Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown
Beth Wilmurt (front) and Stephanie Gularte star in Mary Stuart
Most of us don’t want to kill our cousins. Most of us aren’t Queen of England. Mary Stuart, at the Shotgun Players in Berkeley, explores that situation.
Elizabeth I, however, had a problem with her cousin, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. The problem being that they both wanted to be Queen of England, and both had a hereditary claim on the throne.
So when Mary entered England, Elizabeth had her arrested and tried on charges of murdering her husband, and condemned to die. While the charges were true, they were really just a pretext to remove a rival.
And yet, Elizabeth dithers. She wavers. She frets and stews, finally resorting to bureaucratic manipulation to get the job done and keep her hands as clean as Pontius Pilates.
The story has another side–Mary’s life is hanging in the balance, yet when she manages an audience with Elizabeth, rather than beg for mercy and save her own life she lashes out and asserts herself, sealing her own doom. She is a Queen at heart, and cannot bow her head to another.
There are side issues with former lovers and double crossers and palace intrigue and plotting, just to keep your mind busy.
This play, written in 1799 by Friedrich Schiller, a German playwright, is a fictionalized recapping of real events, decidedly leaning towards Mary Stuart. It has been updated and adapted by Mark Jackson, who is also the director of the production.
The play is now set in the present, on a stark and sterile stage representing a prison and various meeting rooms. There are a few references to modern events, tying the past to the present to indicate the universality of the situation (the line “we do not torture” plays very well in Berkeley).
Shotgun Players is a small house; you buy your tickets in advance, but seats are assigned on a first-come basis starting an hour before showtime. Since we had dinner first, (at Locanda de Eva, in Berkeley) we ended up sitting in the very back row–but it’s a small house with steeply raked seating, and our seats were completely fine.
The other fact of a small house; they can’t afford to pay many actors. Three of the actors were Equity members, the rest were not. Stephanie Gularte, Mary Stuart, is Equity. Beth Wilmurt, Elizabeth, isn’t. To an extent, it was like watching UCLA play the Pittsburg Steelers. Sometimes it seems like anyone could get on stage and pretend, and then you see the difference real talent and training make. Gularte was able to dominate the stage just sitting in silence, bound hand and foot to a chair.
Mary Stuart was a great way to spend an evening. I learned some history, enjoyed the performance, even left $20 in the basket so that the theater can continue next season. Playing through November 7. I recommend it.
Secretariat
Brad, sweetie to Gail’s daughter Kate, doesn’t usually like movies. A couple of weeks ago at Golden Gate Fields, he said he would be interested in seeing Secretariat when it came out, because of the horse race theme. So last night we went over to Marin, had dinner at Il Fornaio and headed off to the theater.
Should have stayed at dinner.
Secretariat is a saccharine feel-good story about a great horse. It’s Rocky on four feet, without the suspense or exhilaration.
Beautifully filmed, with great horse racing sequences, the movie was turgid, didactic, pedantic, sanctimonious and un-exciting. Given that you know from the start that the horse is going to win the race (they don’t make movies about losers), the director (Randall Wallace) has an uphill climb to maintain any possible suspense, and he doesn’t manage it.
Diane Lane stars as Penny Tweedy, a Denver housewife who inherits the family horse farm, and saves the day by choosing an unlikely colt to nurture and race. She gives a fine performance, but how am I supposed to take seriously when she stares in the horse’s eyes and they “agree” that he will win the next day? John Malkovich plays the trainer, in an over-the-top comedy turn which of course becomes heartfelt and sappy. His clothing starts out loud and silly and ends up elegant, to show us how he has grown. Nothing subtle here.
Fred Thompson, having lost his bid to be President 2 years ago, is back to making movies. He is better as an actor than as a politician, so that’s a plus.
Mrs. Tweedy, of course, has a husband who is disenchanted with her spending all of her time and money across the country horse breeding instead of staying home with her 4 children (the eldest of whom bears a scary resemblance to Marcia Brady). Naturally, he comes around and all is well.
There were some odd logical inconsistencies, as well. One of the characters, portrayed nicely by James Cromwell, is supposedly the richest man in the world–yet he watches the races from the stands, just like all the other owners and two caricature newsmen who don’t, apparently, have press box access. Well, it gets them all in one shot, at least.
