CVCA has a service-focused club called Diakonos (Greek for “servant”). During the year, Diakonos helps out at a nursing home once a month, and helps at a woman’s shelter once a month. They collect the paper recycling bins during the school year. And, every year during spring break, the group sends a group of students out on service projects – sometimes Habitat for Humanity, sometimes other projects. It is headed up by my friend Craig, and he does a great job at stressing the need for service for Christians and the need for community for Christians. The spring break trip offers both, since the students live and work together for 5-6 days. This was my fifth year in helping with the trip.

Craig has wanted to plug students in to local ministries, and that, combined with the costs of staying other places, led Craig to make the choice to stay at CVCA this year, in the school. The facilities are excellent, and it was a central place to work with local ministries that needed help. This year, the students helped out at a school for autistic children, helped out an urban ministry in Akron, did some work with Habitat, helped out with a community garden at a local church, and also helped clean around CVCA itself. There was plenty of opportunity to be introduced to local ministries.

We started by gathering at CVCA last Monday. Most students were to be there at 4:00 in the afternoon, to set up camp, as it were. I got there early with a group of students in charge of each evening’s entertainment. We needed to run though a murder mystery play that Craig had heavily modified to be bizarre – it featured the Easter Bunny as the main detective, and the suspects were Mr. and Mrs. Claus, Little Bo Peep, Aladdin, “Parry Hotter,” and Cinderella. We were going to perform the play (using scripts – no memorization) on Thursday, so we needed at least one full run-through (and we eventually got in two run-throughs).

The run-through took about an hour. We then joined up with students in the CVCA library, which became our common room for the week. Some students were needed to help set up for supper, and the rest were free to do as they liked. I was able to play a couple of games with students, including backgammon, which I had not played in 15+ years.

We then went down to the cafeteria for supper. We had chicken soup and fresh bread, which was quite good. We had a good time, and a room full of students is a lively thing. We had 29 students and 7 adults, plus Craig’s family, who joined us for supper, so it was certainly an interesting gathering.

After supper, we had the evening entertainment, which was playing Sardines. Sardines is hide-and-seek, but when you find the person who is hiding, you join him or her. I needed to run to my office before beginning my search because I needed some batteries for a camera. I laughed to myself on the way to my office, and Dubbs and another teacher, Miss Williams, overheard me and wanted to know what was so funny. I jokingly mentioned we could use the security camera monitor in my office to see where the hiding girl was hiding. They latched on to the idea, and the humor of it outweighed the fact that we were cheating. Needless to say, we found the girl with very little effort, but we were not the first there – there were already several students crouching behind lab benches. We joined them, and others trickled in over the next few minutes. After about 15 minutes of waiting, there were still two groups of about 8 students that had not found us, so I decided to help. I went back to my office, fired up the security cameras, activated the PA system, and announced to startled students if they were getting “hotter” or “colder.” It was great. What made it even better was that, unbeknownst to me, the students hiding in the room I’d left had decided to move to another room, so I was actually directing the remaining students to the wrong room. It was a good time.

After the game was done, we gathered back in the common room, and Craig had us break into small groups, which was new this year. I was assigned to a group with four students, three of whom I knew. They are good guys. The point of the small groups was to be able to discuss what Craig was stressing during the worship time of the week – that history and spiritual life was broken into four segments – creation/perfection, the Fall, Jesus being crucified, and the restoration that Jesus started – Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration. We were to informally discuss the idea of the evening in our small groups. The first night we met before Craig spoke, and we prayed about God’s attributes (goodness, holiness, love, etc.), which are different from what he has done for us.

After small groups, we went sang songs together. Sadly, I had been fighting a migraine for several hours, and I finally had to come home and go to bed – my head hurt a lot, and it was beginning to make my stomach upset. Since I was so close to CVCA, Craig had graciously offered to let me sleep in my own bed each night. So, the plan worked out that I would be at CVCA from about 8:00 am to about 11:00 pm, but then I could come home to sleep. That certainly helped me get more rest than I would have sleeping on the floor of a classroom.

Anyway, I missed Craig speaking on the creation story, and how God wanted that perfect environment for us, and that we have a sense that things are meant to be better than they are now. Craig referred to this phase as “ought” – how things ought to have been were it not for the Fall.

In the meantime, I got home and went right to bed and fell asleep after an hour or so of tossing and turning. The night’s sleep fixed my headache, as sleeping always seems to. That made for a good start on Tuesday, the first day of work “in the field.”

