Wednesday Midday, February 21

1) Oldest Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged gave me for Christmas a daily Shakespearean insult calendar, which is great, but I don't remember to change the page every day. Catching up this morning, I was arrested by the insult du jour for Presidents Day: "Fit to govern? No, not to live." - Macbeth

1a) As my friend Sean taught me, "That puts the B in subtle."

2) Observing how little people read or comprehend what is given them. And yes, I've been guilty of some howlers in my time (and will be again). It's just a reminder that people a) would rather call and ask where something is than look for it, and b) see information differently from how we intend them to see it.

3) A glittering, warm February day requires a walk by the river. In shirtsleeves.

Monday Late Morning, Presidents Day, 2018

1) Awake very early, coffee, devotional, dining room breakfast, and acres of dishwashing with Pygmalion in the background.

2) About 10 AM the doorbell rang, beginning a one-hour conversation with the third-floor contractor about what he did in their kitchen and what might be done with mine. A noice young Oirishmin with a foine twinkle in his oye and a pleasant accint. It was a very educational conversation, and I hope he didn't notice how pale I turned when he mentioned an estimate that included many golden vowels. This is probably not a project I'll turn to quickly - I'd rather go to Europe - but, as I'm so fond of saying, Knowledge is Power.

2a) At least I didn't see him turn pale when I mentioned the Howard Johnson's-and-Fiestaware color scheme I was thinking about. I'm well aware that my color sense is considered garish at best, but life is too short for that much beige.

3) Thrilling to have been invited to speak at the WGBH Masquerade fund-raiser on March 10, and I'll be working on my presentation this afternoon. The only thing to get in my way is a return visit from the plumber, to look after the third floor's hot water heater, which mysteriously shut off; our fear is that its electrical components were drowned in Saturday's event.

Sunday Evening, February 18

1) Launched a friend's Birthday Week with brunch at Back Bay Beats, aka B3. I could live the rest of my life on their ham biscuits*. Our table was, deliciously, situated in blazing sun, to which I happily turned my back, and when we weren't talking about the food, we were talking about current films, particularly Call Me By Your Name (which I haven't yet seen).

1a) I didn't have whatever it was that came with "Alabama white sauce," but I joked that it ought to be named after Jeff Sessions.

2) En route to the Stah Mahket, I saw this sign:

And it reminded me of a story a guy in a couple of my college classes told me about getting his dog high. He and a friend were getting high and blowing smoke from their bong hits into the face of their dog. Later they saw the dog walk down the stairs of their front porch, pause, and fall sideways into a bush. They laughed like drains, but I thought "That's abuse."

3) After a nice long NAP I filmed this week's Etiquetteer video, and now, hours later, my brain feels anesthetized by gin.

*As Lady Gwendolyn famously said in The Importance of Being Earnest, "If you don't take too long I'll wait all my life."

Sunday Morning, February 18

1) This is turning into the Weekend of Vigorous Home Ownership. Up just before 6:00 AM (quite naturally) to shovel our length of sidewalk, which took only about half an hour.

Thank goodness the Elizabeth Taylor filter is working! I need it at this hour.

2) Someone at the office left a basket of gourmet goodies on "Temptation Island," and I came away with a large jar of flaked "Mexican drinking chocolate." I put four into a cup of coffee (not what they intended), and I must say, it adds a lush richness to my morning.

3) Speaking of lush richness, all my devotional readings this morning were full of facets and shades of interpretation - more than I could take really. Genesis 47, C.S. Lewis from his book The Problem of Pain. Probably the easiest to deal with was No. 150 from The Art of Worldly Wisdom: "Know how to sell your wares."

Saturday Midday, February 17 - "And I Feel LIke My Boiler Has Exploded!"

Quote of the Day: "I knew this sort of thing happened to other people, but never to us!" - Mary Haines

1) Up around 7:15 after a loooooooong night's sleep. I put in a load of laundry, made coffee with a bit of Mexican chocolate in it (indulgent), had my devotional in the parlor, and actually went back to bed.

2) About 9:00 AM, my third-floor neighbor called. "Are you available?" "Sure, are you in the basement?" "Yeah, and wear shoes, it's wet down here!

