fauxklore

As I mentioned before, the primary purpose of this entire trip was going to the Fforde Ffiesta, which is a celebration of the works of Jasper Fforde. The personal back story here is that from the late 1980s through 2002 I more or less commuted between Los Angeles and Boulder, Colorado. I discovered a mystery bookstore in Boulder (Rue Morgue Books, owned by Tom and Enid Schantz) and made regular trips there, especially when they had signings and, hence, stayed open late. A couple of my colleagues were also mystery fans and we spent many pleasant evenings at a Caribbean restaurant a couple of doors away, followed by book browsing. Anyway, they published a newsletter, in which they made book recommendations and one recommendation in 2001 was for a book titled The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. I bought and read this and loved the originality of the concept, so I kept reading the Thursday Next series and many of the rest of his books. A couple of years ago, I had a conference to go to in London and learned of the existence of the Fforde Ffiesta, but the tickets were already sold out. I kept it on my list of things to do. And back in May 2025, I was able to register for the 2026 event, which happened the first weekend of this May (i.e. 2026).

I had a little preparation to do. For one thing, it made sense to reread The Eyre Affair as I had forgotten various things in the past 40+ years. I had ideas for the costume contest, but never managed to complete executing them. I also never quite got around to crocheting a dodo. (Dodos are popular pets in the Ffordean world.) I decided that it would be easy enough to join the Legion of the Danvers, so I did actually do what amounts to cosplay. Mrs. Danvers is the evil housekeeper in Daphne DuMaurier’s novel, Rebecca, and the prototype for evil housekeepers in other literature, e.g. Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein. Clones of her work for the Goliath Corporation in Fforde’s books. Dressing as her just requires a long black dress, a grey wig, and dark glasses. Here I am as Mrs. Danvers, standing next to a cardboard cut-out of Jasper Fforde, i.e. Flat Jasper. (I’ll explain more about this later on.)



While the Ffiesta officially started on Saturday morning, I arrived at the hotel in Swindon late in the afternoon on Friday. I ended up having supper at the bar and didn’t know that two of the people sitting across from me at a table were Jasper and his wife, Mary. (And I got to explain airag, the Mongolian fermented mare’s milk drink, to Mary. It’s actually not bad and, yes, I’ve done some weird traveling over the years.)

Anyway, I picked up my Ffiesta packet and joined a group of people to play the unofficial Friday night trivia. Our team was doing well until a question which required teams to match Shakespeare plays to the number of people who died in each one. I figured that people don’t die in the comedies, but I have pretty much no clue when it comes to the histories. I redeemed myself when it came to some geography related questions and, in particular, got us close enough on listing countries that have capitals starting with the letter “K” for the rest of the team to make a good guess and have us end up in 3rd place overall.

The official Ffiesta started on Saturday morning. There was a Ffordian Fete with several games to play. Two of them stuck in my mind. One involved guessing the contents of three cans with their labels removed. (I didn’t have a clue.) The other required fishing for magnetic word tiles and using them to write a poem. I came up with:

Chant sweet summer death
Her dragon eyebrows can shine.

Also on Saturday morning was a brief opening ceremony, which included singing the song “Leaning on a Lamppost.” The significance of that is that it was originally popularized by George Formby, who is President for Life in the Thursday Next books. But it has some personal significance for me, because it was used in the revival of the musical Me and My Girl in 1986. I saw the Encores production of this in 2018. “Leaning on a Lamppost” is the second stickiest song in its score (behind only “The Lambeth Walk,” which is as much of an earworm as “It’s a Small World” and the Oompa-Loompa Song from Willy Wonka. There is a special circle of hell for the writers of all of these.) There was also an opportunity to sign up for some activities and I signed up for Literary Karaoke, choosing Chapter 12 of The Eyre Affair, which involves Mycroft’s Prose Portal.

The first event of the afternoon was Jasper’s Tour of Swindon. Some people had spent the morning building a cardboard model of Swindon and Jasper pointed out various of the places and people in it. My favorite part of this involved Michelle, Swindon’s only jogger. There was also Michelle’s understudy, her understudy’s understudy, her stalker, her stalker’s stalker, etc.

That was followed by a Q&A. The most exciting thing Jasper said is that there will be a sequel to Red Side Story, which is itself the sequel to Shades of Grey. Yay!

After a brief break, there was Quiz Hour, with three games. I thought I would have been good at Name That Fruit, since I’ve eaten odd things like kiwano melon and tamarillo (tree tomato) but it turned out to include activities like making a face out of a coconut, which I don’t think I would do so well at.

Next was Evade the Question, in which contestants had to talk for a minute without mentioning anything relating to the given subject. For example, the first subject was “elephant” so one couldn’t mention anything like animal, Africa, trunk, grey, etc. My favorite challenge of that round came when one contestant said “I was painting my room” and was challenged because “elephants are notoriously in the room.” By the way, the last round is traditionally “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” and the challenges were fast and furious, on the order of one or two seconds. I may suggest playing a version of this at a Loser event. (For those who don’t know, Losers are devotees of the Invitational, a humor contest that used to appear in the Washington Post. For more information, see The Not Ready for the Algonquin Roundtable Society. Loserdom is a big part of my life.)