Friday was Good Friday, which Mer and I had off. Ellen still needed to do some work on her dissertation, so we did not plan anything for the morning or early afternoon. We did take a short excursion out in the evening – we wanted to show Ellen Brandywine Falls, which is in a park fairly nearby. Or at least it should be. Mer and I found the falls on a map, but did not bother to print directions out – we knew most of the roads, so it seemed straightforward. So, we headed down into the Valley and headed north along a series of winding roads. About 35 minutes or so later, we found ourselves at the end of a dead-end road with “no trespassing” signs posted. We figured we were only about a half mile or less from the falls, but we backtracked and tried another route and did finally find the falls, after about 45 minutes total.

Brandywine Falls, like many things in Ohio, is not spectacular, but is very pleasant to look at. There are boardwalks that let you see the falls from near the bottom of the falls and from the top as well. It was another beautiful day, so we took our time, but kept to just the falls – we did not have enough time to walk some of the trails around the falls. Once we got back to the car, we tried another way back home, which turned out to be very direct and took about 10 minutes. Live and learn.

Since it was Good Friday, we headed to church that evening. Mer and I were both readers in a tenebrae (Latin for “shadows”) service. A tenebrae service is a somber service that remembers Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, and usually ends with remembering the crucifixion – the celebration of the resurrection is saved for the Easter service. Our service was fairly simple – two songs and communion, and then seven readers reading passages from the Bible that talked about the last hours of Jesus’ life. The passages were more than just the accounts of Jesus found in the Gospels – some of the gospel accounts were there, but other passages from the psalms and the prophets were included as well, to help give a broader context to what was happening to Jesus. It was very effective – it worked well to have other scriptures to help wake me up from having heard the gospel stories so often that I sometimes forget how powerful they are. The service went off well, and we left the church quietly and drove home. Once home, we had a little light supper, and watched some more of the ever-present Bleak House.

Saturday was another big day in Lavish Ohio. I went running with Nate and Jason again (16 miles), and by the time I got home, Ellen and Meredith were awake and finishing getting ready. I took a quick shower, and by around 10:00 or so, we were headed south to Amish country.

Mer and I like to take people to Amish country because the land is very pretty (rolling hills), and the food is amazing. To add to these, I decided to introduce Ellen to Lehman’s hardware store. Lehman’s is a hardware store that specializes in non-electric tools and appliances (including gas refrigerators and stoves). Their stuff tends to be very nice, but a tad expensive, but is still worth a trip to look at things. Ellen came away with a salt/pepper mill (on sale for 2/3s off).

Ellen had mentioned she wanted an island for her kitchen, so I stopped at a furniture store. There are a ton of furniture stores in Amish country, as we found out. After visiting our third one, Ellen and Mer had moved from subtle hints about food to Meredith asking us to stop and Ellen making hungry-kitty feed-me noises. I took the hint, and we stopped at Mrs. Yoder’s Kitchen, where we had a very satisfying meal (and ended it with pie – yum!).

After eating, we took Ellen to the chocolate store we found last summer, the one where they sell chocolates for $5/pound and sell very good cookies. Sadly, they were closed. We also stopped at the farm where they sell the fried fruit pies, but they were sold out. I consoled myself with a package of oatmeal cream cookies. We headed into town and visited a gift store that carried a number of wind chimes (Ellen has been looking for wind chimes), and then visited one last furniture store (one that Mer and I are fond of). We then headed northward again, with a stopover at the Amish Door bakery, where I picked up three whoopie pies and a brownie. Amish baked goods are worth the stop.

Since Ellen had not found her island table, we stopped at Pier 1 in Canton to see if they still had one that Ellen had seen (and one that was on sale). They did not have one, but they called around, and the Pier 1 in Cuyahoga Falls had one. So, we stopped there on the way home, and Ellen bought it (for about 60% off). We could not fit it in Meredith’s car, so we headed home and got my hatchback. Once we had it in the hatchback, Ellen discovered the legs unscrewed from the table. Ooops. At least that meant it would fit in her car.

We headed from Pier 1 straight to Akron, to the Coach House Theater. We were meeting up with Brandon and Jen (Brandon works at CVCA and is the head of the theater department), and we were all going to see the play Doubt. Mer and I had seen Doubt as a film last fall with Mom and Marc, and so we were eager to see it as the original play.