3) Between the time I'd put my wash in and 9 AM, my hot water heater burst its seam, commencing to flood the basement. Time to lurch into action! Quick! Rush upstairs for towels, call the plumber and leave a voicemail, find their online emergency request form and fill it out, empty buckets as my neighbor continued to drain my hot water heater. At least I'd already had my coffee . . .

4) With the heater drained and the plumber expected in a couple hours, we could then survey the situation. A thin but substantial puddle spread throughout all three storage units, but 99% of belongings were not stored directly on the floor. My unit has always been "low tide," but this time around, the back of the center storage unit seemed to have the deepest water.

5) To my surprise, the condo association actually owns a wet vac. I can now claim to have successfully operated a wet vac, under the tutelage of my neighbor. First he removed the filter and I emptied out the barrel or chamber or whatever you call it of remaining brick dust. Then I found the sweet spots in the floor where the water was deepest. After that, it was like Mammy lacing Scarlett into a corset: "Just hol' on, and suck in!"

6) We drained that chamber thing four or five times of brown-black water, filling buckets and emptying them in the back of the house. Gold stars all around for teamwork!

7) The plumber has come and gone, and I'm choking a bit on the price (since this is happening over a holiday weekend). But I am counting my blessings, too. This was discovered before the entire contents of the heater had flooded the basement, and while someone in the building who knew what to do was here (e.g. NOT me) so that I didn't have to get through it by myself, that I'd already had my coffee when it happened, and that a surprise escrow refund a couple weeks ago is cushioning this sudden expense.

8) Speaking of "counting my blessings," I did have a notable GTS moment while cleaning up around the busted heater with my neighbor. "How many fur coats have I got, Annie?" "Six." "And how many of these service stripes have I collected?" "Seven." [with mounting hysteria] "Imagine! Six fur coats! Seven diamond bracelets! An apartment on Park Avenue!" "Honey, what're you tryin' t'do to yourself?" "What am I trying to do? Don't you know? I'M COUNTING MY BLESSINGS, ANNIE! COUNTING MY BLESSSSIIIIIIIIIINGS!"

9) By the way, the quote in the title of this post comes from Roald Dahl's My Uncle Oswald.

Thursday Midday, February 15

1) So, is the glass half empty or half full? Yesterday I missed my self-imposed Etiquetteer publish deadline for the first time this year, but today I got an invitation to do a program at a fund-raiser for a prominent local organization (stay tuned for more info). I'm gonna say the glass is half full.

2) This morning's staff breakfast meeting included a surprise birthday cake presentation. From my seat I could see the cake with lit candles in the meeting room kitchen, but the colleague presenting could not. To prevent puddles of pink wax forming on the frosting, I finally spoke up: "[Insert Name of Colleague Here], I hate to interrupt, but I think we need to give the floor to [Insert Name of Cake-Bearing Colleague Here]."

2a) I could've put my entire face into that cake. #omnomnom

2b) Remind me to tell the story of how I didn't manage the surprise 50th birthday party for Original Boss without hysteria.

3) Ye Instytytte is all concerned about climate change, but still can't keep my office cooler than 74 degrees. Workin' in a hotbox here, people!

Thursday Morning, February 15

1) Up early, and in a somber mood reading the news: the school shooting in Florida, the President's interest in selling off the airports in Washington, the massive cuts in student aid that the President and the Secretary of Education want to make. I fall to see how any of these things could make America great again.

1a) And the news of Russia already meddling in our midterm elections just adds to the worry.

2) Quote of the Day, from Walt Whitman's Calamus Poems:

"There shall be innovations.
There shall be countless linked hands—namely, the
          Northeasterner’s, and the Norwesterner’s, and
          Southwesterner’s, and those of the interior,
          and all their brood,
These shall be masters of the world under a new
          power,
They shall laugh to scorn the attacks of all the remainder
          of the world."

3) Every year Lent rolls around and I say "Robert, you ought to go back and find Rev. Peter Gomes's "How to Keep a Good Lent," and I don't do it, 'cause we never made a big fuss about Lent in the Methodist Church. So today I am at least linking to the article; it's a start.

