#43 Boston - Between you and me and the Grass on the Prairie - April 6 08

Creativity with the English Language
The Petraisms this week just kept on coming – maybe because it was a stressful week and when my brain cannot handle any more tasks it starts getting creative with the English language - “Between you and me and the grass on the prairie” was a new one, as I was talking to a friend about a confidential issue, “we're cooking with oil!” (why just cook with gas I say) and last but not least “I have an allergy behind me” (which was actually meant to be that I had an allergy against some earring studs behind my ears, but since I was pointing wildly to my ears, my conversation partners did figure out what I meant….)

Busy Season
It has been a very, very busy week – I have had the hardest time ever to peel myself out of bed every morning - at work March through June/July is the most active season, littered with conferences in between regular tasks, and I am actually heading off to the another conference next Friday to hopefully sunny San Diego (we do not see the sun much up here in the Northeast these days). It is the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) – you may remember last year I went to Los Angeles for the event, and it will be good to mix and mingle with 13,000 people, won’t it? That oughta reduce my stress level.

Ground Zero, Round Two
So, last week – starting off Sunday with more work at “Ground Zero”, Ruth and George’s nickname for their partially burned down apartment – more salvageable items to be moved to either their new temporary apartment or to mine and other people’s basements. There was tons of work to be done, but on the positive side, it really introduced me to the culinary world around Coolidge Corner, where both their to-be-repaired and their temporary housing are located. A couple of weeks ago, during our first time clean-up, we headed to a very nice Vietnamese place, Pho Lemongrass on Harvard Street (http://pholemongrass.com/) and this past week, we opted for Mr Sushi, also located on Harvard Street. Mr Sushi offered some very delectable Japanese food, excellent seaweed salad and a wasabi that may have cleared up even the most chronic of sinus infections.

Not one Friggin Call!!
Once I headed home on Sunday armed with a few more storage boxes, it was time to clean up and head out to Brighton to go to WGBH, Boston’s own public radio and TV station (http://www.wgbh.org/) to join a small contingent of Community Running volunteers and a whole pile of other people in helping out during their spring pledge drive. First of all, this is a very cool place (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/19/arts/design/19pols.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) totally new and modern, state of the art television and radio facilities, and it features some pretty nifty things, as we discovered on our tour following the volunteer stint. Their gift shop actually slides in and out of a wall, there are binary numbers projected on the floor for reasons I could not figure out, and at some point we did lose our tour guide, and assumed that maybe she also slid back into the wall, just like the gift shop.

It was a fascinating experience to see live television (or partially live television) hands-on. For my European friends, who may not be familiar with the concept of pledge drives; stations like WBGH are so-called public television stations, which means they receive their all or most of their funding from the public, foundations, some state subsidies through taxes. Quite a few of them started out as small outfits started at universities. Their programming is focused on education, cultural events, addresses global issues, and features programs with a good chunk of intelligence and diversity. My American friends of course know that this is the station that is home to “Car Talk”, the nutty radio show with “Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers”, in my mind, the most brilliant radio show ever (and still made) - http://www.cartalk.com/.

So here is how the pledge drive works, the station shows some kind of cultural programming, for example Pete Seeger or Luciano Pavarotti, but in our case it unfortunately was “The Celtic Thunder” (http://www.wliw.org/productions/celtic_thunder.html) or as one of the station’s staffer referred to it “Ireland’s Answer to Menudo” (the boy band, not the soup). These segments are interrupted by TV personalities asking you to send in funds, and then you will receive a gift of your choice from a variety of programs. Us volunteers sit at computers that take us through every step of the way of processing the donations, what to say and what to type in etc. Apparently this was not my night; I did not receive ONE friggin phone call, not one!! The phones and computers around me kept ringing of the hook, but mine, nothing, not even a beep. Actually there was a beep, and it did look as if there was a caller, but then the system flashed a little sign, saying “caller hung up before you could answer”. Well, excuse me for not being one of the Fantastic Four and answering faster than two seconds!!! I could have raised millions and millions of dollars with that accommodating, outgoing, bubbly personality of mine, don’t you think? We did raise a good chunk of money that night, so all was well, even without my help.

Bike/TV Update
With a week like that how can I make it to the gym? I think a different approach may be in order – I might have to get up at 5 AM and head to the gym early every morning before work. Not quite sure if that is physically possible, but I may give it a try. I did make it Monday night for my weekly bike/TV session and again, despite being armed with the resolution not to succumb to addictive programming, I ended up watching a millionaire dating show and (much better, you must admit) “Top Chef Chicago”. Time on the bike: 1 hour 30 minutes (maybe it was 2 hours, can’t remember)

Three Plays in Three Days
I actually attended three theater plays three nights in a row, and all of them were splendid – starting off Thursday night, where my friend Hannah and I ushered at the Lyric Stage Company for Edward Albee’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Albee) “Three Tall Women” – one of the most well acted plays I have seen in a while. Now 80 years old, Albee is one of the quintessential American playwrights, with his most famous work of course being “Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf?” “Three Tall Women”, the play we saw, won him the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1994, and is a well crafted stage play, with two very distinct acts. Three women, reflecting three different generations, are basically the same person – in Act One, the focus is on the women when she is in her 80s, suffers from Alzheimer’s and swings back and forth between reflections of mistakes made in her life, traumatic experiences suffered and happy times experienced. In Act 2 the three versions of the same women discuss the life they/she had, and it ends with the note that whatever journey your life leads you through, when you are at the end of it, “That’s the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop”. My breath was taken away by Anne Scurria, who played the oldest of the three women, her performance was more than award-worthy, and when I saw her post-performance, I almost did not recognize her, the transformation was amazing. What an achievement! If you are in Boston, you must go and see it.

