Various and Sundry Updates
I got a little short on time to write game-by-game updates, and without a play-by-play, they probably all run together. Currently I am 1-8 curling. We won our second match in the Beginners league. I subbed for Mary 2 weekends ago in Mixed. We lost, although our real Mixed team actually won that week. Go figure.
Monday night was my final game with my first Men’s team. The club is entering a sort of Fall Break. The Harvest Bonspiel takes place this coming weekend, so league play is suspended while the party/tourney takes place, and next week is Thanksgiving week, where it has traditionally been hard to organize games with so many people travelling or entertaining guests. In the Men’s league, it seems they try to take advantage of this lull in the action by posting a 4-week preseason of sorts. I don’t know if that means they have a longer season keeping the new teams for the remainder of the season, or if there is another short round in December or perhaps the spring. It seems the other leagues simply reshuffle around January and those teams are fixed until April.
I have definitely made improvements in the past few weeks, to the point where last night I think I only threw one stone out of play, and many of my stones were fairly accurate, especially in the first half while I was still fresh. An experienced club member made multiple comments about how well he thought I was throwing, which really made me happy. In the second end, I threw two very solid draw shots that got buried behind some guards. We picked up 4 points that end, 2 of them being my stones. One of the frustrations of throwing lead is how the role is sometimes exploratory or defensive, so your stones don’t stay on the ice long even when they land in play. Its nice to feel like you actually scored some points, even though in reality good plays by the front end put your opponent on the defensive and can help you score. We took a 2 point lead after that 4-ender, but the rest of the match involved a combination of bad luck, errors in judgement when sweeping, and a relentless onslaught from our opponents as they nickled and dimed us to the end.
In other news, the Montgomery County Cultural Center (home of the Centre Theater) threw an art auction fund raiser that we went to. $18 for the two of us, including wine/beer and hors d’euvres seemed like a good deal, especially considering the Cultural Center’s mission.
The auction was conducted by Ross Galleries, an organization that specializes in fundraising art auctions. X and I had not been to an art auction since our honeymoon nearly 2 years ago. That was run by Park West, a company met with mixed reviews, although I’ve no beef with them. Of course I spent $100 on a Littorio Del Signore print…if you told me today it was not worth the paper it’s printed on, it’s no big deal. I suppose the guy who spent $10000+ on that Dali or Rembrandt is going to be more upset. Don’t you wonder why something that probably belongs in a museum is being sold on a mid-market cruise ship???
I did not expect the auction to be comparable to the cruise ship events. The auctioneer was decent, but there were a lot of items and not a lot of time. As a result, where the auctioneer on the cruise ship could offer lots of cool information, the Ross auctioneer could not do as much. There were too many items and he had to keep them going. There were also far less signed/numbered prints than I recall on the cruise. Most of the items were just posters. Not that adding a signature to a print magically makes it valuable, but I like to believe that signed print is better than a poster since the artist presumably actually had a hand in it.
They even had one “forgery.” They didn’t lie about it, they said flat-out that “A Sunday On La Grande Jatte” was a handpainted repro by someone else. But as much as I love that painting, it seems silly to spend $500 on a fake. In a way, I think the fake is worse than a poster. At least with a poster, no one will think it might be original. No one bought it, btw.
There were some good things, too. Not the least of which was that the art is sold framed, so when they have an unsigned poster with a starting bid of $70 you can at least tell yourself that you’re really buying the frame and getting the picture for free. The crowd wasn’t huge, so there weren’t bidding wars. Most items sold for close to the starting bid. Presumably there is a base profit for both the auctioneer and the charity built into the starting bid, so that the Cultural Center did not get screwed by low bids. Finally, Ross has a “lifetime guarantee” that if you ever decide you don’t like the product, they’ll let you trade it for something of equal purchase price. Compare to Park West whom I believe espouses an “all sales final” type policy.
We bought 4 things, all quite cheap. 2 are posters, but as mentioned above, at the price we paid, we were really paying for the frames. One poster is a flower called Red Geranium by Maria Eva. The other is an abstract musically themed number called A Flat by Emmanuel Mattini. It reminded us of Alfred Gockel. Then we got 2 signed prints by Lucelle Raa. One is called “Wonder” and has a little boy and a dog peering into a bucket on the beach. The boy looks eerily similar to me at that age. The other is called “Summer’s End” and has 3 kids sitting on a beach. They will look nice in the beach-themed blue room.
This weekend we stopped by the Curling Club to sample the Harvest Bonspiel festivities. There was a good bit of reveling going on. A group from Inverkeithing, Scotland was there and they have a bonspiel in February that would be very fun to attend. What better excuse to visit Scotland than curling?
While the games are going on, the warm room is alive with activity. My new Men’s League skip, Derek was doing some karaoke, pretty much making up his own words. They also play an interesting betting game where everyone puts a dollar in the pot and gets a playing card. The number and color signify which team must score and how many points during that end. The result makes for some amusing cheering in the warm room. And of course eating and drinking.
