Last Opera and a Barmitzvah

After Maguie left us on Monday evening, we still had one more opera on our subscription, on Tuesday night: Salome. We took BART downtown in the evening and just missed the first few minutes of the the pre-show talk this time. It is a very confronting opera - seeing Salome dance about with the bloody head of Jokanan (John the Baptist) is not to everyone's taste. I hadn't realised the work was based on a play by Oscar Wilde. There is more than the average number of nasty characters - Herod is horrid, Herodias is not a nice wife and mother, Salome is totally depraved - and not a lot of decent types, one of whom kills himself quite early. We enjoyed it, however - powerful dramatic music and very good performances again. The dance of the seven veils was extremely well-produced, with acres of silk employed to great advantage. One odd thing was the costuming of the Jews, who were in current-day Chassidic garb. The roles have the several Jewish representatives of different sects disputing the meaning of texts while ignoring what was happening in the land, and I can understand this from both contemporary and historical perspectives. But the costumes were totally anachronistic, in an opera otherwise consistently costumed in its own period, so I couldn't help wondering why they chose to dress these characters as if they had just walked onto the set from Crown Heights.

You can hear excerpts and see the cast list, etc. at

http://sfopera.com/o/288.asp

It was not our initial plan to have so many operas clustered together. We had to change the dates of our initial subscription because of our plan to go east the following weekend (which was Halloween, so we missed being Trick or Treated in Berkeley) once again to attend the Barmitzvah of Nate Gruber, Lissy's nephew, in Rockville, Maryland (close to Washington DC). Barry hadn't seen Ben and Lissy on this trip and figured this was the only time he could fit in a trip to their territory on the East Coast, so we flew off on Friday morning and flew home on Sunday.


We had hoped to catch up with Carmela (an old friend from my NYC Women's Group) and husband John while in the DC area, but there was a medical emergency in Carmela's family so she had gone off to New York before we came in. John was dropping his niece and family off at the airport around the time we got in, so we manged to catch up briefly just with him - he met us at the airport and drove us to our hotel (taking the scenic route!). He spent the journey discussing with Barry some details of his family history - his English grandfather and great uncle had been involved in the mining industry in Mexico in the 19th and early 20th Century. He has some fascinating family letters from this period and they discussed what institutions might be interested in these, and what sources could shed further light on this episode. I found the conversation quite fascinating. We arrived at our hotel before Ben did on Friday evening, and managed to catch up with them and other members of Lissy's family who were staying at the same hotel later in the evening. The photo above shows Nate's four grandparents, with Nate standing and his siblings and the Morcheles first cousins sitting on the floor.

We went to Shule on Saturday for the Barmitzvah, where Nate did a great job, sharing the parsha with a Batmitzvah girl, in a very full Synagogue close to the hotel. There was a lavish kiddush and much sitting around with the family in the Shule hall afterwards, then we went back to the hotel and got to spend some time with Ben and Lissy, finally choosing a selection of wedding photos for our album, as they had brought the full set of proofs with them. There were so many gorgeous photos and it was hard to choose a couple of dozen . I had found selecting them on the web, the initial plan, quite difficult: the site allowed us to compare two photos at a time, but where there were 4 or 5 similar to choose amongst, I would prefer A to B, and B to C and D to C, but then find I liked C better than A - going round in circles. Looking at the proofs was much easier! This photo shows Barry and me with Ben and Lissy and Barbara and Bernard (Lissy's parents) at the Barmitzvah.

I managed to get in a swim on the hotel pool before getting showered and dressed for the Barmitzvah party in the evening (Ben got in just as I got out, having worked out in the hotel gym session while I was swimming - I realised I haven't seen him swim since early adolescence, it is something I do a lot but have never really done with him except on long-ago family holidays. His freestyle has certainly improved - the triathlon training he did earlier in the year no doubt contributed!)

http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/20091105FromNatesBarmitzvah

The theme of the Barmitzvah party was a casino and games, of which there were many, and although I didn't get around to the gaming tables, I did do the parent and child dance with Ben (there are incriminating photos). There was a person encouraging the dancers as well as the DJ, so there are some shots of me making a fool of myself with him, too!

I posted all the photos from my camera (mostly taken by Barry) on Picasa, so you can have a quick browse. It is lovely to have acquired such an extended family in the US, and we feel very privileged to now be included in such family simchas. We have only met Hillary and Brian (Nate's parents a few times - Hillary is Lissy's oldest sister, more than 10 years older), and we would not have expected to be invited as a matter of course, so we did appreciate the invitation and were glad to be able to attend. And we very much enjoyed the brunch at their house on Sunday, which gave us a
bit more time to chat with the family and meet a few more of them, including a cousin from the west coast who gave us a lift to the airport.



It took ages (and 2 attempts) on a somewhat slow connection to download the few seconds of video here and it is actually awful, but after all the time I had to defer going to bed till it loaded, I am leaving it in: you will see Ben and Lissy dancing with Kendall, Lissy's young cousin, who is dynamite on the dance floor!

Maguie comes to visit

Maguie Pallares is Barry's oldest friend in Mexico. They met when he was doing his PhD research in 1968, at a venue called Casa Jones where Mexican girls got to meet foreign boys, as far as I could tell, view matrimony in many cases. In her long career at Nestle, she ended up as Secretary/PA to the CEO, and still has many friends from the company - wherever we go with Maguie, people are always stopping us to say hello to her and catch up on news. Maguie has many brothers and sisters and a very large extended family. Barry has met them all, including the ones who live in Europe, and I have met most of them, including the family from Monterey and Queretaro. Maguie has always invited us to celebrate with them on Noche Buena (Xmas Eve) if we are in Mexico at the time (I am writing up this post so late that I can report we did so again in 2009!) We have spent several New Year's Eves with them also, and had many visits including a stay at Maguie's cottage in Queretaro (see in a post from 2007) . In 2005, the first time we ever rented the apartment we love in Coyoacan, I had enough space and a decent kitchen so I was able to invite a lot of the family for lunch one day - I think 14 of them came!

Maguie's 90 year old mother Romy, who lived with her, passed away in July, while we were still in Melbourne. When I heard, I knew how much Maguie would be missing her , and I suggested that a little later in the year if she felt she needed a bit of a break, she might like to come to Berkeley and visit us for a while. Maguie always looks after us so well when we are in Mexico that we were delighted when she accepted our invitation, as we loved having an opportunity to return a little of the hospitality she has showered on us over the years. And I think she was feeling a bit down, so the change got her out of her environment and we hope lifted her mood quite a bit.


Her flight came in on a Saturday morning in October. We had tickets for a matinee performance of The Abduction from the Seraglio that afternoon in San Francisco, and we managed to reserve an extra ticket as we know she is an opera fan (in fact I posted in 2007 about a performance of Turandot we saw together in Mexico City). Barry and I drove to SFO airport (with the assistance of the GPS, only getting one turn wrong) and picked Maguie up. I had done some research on parking lots near the Opera House, as with her luggage in the car it seemed unwise to leave the car on the street, and we navigated to the Performing Arts Garage shortly after it opened. (Getting anywhere by car using freeways in an American city I don't know still feels like a small triumph to me, directionally challenged as I am.)

This left us with a short while to explore the Arts precinct near Civic Centre and the UN Plaza, where the Opera House, the Symphony Hall, City Hall, the Public Library, the Asian Art Museum and assorted other grand public edifices line wide streets , just a few short blocks away from the Tenderloin, where homeless people, often mentally ill, line the streets and frequent shelters and places to get a cheap hot meal once a day. It was an uncharacteristically beautiful day for San Francisco, blue skies, no fog - October is reckoned to be the best month to visit.