Midday, Saint Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday, 2018

1) I got a late start this morning, but I remembered to wear red for Valentine's Day: socks and tie. And actually, I'm wearing a gray shirt, so I guess that works for Ash Wednesday.

1a) I can't say the Methodists ever made a production over Ash Wednesday. It wasn't until I moved to New England that I even became aware of the whole ritual of ashes on the forehead made from burning the palms of the previous year's Palm Sunday.

2) If you can't wear red, think pink!

3) "Temptation Island" in the office is the top of a credenza featuring food offerings: leftovers from meetings, home-baked delights from colleagues, or random culinary detritus. Today features a traditional heart-shaped box of chocolates and another container of chocolate candies. All morning I've been saying "Hashtag Resist!" It's not working.

Tuesday Midday, February 13

1) The first email I read this morning informed me of the death of one of my very favorite volunteers, an elderly gentleman I've worked with almost 14 years, who died in an accident late last week. So it's been a distressing morning.

2) I'd slept badly last night as it was, after witnessing an altercation on the Ligne d'Orange, one man bullying another VERY LOUDLY with phrases like "I CAN'T F*CKIN' HEAR YOU!" and 'YOU'RE NOT AT HOME!" One my way out of the train at Gare de Back Bay I actually said to him "You're not at home either!" but I don't think he noticed.

2a) As to my own reaction, I could only hear Maggie Smith in A Room With a View saying " . . . and you've been brought up among such nice people, you do not know what men can be!"

3) Anything else is trivial after all that.

Monday Midday, Lincoln's Birthday, 2018

1) Baby kale salad, part of today's nutritious breakfast.

2) Alas, The Book of the Courtier has been momentarily cast aside in favor of Daphne Fielding's Emerald & Nancy: Lady Cunard and her Daughter, a recent discovery at ye Bryttle Bykke Shoppe. Having enjoyed Fielding's memoir Mercury Presides years ago, I was interested to read this (Nancy Cunard has interested me since I was first given her biography in college), and I must say, none of the other books about her ever made me want to read her poetry, but this one does. I wasn't expecting to find it full of Quotable Quotes, but it is. So brace yourself, Millicent . . .

2a) "Another particular friend was Tommy Earp, a rich and eccentric young Yorkshireman with a red face, close-cropped hair and an original manner of speech. He too occasionally indulged in verse and one of his poems, dedicated to a boy briefly encountered during a night out in Paris [emphasis mine], opened with the lines:

O golden head that, if the truth be told,
Is golden only for the sake of gold."

2a.1) All the more interested as a flaxen-haired man was sitting not far from me on the bus, and his hair was clearly not "golden only for the sake of gold" but because sometimes even clouds can't obscure the sun.

2b) "At night they bathed naked in the Adriatic."

2c) But I was hammered over the head with this bit from a letter George Moore wrote to Nancy: "Many years ago a poet said to me, and his words have often been with me: 'If you got out and amuse yourself when you can't write, your art and life will waste to nothingness'. An artist's live in this is like an acrobat's, he must exercise his craft daily, when inspiration is by him and when it is afar. He must not wait for inspiration, he must contniue to call it down to him always and at last it will answer him; I should have said be always with him. His counsel did not go unheeded."

2d) Of course remembering Ruth Draper's "The Italian Lesson:" "I expect we'll find this is full of quotations."

3) Wow, Hahvahd finally has a president I know personally.

Weekend in Review, February 10-11

A) I haven't been a thrift shop shopper for a long time, but I grew tired of my guests drinking red wine out of champagne flutes (because I have lots of flutes and martinis, but no goblets). So I stopped off at both ye Gyddwyll and ye Bymmeryngs and ended up with seven balloon goblets in two patterns for less than $10.00.

1) To shake things up a bit, early Saturday afternoon I went to the local paper's travel expo. I don't know what, if anything, I expected besides travel literature, but the place was crawling with retirees, not all of them light on their feet. And it reminded me that a) Lord willin' and the crick don't rise I'll be retired in just over ten years, and b) I really do want to get my serious travel out of the way before I'm 70. So I have 15.5 years to go . . .