Saturday we headed to NYC. We stopped off at Jesse’s house in Jersey City where we were going to spend the night. Jesse was working, so we parked and hopped on PATH to the WTC where we stopped to look at Ground Zero and the memorials there. Then we took the subway up to Fordham, as Mary had promised to show us the “campus” as it were (it’s basically 2 large buildings - one is a dorm and the other has the classrooms) and take us to a diner that she loves.
After feasting on pastrami (the spinach pie sounded good but when I’m in NYC, it’s hard for me not to eat pastrami) and walking around the campus and Time Warner Center, we went down to Macy’s to meet Jesse. While at Macy’s, we tried to see SantaLand where Mary once worked as an elf. Unfortunately, it was closed, although we could see the entrance and peek through the exit.
At this point, it was around 5:30 and we were getting a little bit concerned about the fact that our curtain time for Evil Dead: The Musical was not until 11. We decided to walk up to the theater to see if perhaps we could trade our tickets in for ones at the 7PM show, but it was not to be - Evil Dead is playing very well and both performances were sold out. We were going to have to hunker down and kill a lot of time.
We hiked back up towards Fordham where there was a bar that Mary liked, but it was very crowded, so we stopped by Bar Nine. Mary’s friends had like the place except for skeevy guys hitting on them, but she had never been there herself. Its actually a neat place. Very dimly lit with a sort of goth décor. Instead of tables, there are little “living room” setups with couches, easy chairs and coffee tables. A cat dozed on a nearby couch until a patron came in and sat on the poor thing. Unfortunately, he was similar in color to the couch and hard to spot in the dim light. A band called Led Blimpy was setting up, but we would not be there long enough to see them.
A couple of hours were spent drinking beer and just chatting. We’re not really the loud meat market types, so a nice quiet place where we could just loaf around definitely works well for us. Around 8, we decided to go find some dinner. After some discussion about Havana Central and Virgil’s, we headed to O’Lunney’s. You might guess it’s an Irish pub. It’s spacious, not too expensive, and they have Mary’s favorite, Magner’s Cider. She thought they had it on tap, but they didn’t this time - just bottles.
Food was good - we had some nachos, poppers and wings (we were just going to get nachos, but Jesse has a penchant for ordering (and eating) oodles of food, so he tacked on some extra. I had shepherd’s pie, which was made with lamb instead of the usual beef. Its very good that way. X had some pot roast that was also great. Haven’t had pot roast in awhile. We’ll have to make some this week or next.
After dinner there was a brief wavering of confidence. Jesse had been up since 6AM, X can rarely hack staying up late, and we were stuffed and tired. Skipping the show was discussed, but Mary stalwartly encouraged us to persevere. Off we went to the New World Stages.
The New World Stages is a really neat venue. It is in an underground complex represented at street level by just a small rectangular building with a box office. The place has sort of bomb shelter feel to it, with directions to stages painted on the floor and a very modern concrete and metal décor. Maybe it WAS a bomb shelter of some sort.
I may have told some of you that we were sitting in the “splatter zone.” The first 3 rows cost $25 and are covered in plastic. They sell white splatter zone T-shirts that can be stage-blood soaked souvenirs. In reality, it was decided to sit just outside the splatter zone. We were in the 5th row “Splatter” is an understatement. In the 2nd act they hand out ponchos to those that want them. The final bloodbath isn’t just errant gore flying off the stage. Actors are practically dumping it into the audience! Some people came out completely soaked in stage blood. It would have been fun, but we were also glad to not have to ride trains back to Jesse’s covered in blood.
As for the show itself, it was great. I have not seen any of the Evil Dead movies, but my sources tell me the plot was there and most of the famous lines. The songs are very catchy, culminating in the showstopping “Do The Necronomicon” where the zombies do a dance that’s “like the Time Warp, only better!” It is really a lot of fun, especially if you are not put off by bad language and of course blood and gore. 5 people in front of us went for dessert and did not return for Act II. We were surprised that anyone would come see this not knowing what it was! A few memorable lines:
“I’ve seen games of Guess The Word bring out the worst in people, but that was f***ing ridiculous!”
“They showed Spiderman as the in-flight movie. The directing was the worst I have ever seen!”
Finally, the exhausted crew rode back to Jersey City to crash. In the morning we went to some Ale House for breakfast where they had some awesome choices, like french toast with fresh apples, chocolate chip pancakes with strawberries and amaretto whipped cream, breakfast burrito with chorizo, egg and cheese, and a wrap with lox, egg and goat cheese. I had the pancakes which were very tasty. X got eggs benedict. Good, but the yolks were pretty solid. I don’t know if that was intentional or not…
After breakfast we sat around for a bit, but team Fitz had to get back for a curling match, so we packed up and hit the road.
If you have a chance to see Evil Dead: The Musical, definitely check it out