8.18.2005
Grrr! So last night before supper I wrote about half of a really long post. Then I accidentally quit Safari as a reaction when it was time to go to dinner. I am, in no uncertain terms, an idiot.
But here's what I was going to say.
Last weekend was a real headspinner... The Tanglewood weekend was a whole lot of fun, with Friday's concert entirely devoted to Don Quixote pieces, Saturday with Gil Shaham, and Sunday with Sir James Galway and harpist Ann Hobson Pilot. It's not often that such music is performed by such luminaries - we were all very lucky.
Overlapping this weekend was the fact that Diana and I got to spend the weekend at Tanglewood, which was a lot of fun. Diana is, as one might imagine me saying, very good company. And since it's rare that we have so much time to spend with each other, it was really nice to be able to set aside a weekend to enjoy being together.
But overlapping that weekend was another interesting adventure: eight of my mother's friends from high school (back in Hong Kong) came to visit. So there were eleven people crammed into a vacation home, Diana and I on bunk beds in one room and the rest of the women all over the house, making it virtually impossible for me to go anywhere by between my room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. But more about this later.
Diana and I drove out to Tanglewood on Friday morning. We arrived and put bits of the house in order before driving down the hill to Orient Express, a restaurant I have described on this site several times before. The owner knows us and has been really nice to us in the past. This weekend, he would not allow me to order the whole fried flounder because the fish that they had received that weekend were too small. I was a bit disappointed, but certainly appreciated the heads-up as well.
After lunch, it was back up the hill for some hard-core laundering and cleaning. Diana graciously offered to help with the vaccuuming while I mopped and dusted. All this in preparation for the hoarde of Cantonese women bearing down on us from out of town. In the meantime, I managed to score a rare reservation (on a Friday night with 3 hours to go?) to Elizabeth's in Pittsfield. Elizabeth's is a lovely restaurant nestled in the wilderness of western Massachusetts across from the GE Special Materials plant and next door to a dingy auto mechanic. However, the restaurant itself is one of the cutest around. The whimsical menu is rife with hyperbole and assorted verbiage and the owner/chef, Tom, makes an almost intrusive habit of talking to his customers, but overall, the food makes it all more than worth it. We started out with one of Tom's bizarre salads, containing (and this is different every time we go) peaches, cheddar, walnuts, raisins, carrot, feta, and other assorted goodies I can't remember, all tossed into some lovely field greens with a yummy balsamic vinaigrette. Our starter was a delicious chevre drizzled with an incredibly fruity olive oil and some walnuts. Finally, Diana had a gorgonzola pasta, which was amazingly creamy. The woman at the table next to ours commented that she couldn't believe Diana was sharing such a fine dish with me. I had a really light eggplant dish with spinach, a touch of garlic, mozarella cheese and a light tomato broth and finished with fresh herbs and basil. It was delicious.
The concert was incredible: we got really lucky, as the weather (it had gotten dark and ominous in a hurry) decided not to rain on us that day. The first half was de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show, which actually contained a puppet-show within a puppet-show. (Meta-puppets... woah) There were larger-than-life Don Quixote and Sancho Panza puppets, while the life-sized Master Peter (actually a puppeteer with a mask) and page boy (full-size puppet) put on the show, consisting of smaller puppets in a puppet stage. Three vocal soloists stood to the side and sang very well. The experience was whimsical without getting silly and I loved the music. The second half was Strauss' Don Quixote, which is a masterpiece of brilliance and orchestral contrast. Unfortunately, dinner was catching up to me and I kinda fell asleep for part of it. What I heard, however, was brilliant.
We went back up to the house and I made myself a cup of tea to relax. But within 30 minutes, the cars arrived and my Mom and her friends rolled out. They were mostly quiet and kept to themselves that first night. They were exhausted, of course, it being 11:30, and so they just got themselves ready for bed and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up very early to get breakfast started. Thankfully, all they needed was coffee, tea, hot water, juice, scrambled eggs, bagels, toast, and fixings. Nothing much. :P They had brought some chives from someone's garden - delicious in the scrambled eggs. They piled into cars and went to Tanglewood for the open rehearsal while I cleaned up after them, did a load of dishes, and contemplated the day. Diana woke up considerably after I did (about 1.5 hours) and after we got ready we ended up driving to a lovely cheese shop in Great Barrington. I've been eyeing this shop for two summers - I read about it in a Boston Globe profile and have always wanted to go, but the sad fact is that my family is not huge on artisanal cheese and it's rare that any of them would want to make that trip with me. Diana, on the other hand, is huge on cheese, and we very happily sampled our way through their selection, picking three to take home. Oh, and we stopped in on their cafe where we each had a toasted and deliciously cheesy sandwich. I also picked up some of their fig bread, which is not exactly bread as much as it is pressed figs with hazelnuts and walnuts slipped in and then the whole thing is compacted down some more into a brick. So it's like the inside of a fig newton all compressed very nicely.