Above, some of the public buildings in the general area of the Opera House: further above , City Hall, a couple of blocks away.

So we had a bit of a wander, noted a demonstration in favour of health care reform in the Plaza area, an old-fashioned kind of a demo which I found very encouraging, then had a light lunch at a cafe just a block from the Opera House. We made it to the opera in time to hear the lecture beforehand, where you often get some insights into the history of the opera, what is special about it, and get clued up on the best arias and other highlights to listen out for. You can read a synopsis and hear and see excerpts here:

http://sfopera.com/o/286.asp


It was a lot of fun: Peter Rose, the English bass, played Osmin, hamming it up very enjoyably and with a great stage presence. The dialogue was in English while the singing was in German, and we all really liked the production. But as Maguie had started her day in Mexico very early , we decided to go home rather than stay in San Francisco for dinner. Here are Barry and I at the table we set up to create a dining room, as the kitchen table really can't cope with 3 people at a time:


On Sunday we drove to Oakland to catch the ferry into San Francisco. There is a great Farmer's Market at Jack London Square near the Ferry terminal and we had about 15 minutes to wander about admiring the produce before getting onto the ferry for the ride into San Francisco. See the photo below for the brussels sprouts still on the stalk - I have seen them growing in a garden like this, but never on sale in this form in Melbourne. In the photo alongside we are approaching the Bay Bridge - I highly recommend the ferry ride. It is quite short and on a nice day very lovely. The West Oakland cargo port with all its heavy cranes and huge volumes of containers is a very impressive backdrop as you set out, then you cross the beautiful Bay itself, with the San Francisco skyline approaching, the excitement of going under the huge bridge, and the first stop, the wonderfully renovated and repurposed Ferry Building, is such an interesting destination. (It also goes on to Pier 41, adjacent to the tourist Mecca of Pier 39 and the start of the Fisherman's Wharf precinct.) We went to my favourite coffee shop in the Ferry Building, after sampling a variety of breads, cheeses, chocolates, olive oils etc., and oohed and aahed over the produce again (I probably have posted here before about the produce displays at the Ferry Building, showcasing local produce and offering samples of local olive oils, chocolates etc.) The outdoor craft market across the Embarcadero always has lovely stuff, and we wandered through these stalls, then along Market Street and up into Chinatown by a rather circuitous route - Barry had seen a photo at the craft market of an interesting building and had a fixed idea of where it was (he was completely wrong - we did in fact see the very building later, after having gone about 10 blocks out of our way). We walked into Chinatown and took it all in, then had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant as Maguie had never eaten Vietnamese food before (it was OK but not wonderful. Apart from Yum Cha, we haven't had a really excellent meal in SF Chinatown yet - I guess we should do more research rather than choosing restaurants more or less at random.) After more time in Chinatown we walked down to Union Square, where Maguie and I had a brief look in Macy's to see if there was anything we couldn't live without. Maguie chose some very cute baby clothes for presents, while Barry spent this 45 minutes in a book shop. It was just about to start raining - we saw a really spectacular pink convertible from the 1950's stop and put up his roof right in front of us. But the rain stopped and we walked down to the BART station and took the train back to downtown Oakland. There we took another ramble through Oakland's Chinatown this time, where we bought some Asian herbs and vegetables for stir frying and some wasabi peas for snacking , then walked back to the car in the parking lot at Jack London Square and drove back to Berkeley.

On Monday, on my way to my exercise class at the Albany YMCA, I dropped Maguie at the top of Solano Avenue so she could wander down looking at the really interesting shops and maybe have a coffee before meeting me down at the Albany end, where the Y is located. The weather had looked a bit threatening but luckily she had encountered only a few drops of rain, which held off till after we had been to the supermarket (where she got some Halloween treats to take back to Mexico for some of the kids in her family) . I drove up to Santa Barbara Road, intending to show her the wonderful views and streetscapes up in the hills where we had lived for 6 months last year, but by then the heavens had truly opened and we could hardly see a thing - let alone go for a walk and admire all the 3-bridge views. So we did a little circuit of some of the old neighbourhood and returned home for a late lunch.

Tuesday is a day Barry has no teaching so we all walked the 15 minutes to UC Berkeley campus together, I went for my usual Tuesday swim and he took Maguie on a university tour. It is a beautiful campus and it was a gorgeous day again (what a pleasure swimming in the outdoor pool on such a day!) , and we all met for lunch at Adagia, a resturant I've eaten at before but which Barry has enjoyed several more times, across the road and up the hill a bit from the Rec Centre. Lovely food - they do excellent salads, Maguie had one of their specialty burgers and I've forgotten what Barry had, but it might have been fish and chips. Coffee and biscotti finished us off and we walked back via some of the bookshops on Shattuck Avenue so Maguie could find some English language children's books for some small friends who are learning English.

Over the next few days while Barry was at work, Maguie and I explored various Berkeley neighbourhoods, including Fourth Street, the Marina (see the photos - click to enlarge them, the top one shows the view looking back from the pier towards the Berkeley hills , the next one shows the view towards San Francisco - look carefully and you can see the Golden Gate Bridge from the far end of the pier- and the bottom obe shows some boats in the Marina), and College Avenue. I know the Rockridge area at the far end of College Avenue, which is in Oakland, as my hairdresser is there. I have wandered about the very interesting clothing (new and recycled), shoe and homewares /bric-a-brac stores and had coffee in several places, and have often bought cheeses and fresh fish at the rather expensive Market place (which a few weeks ago had a special on Australian cheeses, featuring such thing as Roaring 40's blue and Timboon cheddar) and usually pick up something at the Trader Joe's store near the BART station. But in another section of College Avenue, the Elmwood district, still in Berkeley, there are some wonderful food places which I have driven or taken the bus through but hardly ever walked around, including a fabulous Italian produce and deli store (A. G. Ferrari, check out their website at the link below for their food menu and some very Italian recipes. It reminded me of some of the specialised Italian supermarkets in places like Auburn Road or Station Street Fairfield in Melbourne. I picked up some arborio rice and some grana padano after tasting several varieties).

http://www.agferrari.com/



At one of the funky clothing shops in the same stretch, we took advantage of the sales to buy a T-shirt each - I found one in an unusual shade of bottle green that I really like on me, so was very pleased with myself, and as the day had turned very sunny I put it on in place of the long-sleeved top I had started out with.

We checked out the ice-cream store Gail had read and emailed about called Ici, where you could see the staff making the ice cream and mixing in all kinds of good stuff in the back. Unfortunately there was no large display of flavours (they change every day) or pictures, and the ones I tried to take through the glass had too much reflection. I had a pistachio and praline kind of flavour, and Maguie had a ginger and pear, I think, but they were pretty expensive. Now make your mouth water - look at their web site!

http://www.ici-icecream.com/

On the other hand, on Shattuck Avenue there is John's. which sells a single scoop of many perfectly acceptable flavours in ice-creams and sorbets for $1 a scoop. I don't think Ici's at 3 times the price are actually 3 times as good. On nice days the queue is understandably very long. Here you can see Barry and Maguie enjoying theirs on another day we were walking back from wherever we had been. Other Berkeley stuff we did included looking at the very fancy interior design shops, kitchenware places, a few clothing stores and some antique kimonos in a store along Fourth Street, and having a Mexican lunch at a very nice cafe, and coffee at another very nice place a few doors away after our wander though the shops. It was much easier to park during a weekday afternoon than on weekends, which is the only other time we have been there.
On Thursday morning Maguie came to my exercise class at the JCC - I had checked this would be OK with the instructor Naomi, who said certainly. I think she enjoyed the class, though from my experience, doing a totally new exercise class is always a bit bewildering - and that is in my native language!

