Stan’s Obligatory Blog

A few weeks ago, we were on our way to the Wilshire Ebell Theater to see Aimee Mann, when we passed the Hayworth Theater and its marquee announcing “Silence! The Musical“. We were curious, so we looked it up, and it sounded like fun. It’s a musical based on “The Silence of the Lambs“, complete with singing Agent Starling, singing Hannibal Lecter, and a chorus of sheep singing and dancing on stage. So we got tickets, and tonight was the night.

The theater is just on the other side of MacArthur Park, not far from downtown Los Angeles, so it was pretty easy to get to. There’s a parking lot next to it, so that was very convenient. Our seats were on the side, on the third row, so we were up close for everything. And as we’d hoped, the show was hilarious.

Before we went over, we found the movie on Amazon streaming and started watching it. It had been many years since either of us had seen it, so we wanted to have it fresh before seeing the show. And almost all of the non-singing dialogue in the show is verbatim from the movie script. But then Agent Starling and Hannibal Lecter break into song and the sheep start dancing, and, well, it’s just hilarious.

This is easily as funny as “The Book of Mormon“, and also comparable to “Pulp Shakespeare“. I recommend it highly, but hurry. It’s only there for another week or so.

Here’s a little preview on youtube with the original New York cast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjbqxm_NeAs

Last weekend’s trip to Chicago was more than just stair-climbing agony. We played tourist and visited, too.

We got in on Friday evening. For some reason, JetBlue doesn’t fly to O’Hare any more from anywhere in southern California. So we ended up on United, which meant flying out of LAX. Yikes. And paying $50 to check our bags. Yikes again. But aside from that, it was all right. And on the way in, I got a good view of downtown and the Sears Willis Tower. Once more, yikes.

Friday night, we got on the train and went for dinner at the Blue Line Lounge again. We’d gone there last time and liked it.

Saturday morning, we had to go downtown to pick up my packet for Sunday’s race. While we were there, we saw some of our stair-climbing friends, and I got to contemplate once more what was in store for Sunday morning.

On Saturday afternoon, we had tickets for the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s boat tour of the Chicago River. Sure, it’s a bit chilly this time of year, but we were prepared. So we bundled up and took the tour.

I’d been reading The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, and I just finished it before we left on Saturday morning. It’s the story of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, and the intertwined story of H.H. Holmes, who is regarded as one of the first American serial killers. A good bit of the book is about Daniel Burnham, who was the chief architect of the fair, and also is one of the pioneers of steel-framed skyscrapers. So there’s one tie-in with the weekend’s activities. At the end of the book, Larson said that Burnham died in 1912, and that he and his family are buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. So of course I checked the map and saw that we could go there after the boat tour.

We rode the Red Line north out of downtown, and then we walked over to Graceland. By this time, it was about 3:30. When we got there, there was a sign saying that the cemetery was closing at 4:15. So we didn’t have much time. As it turned out, the pond was all the way at the back of the cemetery, and I almost ended up having to run there to get there and back before closing. But I made it and got my photos.

After the cemetery visit, we took the Red Line back downtown to meet up with the West Coast Labels team for our night-before dinner at the Elephant and Castle.

Sunday morning was the stair climb. I wrote that up separately, so I won’t go over it again here. After that, we went back to our hotel and got packed up to leave. Then we took the Blue Line back downtown again. We had lunch at Giordano’s, which seems to be one of the few places downtown that’s open on weekends. Even McDonald’s was closed. We saw a crew filming something downtown. It was funny because they were spraying fake snow. We see film crews with fake snow here in L.A. all the time, but I think that fake snow in Chicago is funny. Sort of like how people there wonder why there are tanning salons in L.A.

After lunch, we walked over to Union Station to get the train to Libertyville to visit with Kathleen’s aunt and uncle. Once again, I chuckled about the railroad cars and their builder’s plate:

Engineered & Manufactured by
American Passenger
Rail Car Company
Chicago, Illinois

Nippon Sharyo, Ltd

Who says American industry is on the decli… oh.

Monday was some more playing tourist before it was time to go home. We took a walk with the neighbor’s dog for a bit, and then we went downtown to the Art Institute of Chicago. They have a very good collection there. From Seurat to Grant Wood to Cy Twombly. A full range of art and art-like things. We spent the afternoon there until it was time to go to the airport for our flight home.

All told, it was a fun trip.

Pictures are here:

http://www.1134.org/gallery/main.php/v/stan/trips/chicago2012/

Today I went with Lucinda to go see the spiders at the Natural History Museum. We’d gone to see them two years ago, but we missed them last year.

We rode the train there this time. And now that the Expo light rail line* is running, it was an easy trip. There was even a USC football game today, and it was still no problem. Hooray for progress.

When we got there, we went in to see the spiders first. They were big and creepy-looking, as we’d hoped. A lot of people are afraid that the spiders will drop on them, but they really don’t move much. They just pick a spot to build a web, and then they just sit there. There was one spider that somehow had ended up standing on another spider’s web, and for a minute it looked like they might get in a fight, but the interloper backed off and moved away.

