty wide-ranging. I thought I had written some notes, but I can’t find them. The only thing that is really sticking in my mind was a discussion of pickle soup, which sounds both wonderful and horrible. I will probably give it a try at some time to make up my mind.


After the fact, I listened to a recorded talk on Soviet-Jewish cooking, which reminded me of how much my father enjoyed multiple types of herring, a food that, to this day, I have refused to even try. (There is an even worse food – ptcha, which is calves’ foot jelly, a black gelatinous mass that looks and smells too disgusting to contemplate.) I can deal just fine with foods like kasha and black bread, however. But, for the most part, I still think a lot of my relatives emigrated from Eastern Europe in search of a good meal.



There are several more recorded talks (at least 6 hours worth). I’d love to find the time to listen to at least a few of them.

I've been quite busy the past few days, but it will take me a little more time to write about what I've been up to. So, here, have a meme about food.




1. How do you feel about golden Oreos? They’re okay. I don’t buy them, but I don’t refuse to eat them if somebody has them on a cookie platter. I admit I do buy oreos mostly to check out their odder new (usually temporary) flavors. Recently, I had the s’mores flavor and thought they were pretty good. But I still prefer Carr’s ginger lemon cookies when it comes to this sort of thing.

2. What is your favorite dessert topping? Some sort of liqueur. Probably Grand Marnier, which is excellent drizzled on vanilla ice cream or on fruit salad.

3. What is your favorite flavor/brand of bubble gum? I was unaware that bubble gum actually came in flavors other than the generic pink one of the Bazooka gum of my childhood.

4. Favorite cheese? I am not a big cheese eater. Cream cheese is good on bagels. Those high fat herb cheeses, like Alouette, are good on crackers. Pepper jack is good for omelets or grilled cheese sandwiches.

5. Favorite Lunch Meat? Assuming I can interpret "lunch meat" as any sort of cold cuts, I like tongue.

6. Favorite ice cream flavor? McConnell’s Turkish coffee if we are talking American-type ice cream. I also tend to like ice cream or gelato with cinnamon or ginger (but not both)at the same time.

7. Best looking food? Probably some sort of sushi.

8. Best food to put cheese on? Um, a cracker?

9. Best food to eat away from people? It’s hard to eat spaghetti with any dignity.

10. Best tasting drink in the summer? Sparkling water with lime.

11. Best tasting drink in winter? Hot buttered rum.

12. Best food for a night out with friends? Tapas. Having a crowd means you can order more small plates to share.

13. Best foods to eat with a roll? It depends on the sort of roll. Hot dogs, for example, are the best thing to eat with a hot dog roll. Assuming one considers a bagel or bialy to be a type of roll, then cream cheese and lox.

14. Messiest food, in your opinion? Any sort of long noodle. See comment about spaghetti above.

15. Easiest food to prepare? Chili.

16. Cheapest food you ever ate? I got a bowl of soup and a large dish of kasha for the equivalent of roughly 50 cents in Polatsk, Belarus.

17. Most expensive food you ever ate? Maybe a venison dish I ate in Sweden?

18. Stinkiest food you ever ate? I have eaten durian a couple of times.

19. Favorite dipping sauce? Mayonnaise combined with horseradish. Or with sriracha.

20. Best pizza topping? Mushrooms and black olives.

21. Favorite potato chip flavor? Since the disappearance of onion and garlic flavor potato chips. I have to settle for barbecue.

22. Most toxic substance you ever ate? My understanding is that fiddlehead ferns become toxic if they open up. But, when tightly furled, I find them delicious.

23. Most calories you ate in one meal? Now that some restaurants put calories on their menus, I’ve been astonished at how many calories are in many breakfast offerings. I imagine I’ve probably eaten 3000 calories at a breakfast buffet at some point.

24. Favorite soda? Schweppes bitter lemon.

25. Favorite flavor of juice? Grapefruit

26. Favorite Vegetable? Hmm, asparagus maybe

27. Favorite fruit? Cherimoya

28. Worst canned food? Canned mushrooms are disgusting, which is particularly annoying given the deliciousness of fresh mushrooms.

29. Best side dish? A good, vinegary cole slaw. Unfortunately, most places down here make cole slaw that is sweet and/or creamy instead.

30. Worst fast food restaurant? I ate at Taco John’s in Colorado or Nebraska once. It was awful – salty and bland. There is not enough hot sauce in the world to salvage that horror.

31. Best restaurant? So hard to choose, but let’s say Zaytinya locally and Le Peep in Boulder, Colorado for non-local breakfasts. Though the best meal of my life was at the restaurant of a 3 star hotel in Sorrento, Italy.