On Saturday we packed in a lot. Barry and I were invited to brunch by a colleague of his from the History Department who lives just a couple of blocks away, and Maguie did a bit of independent exploring of the neighbourhood while we were out. Then we headed into SF by BART, and queued up at the turntable to take the obligatory cable car ride all the way to the far end of Fisherman's wharf. It was a lovely day again and quite worth the wait, especially as the buskers entertaining the crowd were very good. The two photos in this section are from Maguie, as I don't think I had my camera that day. You can see what a gorgeous day it was from this shot of the cable cars waiting up Powell Street, taken while were waiting in the queue. There was a crew change half way through our ride and we enjoyed a lot of jolly banter from the operators and some other passengers, and in the wonderful sunny afternoon, the sweeping views of the Bay and the city were magnificent, though I have none to post here.

At the end of the ride, we took some photos against a backdrop of the Bay Bridge, and then walked down from the Ghirardelli Square area to the Hyde Street Pier, where there are restored ships of various types and from many eras that used to ply the seas to and from this port - paddle steamers, tug boats, barges, sailing ships - we didn't do any of the tours or even go on board any of these floating museums, but absorbed the flavour. Although the area is totally thronged with tourists, it is still very charming and the seafood lunch we enjoyed at one of the tourist trap restaurants was very good and value for money. People-watching from your cozy table while enjoying seafood chowder is such fun.

We walked from the Wharf into North Beach, had a great coffee and some cake at Cafe Greco, then continued on to the BART station as we needed to be home by 6.30 at the latest. Maguie and I wanted to go to a concert that Anne Shapiro was giving just a few blocks from home that evening. I met Anne through my JCC exercise class last year, and she introduced me to the Tertulias I like to attend to practise my Spanish with other non-native speakers. Maguie had met her on Thursday at the JCC and was interested to hear her concert. She sang songs in Spanish and German, accompanied on piano, and a guitarist and a cellist completed the programme - with supper at the end with some wonderful cheeses and bread as well as fresh figs and other local fruit, crackers, cakes, wine etc. , which we hadn't really expected.

The hinge on Barry's Mac Book Air had broken late in the week, and many cables pass through the channel at the back affected by the break - apparently this is a design fault in the early models, which Apple only acknowledged and agreed to fix under warranty fairly recently. There is a non-official Apple store on Shattuck Avenue where they specialise in diagnosing problems, so we took it in there a few hours after it happened, and the very helpful techie looked up Barry's machine and ascertained it was still under Warranty, and told us we'd need to take it into an Apple Store and see a Genius (for which one needs to make an appointment). He advised us to go to the downtown SF store which is across the road from the Powell St BART station rather than drive to the Emeryville one, where access and parking is notoriously difficult. So we made an appointment then and there using his computer (as of course Barry's was not working properly) for the following Sunday. We timed it for a couple of hours before we would be going into SF anyway to see our next opera, and they booked it in for repair and said they'd notify Barry when it was fixed.

This production of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment was absolutely delightful, excellent sets and very spirited performances. You can look and listen here, including to the famous Aria with ts nine High C's which showcases the young tenor star Juan Diego Florez, though I was more impressed by the soprano Diana Damrau. If you look closely you will see that the sets are made of maps of the terrain, very interesting I thought. In the pre-opera talk, the lecturer played at least 4 different tenors singing the same aria and asked the audience to identify them - which many people did (the only one I recognized was Pavarotti) .

http://sfopera.com/o/287.asp

So after this bit of fun, we went on to seek out some dinner. I got a bit creeped out walking through the somewhat scary neighbourhoods on the way there, as darkness was descending and I didn't feel safe on the streets, though we were not hassled at all. Coming from the Opera, with expensive cameras and electronic toys in our bags, I just felt a bit provocative and exposed. We were not exactly sure where we were going - Barry likes this, I hate it. We had been looking for somewhere Indian, I thought, but as soon as we found this likely looking Chinese place in the vicinity of Union Square I voted to stay and eat there rather than wander further afield. We mainly ordered yum cha (called dim sum here), which again Maguie had not experienced before. Since we first tasted dry-fried string beans in New York's Chinatown about 30 years ago, Barry and I almost always order them if we see something which sounds like it might be a similar dish, with crisp, squeak-when-you-bite-them vivid green beans with garlic, a little chili, maybe some Chinese sausage or pork tossed in the wok with them. We routinely rate the dishes we try against that first experience, which we remember as a perfect 10. We found some on the menu here, and they rated maybe a 6.5-7.

We came back to Berkeley by BART again, and got ourselves ready for Maguie's last day in Berkeley, when she and I visited College Avenue. We then picked Barry up after his teaching and office hours were done and went right back to have a very early dinner at the Rockridge end of the street, then Barry decided to accompany her to the airport by BART rather than brave the Bridge traffic at that hour. We really enjoyed her stay and we hope the change of environment cheered her up a bit and re-energised her for her return home to Mexico City.

Apologies for spelling errors in this post: I am writing up this final part in Mexico on Herzonia's LAN, and I believe there are some settings so that the spell checker thinks I am writing in Spanish. So just about everything shows up as a spelling error , disguising the real ones!

Some Berkeley-San Francisco Cultural Life

Berkeley was not to be outdone after my East Coast theatre and music experiences. Rather than photos, I have included links to some video clips in the text below.

The day I flew back to Berkeley from New York we had tickets to see Il Trovatore at the SF Opera House. I needed a suitcase for my 3+ weeks away, as that time had included some Synagogue and other occasions when I couldn't wear my usual jeans and a top and also had transitioned across seasons, so I'd needed both cool and warm weather gear. My flight got into SFO around 2 and I had established that the cloak room at the Opera House doesn't open till an hour and a half before the performance(therefore 6PM). Since 9/11, left luggage facilities seem to have disappeared, and I didn't fancy walking around San Francisco schlepping a suitcase. I also certainly didn't want to go back to Berkeley to dump my luggage only to turn right around and come back into SF, so I had been somewhat exercised by the problem.

There is a shuttle service I have frequently taken to and from the airport, so I called them from New York to ask whether they would take unaccompanied luggage, expecting that they wouldn't. But they agreed to take it from the airport and deliver it to my door in Berkeley for what they would have charged me, as long as there was a person at the other end to accept delivery. Like all these services, you have to call them when you have claimed your luggage and they arrange to pick you up at their assigned dock with their next available vehicle, which usually takes longer than it ought, and it worked out fine, leaving me free to take BART into downtown SF to look for something to wear to the Barmitzvah at the end of the month (not enough time for a museum).

In the end I only had an hour and a half at my disposal, as Sonya and Philip, whose niece Susan was visiting from the East Coast, had suggested we all go out to dinner before the Opera at Jardinière, a highly recommended restaurant very close to the Opera House. Check out their web site, which shows off the decor and some of the food, though not the menu from the night we were there, of course.

http://www.jardiniere.com/

They had arranged to pick Barry up at home in Berkeley and drive in together, and luckily the suitcase arrived literally moments before they did (he had a fail safe plan whereby the upstairs neighbours had agreed to receive the suitcase if it arrived after he left.) He called me just as they left Berkeley, and Philip suggested that as the traffic around 4 PM might be difficult, I should aim to get to the restaurant before 5 to ensure we secured the table. But as it was a longer walk than I had expected to get to the Opera precinct from the Westfield San Francisco Centre where I had been, and the traffic on the Bay Bridge was unexpectedly light, in fact they arrived before I did!