The final game was Fforde or Fraud in which two contestants had to guess whether or not characters appeared in The Eyre Affair. The catch was that they were separated by a whiteboard, so couldn’t see each other. The funniest part of this is how much trouble Jasper and Mary had with it.

I also spent some time hunting lobsters. There were various toy lobsters hidden around the public areas of the hotel, each with a tag on them. You had to find them and write down the name on each tag next to the number from the other side of the tag. I call shenanigans as some of them were actually crabs. (And some of us know the sad story of Herman the Lobster and Sally the Crab, immortalized by the Smothers Brothers in the lyrics “crabs walk sideways and lobsters walk straight and we won’t let you have her for your mate.”) I never did manage to find the last few crustaceans, alas.

The evening started with the Fancy Dress parade. (In case anyone doesn’t know, “fancy dress” is British English for “costume.”) My personal favorite was the two people who dressed as “Deleted Characters.”

The day ended with an auction, which was raising money for a literary charity in Swindon. There were several interesting items, but the prices got steep rather quickly. I was seriously tempted by a CD about Swindon and cheese, but wasn’t willing to spend GBP 40 for it. Overall, I think the auction raised about GBP 3000, which is impressive.

By the way, my favorite quip of the day (from Jasper, of course) was “I just learned that microbiologists are the same size as other biologists.”

Sunday morning started with Jasper reading from Dark Reading Matter, the last book in the Thursday Next series, which is scheduled to come out in October. I’m looking forward to being able to read it.

Then it was time for the Legion of the Danvers to meet in the hotel’s quadrangle. There were 81 of us, total, which is impressive given that there were 158 total attendees at the Fforde Ffiesta. There was an oath, a bit of “tutting” and “huzzahs,” drills, marching, and songs. Later on in the day, we got our service and pay books, which obviously need to be kept in a safe place for future events. Here’s a picture of extreme Danversing. (I think you should be able to click on the picture on flickr to see the action.)



I did not stay around for Lobster Space Invaders, since I wasn’t in the mood for a water fight. I used the lunch break to catch up on my travel journal and puzzles and such other mundane activities. In the early afternoon, everyone reconvened to watch the production of Richard III. There were a few people who seemed a bit lost as to what they were supposed to be doing, but it was still entertaining, especially as we were provided with noisemakers to aid us with audience participation.

That was followed by Literary Karaoke. I think my reading went fine and someone did tell me I’d read well. The main thing I’d practiced was making sure I stayed within the time limit.

After a short break, there was a demonstration of dodo whispering. Because, as everyone knows, it does take some effort to train your pet dodo properly. That was followed by prize giving. There were elaborately designed plates for the winners of the big contests and bags or boxes of sweets for the more minor events. Even though there was a brief closing ceremony, there was another unofficial event later on. That was a race night. There were videos featuring races with dachshunds, Shetland ponies, marbles, pigs, sheep, babies, and Fforganizers (that’s the term for the volunteers who organize the Fforde Ffiesta). I used the same approach which I take to actual horse races - namely choosing the contestant whose name I like best. It worked about as well as it does for actual horse races, in case you thought that was a rational approach.

In the morning, I got a taxi to the train station and on to the next leg of my trip, which I’ll write about soon. The bottom line is that the Fforde Ffiesta proved to be ffabulous ffun and I’ll certainly try to go to it again in the ffuture.

I went up to New York a couple of weeks ago for a long weekend. (That was after several days of not going outside at all, due to what they called “snowcrete,” i.e. icy sleet on top of snow, which created a disgusting substance with the texture of concrete.) I had originally scheduled an evening Acela, which would have arrived about 9:30 p.m. but I was notified a couple of days in advance that it was canceled, so I took a train that was scheduled to get in about 5 p.m. I usually just take a northeast regional since the time difference from the Acela is minimal, but this was one of those rare times when the cost differences was minimal. In the end, my train was delayed about an hour, which was annoying mostly because they kept changing the time it was going to leave. And, several times, the text they sent claimed that the new time was the original time, despite what was being announced. It didn’t matter much to me, since I was still getting in quite a bit earlier than my original plans. And Amtrak did send me compensation, which will be helpful since I have 2 or 3 more Amtrak trips in the next couple of months.

I had enough time to grab takeout pizza before going to my hotel. I’d gotten a reasonable price at the Fairfield Inn & Suites right across the street from Moynihan Train Hall. I ate my pizza and watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, which annoyed me because of NBC’s overemphasis on Team USA. I wanted to know more about things like the sole competitor from Guinea Bissau. I was also following the Israeli bobsleigh team because their captain, A.J. Edelman is an MIT alumnus (and even course 2, like me and Senator Alex Pedilla!) He was the first Orthodox Jew to compete in the Winter Olympics (in Skeleton in 2018) and his brother is the comedian Alex Edelman, whose show Just For Us has to do with his experiences with a white supremacist group. And, by the way, one of the members of that Israeli bobsleigh team is Druze.