That building under the crane was where Anthony's Pier 4 used to be.

2) Walking through the Seaport District en route to the Athenaeum . . . so much new construction since I was last there. I don't recognize all this glass and steel as Bostonian. It could be anywhere in the world!

3) I'd intended to stay in town through dinner, but finally had to recognize that I needed a NAP. So back on the Ligne d'Orange I went to snatch 40 winks in 45 minutes before heading right back into town. #oldfart #agingactressyesterdaysglamorqueen

4) Then it was time to dine at Jacob Wirth with my friend David. Those of us who care about Old Boston have a renewed interest in Jake Wirth's after the news story of it being up for sale. Established in 1868, it's still a German beer hall, but y'know . . . people just don't eat sausage and pig's feet like they used to. Anyway, we had a good dinner of "pork tenerlion" ["I'm not making this up, you know!"]. David consumed an enormous liter of dark beer, schooling me on the difference between a stein and a tankard, while I managed two manhattans in reasonable succession.

Of course there were references to The Student Prince.

4a) David ran into a couple of his many musical friends - they're everywhere.

5) Home before 8:30ish, I got my second wind and committed Acts of Domesticity for a couple hours listening to "You Must Remember This" podcast episodes. Listening to the story of Liz Taylor pulling Monty Clift's teeth out of his throat after the car accident . . . *shudder*.

6) Managed to get today's column published before 11:15 AM, so the day wasn't a total waste. (I need to feel like I've accomplished something by 11 AM to feel I haven't wasted the day.) This also means I haven't missed a twice-weekly publish date this year. :-)

7) In the early afternoon the new second-floor neighbors came to call, a nice young heterosexual married couple with a young woman who will be taking their second bedroom. Genuinely nice, outdoorsy folks who play soccer, don't smoke, and who don't have children. I think it's going to work.

8) I fully intended to film an Etiquetteer video this afternoon, but was disturbed to find I had no white vermouth, a necessary ingredient.

9) In the early evening, once all the laundry had been put away, I turned my attention to making a pot of chikhirtma for the first time since I lived in the North End. My kitchen being what it is, that called for a few substitutions, like celery and garlic for a large onion, cheesecloth for a fine strainer, and nothing for cinnamon. The final product was not too bad.

9a) Perhaps the biggest surprise of the weekend was discovering that I did have coriander on my spice rack.

9b) "Have silver that shines or none at all!" declared Emily Post. During the initial stage of the soup cooking, I was able to polish my dinner forks to a palpable difference. Some of them had decidedly gotten beyond the "Perhaps it's just a shadow" stage.

10) Speaking of The Student Prince, someone has put it on Yewtybbe:

10a) And . . . it's a musical of sexual harrassment!

10b) Daddy always liked The Student Prince (not because the Prince harasses Kathy, of course, but because of the music. I sang "Golden Days" at the 50th anniversary dinner because he liked it . . . la, the memories of a Sunday night, "looking back through memory's haze."

Saturday Morning, February 10

1) I am not exactly "greeting the dawn with a breathe of fire" today. Up since just after 6 AM, candlelight coffee and devotional, social media and the news. Now it's almost 8 AM, the sky is the palest purple-gray, and I'm still on the sofa reading and drinking coffee.

2) It's so boring and middle-aged to talk about sleep, and yet for the last weeks I have been so low energy . . . last night, no lie, in bed with the lights off just after 8:30, and only got up twice before 5:21 AM. I slept like the dead for four solid hours, and later it appears I fell asleep getting back into bed before I could pull the covers over me. Ridiculous! And in a way it's all I can think about.

3) The news: speculation on the reunification of Korea, Trump's blocking of the Democratic memo (he thought he could make people forget by waiting until Friday night . . . ), the death of John Gavin . . .

Friday Midday, February 9

1) Burt Reynolds made a new movie (about a has-been movie star getting roped into a film festival being run by amateurs). And while I'm unlikely to see it, reading a review of it reminded me of seeing his interview with Barbara Walters in the 1970s and how surprising it was to hear him declare on national television that he'd be bisexual with himself.