(I mention Westfield because as a shareholder in this Australian shopping centre development and management company, I like what I see of their shopping centres - maybe my shares will recover the value they have lost since I acquired them some years ago! It is a luxurious modern centre, anchored by Bloomingdales and Nordstrom, and I guess the new Chadstone is in a similar vein. The Powell Street BART station is right in the basement so it is very easy to get to.)

We had a delicious meal - with a lot of negotiation, the three women decided to share a number of starters (here they call mains "entrees" , which is confusing for Australians) , but I often find starters more interesting than mains. It is sufficiently long ago that I have forgotten exactly what we had, but there was a seafood dish , a beautifully balanced salad and a soup amongst other things, and our tasters of each other's mains were uniformly good- lots of fish, maybe Barry had duck, did Philip have venison or pheasant, I seem to recall it was game? I need to take notes! We did have several desserts including really outstanding sorbets and ice creams and a crumble, and probably something chocolate...all paired with excellent wines, but not so much as to make me fall asleep at the Opera.

It was new production of Il Trovatore. The famous Anvil Chorus was very spectacularly staged, and overall the singing and the orchestra were excellent.

Go to or cut and paste this link, where you should be able to look at and listen to video excerpts , including the Anvil Chorus.

http://sfopera.com/o/284.asp

I have found some of the performances this season a bit static and a bit too dimly lit, but this was a bit more lively with a very good set. The programme as usual was jam packed with information about the history of the work as well as a piece from Nicola Luisotti (the Musical Director of the SF Opera, in his first season) about it, the usual biographies of the performers and members of the production team, the season's new resident fellows etc., pages and pages of stuff about the sponsors and key contributors, in addition to the synopsis and cast details. We always feel like the poor cousins - it is rare for any of the performers ever to have sung in Australia, though occasionally the director in an expatriate Aussie. We are used to Opera Australia performances where it seems from reading biographies of the singers that the majority are locals and have perhaps appeared in a few European productions - yet we think they really sing as well as many of these very international singers, and I often think the productions are even better (especially ones which take advantage of the State Theatre's larger stage rather than the many which seem to be constrained to fit the small stage at the Sydney Opera House), though maybe the orchestra is less distinguished.

Philip had parked on the street very near the restaurant (and should have fed the meter once before they went off at 6 or 7, but fortunately had got away with it) so the car was just a block from the Opera House, and it only took about half an hour to get home. As we came into the dark dining room Barry tripped over my suitcase that he forgot he had left right in the middle of the floor, but I left unpacking it till the next day and crashed after a very long day still on East Coast time.

On the next evening we went to one of the plays we had booked from the Berkeley Rep season, American Idiot. Here is a link to a youtube preview of the show: turn your sound down a bit!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egGARtwaFEo

I had never heard of Green Day, the rock and roll band whose music the play was based around. The ushers were handing out earplugs at the door, and I used them but they weren't very effective. The action was centred around several young people as they moved out of school and small towns into the big city, through drugs, the army, moving away from home, unplanned parenthood, falling in and out of love... usual coming of age stuff. It was very high energy, rather interestingly staged with multiple video screens and an industrial style set, and though not exactly my cup of tea, it was better than I had expected. Next year I think I had better book the theatre events myself rather than leave it to Barry!

Much more to my taste was Michael Moore's film Capitalism: a Love Story. It was great to watch it in Berkeley, where there were lots of cheers and jeers from the audience as well as laughter and groans and sporadic applause. Ben saw it in Manhattan where there was not a peep from the audience! Vintage Michael Moore, self-indulgent and a bit scattered, I thought, and a cop out at the end where he proposes "democracy" as an alternative to capitalism (but he had just been critiquing the limits of the electoral system and who funded Obama's campaign, for example) but good to see on a big screen in the US anyway. So eyes, ears, mind and soul all stimulated in a single week - it was exhausting!

East Coast Trip Part 1, Cleveland and Baltimore, September 2009.

Seasonal produce on display at the Farmers' Market in Ossining, New York, Fall 2009.




In what is becoming routine when we are in this hemisphere, I caught up with my family for the Jewish High Holidays . This means visiting Cleveland, where my father's two youngest siblings live, and Baltimore, where my brother and his wife and his daughter, her husband and her 7 children live. The activities are pretty much as before, in last year's blog entry for this time of year as well as entries from 2 years ago. In fact my brother referred me to my own honey cake recipe which I had forgotten that I had posted here two years ago when I started the honey-cake baking marathon, if you want it check entries from late September 2007. I printed it out from the blog for Miriam and me to follow when we set about making one at their house for the visiting family to eat at Sukkot.
So I got to Cleveland a few days before Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), and had a lovely time in the kitchen with Aunt Florence baking honey cakes and figuring out a few different vegetable dishes to cook, including roast veggies (potatoes, sweet potatoes, multi-coloured peppers, red onions and asparagus). We arranged them all beautifully for Yomtov meals after due consideration of what would fit in the oven or microwave and what would look gorgeous on which platters. And of course there were heaps so there were leftovers to turn into a roast veggie salad the next day. There was also a bit of driving about with Uncle Henry to collect prepared food from the different stores they had been ordered from (and Aunt Flo orders the Challot for the Shule as well so there were a lot of those to be collected as well).

Yomtov dinner the first night of Rosh Hashanah, also Shabbat, was at first cousin Pam and Stan's. Aunt Flo and I had prepared some of the food to assist Pam, who is a special ed teacher and as a working woman has less time than we retirees did, but she had worked her magic with the chicken soup and kneidlach (aka Matzo Balls), which were fluffy and delicious. I am a failure on the kneidllach front. Everyone I know who makes good kneidlach gives me her never-fail recipe (and its antecedents, mother/ mother-in-law/grandma/ aunt etc) and mine either fall apart or come out hard, which was the style my English mother made - a fluffy kneidl is a revelation to me. My son Ben says he makes fluffy kneidlach using the packet instructions from a mix , but whether I use a mix or make them from scratch, they are never anywhere near as fluffy as those they make in the US. Maybe my hands are too cold or too warm? In between, we visited Aunt Lil, and cousins Fran and Jerry, and Michelle and Jeffrey and his daughter Leah came by at various times for a quick visit too. (Photo above shows Uncle Henry, first cousin Fran, and Aunt Flo.)

Each day I managed to fit in a walk: about 12 minutes' walk along Richmond Road from where my uncle and aunt live, there is a recently constructed linear park that runs along Shaker Boulevard. There is a constructed wetland and a walking/cycling/running track weaving around it, and I am always amused to see people driving up with their dogs to walk them. In all the many times I have walked along Richmond Road to this park, I don't think I have ever encountered a pedestrian other than a few school kids walking home the few doors from their bus stop. though it is a very pleasant area. Oddly (or maybe not so odd given my sense of direction) I had not realised that the side entrance to this park (and the car park situated by the picnic facilities and toilet block) is on the street where Fran and Jerry live. This year I discovered this because I took a walk with them (Jerry is in wheel chair and the access is quite good) and we were right there. If I do the complete circuit on both sides of Richmond Road and walk back home, it takes a bit over an hour and is just short of 10,000 steps (maybe around 7 km) . Additionally I went for a swim with Aunt Flo while she had her aqua therapy class. The JCC's indoor pool was being renovated, and they had kept their outdoor pool, which they normally close when schools resume early in September, open. It was a bright day and very sunny, but there was a stiff breeze. I was fine, doing laps the whole time so mostly submerged, but I think Aunt Flo was pretty brave as she was half out of the water most of the time. I suggested she get one of those cover up T-shirt style tops (we call them a rash suit at home, and in fact a toddler having a lesson was wearing one) that would keep her a lot warmer, even in the indoor pool. Kids wear them at home for UV protection at the beach as well as to protect their skin if they are dumped by the waves, but I don't see anyone wearing them in the pool at Berkeley (maybe I should get one myself for our last few weeks here - it can't keep being so warm and I do swim in an outdoor pool!)