32. Best smelling food? Freshly baked bread

33. Favorite appetizer? Beet salad

34. Favorite cookie flavor? Ginger-lemon

35. Favorite cake flavor? Chocolate

36. Favorite pie flavor? Coconut cream, though there’s a place in my neighborhood that makes wonderful raspberry-peach pie

37. Chocolate or rainbow sprinkles? Chocolate

38. Ketchup or Mustard? Mustard, though not on burgers

39. Best food to have with a near-stranger? You can learn a lot about somebody by eating Ethiopian food with them. Or anything else you eat with your hands.

40. Most share-able food? French fries. Because restaurants always give you about 12 times too many.

Despite my Red Sox fandom, I have not lived in New England since 1980. However, when I visit Boston, I do feel like I belong there.

Not a Good Weekend to Look at Social Media: A lot of my friends from the puzzle community are at MIT for the Mystery Hunt. A lot of my traveling friends are in Singapore for SinDo (a big annual frequent flyer party). I am home. And I don’t get Monday off. And I need my vacation time for a trip in February. But it is still annoying to think of all the fun that friends are having while I will spend a lot of the weekend communing with housework and whining about the weather.

Weather: Supposedly we got another inch and a half of snow last night. While it was snowing when I walked home from the Metro station, it was mostly wet stuff that wasn’t sticking. And I didn’t see any real signs of it this morning on the sidewalk or street. I did, however, remember that I keep intending to collect a bunch of freshly falling snow in a pie tin so I can make sugar in the snow. (This is a New England thing – you boil maple syrup and pour it over a pan of fresh-packed snow and it turns into incredibly good caramel.) There didn’t seem to be enough snow last night for that and I had forgotten last weekend when it would have been feasible. This coming weekend’s forecast doesn’t look very likely either. But I should still make sure to buy pickles and sharp cheddar cheese (which are the perfect go-withs) when I go shopping.

Speaking of New England Things: Durgin Park, a very old Boston restaurant, closed last weekend. The food was never exciting and the waiters were surly to the point of hostility. But it was a classic. In honor of its memory, I am planning to make Indian pudding. And Grape Nut pudding, which I would have done last weekend if I had found a big pan to use as a bain marie. (Again, for those unfamiliar, both of these are essentially egg custards with corn meal and molasses in the first case and Grape Nut cereal for the latter.)

I also have some Granny Smith apples in the house. Which are the right and proper thing to use for apple crisp or apple brown betty and I admit I don’t really know what the difference between the two is.
I should probably cook something that isn’t dessert. I also have things other than cooking to do this weekend.

The meme runs like this:
Comment to this post and say you want a set, and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

cellio gave me Musical perception (you have a singleton LJ interest there), a place not on Earth you would like to travel to, nalbinding, decadent food, MIT, a superpower, a favorite board game.

Musical Perception: Actually, I have a broad interest in perception. I mentioned musical perception, specifically, for two reasons. One is that I went to many of the lectures at the Music and the Brain series that the Library of Congress had a couple of years ago. The other is that music is a particularly complicated art form.

The type of questions that intrigue me can be talked about in other contexts. For example, why do we like what we like? I can just as easily ask why Caravaggio's paintings blow me away as I can ask why I was drawn to Stravinsky's "Le Sacre du Printemps" the first time I heard it. As another example, I've pondered the question of what defines Jewish music. I can ask that question just as well of, say, Jewish food.

But the most fundamental question that intrigues me has to do with my inner experience. I can never know that somebody else actually hears the same things I do when listening to a piece of music. By the same token, I can't know that somebody else's experience of a given color is the same as mine. Because music has so many aspects (pitch, rhythm, timbre, etc.) it seems like a particularly fruitful area to explore.

A Place Not on Earth I'd Like to Travel To: I expect that the question was intended to bring up space exploration, but I think that the deep sea would be as intriguing. I've been on a couple of tourist submarine rides and both were awesome.

Nalbinding: This is one of the most obscure crafts I pursue. I usually describe it as what the Vikings did because they didn't know how to knit, but the same technique is used in a lot of places, including Papua New Guinea. It is, essentially, a detached buttonhole stitch, worked with a single needle and short lengths of yarn or thread. I learned it because I saw a class being offered at the Montpelier Fall Fiber Festival a few years ago and couldn't resist learning something I knew nothing about.

Decadent food: There is nothing more decadent than perfectly ripe fresh berries, but there is a lot to be said for good chocolate. Good chocolate is the major argument in favor of the continued existence of Belgium.

MIT: I chose MIT for a simple reason. I intended to major in chemistry, but I also knew there was a good chance I would change my mind. I figured that anything I did would still be in the math / science arena and MIT is universally strong in those domains while the other school I seriously considered (Yale) is less so. The Boston area was also a big draw. (I was very attracted to Dartmouth, but worried about the lack of Jewish community in the local area, for example.)