2) Just took a brisk half-hour walk by the Charles because it was 77 blessed degrees Fahrenheit in my office. Ye Instytytte makes such a commitment to environmental sensitivity, and yet it can't keep me office at 70 degrees. #justopenthewindow

3) Anybody have any particular etiquette issues around Valentine's Day you want Etiquetteer to cover?

Friday, February 9

1) Candlelight coffee and devotional. Astonished to find a dirty word in the Bible: "Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall . . . " I Kings 14:10.

2) Speaking of Jeroboam, an amusing example of grace under pressure in Iles Brody's The Colony: Portrait of a Restaurant and Its Famous Recipes when the younger-than-usual sommelier chilled a jeroboam of champagne too quickly and the bottle exploded. The maitre d', or the owner (I forget which) didn't waste time fulminating against the loss of that very expensive bottle, but simply said "So go chill another jeroboam."

3) Everywhere I look, at home or at work, there is clutter. I can't just say "Something must be done" or (a favorite at home) "Oh, the servants'll take care of it." It's on me!

Wednesday Morning, February 7

1) Sometimes a quote, a question, a sentence, will just flash across my brain, and yesterday morning it was "Has God blessed you so much that you don't see the burdens of others?" It's a powerful question, not only for myself but for the world's billionaires and Prosperity Gospel believers.

2) Reading about mutant crawfish taking over the world, I couldn't help remembering one of the Cajun jokes Daddy used to tell about Boudreaux and Thibodeaux. They were off hunting in the bayou when they saw a spaceship with tiny green lights fly by - and shot at it. The spaceship fell some distance away. Boudreaux asked Thibodeaux "What was dat?" "I don' know," came the answer. "Cook some rice."

2a) The article actually refers to "crayfish," but where I come from we spell it "crawfish."

2b) And I'm on record as not really being a crawfish fan no matter how you spell it. #southernbybirthyankeebychoice

2c) Which may have something to do with something that happened when I was four years old. One Sunday we didn't go to church, but somewhere southeast of Lake Charles to go crawfishing with long-handled nets on the side of the highway. There was a small wooden bridge with a metal railing as I recall, from which Daddy would scoop his net. At one point he dropped the net in the water and he had to reach down quickly to get it. Alas, something fell from his shirt pocket as he did so - the car keys! I can still see him lying flat on that bridge, using the net to try to scoop back those keys, but no luck. We had to hitchhike back to town (a very nice couple picked us all up and we had iced tea in the living room after we got home). I was then annoyed that I couldn't stay home to watch The Wonderful World of D***** (a favorite Sunday habit), but we all had to get into the second car to return and collect the first.

3) The last couple days my internal soundtrack has been the score of Blanche Fury. Why I have no idea. Start at 00:25. And notice particularly how the composer Clifton Parker uses the woodwinds and the harp.

The Daily Devotional

Living the life you want to lead means actually doing it, no matter how tired you are or with whatever else you have going on. This year I've made a more conscious commitment to myself to do something that is part of the life I say I want to live, and begin the day with a devotional. This has come up in conversation twice in the last three days, in different circumstances. It makes sense to record it here.

What is a daily devotional? Following the lifelong example of my mother, it is sitting at one end of the sofa with a cup of coffee and reading literature that inspires or feeds one's soul.* In the dark of winter, candlelight helps.

I have a small rack of books to choose from, but I always begin with:

• The King James Bible (this is a very small copy the Christian Scientists gave my uncle when he was drafted in WWII; he ended up declared 4F and didn't serve). The last three weeks I've taken a chapter of the Gospel of John each day on the recommendation of a friend.
• Baltasar Gracián's The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a deeply subtle book of aphorisms by a Spanish Jesuit of the 15th (?) century.
• A Year with C.S. Lewis, a book of daily readings from his works. Mother uses this, and gave me a copy a few years ago.
• Daily Rituals, by Mason Currey, which I got in New York last month.