And again I didn't get to the Rock and Roll Museum - I absolutely must get there again next time I am in Cleveland. I did attend a lot of synagogue services, always very enjoyable at their Conservative Temple as the cantor has a gorgeous voice and the Yomtov choir (of which Uncle Henry is a member) blends with him beautifully. The congregation loves to sing along, and this year a routine involving a Mexican wave travelled right across the sanctuary during the chorus of one of the piyutim (a piyut is a hymn usually extolling the virtues of Hashem, often an acrostic each line of which begins with a letter of the Hebrew Alphabet, sometimes in reverse order) sung to a Chasidic tune, "V'yitnu lecha keter melucha" with lots of "ya da dai's". Apparently some of the more po-faced members of the Worship Committee thought it a bit frivolous when one large and high-spritied family started it off last year, and before yomtov brought it up as something that maybe should be discouraged - but the Rabbi came down on the side of participation and enjoyment and in fact this year continued the Mexican Wave across from the congregation to himself and the President, and others seated on the bimah joined in too. After many solemn prayers on Yom Kippur this joyful melody breaks the tension and the leaping up and down oxygenated our blood to carry us through the rest of the service awake and somewhat refreshed!



From Cleveland I flew to Baltimore for a couple of days, and went swimming with Miriam at the JCC, where, though I don't think there is a formal agreement for reciprocity, showing my membership of the Berkeley JCC got me a couple of day's passes. It is a very good deal, as the JCC here in Berkeley is a cultural centre more than a sporting facility and doesn't have pools, gyms etc. , and membership is much cheaper than at places like the Baltimore or NYC JCCs. One evening we also went out to dinner at the Royal, the Iranian Glatt Kosher Chinese American restaurant that has also become a standard event when I visit. The kids really enjoyed the buffet, especially the chicken wings, and it is a pleasure to see them eat! This picture shows my brother Yaacov and his wife, Miriam, at the restaurant, where Yaacov always orders chicken-fried steak. Australians please note, this seems to be a thin piece of steak breaded and deep-fried like KFC. I haven't studied the matter carefully, so am not sure how different this wold be from a schnitzel made from somewhat aged veal. Miriam had a grilled chicken salad, most of which she took home, as the servings are very large indeed.




For my niece Esther (pictured with her youngest daughter, Leah), not having to prepare and serve a meal for her large family and, better yet, no washing up, is a real treat, even if no food were involved. Similarly for Miriam. In a strictly kosher household there is a lot more fuss over food. For meal preparation and service, tablecloths are changed or covered over as well as ensuring the correct choice amongst multiple sets of cookware, implements, cutlery and crockery needed, trips to the extra fridges or storage places downstairs , different sinks and dishwashers, quite apart from the rituals of hand washing, ensuring the appropriate blessings are made before eating each type of food, the grace after meals etc etc. It is a very different experience to a meal in a secular household, except in most households it still seems that most of the burden (or pleasure if you see it that way) falls upon the shoulders of women. I certainly need to add that this is my take on things, the observant women in my family do not complain at all about it

East Coast Trip Part 2 - New York, September-October 2009

I am opening this blog with an extremely amateurish video I shot with my camera from the fixed balloon ride I took with Ben and Lissy in August 2008 above Central Park. After all, New York City is the setting for some of this post and Central Park is an iconic site, and it has taken me a while to figure out how to post it - apologies for the quality. The mumbles are me, Ben and a WOW from Lissy. You may have to cut and paste this link into a browser window to view it.

http://picasaweb.google.com/bjoymarsh/20091127#5409001863334413458


One of the reasons I love visiting New York, beyond the fact that it IS New York City, after all, and Ben and Lissy now live there, is because of the old friendships from my days in NYC from 1968-1972. It is wonderful how I have been able to re-energise so many relationships from those passionate times, forged initially through activism in Computer People for Peace and my women's group. Jay and Ellen, Joan, Emily, Judith, Elaine, Vicki - I love to catch up when I am in NYC. Some other friends from that time are not still living in the City but I do my best to see Carmela, Laura and Judy when I am wherever they live now. And especially when I manage to get more than just an hour or two - it is really nice to be able to hang out with friends in their own space, and share their life at their pace for a little while . It does a lot to regenerate the friendship, as I discovered several years ago when I got to spend about a week at Emily’s in Briarcliff Manor, on the Hudson just north of New York City, when I first had the chance to have a more leisurely visit after I retired, rather than the typical frenetic rush when there is only a week to spend.

During the NYC part of my trip East this year, I stayed with my old friends from Computer People for Peace in the '60s, Jay and Ellen Bitkower. Jay and Ellen still live in the same building where they lived in 1969, though they now have a much larger apartment spread across 3 floors, which has undergone several very significant renovations to accommodate their growing and now departed family. It is a marvelous place to stay, within easy reach of the Broadway subway, better yet the express stop on 72nd Street (which makes it just a single stop to Times Square) , a short walk to Riverside and Central Parks for great walks, a block from the JCC and the great supermarket Fairway, the famous deli Zabar's, no end of excellent restaurants and clothing boutiques, the discount stores Loehmann's and Filene's, etc. etc. There is a Weight Watcher's meeting a block away (a plus for me) , the Museum of Natural History is an easy walk, and you can walk across Central Park or take the crosstown bus to the Met Museum. It isn't so close to where Ben and Lissy currently live (downtown on the East side) but with good connections I can get the 50 blocks downtown (these blocks are 20 to the mile) and 6 or 7 much longer crosstown blocks in under half an hour. The photos were taken last year - one is of Jay and Ellen and the other of Ben and me, both taken in August 2008 on a sunny Sunday afternoon on their deck - yes, this is in Manhattan.

Ben and Lissy had been in Argentina and returned a few hours after my arrival, so as soon as they were available I whizzed down there, bearing leftovers Ellen put together from Jay's birthday party the previous weekend which made a wonderful lunch for the three of us without needing to go out and restock their fridge. We caught up on happenings since April, when they left Melbourne, and mapped out plans for family activities during my stay. Ben and Lissy were both between jobs, so for once we were able to set aside time during the day to do things together. We had dinner at a local Indian vegetarian place before I headed back uptown.

On Friday, after a swim at the JCC (utilising the reciprocal membership rights they extended for my Berkeley JCC membership) and a bit of pottering about, I headed down to their place again to bake honey cakes for them and for Lissy's parents before a Shabbat dinner to which we also invited Rachel Boehr (who house sat for us in 2007 while she was living in Melbourne and working for Oxfam, and returned to the US to campaign for Obama in 2008. She considers Barry and me to be her "Aussie parents") . The JCC has a great gift shop and I couldn't resist taking this and several other photos of the very non-traditional menorot they had for sale, including the shoe menora which could be titled "Sex and the City meets the JCC". I spent Saturday afternoon with Ellen and her daughter Jennifer - we went downtown to catch a concert but had got the date wrong, so we enjoyed the street life around Union Square (including the farmers' market and another street fair a bit further downtown) and checked out Trader Joe's. Barry recently discovered that Aldi, the German supermarket chain that we know about since it has opened stores in the last few years in Melbourne, owns Trader Joe's, and there are some family similarities, though Trader Joe's stores seem to be a bit better organised than Aldi's seemingly randomly arranged Melbourne stores. There are 2 branches I use close to Berkeley, one near my hairdresser so I am usually there without a car, and the other at a nearby mall where we drive to stock up. It is the one place I know of locally which stocks kosher chicken, whose flavour I prefer - much US chicken seems to be tasteless, even the organic and free range versions. Due to NY state licensing laws, the liquor is sold in a separate outlet in NYC, not like here where "2 Buck Chuck" , a range of quaffable wines under the Charles Shaw label is sold for $2 a bottle alongside all their other liquor and ordinary groceries. All the stores stock Australian and NZ wines, sometimes even exactly the labels and vintages we're familiar with, though more often under more generic Australian labelling. Though I enjoy trying new wines, I must admit I buy a lot more NZ Sauvignon Blanc and Aussie Shiraz than I should - it seems patriotic and my taste has been formed by these wines (though as a Foster's shareholder I guess I should buy anything under the Beringer label to improve my dividends) .