It was particularly windy and frigid out, which limited the amount of random walking around that I did. My plans were for a theatre day, so that wasn’t a huge issue. The first show I saw was the matinee performance of Buena Vista Social Club. This was an easy choice for me to make since I like Cuban music and have loved both the movie and CD for years. And it was, indeed, very enjoyable. The performances were heartfelt and I really appreciated the booklet about the songs that was included inside the Playbill. And the band was incredible, well deserving of the special Tony award they got. By the way, the real Omara Portuondo is still alive (in her mid 90’s) and has recorded an album as recently as 2023. Highly recommended.

Saturday night’s selection was Death Becomes Her. I didn’t know a lot about this musical going in and had chosen it largely because the reviews were good. The basic premise is that Viola Van Horn (played by Michelle Williams, who had started her career in Destiny’s Child) has access to a potion that promises eternal youth - and life. The actual story has to do with the rivalry between an actress named Madeline Ashton, and the friend (named Helen Sharp) who she abuses all her life, down to stealing her plastic surgeon fiance. And that’s exactly the problem I had with this show. The songs have amusing lyrics and there is plenty of funny material and the special effects are impressive. But do we really need a show that is based on two women attempting to sabotage one another?

By the way, how cold was it out? They were claiming the wind chill made it feel like -17 Fahrenheit. In more practical terms, I walked 4 blocks (to 43rd street) and got on the subway for the remaining 10 blocks because I just couldn’t handle the temperature any more. And I was wearing 3 layers of clothes, as well as my warmest jacket.

Sunday wasn’t much better, though I had the sense to add yet another layer to my clothes. I headed cross-town to meet up with a group of folks from FlyerTalk at the 2nd Avenue Deli. Josh organizes Deli Do a couple of times a year and there were about 20 attendees. I’ve been once or twice before and I’ve eaten at that deli lots of times, going all the way back to when it was actually on 2nd Avenue. I noticed that the menu no longer has hot open faced sandwiches, which used to be one of my go-to orders in my childhood. A tongue sandwich and a kasha knish is my most common deli order these days. But, given the cold weather, I thought that the soup and half sandwich option was a good idea. I got the mushroom barley soup and half a chopped liver sandwich. Both were quite good. And, of course, a Dr. Brown’s diet cream soda, since I never acquired the taste for cel-ray. Jewish soul food and talk about flying / travel - what better way to spend a long lunch? Several of us walked over to Blue Haven East afterwards for adult beverages and more conversation. I have a long standing quest for the best hot buttered rum in NYC and theirs was pretty good. And it was nice to be able to mingle and chat with people who had been sitting at the far end of the deli from the table I ended up at.

I took advantage of proximity to walk over to the Morgan Library, which had been on my list of places in New York that I had not been to before. I was particularly eager to get there since they have a Caravaggio painting temporarily on loan from the Galleria Borghese in Rome. In addition to Boy with a Basket of Fruit, there were other naturalist works, mostly by contemporaries of Caravaggio and other painters influenced by his style. I’m mostly a modern art aficionado, but I was awestruck by Caravaggio’s use of color and light when I saw two of his paintings at Saint John’s Co-Cathedral in Valetta, Malta some 25 years ago and consider him the greatest painter of the late 16th / early 17th centuries.



It was also the last day of an exhibit of Renoir drawings. I’m not particularly keen on Renoir (or, frankly, the impressionists, in general). But a quick look through that exhibit left me impressed with Renoir’s skill as a draftsman.



But, of course, the real highlight of the Morgan Library is the actual library, which is spectacular.





Don’t forget to look up at the ceilings, too!



I wandered over to Grand Central Terminal for a bit, then headed back to the west side to go to a cabaret show. I had heard of Don’t Tell Mama from a couple of puzzle people, but had never been there before. I was impressed with the number of people who went there alone, which is a bit unusual in my past experience at cabaret venues. I had a lively and interesting conversation with the woman sitting at the table next to mine, who I found out at the end of the evening was a somewhat well-known actress, Neva Small. As for the actual show, it was called Jewish Caroling: The Music of Carole King, Carole Bayer-Sager and Carolyn Leigh. The performer, Deborah Zecher,is a singer, storyteller, and rabbi and she put together an interesting mix of songs by those three Jewish women. I hadn’t known this going in, but the proceeds from the show are being donated to Beth Israel, the synagogue in Mississippi that was burned down.

For women of my generation, Carole King’s Tapestry was a truly iconic album. I remember listening to it with my best friend in the bedroom of an older girl who lived on our block, who would go on to tell us that an orgasm is like a sneeze between the legs! And, yes, I do still have my own copy of it. Anyway, it was a very enjoyable show and I’ll check out the offerings at Don’t Tell Mama for future New York trips. By the way, the wind had died down and walking back to the hotel was tolerable.

I went down to the Lower East Side on Monday. Walking through Penn Station to get to the F train, I passed this interesting glass mosaic mural. It is called Garden of Circus Delights and was done by Eric Fischl. There is actually quite a lot of interesting art in the New York City subway system and it would be fun to spend most of a day exploring it.



My goal was seeing a temporary art exhibit, sponsored by Manischewitz in honor of a new line of bottled soups.





They also had some cute merchandise, e.g. aprons, baseball caps, and patches with various Yiddish slogans. But none of that is anything that I’d ever use. And neither my brother nor the gentleman with whom I’m conducting the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling ever wear any type of hat. They were also selling soup from a food truck nearby, but I had other intentions.