After the spiders, we went inside to see the new Dinosaur Hall. They’re redone the whole dinosaur exhibit there, and it’s pretty good. It’s nowhere near as big as the Hall of Dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but it’s still way better than their old exhibit. And they did have one place where they had a painting of the current vision of a velociraptor with feathers. Sure, that kind of blows the whole ‘bloodthirsty killer dinosaurs’ idea from Jurassic Park, but that’s the Advance of Science for you. They’re still killers, but they’re much cuter and cuddly-looking with feathers.

We spent a little time looking around the rest of the museum before we had to go home. On the way out, we stopped to peek into the building where they stashed the space shuttle. Then we got on the train to go home. It was a nice afternoon outing.

* Also known as the ‘slightly lighter shade of blue line’.

Last night, Kathleen and I went to see “The Book of Mormon” at the Pantages here in Hollywood. While we like going to see live theater a fair bit, it’s quite rare that we go see anything well-known or ‘mainstream’. But given what we’d heard about the show, we made an exception for “The Book of Mormon”. And we were not disappointed.

We started off the evening meeting up in North Hollywood and taking the train into the city. The Vine St Metro station is right across the street from the Pantages, so it was very convenient. We had dinner around the corner at Lexington Social House. It was quite nice, but the service was kind of slow. I think they could easily double their bar receipts if they just had a few more people working there to speed up delivering the drinks.

When it came time, we walked back around the corner to the theater. I’d never been inside the Pantages before. It’s really quite large and ornate. And soon it was showtime.

The show was hilarious. As an outsider, a good bit of Mormon theology sounds ridiculous. We’d been exposed to some of it in Julia Sweeney’s show, “Letting Go of God“. But at the same time, while they were poking fun at the Mormon religion, it was done in a good-natured way. Pretty much every religion sounds ridiculous to anyone not brought up in it. So they’re all about the same in that regard.

I really can’t describe the show. But it was easily one of the funniest musicals I’ve ever seen. There were some echoes of the “South Park” episode “All About Mormons”, but much larger and livelier. If you can, go see this show. It’s a hoot.

It’s the end of summer, and time for the Los Angeles County Fair. And this year, for the first time, I’m a blue-ribbon-winner in the baking contest. So today was our day to go see my cookies on display. And of course, we went there first.

As always, it was hot. 103 in Pomona, according the Weather Service. Still, we made the best of it. There are a lot of things there that are indoors, including the displays of wines. Who knew that there are wineries in New Jersey? We also got some Dr Bob’s ice cream there.

Later in the afternoon, we went to see the pig races. That was fun, and at the end, they gave us a coupon for a pound of bacon. Hmm.

All this time, Lucinda and London were out and about. The rode some rides, and they played a lot of games. So when we found them later on, they were carrying some big stuffed animals.

I saw one place that was selling hamburgers with a banner of a decidedly unhappy-looking cow on it. I’m not sure that that’s quite the message they were going for there.

In the end, the girls played a few more games. They had to get a big bag to carry all the stuffed animals. So I guess that made it a good day.

Tonight we went back to Hollywood Forever to another Cinespia movie screening. And I didn’t have to put an asterisk on it when I say it was a fun time. We’d gone to two movies there last summer, and the experience was a bit of an ordeal. But this time, we knew how to deal with it, and it was fine.

We made up a little picnic to bring along. Our Tommy Bahama chairs are good because they have pockets to pack stuff in, and straps so they can be worn like backpacks. So we were able to carry lots of stuff pretty easily. We went over there, and we just parked in the first parking lot we saw. It was the car wash at Gower and Santa Monica, and they wanted $10 to park there. That worked for us, so we parked and walked over to the entrance. We got there about 30 minutes early, and we were able to get a spot in the shade. We set up our chars, and it was really quite comfortable. Then, when they opened the gates, we got inside pretty fast, and just walked back to the area and set up camp. Last year, when we waited in the car line to get in, by the time we got there, we had a really crappy, far-away spot on the lawn. But this time, we got a good spot. So the lesson is, don’t try and park inside the cemetery.

While we were having our dinner, two women set up camp behind us. They put out a tremendous spread of stuff. All kinds of things. So we talked with them, and I gave them some of my hummus and homemade pita bread to sample. And they gave us some exotic cheeses, roasted hazelnuts, and what they called ‘lawyer bread’ that was made by someone they know. It was all quite good. And I was regretting that I hadn’t had time to make a batch of my award-winning cookies to bring along tonight.

The movie was Woody Allen’s “Manhattan“, which neither of us had seen in decades. It’s interesting how our perspective changes with age. We enjoyed it, but we both got something completely different out of it this time, as compared to when we saw it 30-something years ago.

All told, it was a fun evening.

Last night, I was at home when my phone chirped at me. It was a message and a picture from Morgan from work. She had gone to the L.A. County Fair and sent me pictures showing my cookies. The very ones I’d brought in last Tuesday. Apparently, all that development and all those endless test batches I baked paid off. My traditional chocolate chip cookies were 4th in their category, and my chocolate cookies took 1st place.