I realize I was so overwhelmed by Ben and Lissy's January wedding that I have never blogged about it, and though it was a very significant event, and a truly wonderful and joyous occasion, I probably never will. But here is one photo of Ben and Lissy and both sets of parents taken in the Park Avenue Synagogue by a family member on my camera just before the ceremony on January 3, 2009. This can remind you of what Lissy's parents Barbara and Bernard look like, though usually we are none of us quite so glamorous!

Sunday I headed off to NJ with Ben, where Lissy collected us at the station and we had our pre-Kol Nidrei meal at Barbara and Bernard's and headed off to shule. I spent the night there, and Yom Kippur again was spent in shule, though as their Temple is undergoing renovations, the local High School was used to house the various services. NJ, or at least this part of it, has a school holiday for Yom Kippur, but getting the place all ready in time must have required formidable organisation and logistics. I haven't visited a high school at home for years, but was blown away by the size of the campus here, and the gymnasium, the assembly halls etc: I guess high schools are very big! Between the regular service in the Hall designated as the Sanctuary, the lay-led service we attended, and the various children's and youth services, there were a lot of spaces to prepare and occupy. I still can't quite get used to synagogues having large car parks attached, a legacy of growing up attending Orthodox Synagogues where people either didn't drive or if they did, parked a respectful distance away!

We broke our fast as usual at Isaac and Melanie's (Isaac is Barbara's brother), and I really am feeling part of the family now after many Yomtovs spent together. They are so generous, warm and welcoming. And Melanie told Lissy when they first met Ben years ago that he was "a keeper" so how could I not love her? They were about to go to Israel to visit their daughter and son-in law Andrea and Brad, plus 2 small kids, who have recently made Aliyah (emigrated to Israel) , so there was a smaller group at table than usual - but it seemed just as much food (and just as delicious) . We decided to return to NYC that night, as Lissy had a job interview on Tuesday, so Lissy's brother Drew dropped us at the train station in Jersey City on his way home, and we got the PATH train which links with the subway home. I had never travelled on this line before and wasn't sure of the best connection, and had no subway map with me, so I had a bit of a long trek underground, but had very little luggage so it was no hassle . I have since discovered a much better connection, so if I need to do the trip again I am equipped. After 9/11, quite a lot of businesses and residents moved across to Jersey City, and in fact Goldman Sachs's training centre, where Ben would be due to start his new job in a week, is right there and we noticed it on our way to the station.

We had arranged to go to Lakewood NJ on Wednesday to spend some time with my nephew Moshe, his wife Leiba, and their 3 kids. The senior's fare on the bus was very reasonable but the full fare was more than twice as much. I got to the Port Authority Bus Station first and picked up all the tickets, but when Ben and Lissy saw what it all cost they realised it would have been cheaper and a lot faster to hire a zip car for the day. But anyway, we took the bus as arranged and Mose picked us up at the bus station in Lakewood. There are a lot of Yeshivas there, and I still have trouble accommodating to seeing large ultra-orthodox institutions and store with signs in Yiddish and Hebrew cheek-by-jowl with a heavy Latino presence and Spanish signs. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera ready to take shots from the bus as some of the weirder juxtapositions tickled my funny bone.

Leiba had prepared the most lavish and delicious lunch for us, with sushi in addition to more tradition fare of Bagels and "shmears" - egg , tuna and whitefish salads , cream cheese and lox, salad, fruit - and home made soup to start, and cake to finish.... Lissy had not met them before except briefly at the wedding, so there was a lot of catching up to do. Their 2 girls were at school and Yisroel their son at pre-school, so Moshe gave us a little tour of the 'hood before it was time to pick them up. I remember staying at a kosher hotel with wonderful food by the lake in late 1969 just after my brother's wedding, so asked to see the lake for which the town is presumably named. We took a scenic tour and I got a photo of Moshe with Ben and Lissy by the lake, and also some Canada Geese (one of which is pictured below), which Moshe asserted were not kosher, so they are presumably safe from Orthodox shooters at least.

Leiba, who is a hairdresser and works a lot with sheitls (the wigs worn by Orthodox women) has opened a Shadchan (matchmaking) business in Lakewood over the last couple of years. She is a very empathetic and resourceful person, very warm and welcoming, and when I first heard about the business I was sure she'd be great at it. With all the Yeshivas there, there is a very large pool of young men looking to get married, and in the Orthodox community young people depend on introductions to meet the opposite sex as they are hardly likely to meet them in bars or the gym or at work, for example. She told us a bit about the business and we visited her offices and looked at the applications from the girls' families and the databases of boys from the Yeshivas that she works with. There is a Rabbi from Baltimore who works with her as that is another very large Orthodox community in need of matches - in fact the community there financially rewards Shadchans who match girls over the ripe old age of 24 in addition to whatever fees are paid by the parents! It was a fascinating view of a very different culture - Lissy asked Ben if he'd seen anyone amongst the applicants who looked a likely match - well, of course, he is taken already, but he then asked her what she (or her parents) would have put on her application. Cause of much hilarity all around, of course way over the heads of the kids who loved racing around writing on the whiteboards and punching holes in scrap paper while we got our business briefing.

We returned to the house for a bit of a play with the kids - Lissy and Ben are so good with little kids, they get right into their games- and then Moshe and Yisroel took us back to the bus station for the much longer ride back into Manhattan, as it was evening rush hour and getting to and through the tunnel took ages. So I was rather late for the scheduled dinner with Joan, Jay and Ellen at our local Indian restaurant, and they at least were starving, not having experienced Leiba's lunchtime hospitality.

Another evening I met Ben and Lissy in Greenwich Village to see a new production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. I knew nothing about it except that it is a classic American play, studied at high school or college, and was very surprised by it: I thought it must be a very modern, stripped down production but it seemed to be produced pretty much exactly as written. I guess the Australians who know as little as I did about the play can do what I did when I got home, and check it out on wikipedia at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Town

We had a great meal beforehand at a restaurant called Westville, which specialised in vegetable side dishes - we had 8 small ones (I remember as I write, 2 months later, the garlic mashed potatoes, mushrooms with leeks, snow peas stir-fried with sesame and soy, baby bok choi, crispy string beans maybe with almonds, zuchinni with cherry tomatoes, beetroot with goat cheese, but must have forgotten one dish - plus a big mixed salad with some steak in it). I hadn't been down to the Village in years and determined I must explore it some more on my next trip, as I'd forgotten how interesting it is where the numbered streets' grid gets distorted, W4th and W10th intersect around the corner from the Sheridan Square subway stop, and named streets rule. As on my last full day in NYC, when Iagain went downtown and hung out with Lissy for a while at their apartment before heading to Chinatown for a Vietnamese meal with Ben after his first day at his new job, in an area of NYC I also don't know well, I was very glad to have them guide me to the right subway to get home without too many line changes.