Specifically, I had lunch at Russ & Daughters. The “Super Heebster” consists of whitefish and baked salmon salad with horseradish-dill aream cheese and wasabi roe. I got it on a bialy, and it was very tasty. It also came with half sour pickles and, while I normally favor full sours, they worked well with the mild spiciness.



And I couldn’t resist their halvah ice cream. While I enjoyed it, I would have actually liked a smaller portion and I didn’t think the salted caramel topping added much to it.



The food was pricy, but worth it.

I spent a lazy afternoon catching up on some reading and puzzles, before heading uptown towards Lincoln Center, where the subway station had another attractive set of glass mosaics (but I didn’t photograph those). From there, it was a short walk to the Marjorie S. Dean Little Theatre to see Going Bacharach. This was (obviously) a tribute to Burt Bacharach, performed by three singers with a small band. All three singers were excellent. I was not thrilled by the musical arrangements, which lacked brass. The music director, Adrian Galante, was impressive on the clarinet, but the flamboyance of his piano playing annoyed me. I’d also have liked to actually learn something about Burt Bacharach as a person. One of the singers did talk a bit about his use of mixed meter, which I thought was interesting. But, overall, I found the show disappointing.

Speaking of disappointing, I ‘d stayed at that Fairfield several times before. While the rooms are comfortable, the breakfast offerings have deteriorated. The breakfast on the weekend was better, but on weekdays, they didn’t have salsa for the scrambled eggs (though they did have bottles of a few types of hot sauce) and they didn’t have pancakes or waffles. More egregiously, the only fresh fruit they had were bananas (yuk). On the weekend, they had salad, but not on weekdays. This is a minor annoyance as there are plenty of places to get a decent breakfast within easy walking distance. But there used to be more variety. Another issues is that one of the three elevators wouldn’t recognize my room key, nor those of several other people, and this did not get repaired during my stay. My biggest complaint is that the rate for Monday night was considerably higher than for the previous three nights and this was not clearly displayed when making the reservation on line. I’ll have to rethink whether or not to stay there in the future.

I didn’t have any issues with Amtrak going home on Tuesday morning. The metro also cooperated and I was able to get in a lovely afternoon nap, before catching up on some household chores.

I was just too exhausted last night to write anything.

I’d had a pretty social day. I did do a bunch of household stuff in the morning. Then I went into the city to go to brunch and the theatre with a few Losers. (Losers are devotees of what had been the Washington Post Style Invitational, a humor contest that continues its afterlife on Gene Weingarten’s page.) We’d gotten about an inch of snow overnight but, other than crossing the street to the metro station which was a bit icy in spots, it was reasonably clear. It was, however, very cold and windy out. Normally, I would walk from Metro Center to Penn Quarter, but not with that wind. I had a long wait at Metro Center for the Red Line, but I’d left myself a lot of time, so I was still a little early for our reservation. We had a lovely meal - huevos revueltos (scrambled eggs) with salsa, tortilla chips, and avocado plus cafe de olla (spiced with cloves, cinnamon, and canela) - in my case. By the way, I am fairly sure that canela refers to true cinnamon, while what they refer to on the menu as cinnamon (and almost everything sold in supermarkets as cinnamon) is actually cassia. The food was all very good and the conversation was lively and far ranging.

We met up with the rest of the Loser group at the Shakespeare Theatre (Sidney Harmon Hall) where we were seeing Guys and Dolls, one of my all-time favorite musicals. I know every word and every note of every song from it and like most of them. I think the lyrics of “Adelaide’s Lament” are among the most brilliant comedy lyrics in any musical ever. (And Stephen Sondheim agreed with me on that.) While there are some rhymes I am not crazy about (e.g. in the title song, Biloxi doesn’t rhyme with Roxy, but hey, I’m pretty sure Nicely-Nicely Johnson and Benny Southstreet wouldn’t know that) and I’m fairly sure Frank Loesser never met anyone from Rhode Island given the accent he (and Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows) had Miss Adelaide use, the whole show works. My favorite song is “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” but I also have a soft spot for “More I Cannot Wish You.” The combination of the book, music, lyrics, and choreography epitomizes everything I love about Broadway musicals.

This production had excellent performances. Julie Benko was note perfect as Sarah Brown and played well against Jacob Dickey as Sky Masterson. Hayley Podschun was spot on as Miss Adelaide. The whole show just worked for me. It isn’t the absolutely best cast I’ve ever seen for it - that would be Steven Pasquale as Sky Masterson and Phillipa Soo as Sarah Brown at the Kennedy Center Broadway Center Stage production a few years ago. (I’ve also seen the show on Broadway at least twice.) But it was still excellent and all of us enjoyed it.

By the way, I also ran into a storytelling friend who was seeing the show with a group of her friends. This sort of coincidence happens to me a lot. And I like that aspect of living in the D.C. area.

I got back from LoserFest on Sunday afternoon and on Tuesday afternoon I was off to New York for a few days. The official reason for my trip was the premiere of a Yiddish opera. But, me being me, I also had to throw in three musicals and a museum excursion.