Sometimes I stop with just these; other times I select two or three others from the rack to continue:

• Walt Whitman's The Calamus Poems
• The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayaam (my grandmother's copy)
• Henry Beston's Herbs and the Earth
• The Secret Language of Flowers: Notes on the Hidden Meanings of Flowers in Art, by Jean-Michel Othoniel (created while artist-in-residence at the Gardner Museum and featuring its collections)
• Manage Your Day-to-Day, from 99U.
• Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet

These books are on the rack, but I turn to them rarely (or in some cases, never):

• The Jefferson Bible. TJ snipped the Bible apart and rearranged it according to his own beliefs.
• The Complete Jesus, by Ricky Alan Mayotte, a compilation of all the words spoken by Jesus (including from the Gnostic gospels).
• The Sins of Scripture, by Shelby Spong. (I confess I've hardly gotten anywhere in this.)
• A Book of Courtesy: The Art of Living With Yourself and Others, by Sister Mary Mercedes, O.P. (as revised and updated by the Class of 1950 of Sister Mary's Dominican school for girls, for their 50th reunion in 2000 - I just love that they did that! I found this at Brattle Book Shop last year.)
• Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke (recommended to me by a young friend in 2015 and purchased by me at City Lights in San Francisco that summer)
• Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, by Charles Sprawson (a very influential book for me in the early 1990s, it examines the importance of water and swimming at different points in civilization while the author returns to swim a famous spots from antiquity, like the Hellespont.)
• As a Man Thinketh, by James Allen (bound in gold and given to me by my grandmother for Christmas 1981).
• Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy. The companion book to my uncle's KJV, I don't think I've opened it once.

To do this and not feel rushed or inattentive (because remember, I want to do this), I need to be up no later than 6 AM weekdays. Sometimes that's easy, and in the last month I've decided that if I'm awake after 5 and before 6, just to get up and start the day. There have been a couple days, however, when I lift my arm like lead to reset the alarm to 7 AM. But only a couple days.

I remember the story (I must have heard it in Sunday School as a child) about the boy who complained to his grandfather about having to read the Bible every day. The grandfather set him a task, to fill a large tub with water from a creek a short distance away using the coal basket. "But it leaks!" the boy said. "It leaks, but just you go ahead and fill that tub with it," answered his grandfather. So back and forth the boy ran, from creek to tub with a powerfully leaking basket. After awhile, the weary boy flopped down in the grass and said "Grampa, I just can't fill that tub with this basket." His grandfather then asked him to look at the basket. The boy saw that it was bright clean, not black with coal dust as at the start. "You are the basket," his grandfather said, "and the water is the Word. You need it to pass through you more than once to clean yourself."

To which I can only add the words of Sidney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon: "When you're young you simply don't appreciate these matters." I know I didn't.

*I find the term "inspirational literature," um, uninspirational. I would give it the Veda Pierce Distinctly MIddle Class Award.

Friday Morning, Groundhog Day 2018

1) Remember biorhythms? I swear that right now I'm at the bottom of the physical cycle, slaughtered by fatigue. Three days running I have been irresistibly sleepy in the late afternoons, and have collapsed into bed for an hour of intense sleep just before or just after dinner. It's ridiculous.

1a) As the Scarlet Pimpernel said, "You know I've just been to Bath to be cured of the fatigue, and now I find I'm so fatigued by the cure, that I simply must go back to Bath again . . . to be cured of the fatigue."

1b) I remember we had our biorhythms read at some point in the 1970s; it must have been at an Automotive Wholesalers convention to which Daddy'd brought all of us. Mother might still have the report somewhere at home, printed on a dot-matrix printer. Whatever the high day was for all three cycles (physical, emotional, intellectual) that summer happened to be a day at church camp.

2) I was given scented candles by a couple different friends for Christmas, and they are the best gift.

3) I've begun in earnest Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, which a friend recommended to me a looooong time ago. The first book of manners in Renaissance Europe, I'm enjoying it, but you really have to pay attention. One's eyes don't just skim along the pages.

Thursday Evening, February 1

1) Proofreading a document, I found that someone had typed "beaurocracy" instead of "bureaucracy," which made me wonder what kind of a government a beaurocracy would be: government by nice guys who want to date you?