Towards the end of this trip I managed to spend a couple of days at Emily and Bob’s. When I arrived Emily’s on Friday morning, her older sister Eleanor was visiting. I think I have met her once before, very many years ago, but certainly hadn’t previously spent time with the two sisters together. After seeing my Berkeley friend Sonya with her two sisters and now Emily and Eleanor, I wish I had a sister of my own! After Emily and Eleanor picked me up at the station, we had lunch at the Stone Barns, part of the Rockefeller Estate I probably mentioned in this blog last year. There was a special event, The Harvest Festival, scheduled for the next day, so the usual Friday Farmers’ Market in the garden was cancelled, and there were three enormous pigs being roasted on huge spits for the festival, each hand-turned by an independent operator) nearby, in preparation for the festivities, so we found it a bit smoky. The utensils, cups and plates the cafe uses are all compostable, though the cutlery looks like dull beige plastic. Later we toured the greenhouses where they grow the veggies they use in the cafe and restaurant there (and also supply several other establishments) and read all about their composting and recycling policies and practices. Very encouraging. But I am always astonished at the huge volumes of garbage in bags on the streets in the City – I guess this is another manifestation of the population as well as the general over-packaging in the US. I don’t see many people bringing their calico or other reusable bags to the supermarkets here, though most of my friends always do so. I think I see a bit more of it in Berkeley than in NYC – like Priuses! (In fact Joan even has a few green bags she collected several years ago in Australia, and Emily has so many calico bags she has been known to give them away to willing takers in the supermarkets!)

The photo shows Eleanor (left) and Emily in front of a store window in the old main street of Tarrytown , which we visited on our way back to Emily's. Emily's hair is growing back after she shaved her head in solidarity with Sondra, her best friend who recently underwent chemotherapy. Eleanor had her 50^th High School reunion on Friday Night, and Emily’s Cousins' Party, an annual event for the 30 odd cousins on her mother’s side, had been scheduled nearby in New Rochelle for the same weekend so that Eleanor could attend both with one flight in from Chicago. The same weekend it was Sukkot and the Caramoor Music Festival was on. This is another of the outdoor venues there are so many of in the US (Tanglewood is the biggest I guess, but there are many others in the summer in the Northeast. ) We went to a Friday night all-Beethoven concert by the New York Philharmonic, conducted by their new conductor Alan Gilbert, the Seventh Symphony and the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58) , with Emmanuel Ax as soloist. The traffic was really awful – we got to the concert late though we thought we had allowed plenty of time. They delayed the start so we were seated just in time, but hundreds were not . The entire row in front of our seats was empty until the interval, when we heard from the latecomers about the late-seating area which was filled to overflowing ,while a queue snaked all around the impressively huge tent with latecomers held up on the one road in, who missed the first half and were only allowed in for the second half. I gather that this was by a large margin the biggest crowd they had ever had, and despite having sent out postcards to ticket holders advising early arrival, you needed more like an hour in hand than the 30-45 minutes most people allowed.

Despite the logistics, however, it was a great programme, very enjoyable to hear such a good orchestra and a great soloist, though I thought they played the last couple of movements of the Seventh a bit too fast, and the acoustics seemed to swallow up a bit of the lower registers of the piano and the brass during the piano concerto. The New York Philharmonic was very impressive.

We picked Eleanor’s husband Mike up at the local airport a bit before the Saturday concert, which featured Jazz great Chick Corea playing solo on the same Steinway. We left time for traffic jams this time but got there very early as there was no problem at all. We had a picnic supper first – it was a bit damp as it had been quite a rainy day, and there was no lighting in the picnic area at night so it was a bit hard to figure out what we were eating, but the pre-ordered picnic boxes provided were very tasty and varied. The first half of the concert was jazz classics and improvisations that I don’t really appreciate, but the second half opened with pieces by Scarlatti and Scriabin, followed by some pieces by a few other jazz composers and a lot of Corea’s own work, whose structures and musicality I was much better able to enjoy. It was quite a contrast from the experience of a full symphony orchestra the night before.

On Sunday morning Emily took us for a walk by the beautiful Hudson (see the photos above m- lanscape, autumn foliage and some fall crocuses) , in a part of the Rockefeller estate I hadn’t seen before, and then we proceeded to White Plains, where Emily and Eleanor grew up. I saw their childhood house and then Emily took me to the new home of my first cousin Jeremy, who with his wife Tara and twins Jonathan and Jacob (pictured here) have relocated from London. We swung by the train station to collect Ben and Lissy, as we were all invited to lunch in their sukkah. And as a bonus, Jeremy’s sister Angela (her picture is just below) was visiting from London, so it was another family reunion. Angela and Ben hadn’t seen each other for about 20 years, we guessed, and she had of course not met Lissy. We 3 last saw Jeremy and Tara at Ben and Lissy’s wedding, and last time we visited they were in Scarsdale and had not yet moved to White Plains, so there was a lot of catching up to do. Ben and Lissy love interacting with the 5 year-old twins, with a lot of pretend and chasey and shrieking and throwing balls and scary soft toys. This was the day before Ben was due to start his new job, so after taking the express train back to Grand Central in the evening, they went home and I returned to Jay and Ellen’s, with a plan to meet for dinner the next night, my last night in NYC.

I took the Supershuttle to JFK airport from Jay and Ellen’s, on the Upper West Side. Though it picked me up 3 hours before my flight was due to depart, and I was second on the minibus, we took an hour and a half tracing a circuitous route through Upper Manhattan , back down to the Upper East Side and then down Lexington Ave to the 59^th Street Bridge. This was pretty interesting between 7.40 and 9 on a workday morning, seeing such a variety of streetscapes and street life. Not a white face to be seen north of 145^th Street, and still many boarded-up buildings and store fronts up there in Harlem, giving way to largely Hispanic faces and stores in Spanish Harlem (is it still called that? I remember looking for an apartment to rent in early 1968. Innocent abroad that I was, I put down a deposit on a place around 98^th St on the East Side, only to be told that I wouldn’t be safe in that neighbourhood, Spanish Harlem , in those years (long before I learned to speak Spanish). I took the advice, lost the deposit, and ended up on the Upper West Side, where I still encountered several muggers in my 4 years in NYC). Of course the greatest risk one faces in this neighbourhood now is to be mowed down by people queuing for ice cream, and the blocks of misery to be avoided then have been gentrified and are now very desirable and totally unaffordable.

As we got closer to mid-town all the pedestrian traffic was heading towards office blocks, bearing briefcases and very smartly turned out, except for the sneakers rather than smart women’s shoes, which are kept in the office. Manhattan is so densely populated! And the traffic! I thought nostalgically of the Clearways in Melbourne as the Shuttle Van wove in amongst the double- and triple-parked cars, taxis, delivery vans, buses and streams of pedestrians jay-walking. Then it took nearly half an hour just to get across the bridge and onto the bits of freeway heading for JFK, but there were no further hold ups and I got to the airport just short of 2 hours after leaving 75^th St, with a bit over an hour in hand to check in and deal with the queues through security.

I remember when flying used to be fun, but the performance at airports especially in the US is very far from that now... I always forget about taking off my shoes when I get dressed – today I was in sandals so had to walk about barefoot for a while, at other times I have worn boots with a tricky zip or awkward-to-lace and -unlace sneakers. I don’t actually have any easily-slipped on and off shoes, certainly none I could comfortably travel in – I should have saved some of those paper slippers they give you in Japan. I wonder what the next crazy bomber will do to alter the search protocols once again – the shoe bomber and the liquid plotters have a lot to answer for in adding to the misery of millions of airline passengers!