When I got to New York, I walked over to my hotel. I had planned to go down to Little Italy for the San Gennaro festival. But it was drizzly and I was tired and, as much as I have fond memories of eating zeppoli at the Feast in my home town, I just wasn’t really in the mood for greasy overpriced food. I did stick to the Italian theme and got cheap pizza. For what it’s worth, $1 Pizza now costs $1.50 a slice, but they haven’t changed the name. (It does also cost extra to add toppings. I like my pizza with mushrooms and black olives, by the way.) It was perfectly adequate and filling, allowing me to collapse happily with a book.

On Wednesday, I had plans for seeing two Broadway shows. I didn’t really do anything touristy in the morning because I had a bit of storytelling business to attend to and I wanted to get further on with a book club book I was in the middle of. After getting a smoothie for lunch, I went to the first of the two shows I had tickets for - the matinee performance of Maybe Happy Ending. For those who are unfamiliar with the story, the premise sounds really strange. Two decommissioned helperbots (i.e. robots that act as domestic companions to people) live across the hall from each other in a complex for retired helperbots. Claire’s charger fails, leading her to beg to borrow Oliver’s charger. This eventually leads them to a relationship. Oliver believes that his former owner, James, will come for him some day, but when Claire expresses a desire to go to Jeju Island (where James now lives) to see the fireflies there, Oliver joins her on a road trip. I thought the show was really sweet and I liked the jazz music used throughout it. I also thought the issues it raised about whether robots can feel the same emotions as humans and the ethics of robot to human relationships were handled well. Overall, this is a clever and original musical and well worth seeing. As an aside, the bio of HwaBoon in the “who’s who in the cast” section of the program is almost certainly the best cast bio I have ever read in a theatre program. Highly recommended.

My evening theatre excursion was Heathers the Musical. I liked the movie it was based on and I have nothing against dark and violent musicals. Unfortunately this show has a fan base of shrieking teenagers who were never taught proper audience behavior. The constant screaming at any mildly amusing line and loud stomping of feet really detracted from the show. That’s a pity because there is some good material and some fine performances. In particular, Erin Morton was excellent as Martha. File this under shows I won’t go to see again, along with Wicked and Six for similar reasons.

I had a bit of shopping I wanted to do on Thursday during the day. An excursion to a dance wear store didn’t yield a brown unitard, but did yield a long-sleeved white leotard that can be died to the correct color for my costuming purposes. And I have a reliable source of tights in pretty much any color I might want. I still need a bunny tail and ears and an apron which I can cross-stitch. But I have a few months before I need this to be done. I could have bought the ears at a costume store one of my friends had mentioned, but the store was more crowded than I wanted to deal with.

I should also note that I’d never noticed the upside-down A in the Herald Square signs before. One of my Facebook friends solved the mystery. That A represents the shape of Herald Square which is really more of a triangle with extended legs.



Anyway, the actual purpose of the trip had been to see the opera The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language at YIVO. I had enough time to check out a few exhibits, including one about people who rescued Yiddish books in Vilna (Vilnius, Lithuania) during World War II and one on Jewish artists in Lithuania. The latter, alas, failed to mention any of my artistic cousins. As for the opera, it’s based on the true story of Yudel Mark’s attempt to write a complete dictionary of the Yiddish language, despite the insistence of Max Weinreich that it wasn’t essential to capture every Yiddish word. The conflict between the two men was interesting and provided some opportunity for comedy. I didn’t find the music particularly memorable, but the performances were good and I was glad I’d had the opportunity to see it.

By the way, on the way back to my hotel, I stopped at Aubi & Ramsa, which specializes in liquor-infused ice cream. I got the Old Fashioned, made with Woodford Reserve bourbon and Cointreau. It was very tasty and the place gives new meaning to the term “ice cream bar.”



I’d decided I should use Friday to go to a museum I’d never been to before. Several of my friends were enthusing over the recently renovated Frick Collection. The only place you can take pictures inside it is the courtyard.



For the most part, I found the decorative arts, e.g. the wallpaper and ceilings, to be more impressive than the actual art collection. But I generally prefer modern art to old masters. I will say that they have a nice app that lets you look up info on the endless array of portraits of rich people, shepherdesses, and/or rich women dressed up as shepherdesses. (The biblical scenes are a bit better or, at least, less fluffy.) I’m glad I went to see it, but there are other museums in New York which I prefer. I will also note that their cafe is one of the few places remaining anywhere that serves a Caesar salad with actual anchovies on it.

I decided to spend some time in the afternoon strolling around Central Park. Back in high school, I went to a Saturday science program at Columbia University, which is where I met my 10th grade boyfriend. We had classes in the morning and periodic afternoon special lectures. On the Saturday afternoons when we didn’t have a lecture, he and I would often go to Central Park. My funniest memory of that was that we had an obligatory stop at a store that sold telephones, which he collected. Even 50ish years later, that’s still my major mental association with Central Park. That store is, of course, long gone. So I settled for looking at people playing with remote controlled yachts on the lake and listening to various street musicians. I also had to take a photo of the Alice in Wonderland statue.