50 years ago I watched the Mickey Mouse Club, which had a series within it called Spin and Marty. Little morality plays for children, but they were exciting and interesting. Apparently, in the ensuing half century Disney remembers the moralizing but forgets to be interesting.
The sad part is that it is really a great story, and when Secretariat wins the Triple Crown at Belmont Park, he runs the greatest race in history.
Here’s the original race. It’s more exciting than the movie, only takes a couple of minutes and you’ll save $10.
From Brahms to Bluegrass
The Ballet is always beautiful. Photo by Smuin Ballet
It was almost exactly 5 years ago that Gail first went to the Smuin Ballet with a friend, while I was out of town. That night, they performed Bluegrass/Slyde, a piece choreographed by Michael Smuin, that brought Gail to tears. When I got home from my trip, she took me to Mountain View to see it again, and cried again.
Last week we went into the city to see the Smuin fall program, and Bluegrass/Slyde is back in the rotation. Yes, there were tears this time too.
The performance was in a theater I didn’t even know existed, at the Palace of Fine Arts. Very nice, very modern, with wide curving rows of seats not unlike the dome theater in Pleasant Hill. How many more great venues are there for us to discover? How has this one stayed hidden from me for so long?
The first piece is Brahms-Haydn Variations, also choreographed by Smuin. It’s as classical as the company gets–toe shoes and all, but thankfully no tutus.
Next up was Oh, Inverted World, a world premiere dance choreographed by Trey McIntyre. Set to music by The Shins, a group far too hip for me to have heard of them, the piece featured minimal costumes–everyone was in some sort of swimming outfit, with barechested boys and no shoes at all. We went with Carol Sue Chuckery Tracy and husband Steve; Carol felt that the dance was narrative in form but we didn’t really get the sense of a story.
Lastly, Bluegrass/Slyde. The stage actually has “furniture”; a metal frame with 4 (5?) poles that are set in bearing so that they spin. There are small round platforms on the bottom that spin along, as well. The dancers, clad in black unitards, use the poles as an essential element, climbing, spinning, leaping and posing on them. The music is all bluegrass, of course, but you won’t really recognize any of it–it’s more a mood item. There are 7 parts: the 3rd part, Misty Moonlight Waltz, is the real heartbreaker, with a final pas de deux by Robin Cornwell and Jonathan Powell that will stay with you for some time.
My favorite dancer with the company, Aaron Thayer, is gone. Silly boy is getting his engineering degree from Stanford. The world has too many engineers and too few really wonderful dancers, and who ever heard of an engineer with a decent sense of rhythm, anyway? Fortunately, the Smuin has a deep reservoir of talent and the show goes on.
So we loved it. Good thing, too, since I think that we will see this program again in February when the Smuin is in Walnut Creek at the Lesher Center. You should go, and bring a handkerchief.
Making choices
Running a nation is hard. Running even one state in a nation is hard. But you would think that at least some choices are easy, and yet our “leaders” keep failing on even the easy ones.
Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times
We can go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threaten to blow Iran off the face of the planet. We can conduct a nonstop campaign of drone and helicopter attacks in Pakistan and run a network of secret prisons around the world. We are the mightiest nation mankind has ever seen.
But we can’t seem to build a railroad tunnel to carry commuters between New Jersey and New York.
The United States is not just losing its capacity to do great things. It’s losing its soul. It’s speeding down an increasingly rubble-strewn path to a region where being second rate is good enough.
Somewhere, somehow, we have to find a leader, or set of leaders, who are capable of choosing what is best for the USA first, and then worry about the rest of the world.
We were all taught “family first”. You stick up for your brother, or son, or wife no matter what. When it comes down to a choice between your best friend in the whole world and your children, you choose your children. Yet we are spending trillions fighting wars on the other side of the world while our children go barefoot, and we cannot maintain or improve our own basic infrastructure.
I’m not isolationist. I’m certainly not reactionary. But if our larger family are the citizens of this nation, shouldn’t we put family first?
Baby it’s cold in here
We’re in South Lake Tahoe for our annual weekend at Jack and Carol Scott’s cabin. Forty eight hours of bridge, hanging out and going to dinner.
We always have a great time, but this year there’s a hitch–we don’t have any heat. And it’s 30 degrees at night.
Over the winter, a bear decided to take up residence under the house, and tore out all the heating ductwork. Then there’s some problem with the chimney, so we can’t build a fire. We plugged in one small electric heater, but a second one blew the circuit breakers.