Dinner that night was interesting. Mom and I had wanted to treat our guests to a Berkshires tradition: a picnic dinner on the lawn at Tanglewood. Unfortunately, as lucky as Diana and I had been the evening before, our luck ran out and the sky opened. And I had already bought meat to throw on the grill! No matter - in a lull in the storm, I pulled out the grill and made nice marinated steak tips and grilled asparagus, along with some store-bought potato salad and noodle salad. Also some salad with tomatoes from the aforementioned person's garden. Mmmm... And no rain on the food - just some damp earth under our picnic tarp.
Gil Shaham played his Mozart violin concerto like the consummate showman he is: he grinned, he gesticulated, and he even winked at the conductor a few times. The second part of the program, Shostakovitch 10, was good but very heavy and forbidding. I'm not such a fan, though I heard things in Saturday's performance that I hadn't before. Upon return to the house, I was forced by my mother to sing for her guests. Then one of her classmates sang. Both of us were right mortified, though I have to think that the several glasses of Pimm's I'd had beforehand helped a bit.
They talked and talked and talked long after I grew tired. Of course, they were a bit late getting up in the morning, but I had already gotten up and brewed a fresh pot of darn strong coffee for them (and for myself). They went off to see Chesterwood (the workshop of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the Lincoln Memorial statue) while Diana and I ate the cheese that we bought the day before and had a lovely morning in. Unfortunately, we were watching the weather stations reporting nickel-sized hail and huge thunderstorms so we packed up the house and hit the road, missing the all-Mozart concert that afternoon (though we caught much of it in the car - it was delightful).
What should have taken 2 hours ended up taking 4: Not only were we dealing with huge amounts of traffic from I-84 (go back to Connecticut, you weirdos!), but then the thunderstorms hit and we were all driving at about 35 MPH with our hazard lights on. We couldn't talk or listen to the radio because of the noise, and it was virtually impossible to see. After I dropped Diana off and went home, I was exhausted and both my shoulders and back ached (much like they do after all of this typing). Still, it was a wonderful weekend and I was really happy to have been able to spend it with family, friends, and my girlfriend.
Oh, and we went back out to Tanglewood on Tuesday to hear Yo-Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax. Interesting stuff. More on that later. Right now, my fingers hurt from typing.
But here's what I was going to say.
Last weekend was a real headspinner... The Tanglewood weekend was a whole lot of fun, with Friday's concert entirely devoted to Don Quixote pieces, Saturday with Gil Shaham, and Sunday with Sir James Galway and harpist Ann Hobson Pilot. It's not often that such music is performed by such luminaries - we were all very lucky.
Overlapping this weekend was the fact that Diana and I got to spend the weekend at Tanglewood, which was a lot of fun. Diana is, as one might imagine me saying, very good company. And since it's rare that we have so much time to spend with each other, it was really nice to be able to set aside a weekend to enjoy being together.
But overlapping that weekend was another interesting adventure: eight of my mother's friends from high school (back in Hong Kong) came to visit. So there were eleven people crammed into a vacation home, Diana and I on bunk beds in one room and the rest of the women all over the house, making it virtually impossible for me to go anywhere by between my room, the bathroom, and the kitchen. But more about this later.
Diana and I drove out to Tanglewood on Friday morning. We arrived and put bits of the house in order before driving down the hill to Orient Express, a restaurant I have described on this site several times before. The owner knows us and has been really nice to us in the past. This weekend, he would not allow me to order the whole fried flounder because the fish that they had received that weekend were too small. I was a bit disappointed, but certainly appreciated the heads-up as well.
After lunch, it was back up the hill for some hard-core laundering and cleaning. Diana graciously offered to help with the vaccuuming while I mopped and dusted. All this in preparation for the hoarde of Cantonese women bearing down on us from out of town. In the meantime, I managed to score a rare reservation (on a Friday night with 3 hours to go?) to Elizabeth's in Pittsfield. Elizabeth's is a lovely restaurant nestled in the wilderness of western Massachusetts across from the GE Special Materials plant and next door to a dingy auto mechanic. However, the restaurant itself is one of the cutest around. The whimsical menu is rife with hyperbole and assorted verbiage and the owner/chef, Tom, makes an almost intrusive habit of talking to his customers, but overall, the food makes it all more than worth it. We started out with one of Tom's bizarre salads, containing (and this is different every time we go) peaches, cheddar, walnuts, raisins, carrot, feta, and other assorted goodies I can't remember, all tossed into some lovely field greens with a yummy balsamic vinaigrette. Our starter was a delicious chevre drizzled with an incredibly fruity olive oil and some walnuts. Finally, Diana had a gorgonzola pasta, which was amazingly creamy. The woman at the table next to ours commented that she couldn't believe Diana was sharing such a fine dish with me. I had a really light eggplant dish with spinach, a touch of garlic, mozarella cheese and a light tomato broth and finished with fresh herbs and basil. It was delicious.