I had bought a ticket to see the musical This Is Not a Drill at York Theatre on Friday evening. I realized that the Upper East Side branch of Pastrami Queen is just a few blocks from there, so I decided to fulfill my periodic need for Jewish deli food. I got my standard order - a tongue sandwich, pickles, kasha knish, and Doctor Brown’s diet cream soda. It was delicious.



By the way, I posted that photo to the Save the Deli Facebook group and got over 300 likes for it! Plus, of course (and alas), people telling me I was doing it wrong because the rye bread is unseeded and I prefer tongue to pastrami and I like cream soda, not cel-ray. But most of the comments were positive.

As for This Is Not a Drill, the premise is that a group of people are at a resort in Hawaii when there’s an announcement over the radio about a North Korean ballistic missile alert. This is based on an actual event in 2018, by the way. Since this is musical theatre, all of the people at the resort have relationship issues, which they resolve in song during the 38 minutes between the announcement and the revelation that yes, actually, it was a drill. I liked a lot of the music and the performers were good. But I thought the story was rather thin and predictable.

I took a train home early on Saturday. I ended up calling into my travel book club from the food court at Union Station shortly after I got to D.C., then took the metro home. I finished off my theatre binging on Sunday with Damn Yankees at Arena Stage, but I already wrote about that. (Short version: it’s wonderful and you should go see it if you’re local-ish.)

The biggest thing I did in July was go to Minneapolis for the National Puzzlers’ League Convention, which will get its own entry.

As for other things in July, I had a few of my usual activities, including my Litvak genealogy mentoring group and playing board games over zoom. I also had a couple of other zoom meetings - one to get an introduction to the app for the Jewish genealogy conference I was going to in August and another for planning for the 2026 Women’s Storytelling Festival.

Physical Therapy: I finally had my first PT appointment. The PT said that my knee issues were actually due to having strained my patellar tendon and he gave me a series of exercises to help strengthen the surrounding muscles, as well as the tendon itself. The most challenging is the wall sit, largely because I don’t have an obvious smooth stretch of wall to use for them. My doors all have indented panels in them. And most of my wall space has things against it (either furniture like bookshelves or boxes of stuff).

Baseball: The Washington Nationals always play an early (11 a.m.) game on the Fourth of July. This year they were playing my Red Sox, so I couldn’t resist getting a ticket. It was very hot out and my phone overheated, so I didn’t get any pictures. Despite that I had a great time watching the BoSox demolish the Nats, with a final score of 11-2. By the way, this was just a few days after Wilyer Abreu became the first player since 1958 to hit an inside-the-park home run and a grand slam in the same game.

After the game, I stopped by Bereshovsky’s Deli (attached to Gatsby) and got a potato knish and a can of Dr. Brown’s diet cream soda. It’s not like a real New York deli, but the knish was decent and I would probably be willing to eat there again.

The Untitled Unauthorized Hunter S. Thompson Musical: On Saturday of the fourth of July weekend, I went to see this show at Signature Theatre. It was created by Joe Iconis, who is best known for Be More Chill, which I had never seen but heard good things about. This was, sadly, politically relevant and very very funny. Eric William Morris starred as Hunter S. Thompson, but the really notable performance was by George Abud as Richard M. Nixon. There was also some very interesting use of puppetry. Overall, this was well worth seeing and a good reminder of why I love Signature so much.

Profs and Pints: A few days after that, I went to a Profs and Pints talk on The Physics of Baseball given by Scott Paulson, a professor at James Madison University. His lecture was both entertaining and enlightening, with topics related to pitching, batting, and fielding. I liked his explanation of why knuckleballs behave so strangely and what the real impact of things like corked bats and the thin air of Mile High Stadium in Denver were. By the way, the event was at Penn Social, which is huge and has a very extensive bar menu and reasonably priced food with large portions. (I couldn’t finish the grilled cheese sandwich I ordered.)

Please Don’t Analyze This Dream: I had a dream that involved a very elaborate grey hat, sort of like a huge saucer shaped fascinator grafted onto a brimless cloche. I am seriously tempted to try to make this if I can find the right color and weight of felt. By the way, I think this may have been inspired by a photo I saw of Princess Beatrice.

The genealogy conference schedule had turned out to be very convenient for me, since a crossword tournament I like a lot was conveniently in New York on the weekend after the conference in Philadelphia. So I had arranged to go to Lollapuzzoola on Saturday and throw in some theatre going on both Friday and Saturday nights.

The Outsiders: I’d gotten an okay price on a room at the Algonquin, which I like because I always feel wittier when I stay there. (It is also quite convenient for theatre going.) I had time for a nap before getting dinner on Friday night and wandering a few blocks west to see The Outsiders. I’d wanted to see this largely because the book it was based on had been one of my favorite books when I was in junior high. I don’t know how many times I read it, but it was a lot and I sobbed my way through it every time. The musical was reasonably true to the story (or, at least, as much of it as I remembered after some 50+ years). Unfortunately, the music did not work for me. And the choreography seemed very much out of place for 1967. The story is still a great one and I liked that a lot of the cast were new to Broadway. I just wished the music had grabbed me.

