Memorial Day weekend is four days of no day. Friday, May 25, was like a Sunday. My husband had the day off so he hung around, a mixed bag of his neatness dogging my desire to just hang out ( in my robe) on the big chair in the living room, while he traipsed by heavy-footed with a few loads of laundry. The footsteps were to let me know that he was the only one doing household chores.
We both had meetings late in the day, separately. But at night it felt like Sunday because we had no plan. We grazed on leftovers. We'd had plans with family that fell apart when it turned out we'd all said "yes" without checking our calendars. Getting 6 people together for a family gathering is not like the old days when you knew that Sundays were for family. On Saturday, we did one of our favorite things--- viewing, not buying, fine antiques in the Stamford group antique shops on Canal street. We congratulated ourselves for not spending a penny, but I did wish we were just starting our lives togethet and could absorb a whole new collection of mid-century modern into our ecclectic but over-filled house.
In the evening we sat under the awning at Sunset Grille with friends for whom it took six months to clear this date. We walked Washington street in Norwalk after dinner looking for a vibe' and much to our dismay, it doesn't feel like it's thriving. We did manage a dance at a BBQ place with a band in the back, but that really needed more people on a Saturday night to call it a happening. Even Compo Beach was marginally sparse on Sunday. Quatro Pazzi in Fairfield was packed at 6:30. Great buzz there. Mother-in-law with us. Enough said.
Monday, my husband drove the Hippie Van for WPKN for the Westport Memorial Day parade. Afterwards he came home and slept. I read the newspapers all day thinking it was Sunday. I nearly forgot that I had our radio show--- fourth Monday of the month. Look for the archive www.wpkn.org later this eeek. At 11pm up in the studio, and finally for me, I knew what day it was. Bill Bosch and I had never done radio together before and as usual we were an easy team. Steve di Costanzo, our host on Radio Base Camp is a terrific programmer, avid listener too.
It's Tuesday, but feels like Monday of the first day of summer and after four Sundays, please recommend how to start my day with weekday verve.
Leave Town & Country for an Evening
Repost with addendum. We have been playing to capacity at TWO BOOTS of BRIDGEPORT. Now, coming, other programs using real life experiences as their core. http://thebijoutheatre.com/blog/
MAY 23, 2012
Today is an important day for Mousemuse. We are hitting the streets of Bridgeport's ambitious revival district at Bijou Square. Once upon a time, Manhattanhites winced about attending cutting edge arts events in what was called "alphabet city." Now, they have to lineup for tickets to cutting edge entertainment or theater that doesn't cost $175 a ticket like Broadway, but is just as thought provoking.
Yes, in Westport we've embraced the arts. But the emerging artists have little or no center to simply gather. Restaurants are sprouting again in Westport. Gorgeous women and magazine men. Good hype and vibe at the Spotted Horse late at night. Then where to? A rock band at the Duck? Maybe. A little upstairs music at a couple of places. Jazz Jam at WAC in folding chairs with a plastic glass of wine? No ambience, but sometimes exciting if you could walk there and feel the "club" vibe.
But how about a little culture? Are the art galleries planning to stay open. Is our town Madison Avenue? Is Westport ever going to properly develop a venue with a stage. Town Hall has the auditorium, and a black box theater that's privately run, but budget constraints are real as Westport focuses in on our gem of an educational system.
How did Brooklyn and SoHo and Alphabet City develop into vibrant places? Cheap real estate and someone with vision. Lots of someones. Youth could afford to live there and work there. Later they'd move out to the burbs and wonder why they felt "dead."
We are so insular we've forgotten to look a few (metaphoric) blocks up the road. That's where Bridgeport has, for the past ten years, been quietly putting its future in the hands of artistic visionaries like Phil Kuchma. The Kuchma Corporation has put its money and passion behind the redevelopment of Bijou Square. Kuchma and MouseMuse are meeting on Friday, May 25th. MouseMuse and Kuchma's team are heading into a momentous time. If you stop thinking of Bridgeport as if it is Hell's Kitchen, (and you know that Hell's Kitchen is now unaffordable) you will realize that it's a city much closer to you than New York, some of the best places like Two Boots and the Bijou were recruited by Kuchma to start up a quality arts community. It's an opportunity for our fans to not only dine out with the swells, but an opportunity to get real, and to generate ideas.
Remember those lightweight aluminum fold up chairs with plastic mesh web strips we used to hang on a hook in the garage? Every summer we'd drag tme out to either a lawn event or to the beach. Sure they used to fray at the edges and then rust, but with a new roll of webbing they were as good as new.
Enter the first generation of snazzy chairs that were sturdy enough to hold not only our widening bottoms but bottles and glasses fit in the side pouches or tray tables on the arms. Only a tornado could blow away those new chairs introduced into the leisure market in the 1980s.