Play Number two, which you should also go and see, is “Much Ado About Nothing” performed by Theatre@First, a community acting group, who stages their plays at the First Congregational Church in Somerville (http://www.theatreatfirst.org/shows/much_ado/much_ado.shtml ). My friend and colleague Renee is part of this group, and I have seen almost all of their performances over the past three years. You will enjoy this version of the Shakespeare play – well arranged with a central stage and the audience surrounding it, it was cast extremely well, and played light, funny and such a great diversion which was much needed in my case Friday night. It was one of those “Days From Hell” – created by a tight and way-too-early schedule and enhanced by serial incompetence of the secretarial staff of several renowned Boston medical institutions and I am not naming names. Anyway, if you are have time see them this afternoon (hurry, it is at 3PM) or next weekend, this is a worthwhile experience.

Play Number Three was staged by the Mystic Players (http://www.mysticplayers.org/) in Medford where our friend Irene performed in a wonderful production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” – again, one of the local community acting groups that deserves your attention if you live around here (go see them!). Irene was spectacularly evil as Nurse Ratched and we told her boyfriend Dave to watch out should she ever bring home some strange electrical equipment or white jackets whose sleeves may appear just a wee bit too long.

My Dates and Days With Ellen
My friend Ellen has been what we call a “straw widow” in Germany (I guess there is an English term “grass widow” that refers to the same scenario) – her husband was out of town for a while. The term actually derives from the German Goethe play “Faust” – straw relates to the bed, and the character Marthe complains “And he leaves me alone on the straw”. So poor Ellen was alone, sans husband and dog, and the “Let’s Keep Ellen Entertained” program commenced last Saturday evening when we headed off to Watertown to the New Ginza restaurant, one of my favorite Japanese restaurants in the Boston Area.

This weekend, we started out with a volunteer stint through Boston Cares (http://www.bostoncares.org/) at the Bridge Home, which is an emergency shelter for children newborn to 12 years old that have been neglected or abused. Accompanied by social workers and staff, we did some arts and crafts with the kids, this time making mosaics (with construction paper on the back of paper plates), and apparently, wouldn’t you know it, I am a professional artist!! This was loudly proclaimed by one of the kids who was not quite convinced that the volunteer who helped him draw, was up to par with my drawing skills. Now most of you know that I cannot draw anything to save my life (except a box or a square maybe), but thanks to Ellen who brought along templates, I apparently was at least better than a four year old boy and that other volunteer. I’ll take my small accomplishments…. One of my new little friends and I made shark mosaics, and we actually managed to make two plates with two sharks, both named Nick. The little guy insisted that each shark had just gobbled up someone and so we needed to draw blood dripping out of its mouth, but aside from that slightly morbid aspect it was a lovely mosaic and he was very proud of them when we parted ways.

The volunteer event was followed by a driving tour through Boston for Ellen and myself (meaning we got lost – apparently we could not find our way out of Dorchester and drove around Roxbury for a while (yes, we did have the doors locked), and then by some miracle found our way to the Back Bay and subsequently had to drive back to Watertown. We met up with fellow volunteers Ram and Rachel for a meal at Panera Bread and then went for some shopping at the Arsenal Mall. This then just left us enough time to head back to Ellen’s, throw in one Episode of “Sex and the City” and then zip out again to meet Ellen’s sister Amy and her husband Dana for Japanese food at the Yoki Restaurant at Station Landing in Medford. The food was excellent, but a quick note on parking there – there is the T stop parking garage ($3, so no biggie), but apparently there is also a free parking garage, only no one can find it. But if you do find it, IT IS FREE. After that it was off to Irene’s play and needless to say, I had a lot of sleeping to do this morning.

I have been trying to catch up a little bit on my reading (for the book group – current selection “Dirty Job” by Christopher Moore) and movies. I can definitely recommend “Curse of the Golden Flower” and am currently nursing my way through “Gun Fight at the OK Corral” – I used to not like Westerns that much but have taken a liking to them lately, and just like the Film Noir movies, this genre has its unique language. I just love the way they talk in these old flicks, and my newest favorite tag line (that I may use on occasion) is “Where is that yellow-livered skunk”?

On that note, I gotta get going – no plans, but I have to do some relaxing and not sit on a computer….

Hope this finds you all well.

Pet