Lollapuzzoola 17: Lollapuzzoola is an annual crossword tournament, held every year on a Saturday in August in New York. The puzzles tend to be, let’s say, challenging, especially as I was definitely not at my best. I apparently made one mistake on the first puzzle, but, oh well, that happens. I solved cleanly on the second puzzle, which was (for various reasons) completely in my bailiwick. Alas, I was too slow to finish any of the other three puzzles, though I did come close. On puzzle 3, I got the theme for the most part, but just wasn’t fast enough. However, I was completely lost on puzzle 4 and somewhat lost on puzzle 5. So I finished embarrassingly badly for the day. I did, however, get to see several friends, which is really the point of the event.

Suffs: I wasn’t really sure how interested I was in this musical about the struggle for women’s suffrage, but I decided to take a chance on it because the subject is one I’m interested in. This turned out to be an excellent decision. The music was enjoyable - lively, suitable for the era, and entertaining. The characters were fleshed out reasonably well and the issues about divisions between the groups of women (based on political divisions and on race) felt realistic. I was only familiar with a few of the performers - Emily Skinner, Jenn Colella,and Hannah Cruz, for three. But the cast worked well overall as an ensemble. There was one casting note that nagged at me a bit. Namely, there are times when color-blind casting gets confusing and I kept being jarred by Dudley Malone being played by a black woman. My issue was that Woodrow Wilson was notorious for his racism so I couldn’t buy Wilson being willing to have a black person in various prominent positions. (In real life, Malone was white.) I just wish there had been a way to handle that more smoothly. By the way, I saw the show on August 24th, which was the 104th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and they had a “roll call” presentation at the end, highlighting each of the states that had voted for the amendment. Overall, I enjoyed this show and was glad I saw it.

And home: Back pain, alternating with knee pain, continues. I really need to make a doctor appointment.

I have actually done a bunch of things since late March. Looking back, I actually wrote about more of it than I thought I had (e.g. board games and some storytelling related things, including Grimm Keepers). So here’s an attempt to get up to date on everything except the Israeli Dance camp I went to in association with the eclipse, which deserves its own entry.

Storytelling: I went to an on-line story swap held by a group in Ottawa. I really enjoyed it, especially a ballad performed by one of the members. I told my original fairy tale, “The Three Sisters,” which went over well. All in all, it was a lot of fun and I plan to go again, schedule permitting.

Book Clubs: Crones and Tomes had an interesting discussion of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This was a rare case where I’d seen the movie before reading the book, though I found them pretty much the same. I liked the main character, Kiya, and hated the people who didn’t try to do anything to help her. I did have to suspend a lot of disbelief. Overall, I thought the book was worth reading, but I didn’t love it.

READ was supposed to discuss Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman last night, but the leader had issues with zoom, so we postponed a week. I loved most of this book, so I’m interested in hearing what other people thought of it.

FIOS Upgrade: Verizon sent out a notice that they were switching our FIOS service to an updated version. I got the upgrade installed a week ago. It took maybe an hour and a half and so far things seem more stable. (It’s hard to tell if it’s faster.) And the price is lower than it had been, with a five year price freeze.

Taxes: The other major adulting activity was doing my taxes. It is always a pain in the neck to find all of the paperwork I need. Due to having to do some searching, it took about twice the amount of time that TurboTax estimated, but it’s done, which is the important thing. Along with my annual resolution to do a better job of keeping track of everything.

Little Shop of Horrors: Since I was feeling a bit caught up on stuff at home, I bought a last minute ticket to go to the Saturday matinee of Little Shop of Horrors at Ford’s Theatre. This is a show I like more than I should, but, really, how can you go wrong with doo-wop music and a carnivorous plant? It wasn’t the best production of this show I’ve ever seen, partly because of sound and lighting issues. The performances were generally good, but (and I know this is unfair), I thought Derrick D. Truby, Jr. looked way too old as Seymour, who’s supposed to be maybe 20 years old but looks about 40. Still, it’s a fun show and was worth a couple of hours.

Nick Baskerville at Artomatic: After the show, I walked over to Foggy Bottom to see a bit more of what I hadn’t gotten to at Artomatic the previous time I was there. The only thing I took a picture of was this exhibit, called Wear Scene.



Eventually it was time for Nick Baskerville’s storytelling show about African-American Firefighters.



Nick told an interesting mix of stories, including true stories and a tall tale about a legendary woman. He was relaxed and entertaining and I enjoyed his performance. If you want to see this, he’s got one performance, on April 27th. And it’s free!

Adulting - Still to Go: The insurance company I’ve used for my auto and homeowner’s insurance for years is pulling out of the Virginia marketplace, so I need to start shopping around for a replacement.

I also need to make a bunch of travel arrangements. But, first, I’m going away for (part of) the weekend. And I have to finish getting ready for Pesach. Plus, of course, the rest of catching up here.

The weekend before the one that just passed, I was home and fairly sociable.

tick. tick . . . BOOM1 On Friday night, I went to see this musical, which was part of the Broadway Center Stage series at the Kennedy Center. That means that the staging is fairly minimal, but they still had a video screen, providing parts of the setting. For those unfamiliar with this show, it was originally a semi-autobiographical monologue by Jonathan Larson and, after his death, was turned into a three person musical. This version (which was directed by Neil Patrick Harris) also had several other characters, with one of them who seemed to deserve as much credit as the three principals.