Last night we were plenty cold. This morning we ended up packing our bid boxes and Doop and heading for a local coffeehouse to play cards somewhere warm.
Finally, the cabin is pretty comfortable. It was sunny today, and the heater has been on for twenty- four hours. Of course, in an A-frame cabin the heat all rises to where you don’t need it. At least the master bedroom is on the second floor so the Scott’s are toasty.
Fridays dinner was at a place cutely named Fresh Ketch. The food was good and the portions were simply enormous. I finished less than half my meal.
Tonight we went to Blue Water Bistro, hidden behind a motel but built on a dock into the lake. Excellent food–particularly the fresh halibut fish and chips.
Gail and I are beating Jack and Carol like Atlanta beat the Giants. Time to go back for the next set of hands.
Lake Chalet
Take a 100 year old boathouse on the shores of Lake Merritt, refurbish it inside and out with soft lights and warm wood, hire a head chef with experience at the French Laundry, design a menu of California cuisine with a heavy emphasis on seafood, and you have the newly opened Lake Chalet in Oakland.
We ate there tonight with Mike and Linda after crushing the opposition in the Oakland Unit game–we tied for third/fifth, and how great must we be? Celebrating our victory, we decided to try the new place in town we had heard many good things about.
The address is 1520 Lake Shore Drive, and there is valet parking, which for some reason is actually on the sidewalk. It feels weird to turn off the street onto the sidewalk, but it works, and only $5.
First, we had drinks on the dock. The sun was setting, lights were coming up, it was beautiful. Chilly, since the fog was rolling in, but beautiful. They have a small kitchen out there, serving appetizers and sliders, but we were just waiting for dinner time and merely enjoyed our wine and Baileys. The only weakness was the lack of outdoor space heaters–they seem to have only 1, which is about 7 too few.
After our pre-prandial drinks, we headed in to dinner. The spacious dining room looks out over the lake, and is reminiscent of the kind of place your father took you to–tablecloths, heavy napkins and silver, thick carpets that hush the sounds.
The food is, on the the other hand, quite modern. I saw no heavy sauces, nothing stale or old fashioned. The execution of the dinners matched the promise of the menu–we all enjoyed our meals.
I started with the green pea and ham hock soup, which I traded off to Gail because it was considerably spicier than I expected. She likes spice and hotness, I’m a sissy. So I finished her excellent wedge salad and we were both happy. Then I had the halibut poached in olive oil, and quite enjoyed it. Poaching in oil is not at all like deep frying–it is a delicate process that leaves the fish cooked through without out drying, and doesn’t fill the meat with oil and calories like the deep fryer does. Linda made the same choice, and neither of us had leftovers.
Mike had the Mahi Mahi special. It disappeared too fast from Mike’s plate for me to get a good look at it, but it must have tasted fine.
The best choice, though, was the scallops Gail chose. Served on a bed of corn risotto and garnished with pancetta vinaigrette (pancetta, olive oil, sherry vinegar, secret spices and a touch of chili pepper), it was the hit of the night.
So the building was great, the food was great, if only the service had kept up. But they’re new, and our waitress was even newer. Somehow she couldn’t manage to keep the right amount of silverware on our table, or refill my glass of iced tea. It’s possible I’m oversensitive on the subject of ice tea refills, but I ask for so very little………….
In any case, we had a good time and would be more than willing to go back. Sitting on the dock is beautiful and romantic, dining inside is warm and comforting. The Lake Chalet is a keeper.
Morimoto
The Food Network was just another struggling cable channel when they started showing re-runs of an odd Japanese show called Iron Chef. Every week, some chef would be recruited to compete against the “Iron Chef” to see who could turn out the best dinner in exactly one hour–and every dish had to use some secret ingredient which was revealed at the last second.
The luckless chef could choose from amongst four opponents–Iron Chef French, Iron Chef Chinese, Iron Chef Italian and Iron Chef Japanese. Although a Japanese show, they rarely chose Iron Chef Japanese, because he was just to tough.
That chef, Masahiro Morimoto, eventually left Japan and opened a now famous restaurant in New York, named simply Morimoto. Just a few months ago, he opened a branch in Napa; Thursday night we were lucky enough to get a reservation.
Morimoto is in a large new building, artfully combining both the coldness and sterility of concrete floors and walls with the warmth of wooden tables. It manages to be ultra-modern and yet inviting. The service is excellent–from the minute you walk in the door, you are welcomed, tended to and cosseted. Our friends had arrived first, the hostess knew where they were instantly and our waitress met us there to lead us to the table.