Woo-hoo!

So here are the recipes:

http://1134.org/recipes/chocolate-cookies-2012.pdf
http://1134.org/recipes/chocolate-chip-cookies-2012.pdf

Today was the day that I had to submit my cookies and recipes to the L.A. County Fair for the baking contest. I came home a bit early and started baking. Sadly, the heat wave we always seem to get in time for the county fair came right on schedule, and it was not much fun standing around in the kitchen with the hot oven.

I made two batches of cookies, one of each of the two recipes I’m entering this year. When they came out, I taste-tested one of each for quality control purposes. Truth be told now, I’m pretty sick of these cookies, since I’ve made so many test batches over the past few months. So I kind of had to choke them down. But they came out all right, and I picked out the six best-looking ones from each batch to enter in the contest. I put them in a little box, and headed out to the fair.

The fair is open from 3 to 7 for everyone to bring in their baked things for judging. I got there about 5, and you can see from the picture that the big tables they have set up are nowhere near full yet. But I know that they will be by the end. Los Angeles County is big, and there are a lot of entries in the fair. I put my cookies in, got my receipt, and headed home. They told me that the judging is done first thing the next day. So it’s a good thing I paid so much attention to making sure my cookies were still good more than 24 hours out of the oven.

So that’s this year’s baking contest story.

Last year, we came to the Nisei Week Festival in Little Tokyo to see the gyoza eating contest. And it was both hilarious and horrifying. So of course, we had to come back again this year. And this year, the number-one ranked eater in the world, Joey Chestnut was going to be there. Last year’s winner, Pat Bertoletti, and also the number-two ranked eater was also there.

There was lots of fanfare before the actual contest started. As they did last year, they had one seat in the contest up for auction to benefit the Nisei Week Festival. This time, there was fierce competition for it, and the winner paid $400 to sit in the last seat. He said he was from Australia, and he’d done some eating contests there, so he wanted to try this one.

When the contest started, it was quite a spectacle. Bulging cheeks, chomping jaws, and everyone doing the little body wiggle that apparently helps the food to pack down better into their stomachs. Looking at their faces, it’s pretty plain that they’re doing something difficult and painful. In many ways, athletics are all about pushing the limits of the human body, and I suppose stuffing massive quantities of food into it is just another limit to be pushed.

This time, nobody suffered a ‘reversal of fortune‘. When time was called, everyone stood up and finished swallowing the last of what they’d stuffed in their mouths. And then the judges counted plates and tabulated the results. In the end, Joey Chestnut had won and set a new record with 264 gyoza in ten minutes.

As I said, it was both hilarious and horrifying. And that makes it a must-see in my book.

On Sunday, we began the second part of our trip. A visit to Hoboken to see my old friend Gordon, and then to play tourist in New York City.

We started with a short cab ride from the hotel to the Park Ridge train station. While we were waiting for the train, I noticed Cyclesport across the street. Back in the ’70s, when I was racing for the North Jersey Bicycle Club, Cyclesport was the headquarters for our arch-rivals, the Italian Cycling Association. It appears that they still have a racing team, although it’s under a different name now.

This was my first time riding the New Jersey Transit Pascack Valley Line. I always remember seeing it when I was out on bike rides, but I don’t recall ever seeing a train on the tracks ever before. I always wondered how they did it, since most of the line is single-track. So while we were riding the train to Hoboken, I paid attention, and I saw that there were about two or three places where there were passing tracks built along the line to allow trains in opposite directions to pass each other. It was a pleasant ride, and pretty soon we were in Hoboken. I’ve been through the Hoboken station countless times before, but never before have I actually gone out the door to the town outside. But this time, that’s what we did. We walked outside, and Gordon met us there to give us and our suitcases a ride to his house.

After a short rest, we decided to start our sightseeing. We took a walk down to the waterfront, passing the “Cake Boss” bakery and the line down the block of people waiting to get in. There is a park built on one of the old piers where we had a nice view across the river to Manhattan.

Next, we walked back to the train station and took the PATH across the river to the 14th St station. From there, we walked west to go to the High Line. I’d read about this park some years ago, and it sounded interesting. It’s certainly a good way to reuse an old structure.

We walked up to the end of the High Line at 30th St, and then we took a cab back to Greenwich Village. We passed by the Stonewall Inn, which was where the gay rights movement got its start in a riot on a hot June night back in 1969. Then we walked around Washington Square Park a bit until it was time to head over to Houston St to meet up with my friend Thaddeus for dinner.

We met with Thaddeus and his family at Veselka Bowery. We had a nice dinner there, and we got to talk and catch up on stories. It was a nice evening, and afterward, he showed us to the subway entrance so we could make our way back to Hoboken. It was amazingly hot and stuffy down in the subway stations. I know I’ve been in the subways in summer before, but I don’t remember it ever being quite so totally uncomfortable. But the trains were air conditioned, so once we were moving, it was all right. We rode the train back to Hoboken and Gordon’s house, and we planned our sightseeing for Monday.