The plot involves the main character, Jon (ably played by Brandon Uranowitz) , turning 30 and debating whether he should abandon his goal of writing a musical in favor of making money in advertising. His girlfriend, Susan, thinks they should move to Cape Cod. As he says / sings “Johnny Can’t Decide.”

I mostly enjoyed the show, but some of the songs don’t do much to advance either the story or character development. For example, “Green Green Dress” is a fairly generic song Jon sings about Susan. On the other hand, “Sunday” is a brilliant pastiche of the Sondheim song of the same name (from Sunday in the Park With George) and was worth the price of admission alone. And “Why,” effectively summarizes the whole point of the show.

Loser Post-Holiday Party: Saturday afternoon was the annual Loser post-holiday party. My contribution to the pot luck was a mushroom quiche and, since I got requests for the recipe, I’ll include it below. Then there were some awards for people who’d reached certain invitational milestones. And, finally, the singing of various parody songs, mostly with political themes. Plus, of course, lots of interesting conversation, including some discoveries of mutual connections I hadn’t known of before.

Mushroom Quiche Recipe: Since I had requests for the recipe…

Ingredients:
1 deep dish pie crust (I admit I used a frozen one.) Bake in a pie pan according to package directions or recipe if you're less lazy than I was.

8 oz. white button mushrooms
half an onion, chopped
2 T. butter
8 oz. gruyere cheese, shredded (or you can buy cubed gruyere). Do not use smoked gouda.
1 c. heavy cream
4 large eggs
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
a pinch of nutmeg
2 T. grated parmesan cheese, divided

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Salute the onions and mushrooms until browned.
3. Sprinkle the mushrooms and cheese into the bottom of the baked pie crust.
4. Whisk the eggs. Add the cream, seasonings and 1 T. of the parmesan cheese and beat together. Pour the mixture over the mushrooms and cheese.
5. Sprinkle the remaining parmesan cheese over the top.
6. Bake until the top is light brown and the center of the quiche is set, roughly 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool about 10 minutes before serving.


TCC Meeting: Finally, there was a lunch meeting of the Travelers’ Century Club DC chapter on Sunday. Lots of good conversation about travel, of course. It also looks like several of us will be in the Azores together.

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.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. So what else is new?

First, the gentleman with whom I’m conducting the world’s longest running brief meaningless fling was here. Most of his visit is not for public consumption. But we did go to Signature Theatre to see their production of Sweeney Todd. We had dinner beforehand at Carlyle Grand Cafe. Their pecan crusted trout was delicious. As for the show, he had never seen it before and enjoyed it. I’ve seen a few productions of it before (including on Broadway in 1980) and I thought the performances were very good. I was particularly impressed by Bryonha Marie as Mrs. Lovett, who came across as truly demented. However, I disliked the set. They had meathooks, from which they hung various things - bird cages, for example, but worst of all, two rows of body bags. One thing I did like is that they included some of the music that is often omitted, e.g. Judge Turpin’s rendition of “Johanna” and Beadle Bramford’s performance of “Parlor Songs.” Overall, it was a nice night out.

By the way, I think it’s really sweet when old people (a category in which I include us) hold hands in public.

I had two Fourth of July events to go to. The first was a chavurah get together. It was supposed to be a barbecue outdoors, but it was very hot and humid, so we ate inside. I brought hummus and pita chips, but nobody ate them. (Mostly, the chicken and corn on the cob got eaten and some of the cookies.)

After that I went over to my friend Kathleen’s place in Crystal City. Her balcony overlooks the Potomac (and DCA) so is a good place for watching fireworks. Part of her building blocked the view of the fireworks on the National Mall, but we could see fireworks from 30 or so other places. Also, we played a few rounds of Blank Slate, which was fun. It was a fun evening, though the traffic coming home was terrible.

And Saturday, I went to see the touring company of the revival of 1776 at the Kennedy Center with Cindy. This production features “a company of artists who identify as female, trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming.” For the most part, the script appeared unchanged, but it’s not like I have it memorized. The fundamental problem I had with this show is that 1776 is one of the rare musicals for which the book is good but the score is so-so, with amateurish lyrics. Sherman Edwards never wrote another musical and the world is better for that. There are two songs I like. They did fine with “Mama Look Sharp.” “Molasses to Rum to Slaves” will never be entirely satisfying to me without John Cullum playing Edward Rutledge. (Admittedly, I would pay good money to watch John Collum open a supermarket, so I may be biased.) Overall, I thought the show was just okay.

Afterwards, Cindy and I went to meet up with a flyertalk friend of mine at Pisco y Nazca. This is an excellent Peruvian restaurant. I drank a classico chicano, which was delicious and refreshing. As for food, I ate ceviche dos temperaturas which consisted of marinated fish with choclo (a type of corn with large kernels) and sweet potatoes in a spicy sauce. That was also quite tasty. The others also seemed to enjoy their food. We had lively conversation, mostly travel related.

Now I am in minor panic mode regarding upcoming travels. I’ll be fine, but there are always last minute things to get done.