My Berkeley Choir at the Solano Stroll, and some observations

They put on a street festival called the Solano Stroll each year along Solano Avenue, a street about a mile long that runs downhill from Berkeley into Albany and is full of interesting shops and restaurants. I blogged about last year's Stroll here, so if you are interested you can refresh your memories by scrolling back through this blog to that posting, or look at the Stroll's web site http://www.solanostroll.org/ for more information on the kind of festival it is. The East Bay Jewish Folk Chorus had a gig at this year's Stroll with a band called Adama, singing and playing some well-known Israeli folk dances to draw in lots of the passers-by. I rehearsed with the choir last year and found it great fun to be singing in Hebrew and Yiddish - well, at least I am very familiar with Hebrew, more so than with the Spanish and much more so than the Greek that my Melbourne Community Choir, Canto Coro, sing in, and I am also familiar with a lot of the songs from my childhood and general cultural exposure. But last year because of other commitments (notably Ben's wedding!) I wasn't around to actually perform live with the choir.

I don't read music so I need to practise lots, and finally bought myself a little MP3 player as Barry's iPod is loaded from his Mac and with his being away at a conference in Bilbao, it was impossible to get late versions of my songs onto it. I must seem fairly peculiar to the casual observer as I walk around Berkeley singing along with the alto parts I am listening to on the player. Come to think of it, in the general Berkeley scheme of things, I am probably no more eccentric than is normal here! But as I do walk a fair bit, it is a golden opportunity to get the music into my head, though I need to practise with the words as well. I also tend to practise (very quietly, I thought) on public transport, which I thought would be noisy enough so no-one would notice, but recently while travelling on BART into San Francisco I have got some funny looks from adjacent seats so maybe the earphones are distorting my perception of loud!

I only found out about the gig a couple of weeks before it was due to happen, so the singing was my highest priority since then. I went to 2 full choir rehearsals, and as I drafted this post, was feeling terrific after a great alto rehearsal at my house. Three of the four altos (including me) were able to come after we decided at a rehearsal the night before that we needed more work.

As the other two women, Laurie and Dana, were coming from work, and it had been a very hot day, I decided to prepare a great big salad so we could eat together quickly and recharge our batteries. It really hit the spot, as did the wine Laurie brought. We had a lovely chat over the salad, and then got down to work. Dana had brought her keyboard and we went through all our songs many times, working through the tricky bits. I had seen one of the songs for the first time the night before, and Dana hadn't been at any rehearsal before then, so most of them were new to her. But as she is very well-educated musically and sight-reads, we rely on her a lot. We took a break for a cup of tea and some honey cake and went back to work again. I guess we put in at least a couple of hours' singing altogether, and it was totally enjoyable.

I usually characterise myself as a singer whose enthusiasm exceeds my talent by a considerable margin, but with enough work I can learn the tunes and I just love to sing. It is one of those activities I only took up when I retired, but I so enjoy it. I find however tired or disinclined I feel before a rehearsal or performance, I always feel uplifted, energetic and full of joy afterwards. And that is how I was feeling when I started on this post. We had a dress rehearsal the next afternoon, then our performances were at 2 and 4 on Sunday. This year I remembered to charge my camera battery (last year the battery ran out quite early, so there were many sights I couldn't capture. Very frustrating!) But this year I was so busy rehearsing, singing, and meeting friends that I was too preoccupied to take many photos. The ones I have posted were mostly taken by the wife of one of the band members. If you click on the photos they enlarge so you might even recognise me in some of them , and any other choir or audience members who are reading the blog, check yourselves out too!

There are more photos, in a large format, at this link

http://www.jeremycohenbass.com/Solano.html

but you probably need to copy and paste the link into your browser's address line rather than just click on it to see the photos

In the shot above, you can see me talking with my friend Sonya and her sisters (who were visiting from the East Coast) after the chorus had finished singing, listening to the band and watching the dancers.

It is quite hard to grasp the diversity of this country. Here in the Bay area we have the largest concentration of Nobel prize winners in the world, and an event like the Solano Stroll really embraces and celebrates diversity and difference. Yet in the US right now one also hears a level of debate about health care reform which is utterly ill-informed and totally ignores the fact that despite the existence of extremely advanced (if costly) medical care, life expectancy is lower and infant mortality higher here than in almost all developed (and some developing) countries, and medical costs are spiralling up at many times the overall rate of inflation. It is a kind of blindness, and many people are in the thrall of a counter-factual vision of reality where the US is always seen as the best of all possible worlds. Another example - people refusing to send their kids to school because President Obama is addressing school kids about the importance of getting an education, working hard and staying away from drugs, as if that were some kind of socialist propaganda and the elected president has no right to speak to the next generation about the world they will inherit. It often leaves me speechless, with no common ground for advancing discussion.

Two other illustrations of the kind of thing that throws me:

First, I bought a copy of Street Spirit, the newspaper that homeless people sell on the streets here. It is not formatted as a magazine like The Big Issue in Melbourne, but is tabloid-sized and printed on newsprint. It is published by the American Friends Service Committee. I am going to quote something that left me speechless, from an article about violence directed against homeless people on the streets in the US, by Brian Levin and Michael Stoops, in Vol 15, No 9, September 2009.

"Bumfights"is a popular violent video series that sold hundreds of thousands of tapes and DVDs before going viral on the Internet. The film series sets a new low in American popular culture, featuring fights between homeless men plied by the producers with alcohol, as well as sadistic parodies of the late Australian conservationist "crocodile hunter" Steve Irwin. These skits feature terrified sleeping homeless people who are startled awake and forcibly restrained with duct tape by "hunters" narrating their attacks with feigned Australian accents"

And, to quote the caption of a rather horrible accompanying photo, "Violent and fatal attacks against homeless Americans have risen to shocking levels. Assaults and murders of homeless people now exceed those of all other hate crimes committed against all other minorities".

73% of the attacks were committed by individuals who were aged 25 and younger. When we were at Lake Tahoe I saw an episode of Law and Order: SVU which dealt with this phenomenon. I have often seen episodes featuring a newsworthy or morally challenging issue, e.g. recently euthanasia or opposition to vaccination, but in this case I had not heard of the issue until I saw the episode, and then to see it raised in this publication a week or two later was quite a shock, (even without the truly bizarre Steve Irwin link).

Second, while I was taking a break from practicing for the Solano Stroll concert, it happened to be the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers in New York. As usual when I am around the kitchen, I was listening to KQED, the Bay Area Public Radio station. They were broadcasting a BBC mockumentary dramatization of the events around that weekend, with the Bank of America takeover of Merrill Lynch, the behind-the-scenes machinations involving the Federal Reserve, the British government, the various individual players at Lehman and the other institutions – it was absolutely riveting radio but I haven’t been able to locate a link to a podcast to refer you to (I know quite often when the (Australian) ABC has broadcast a science programme based on BBC material, the podcast doesn’t use that material, so maybe they have a more restrictive approach to podcasts than Australian or American public broadcasters do. ) I will try again before I finally publish this post , but perhaps you have better skills than me in finding such things for yourselves if you are interested. I highly recommend it both as an interesting piece of radio drama but also as an example of the excellent coverage of public affairs by NPR, as opposed to the shock jocks of talk radio who deal in slogans and fear-mongering and eschew any kind of rational consideration of the real issues. Again, as so often here in the US, you find the best and worst examples cheek by jowl – media, food, environment, health care, religion, social attitudes. It is definitely a very interesting and endlessly fascinating place to live