It was a good choice for me. For one thing, I did change my mind about what I wanted to do and ended up majoring in mechanical engineering. For another, I think I did a good job of taking advantage of the cultural environment in Boston. I'd also say that I fit well into the campus environment. What I appreciate most about MIT is that people there are passionate about what they're doing (which isn't necessarily what they're studying). From what I've seen via the MIT Club of Washington and encounters with a handful of current students, that's still true.

A Superpower: My first thought was, "but, wait, isn't the U.S. the only superpower left?" Then I realized what the probable intent of the topic was. I think the superpower I would most like to have would be the ability to instantly understand and communicate in any language.

A Favorite Board Game: While I love all the modern games, there is still something about backgammon that tops anything else for me. Part of it is memories of many hours spent playing it with particular people, some of whom are, alas, no longer with us. But mostly it's the simple fact that it is a game of skill when I win and a game of luck when I lose.

I may have misled people a bit with my protein query. I'm not looking at anything particularly radical - just something to be somewhat more conscious of when grocery shopping and meal planning. For example, I can choose a higher protein alternative for, say, breakfast cereal (or, for that matter, Greek yogurt over regular yogurt).

My biggest event of the week was the change in my commute. We had a nice cushy private bus from West Falls Church to the Mark Center. Key word is "had." On Tuesday, it switched to a metro bus. Not only is it less comfortable, it is just an "express" not a non-stop. Apparently "express" means it stops only every 3 blocks instead of every single block. It takes 20 minutes longer. There is much grumbling.

I did a minor experiment on Wednesday and took advantage of excellent, spring-like weather. I walked from the Mark Center to Ballston Metro. If I figured correctly, that is just under 5 miles, which is a nice distance for a weeknight mind clearing walk. Most of it was pleasant and I noticed a couple of potential route alternatives that might be even nicer. Given that it still gets dark early and I have a terrible sense of direction, I was loathe to deviate from the route I'd planned. As the sun returns, I plan to see what happens if I pick up some of the trails, instead of sticking to streets.

Finally, my knitting group had a yarn frenzy last week and this. One of Tom's coworkers inherited a large quantity of yarn (and related books) and, after keeping half of it, passed the rest along to him. He picked over things and kept some, but he still had 13 some odd tubs of yarn and 3 boxes of books to share. Free yarn doesn't count as stash accumulation, right? And free books don't take up bookshelf space. I even know what I intend to do with some of the yarn I took.

All of my good intentions about regular updates seem to fall prey to being absurdly busy.

Last Friday, I had planned to get out of the house bright and early. But I wanted to do two things before leaving - 1) write an entry here and 2) finish the minutes from the Voices in the Glen annual meeting. This was slightly complicated by my internet going down in the middle of the first of those. My phone had no dial tone, too, so I got out the cell phone and called Verizon's customer service. The good news is that unplugging everything and plugging it back in fixed the problem. The bad news is that the customer service representative didn't suggest that until 40 minutes into the call, around when she was telling me they couldn't get a technician out to my place until Thursday morning. (Yes, nearly a week.) Still, things were fixed and I ended up leaving the house just about two hours later than I'd planned to. (The other hour and 20 minutes is because I had underestimated how long I needed to actually finish writing those meeting minutes. Also, despite how much I travel, I still seem to end up packing last minute. And I still managed to forget something I intended to bring with me.)

Eventually I got out the door and headed west. Taking the day off had been a very good idea since the traffic was minimal and I made it to Harrisonburg in just over two hours. That gave me time to do the Volksmarch there. The walking route took in the historic downtown (pretty much like every other historic downtown in Virginia) and parts of the James Madison University campus. In particular, the campus part went to the arboretum, which was lovely except for the part when I couldn't quite figure out the directions and walked an extra kilometer or so. The weather was gorgeous and I'd have liked more time to linger over the route. As it was, I had to restrain my usual compulsive reading of historic signs.

It's just a short ways to the Massanetta Springs Conference Center, where the Virginia Storytelling Gathering was being held. On the way, I made a quick grocery stop and bought chocolate for the white elephant gift basket the Virginia Storytelling Alliance board was putting together. (My basket contribution was what I'd forgotten to stick in the car, despite having left myself two notes to do so. I blame stress.) I picked up my room key and went off for dinner with the rest of the board, the featured tellers and a few general hangers on. L'Italia serves your basic red sauce Italian menu and the eggplant parmesan I got was good enough, but Harrisonburg is not Italy, nor is it New York. The company is more important than the food, of course, and I had no complaints about that.