The concert was incredible: we got really lucky, as the weather (it had gotten dark and ominous in a hurry) decided not to rain on us that day. The first half was de Falla's Master Peter's Puppet Show, which actually contained a puppet-show within a puppet-show. (Meta-puppets... woah) There were larger-than-life Don Quixote and Sancho Panza puppets, while the life-sized Master Peter (actually a puppeteer with a mask) and page boy (full-size puppet) put on the show, consisting of smaller puppets in a puppet stage. Three vocal soloists stood to the side and sang very well. The experience was whimsical without getting silly and I loved the music. The second half was Strauss' Don Quixote, which is a masterpiece of brilliance and orchestral contrast. Unfortunately, dinner was catching up to me and I kinda fell asleep for part of it. What I heard, however, was brilliant.
We went back up to the house and I made myself a cup of tea to relax. But within 30 minutes, the cars arrived and my Mom and her friends rolled out. They were mostly quiet and kept to themselves that first night. They were exhausted, of course, it being 11:30, and so they just got themselves ready for bed and went to sleep. The next morning I woke up very early to get breakfast started. Thankfully, all they needed was coffee, tea, hot water, juice, scrambled eggs, bagels, toast, and fixings. Nothing much. :P They had brought some chives from someone's garden - delicious in the scrambled eggs. They piled into cars and went to Tanglewood for the open rehearsal while I cleaned up after them, did a load of dishes, and contemplated the day. Diana woke up considerably after I did (about 1.5 hours) and after we got ready we ended up driving to a lovely cheese shop in Great Barrington. I've been eyeing this shop for two summers - I read about it in a Boston Globe profile and have always wanted to go, but the sad fact is that my family is not huge on artisanal cheese and it's rare that any of them would want to make that trip with me. Diana, on the other hand, is huge on cheese, and we very happily sampled our way through their selection, picking three to take home. Oh, and we stopped in on their cafe where we each had a toasted and deliciously cheesy sandwich. I also picked up some of their fig bread, which is not exactly bread as much as it is pressed figs with hazelnuts and walnuts slipped in and then the whole thing is compacted down some more into a brick. So it's like the inside of a fig newton all compressed very nicely.
Dinner that night was interesting. Mom and I had wanted to treat our guests to a Berkshires tradition: a picnic dinner on the lawn at Tanglewood. Unfortunately, as lucky as Diana and I had been the evening before, our luck ran out and the sky opened. And I had already bought meat to throw on the grill! No matter - in a lull in the storm, I pulled out the grill and made nice marinated steak tips and grilled asparagus, along with some store-bought potato salad and noodle salad. Also some salad with tomatoes from the aforementioned person's garden. Mmmm... And no rain on the food - just some damp earth under our picnic tarp.
Gil Shaham played his Mozart violin concerto like the consummate showman he is: he grinned, he gesticulated, and he even winked at the conductor a few times. The second part of the program, Shostakovitch 10, was good but very heavy and forbidding. I'm not such a fan, though I heard things in Saturday's performance that I hadn't before. Upon return to the house, I was forced by my mother to sing for her guests. Then one of her classmates sang. Both of us were right mortified, though I have to think that the several glasses of Pimm's I'd had beforehand helped a bit.
They talked and talked and talked long after I grew tired. Of course, they were a bit late getting up in the morning, but I had already gotten up and brewed a fresh pot of darn strong coffee for them (and for myself). They went off to see Chesterwood (the workshop of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor who created the Lincoln Memorial statue) while Diana and I ate the cheese that we bought the day before and had a lovely morning in. Unfortunately, we were watching the weather stations reporting nickel-sized hail and huge thunderstorms so we packed up the house and hit the road, missing the all-Mozart concert that afternoon (though we caught much of it in the car - it was delightful).
What should have taken 2 hours ended up taking 4: Not only were we dealing with huge amounts of traffic from I-84 (go back to Connecticut, you weirdos!), but then the thunderstorms hit and we were all driving at about 35 MPH with our hazard lights on. We couldn't talk or listen to the radio because of the noise, and it was virtually impossible to see. After I dropped Diana off and went home, I was exhausted and both my shoulders and back ached (much like they do after all of this typing). Still, it was a wonderful weekend and I was really happy to have been able to spend it with family, friends, and my girlfriend.
Oh, and we went back out to Tanglewood on Tuesday to hear Yo-Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax. Interesting stuff. More on that later. Right now, my fingers hurt from typing.
