4 April 1999: Desserts

Saturday we went to the symphony and heard Bach concerti. We didn't go to the symphony; we went an auditorium designed for symphony to hear chamber music. The harpischord therefore got lost somewhat. I personally feel this is no bad thing. I don't like harpsichord. It might as well be a banjo, it's so twangy. But I enjoy anyone being proficient in an arcane instrument, and the harpsichord certainly has fallen out of vogue. Because it's twangy, I say.

Name me another instrument whose volume you cannot control. Drums, horns, woodwinds, strings. You can't play a harpsichord louder or quieter by striking the keys harder or softer. A piano was first called (read your Jane Austen) a piano forte because it produced either softer or louder noise depending on whether you banged or caressed the ivories.

Anyway, the harpischordist was an acclaimed one, a music professor from Columbia and all. He was the Jerry Lee Lewis of the harpsichord and I nearly expected him to put on bizarre glasses and commence "Crocodile Rock."

The performance of the music was riveting, which was good since the woman to my left reeked of that new scent Miasma. I am so glad I can write that joke because in telling it, people think I'm saying "My Asthma." I don't have ass-mar, okay? Every time she moved in her seat we got a fresh wave of it. She emitted such thick molecules of stench that it bothered my contacts, and it did bother RDC's asthma. I knew she was bad news when I saw her approach (and her scent preceded her by only slighter slower than 186,000 miles a second) because she wore dark hose with pale shoes. Grrr.

With the hose thing and the miasma, I had her pegged as a lower-class peon. These were upper balcony seats, after all. And art is for the masses ("Poetry, like bread, is for everyone") and I shouldn't be elitist and whatever. After the intermission I rolled my eyes again when I spotted a cellophane-wrapped collection of cheese cubes and fruit in her leathery claw, just because I was in an unforgiving mood, but then during the performance she unwrapped the cello and she and her companion ate in the auditorium during the performance. They clapped between movements of the individual concerti, too. Swine.

I saw a coworker there who stayed for the chat afterward. She told me the conductor is openly gay (although I doubt that was a subject of the instructional chat), which somehow disappointed me. I'm probably being sexist. I suspect few conductors of major city orchestras in the U.S. are female, and this conductor seems fairly butch. I am being sexist in attributing her attaining her position to male qualities I presume she has.

We did not stay for the chat. We were on a mission. We've been eating all this low-fat vegetarian and nearly vegan healthy stuff recently (in an Andrew Weil phase) and now we needed dessert. RDC suggested cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory, which surprised me because of how ill-pleased we were by our first and only excursion thither on my birthday two years ago. It's possible we were in pissy moods already because WallyWorld was closed everywhere we wanted to be and we wound up there out of desperation, whereupon its sullen service and unimaginative menu did not amuse us who had set out for sushi. But the cheesecake was good, and so cheesecake it would be.

The Cheesecake Factory has glossy advertisements in its spiral-bound, multi-page menus. This says to me "Hi, we can't afford to print our own menu even though everything we sell is overpriced." It took me a while to browse to the cheesecake page, by which time RDC had decided on chocolate mousse cheesecake. I pondered. I asked the server to opine on Chocolate Raspberry Truffle and Ultimate Deep Dark Chocolate. Chocolate and raspberry together are the most sublime flavor, but chocolate alone, ultimate deep dark and sinful, shouldn't be passed up. I pro'ly had the chocolate-raspberry truffle before, anyway. So I got the Ultimate.

And it came. And it was good.

At 10:30 at night I didn't order my usual iced tea but lemonade. This was good lemonade, tart and sweet, and I hoped it would cut some of the chocolate. Without it, I wouldn't've been able to eat as much as I did, but nevertheless I left about an inch at the thick end of the wedge. We were all three disappointed in me.

Sunday morning dawned chilly and bright and an hour late. I dislike Daylight Savings Time. The high point of the sun and noon should coincide, damn it, and not just so movie titles like "High Noon" make sense.

I had grand ideas about blowing the eggs and using the guts for baked goods, but when my first attempt broke, I decided to hell with that. I boiled the remaining 11 white ones and called them done. I began a batch of brownies and a double batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with six brown ones, fetched HAO, baked, dyed, and watched "The Sound of Music" which we both ridiculed fondly while singing, both out of tune but compelled nevertheless, the primary songs.

We have never watched this movie together before, but we both burst out, just before the hateful scene, that we cannot stomach the face of Gretel (the littlest one) watching her father play and sing for the first time since he was widowed. I said something about her looking like Steve Martin as Rupert in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" after asking "May I go to the bathroom?" and "Thank you." Like it's been about a week. And HAO didn't know that one of the nuns is Lila Quartermaine on "General Hospital."

"How'd you know?" she asked (she, who recognizes every movie face). Umm, I watched GH every weekday for longer than I care to admit and "Sound of Music" every year and eventually the voice clicked?

No, I can't just say that. I began to watch "General Hospital" I think in fifth grade, when CLH started watching all three ABC soaps, and throughout middle school I was a repellent little GH-addict until midway through eighth grade when I realized I had no life, not that stopping watching it gave me a life. I watched occasionally throughout high school and never during college except rarely on break, and less still until the fall of 1993 when I learned that Luke and Laura were coming back. I watched when I could, called toll-free line for daily updates, and read the weekly synopses in the grocery line until early 1997, when I stopped again, this time I hope for good.

Now that I've tried to clear my reputation as an elitist…

So we watched Julie Andrews (either "Sound of Music" or "Mary Poppins" or "Wizard of Oz" on Easter--they're very spring-like movies) and didn't go for a walk and ate cookies and brownies and dyed some extremely odd eggs.

On Monday I brought the ten hard-boiled eggs to a working man's shelter and was thanked for them. (There wer ten because another shell cracked, but HAO declared it a perfect consistency. I wouldn't know: the closest I'll get to actual egg is a omelet full of other stuff. Eggs are gross.) Then I read that Willa used the swirly, oil-based dye also, and she says it makes the eggs inedible. Because the dye took too long to dry, or because it permeated the shell and ruined the meat, I do not know. Next year I blow the eggs and stick to food coloring. Stupid new-fangled stuff.