They came in their own cases and packed up as small as a full sized beach umbrella. You'd sling the case over your arm and trek uphill or downhill until you settled on your patch of land and began to reassemble them? Sturdy little buggers they were. Taut and tough like an army cot. After low back-breaking sling-ass evening at the beach or Tanglewood, the engineer types helped the non-mechanical people fold and slide the chairs back into its own nifty neat sleeve. They only weighed as much as a few golf clubs, but they weren't unsightly when not in use like the cheapo, low-tech old chairs were.
Thirty more years of portable chair engineering has taken us to every convenience you'd want in a chair. Canopies, tables, footrests. Every year another chair item to make a trip to outdoors a pleasure. Before we knew it, the chairs had gotten almost as heavy as carrying a sailboat boom on your shoulder. I secretly craved my mother-inlaw's ten dollar aluminum rusted chairs from the 1950s. She gave them to me when she moved.
We gave away our high tech chairs and went in search of something lightweight, ugly and low tech. This 2012 summer scene at Compo Beach? Mostly aluminum plastic webbed chairs? Maybe it's not necessary to put engineering minds into creating a luxury portable chair with so many bells and whistles, ones that by sheer weight alone could deter you from taking them out of the car. Maybe those chairs are better off in an RV.
A couple of audience members approached some of the mouse volunteers and asked for the recipes from the Landmark Academy event. It's ironic that Siobhan Powers who runs the Landmark Pre-School gave me the basics of this very simple chicken dish that I'll detail in Mouse News. The salad dressing? Well, my mother was a maniac for garlic and salt. While other mother's in the 1950s made Celestial Seasoning's dressing pre-mixed, my mother fell in love with a dressing we were served in a restaurant in small town in the Berkshires. The restaurant was called the Hillside Inn. We ate there at least one day out of every summer weekend. We had to order our food a few days in advance because they brought in fresh beef, and they picked their own lettuce and tomatoes which they served in a dressing with fresh cut up garlic, wine vinegar and what was probably a trough of salt.
We loved it. As the years went on, I became known as the Salad Dressing Queen. I'd grown up on real dressing. No bottle dressing ever passed muster in our house. Although my mother didn't really cook, the dressing we her signature contribution to my repertoire.
To this day there is no mystery even though I have added and subtracted many ingredients over the years. The three things that remain the primary taste in all of my dressings are olive oil, some sort of acid like lemon juice or multiple types of vinegar and excessive salt. The recipe will post on Mouse News.
BTW. I never use Balsamic except to cook with. The taste overwhelms greens, I feel. I traveled in Italy many times with a cook and they don't use Balsamic on salads often.
I guess the right thing to say is "If you Build it They Will Come." That was a movie about "energy fields" and belief.
Today is the day we unveil our new website. The trip to this "reveal" has involved energy sources that seem to have landed in my mouse field as if they were UFOs. I'd started MouseMuse after I'd dissolved a company where I bit off more than I could chew (which if anyone knows me, they know this mouse is allergic to cheese) by starting with a metaphoric very big cheese wheel, and getting burned out too fast trying to produce shows that required filling 120 audience seats every time, and get the word out without a functional website.
Social media needs careful administration. Without it what I wanted to do was undoable. However, the Fairfield Theatre Company where I first started gave me a chance to try. Then, after some extremely good shows, and some pretty bad ones, I stepped back. But not for long. There was energy all around me. Good energy. Rozanne Gates, Gabi Coatsworth, Debra Coleman, Diane and Bill Effros, my husband, Richard Epstein. Soon it was an energy field that crackled with support and ambitious plans.
I had to reevaluate how much creative control I needed. A lot, I learned. But I also had to rely on people who are expert in other areas and who question me. I need to be questioned or I could be delusional and try to propel my mouse self into a faster-than-the-speed-of-light-tizzy. I had to try be a good boss, but solo for where the buck stopped. The mouse is a replacement of the MGM lion. I wanted to roar, but not to scare myself and others either.
Each step along the way since July 2011, when I incorporated, has been both scary and exhilarating. I built the first website myself (with some tech help from Kevin Newcomb) and continued to add to it as each program grew. Starting with the Westport Arts Center to Fairfield Museum and History Center to the Gaelic Club to Landmark Academy to Matt Davies' barn, and now Two Boots of Bridgeport, there have been amazing people who have reached out to hear the full house of mouse squeaks, sharing the visions, but never a roar. I wanted to imitate the mouse that roared but certainly shook things up.
When my programs needed my attention, the website needed to be clearer. I had not known how fast I would grow. Robert Steven Williams, www.againstthegrain.com sat with me one day and said, "Your website is so 20th Century and this is the 21st Century." He pointed me toward WordPress designers who would not destroy the image I wanted to convey when I build the site, but who would enhance it and make it splashy, and fun, I hope.
We are still beautifying it and it is always a work in progress. Thank you to Mark Standish at CarlMarx designs for forcing me to put copy in categories and pictures in boxes. I couldn't have done it without him.
He landed in my energy field. If you read today's news on Mouse News, you will see that quite by date coincidence, new people started working with mouse muse this week, and even today.
We have show today. Stay with us, and send me any ideas you have to guest blog. This space has to be filled with bright energy sources. That means all of you.