The Friday night concert started with an amusing story by Donna Will about Volkswagons and small towns. Then Lynn Ruehlmann told a touching story about adopting her son. Mack and Joan Swift closed the concert with a Jack tale, told in tandem. After a refreshment break, we had a story swap. I won't name everyone who told, lest I inadvertently omit someone. I told "The Secret Place," which went over well.

The morning started with a keynote speech by Michael Reno Harrell. He pretty much just talked about how he fell into storytelling. He was entertainingly funny, which is what one needs in a 9 a.m. speech. Everyone had signed up for his workshop on humor so the schedule was rearranged to put that shortly after his keynote. He started off with a truly atrocious pun about how Houdini used trap doors a lot in his early work, but it turned out he was only going through a stage. (Yes, I have repeated that pun to many people in the past week. You should know me well enough to know I can't resist the groaners.) Then he went on to say that the secret to being funny as a storyteller was to be a retired Methodist minister with a bowtie. That reference to Donald Davis got a good laugh, but it also served well to illustrate a point about context and humor. The rest of his talk had to do with how the humorous story (as compared to the comic story and the witty story) is uniquely American, with a lot of references to Mark Twain. I'm not entirely convinced, but I'm also not sure I really grasp the distinction he was trying to make. All in all, his presentation was entertaining. But I'd have preferred an interactive workshop to a lecture.

The other workshops were held after lunch and one had the opportunity to go to two of the three. For the first session, I went to Linda Goodman's showcase, "Shattered Silence." Her two stories, about women who had been abused as children, were powerful and I thought she did a good job of answering questions about how she developed the material. The other workshop I went to was Ellouise Schoettler's "Put Flesh on Old Bones," which had to do with genealogy and oral history. She had some interesting examples (e.g. from old letters) of using genealogical materials to find stories. I wish she'd had the time to go more thoroughly through a speciifc example, so we could see her entire process.

After the workshops came the VASA general meeting. I am now officially on the board for 3 years (starting in July, though I've been an acting board member since Novemberish).

The evening concert started with Ralph Chatham telling a Celtic story about a kelpie. Then Geraldine Buckley told two personal stories - a short piece about her first experience volunteering at a prison and a longer one about sangria and nuns. After a short intermission, Michael Reno Harrell told a few stories (and sang a little). His story about the things he and his siblings found in his mother's house after her death was particularly notable. And, seeing as how I describe my mother as having the largest collection of half-used rolls of contact paper in the greater New York Metropolitan Region, it definitely struck home.

We were doing a basket raffle (hence, the chocolate I mentioned above) as a fundraiser and the raffle followed the concert. I'd bought a dozen tickets and distributed them among a few of the baskets. (My general philosophy on where to place tickets at these things is that wine is a good thing and scented candles a bad thing. Baskets with some of the former and none of the latter are desirable.) I ended up winning one from the Virginia Beach folks. In addition to a bottle of wine, it had margarita mix, cans of roasted nuts, various art objects (e.g. a pin in the shape of a mask which is presumably Lynn's handiwork), aquarium tickets, etc. And no candles.

Saturday night closed with a swap, which I emceed. (Surprisingly few people know that MC really stands for Miriam of Ceremonies.) I made sure that people who had told at Friday night's swap would not tell unless everyone else who wanted to had a chance. At midnight, I gave everyone the option of continuing with the last few names or going to bed. The vote for bed was unanimous.

Sunday morning's swap gave those last few people (and some others) a chance to tell. So, overall, almost everyone who was at the gathering told a story. (There were a few who didn't want to. We encourage but don't coerce.) A session of Inspirational Stories followed. I asked permission to set the stage for our final event and told "The Tragic Tale of Benny the Bum" to start a half hour or so of atrocious puns. I have a reputation to uphold, after all. (My instructions for my funeral specifically call for there to be a 21-pun salute.)

All in all, it was a wonderful weekend. Hanging out with other storytellers is always fun. The attendance was small, but that meant there was plenty of opportunity to get to know everyone there. I'd say it felt like a family reunion, but my family does not reune (and, if we did, I suspect there would be bloodshed involved).

The drive back was also reasonably quick and uncomplicated. I had time to do my grocery shopping and handle a few chores before heading into Arlington for dinner at the Mad Rose Tavern with the Flyer Talk crowd. The best story of that evening was hearing about Greg's attempts to get to South Korea, with his connecting flight scheduled to arrive in Tokyo about 45 minutes after the earthquake. He did make it, with a day's delay, but had to spend way too much money for a hotel room in Kobe - and a taxi to get to it. By the way, Mad Rose has gotten some opening buzz, but I was not impressed by either the food or the service. It's probably worth going to as just a bar, but not for dinner.

I will write about everything else that's been going on in a separate post. I hope not to take so long getting to that one.