2) Quote of the Day: "Moreover, we are always most anxious to take sides either passionately for or against, as can be seen in public combats or games or any kind of contest, where the onlookers often for no clear reason favour one or other of the participants, desperately anxious that he should win and his opponent lose. Then as regards men's characters, their good or bad reputation, as soon as we hear of it, arouses in us either love or hatred, so that for the most part we judge on the basis of one of these emotions." - from The Book of the Courtier, by Baldesar Castiglione

3) Sometimes I regret that I can only be who I am. A few times in my life I've been given the advice "Dial it down," and seriously, try as I might, sometimes I just can't. #bewhoyouare #theswordcutsbothways

3a) Daddy would say "Be as great as you are." I fear that might only be possible if I dial it down.

Thursday Morning, February 1

1) Spin the GTS Wheel and you get "Effie, we all got pain."

2) Yesterday at the office I noticed a new colleague wearing a crisp white shirt and silk-satin necktie. And I looked at myself in a sweater and khakis and an ill-fitting plaid shirt (and no tie) and thought "What the hell happened to me? I'm the one that's all snooty about being well-dressed at work!"

3) Looking back, January included a trip to New York, a Saturday workshop on annual planning, Massie's Catherine the Great (just finished last night - spoiler alert, she died), the start of a new guest book, and on-schedule publishing of Etiquetteer twice a week. That's not so bad.

3a) And reasonable fulfillment of two New Year's resolutions. Yes, I'm paying more attention to podcasts - though that does seem to be heavily heavily concentrated on You Must Remember This - and to dedicating time in the morning to devotional reading over coffee. Though this morning I confess I was so sleepy I almost had to pull my upper lip out of my coffee while I was reading . . .

Postmodern Jukebox at the Wilbur, Tuesday, January 30

1) I met my friend Carl at Jacob Wirth for dinner before the concert. I'd wanted to go there because it's up for sale. "The last time I was here," he said, "they had sawdust on the floor." "That was a LONG time ago!" I answered. I've never once seen sawdust on the floor there, in all these years.

2) After the very, very rich dinner I enjoyed on Sunday night, I bypassed all the schnitzels and wursts and whatnot and had a Cobb salad. At least I washed it down with a couple Old Speckled Hen beers.

3) And then off across the icy-cold streets to the Wilbur, where the staff was loudly directing people in the front of the theatres to I.D. check (but only if you were drinking), bag check, etc. They've clearly dealt with rowdy crowds before.

4) Should've brought my Tyrolean mountain gear for use on the steep stone stairs to the balcony - and then again for the deep steps going down the balcony. Third row left seats, two in from the aisle.

5) Fashion influences in the crowd included Pink; one sophisticated young woman in a polka-dot sundress with crinoline and shoulder tattoo, for instance.

6) Finalmente, the lights went down and the noise went UP! Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox took the stage for a fantastic evening of music (and it was) . . . and without Scott Bradlee. Did I miss a memo?

7)  But one after another the restyled hits kept coming, and now, from the safety and comfort of my own bed, I couldn't tell you what they sang . . . but it was all fantastic.

8) For me, of course, the real reason to be there was Olivia Kuper Harris - and she delivered, with her hair in a 1940s pompadour with curls trailing down the back, a succession of fab frocks, and (you can hear me smiling, can't you?) a start-slow-then-freak-out rendition of her theme song with PMJ, Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night." In contrast to the video, here she interacted with the musicians, and shook up the style even more. Loved it all.

9) The one thing for the Wilbur balcony is that at least there's more leg room than at the Colonial . . . perhaps an entire quarter-inch more. Call me an old fart (you wouldn't be the first), but after awhile, I thought "My God, my bum can't take any more of this concert."

10) And then just when I thought we could go home, they all came back for an encore . . . and invited a couple on stage. And the guy in the couple proposed to the woman! And I thought "Oh my God, what if she says no?!" But she didn't, thank goodness. So let's hear it for true love!

11) And then two or three more encores, and finally we could scale the heights back down to the street. WOW. WHAT a night!

12) Walking to the T, I said to Carl, "Now, if I was gonna be a groupie or something, I might head to the bar at Jacob Wirth to see if they show up." But I was just far too drained.

13) Thank you, Oldest Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged, for introducing me to this wonderful new (to me) group of musicians. #loving