When christine called me the other day, she asked how the fitting-into-the-dress was going. let me just give you an example of why it’s not going so great. last night we went to “aida” at the muni and they were giving away GOBS AND GOBS OF FREE CAKE. because it was their whatever anniversary, and they had their one millionth guest, and they gave everybody balloons to let loose in the air.
BUT THE FREE CAKE…kevin and i split a piece. so at least i didn’t eat a whole piece by myself. AND IT WAS VERY DELICIOUS, I MIGHT ADD. and then we sat at the top of the hill eating our free cake and drinking wine that we’d brought and not more than five feet away from me was the TABLE CHOCK-FULL OF FREE CAKE. i mean, they just kept bringing in the cakes. it was like a big pile of heroin, just sitting there, calling to me.
at least i’m not a heroin addict. just a CAKE ADDICT.
food in general. HI, MY NAME IS GRACE AND I’M A FOOD ADDICT.
oh, and the show was amazingly good. it was such a nice surprise to be nicely surprised. the show itself is good, the music (it’s by elton john and tim rice) was great, and the performances were also great. the woman who played aida, tiffany williams, was amazing. when my sister amy had a disco band, tiffany was in the band. i never got to see them perform, something i’ll always be sorry about, but at least i got to see tiffany sing a lot last night. joshua ratz played opposite her; he was jekyll in “jekyll & hyde” at the theater center last fall, and he was also good but i just kept feeling that he was going to turn into mr. hyde at any moment, lurching and sneering and glowering and stabbing people. he didn’t, at least not last night. well, he did a small amount of sneering, but that was at the beginning, before he fell in love with aida. there are two more performances, and you should try to get there to see it.
everybody in the play was good. the choreography was interesting and really well executed. two particularly noteworthy members of the ensemble were a couple of young men who appeared bare-chested. there were a bunch of these bare-chested guys in one number, but they put two of them front and center, because they were the ones who had clearly devoted a lot of time to their pushups and various other pec-enhancing exercises. one of them was sam germann, the son of annie and gary, and i don’t recall seeing any guys who looked that buff when i was a junior in high school.
ann and gary and their sons are coming to the wedding; annie came up to us after the show and rsvp’d in person, and i was happy that she was so enthusiastic about being there. i just mailed most of the invitations on thursday, and i think most people who live here got them yesterday. there are still a few that we haven’t quite figured out addresses for, but i’m sure we’ll accomplish this before the wedding actually takes place.
IN SEVEN MORE WEEKS.
the one slight trauma i’m facing now is that the guest list continues to grow. i told kevin YOU CANNOT INVITE ANYBODY ELSE. but then i think of somebody else i forgot to invite. THERE IS NOT GOING TO BE ANY ROOM AT THE RECEPTION FOR ANYBODY TO SIT AT A TABLE AND EAT. kevin feels that this is not going to be an issue. if it doesn’t rain, i guess it won’t be an issue, because some people can sit outside. but what if it rains? plus, does the facility have that many tables and chairs anyway? it won’t be a fun time for people if they have to stand huddled in a corner eating.
besides that, things are going fine. FINE.
fine.
i have to practice the piano today. oh yeah, the band. did i mention that this band is going to play in a wedding IN TWO WEEKS? and that i believe i’m going to be expected to play with them? i’m trying not to think about it.
i’ve been to one band practice. ONE. i played a couple of songs, and was basically pretty horrible. pretty darn horrible. that was just two tuesdays ago. and then, last saturday, we were all going to go to Pontiac IL to play in some “bluegrass jam.” i tried to avoid thinking about this before we went, because of course having practiced the one time. was it going to be a huge event? lots of people? it was put on by friends and family of one of the other new band members, gary. BUT GARY KNOWS HOW TO PLAY JUST FINE. guitar, keyboards, who knows what else.
so we drove to pontiac and THANK GOD it was much less than i thought it’d be. gary’s brother had a couple of tents set up in his back yard and they had a stage with lots of musical equipment on it and there were chairs scattered around on the grass. but there weren’t many people when we first got there, and then some guys on the stage started messing around with their guys, as guys with guitars are always prone to do, and they played a few songs, and a few more people showed up, and after a while there were maybe 50 people there. and we got up and played a couple of songs.
now, not only was i horrible, but there were two keyboards on top of each other (nobody ever used the top one, i noticed), so there was no room for the music, so the music stand was way off to the side. so not only did i suck, but i couldn’t actually read the music most of the time and so didn’t even know what the correct notes might have been.
the upside to all this is that most of the time we were playing (and we played maybe four songs), quite a few of the other people were out in the garage smoking and drinking. so even if they could hear us, they might not have known it was me, sitting behind my wall of keyboards, playing no correct notes at all.
one of the guys who played a lot, a drummer who also played guitar and harmonica and probably also many other instruments and lived in AUSTIN and played in bands there so obviously he has to be a fine musician, he was really good. when we were leaving he came over to say good-bye (not to me, because i hadn’t talked to him), and i told him he was a really fine musician. and he said, THANKS, SO ARE YOU.
at which point i wanted to disappear down into the ground because i felt so bad that he felt obliged to say this big fat LIE to me. he wasn’t one of the people in the garage smoking and drinking, because he played the entire time and was sitting there playing the drums while i was wrecking the keyboard, not more than two feet away from me.
kevin says the guy just said that because i was wearing a short skirt.
oh boy.
PLAYING A WEDDING IN TWO WEEKS.
luckily i’m not doing anything else with my time, so i have hours and hours to practice.
i feel that even if i had hours and hours to practice, i couldn’t be good enough in two weeks.
when i was in high school, the culmination of all the years of piano lessons was a GOLDEN LYRE PIANO RECITAL. i don’t know why it was called that, but it was just me, playing the piano for a bunch of people. i played about 45 minutes maybe, not a lot of time, but i played many pieces, really difficult pieces, and i practice a lot. sometimes a couple of hours a day. this was a WHOLE LOT for me, because there were years when i wouldn’t practice at all, or i’d just practice a half-hour here and there, i was never serious about it.
i have a problem getting serious about things sometimes.
but anyway, the pressure was on for this recital and i practiced and practiced FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS and it was actually a lot of fun and i really felt i’d accomplished something.
afterwards we had a big party at my house. my parents went to a lot of work doing party preparations, including cleaning pounds and pounds of shrimp, and they made something really complicated like maybe rumaki, which is water chestnuts wrapped in something, i think, maybe bacon, or maybe it’s liver wrapped in bacon? surely not. anyway, they went to a whole lot of trouble but i don’t remember doing anything to help with the preparations, i guess because i was so busy practicing all the time.
liver wrapped in bacon. not liver wrapped in bacon. who would ever eat that? nobody. they’d eat a burger wrapped in bacon, though, and covered with cheese and deep fried.
ok, one more thing, this week we went to lunch at Saputo’s with the judge who is going to marry us, and kevin wanted to order something healthy so he asked for the baked fish. and the waitress said “have you had our baked fish?” and he said no. she said it’s not baked fish. it’s fried fish that they then cover with cheese and bake all that. why? because people LOVE TO EAT EVERYTHING BAD FOR THEM.
cake, for example.
i didn’t go to sleep till 2 a.m. last night because MFH has suddenly become a night person because of his work schedule. and then i woke up this morning at seven and now it’s almost nine and i hope to go back to bed for a while.
that is my plan for saturday.
oh yeah, plus doing a couple of wedding things.
ok then, back to bed,
july grace.