The menu is vast and varied–and you probably haven’t seen many of the things on it, since most of the items are Chef Morimoto’s own fusion creations. The house offers a 7 course tasting menu for $110, but we chose instead to simply order many items off the menu and share around the table. This was not only more fun, it was considerably cheaper, too.
Gail is a carpaccio fiend, so we naturally started with the Australian Wagyu beef carpaccio: paper thin slices of melt-in-your-mouth tender beef seared with hot oil and spiced to perfection. The next item was the marrow bone–surely not Japanese in origin at all, yet flavored with ginger and Asian spices and crusted with Panko crumbs. Marrow bones are hard to find in American restaurants, and quite a treat: this one was perfect.
Enormous marrow bone crusted in ginger and Panko
Then we had the calamari salad–perfectly tempura-ed calamari topped with a fresh salad–an entirely new presentation of the standard fried calamari, eliminating the customary mayonnaise based dipping sauce, lightening and freshing the dish immensely.
The sauce returned with the next dish, tempura rock shrimp, which was presented in a dish segmented into 3 bowls–one for the shrimp in wasabi aioli, one for the shrimp in a hot spicy sauce not unlike Buffalo wings, and the third segment with the chef’s re-invention of Ranch dressing.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the spaghetti carbonara in Lafayette. Morimoto makes a similar dish, with Japanese noodles and uni (sea urchin roe), also presented with a raw egg yolk to be mixed in. The two dishes are similar while being totally different, another example of the Chef’s creativity.
Sea Urchin carbonara, Morimoto style
There was more, and the crowning moment of the meal was the rack of lamb. We’re all familiar with Kobe and Wagyu beef, so tender you barely need a knife, but I’ve never seen lamb that tender and tasty before. Simply wonderful.
As one would imagine, Morimoto is not cheap–but it’s not unreasonable, either. Gail and our friends had 3 glasses of wine each, we shared many dishes, tipped generously but not lavishly, and were out for under $100/person, which is not at all exorbitant for a restaurant of this class. We can’t wait to go back.
Catfish
Catfish. It’s a strange name for a movie, made stranger because there are no fish in this flick. No catfishing, no catfish dinners. Yes, one reference, but it’s pretty oblique.
Then again, the whole movie is sort of strange. This guy is a 24 year old photographer in New York, and he starts an online friendship with an 8 year old girl who makes a painting from one of his photos.
Through her, he meets her whole family, and begins a relationship with her 19 year old sister.
Then things get strange. Very strange.
This is a true story–the photographer has a brother who makes films, and he starts to document this unique relationship, and the things that develop therefrom. The movie is shot on essentially no budget, and often looks it, but the characters are compelling and what happens is fascinating and you just get completely wrapped up in the story.
No, I can’t tell you what happens, you have to pay the $10.00 to Cinemark for that. I can tell you that you’ll be entertained for your money, and be glad you went to the theater.
Pet squirrel
I saw this little guy in the bank this afternoon. He had fallen out of the nest as a tiny baby and the guy he is on picked him up and hand fed him until he could eat hamster food.
I’ve never seen a pet squirrel before. The guy doesn’t know if he can release the squirrel or not.
Monsters in my kitchen
Barbara Hanson is the president of my fan club, so it is my duty to help her in any way I can. Since she’s my friend, too, it’s also my pleasure.
Barbara’s granddaughter’s birthday is tomorrow, and the party plans call for monster cupcakes. When Gail first told me that I had volunteered to make them, I thought that this meant really big cupcakes–kind of like cakes, but that didn’t really make a lot of sense, so I didn’t get it.
Then they explained that I was making cupcakes decorated like monsters, and handed me print outs from Google to give me direction. Gail and Barbara are always very helpful in the things I am supposed to do.
So I bought a cake mix and plenty of decorating stuff, but the really good fortune was that BJ Ledgerwood was coming over for dinner, and could be impressed into service. She’s a much better cook than I am, and fantastic at cake and cupcake decorating.
So we mixed and stirred and painted and frosted and sculpted all evening.
We really had a great time creating.
Then we called Barbara to see where/when to deliver. She was surprised. The birthday is tomorrow, the party is October 16th.
Do monster cupcakes freeze?
Totally Unauthorized 