It worked very well, better than the movie. The staging kept the focus on the actors, since there were no scene changes. The stage was done up half as a church, and half as an office, with a small courtyard in the middle. The play only uses four actors, so it can be very intense at times. All of the actors did a fine job, but the woman playing the head nun was superb. She was no-nonsense and driven. The actor playing the priest seemed a bit light at first, but he grew more intense as the play went on, and the climactic showdown scene between the priest and the head nun was electrifying. The show had no intermission, so the tension was never broken.

The five of us talked for quite awhile after the show was over, and we all loved it. Ellen had never seen nor read it, so that was fun to introduce her to the play. This was the third time that Brandon had seen it done live, and he said he kept changing his mind as to if the priest was guilty of what the nun accused him of. It really is a well done play. We said goodbye to Brandon and Jen, and we headed home to food and Bleak House.

All good things come to an end, even Lavish Ohio ™. On Sunday, we went to church (it was a very fine Easter service), and then came home. I cobbled together a rudimentary brunch of eggs, homemade bread left over from the Heather Dale concert, and Sun Chips (the ones I forgot to set out for the concert). Once we finished eating, Ellen packed up her things and headed home (about a three-and-a-half hour trip). Mer and I took a long nap (3+ hours). Lavish Ohio can take it out of you. We did not get to show Ellen everything that is wonderful and grand about Ohio, so Lavisher Ohio ™ is now in the works for a future date.

Lavish Ohio continued on Tuesday, but in a slightly unusual way. Ellen, who was on spring break, came with us to CVCA for the day to visit Meredith’s classes. If that were not enough, Meredith even had Ellen speak in her two AP classes on how the AP exam is graded, since Ellen has spent some time grading AP exams.

We did try to make it up to Ellen, at least in part. My running partner Jason knew that Ellen was in town, and as the Vice President of CVCA, he wanted to take her to lunch to pick her brain on how Ellen sees teaching English. CVCA is an excellent school, but we still don’t get (essentially) PhDs coming though every day. As an unexpected bonus, Jason took me and Mer along for lunch as well. We had some excellent Mexican food at Mariachi’s restaurant nearby, and we had about an hour-long conversation about teaching and English and the like. It was a nice time, and productive.

After school, I ran with Jason, and we both had pretty bad runs. We both blamed the late lunch, but it may also have been the 20-mile run on the previous Saturday. At any rate, we ran 8 difficult miles, and then I took a shower.

Mer came home, and so we ate supper and watched more Bleak House. But, since Ellen likes ice cream and has a fondness for custard (rich soft serve), we had arranged to meet Nate and Rachel at their house, and head over for custard at Strickland’s. Strickland’s is a local chain that makes custard; they always have chocolate and vanilla, plus two special flavors that rotate every few days. We drove down to Nate’s, and then followed Nate and Rachel to Strickland’s. While we were reading the menu, some firemen invited Nate’s young son to check out the fire truck, so Nate and his son wandered over. Since I had a decent excuse, I followed along. I like trucks too.

After the truck pulled away, we ordered custard, and Ellen proclaimed hers to be quite good. We all ended up sitting in our car to visit, as the evening was quite cool. The windows fogged up pretty seriously, but the company  was fine. Once we finished eating, we said goodbye to Nate and Rachel, and we headed home.

Wednesday was another dissertation-writing day for Ellen. Mer and I went to work, and Ellen stayed home and worked. I had to stay late to coach my improv group, but then Mer and I were able to go home together and collect Ellen (and rescue her from her computer and books). We drove about 15 miles to the Furnace Run metro park, and we hiked along the Daffodil Trail. Ellen likes flowers, so I thought she should see this trail that has lots of daffodils planted along it. The trail itself is easy, and only 0.6 miles long. The daffodils were all up out of the ground, but only about 10% were in bloom – we were about a week early to see them in full bloom. Still, Ellen seemed to like it, and Mer and I are fond of the metro parks, so we had a pleasant walk.

After the tromp through the flowers, we headed into the Valley to the town of Peninsula. Peninsula is a very cute town on a river, in a valley, and so it seems as close to a New England town as I have seen in Ohio. In Peninsula, we parked at the entrance to the Towpath Trail, and then we walked the short distance back into town to the Winking Lizard restaurant. The Winking Lizard is a beer-and-ribs place, but they have lots of good and hearty food. Ellen did tackle some ribs, but we left the brews on tap.

Thursday was the exciting day of Lavish Ohio. A few months ago, I had received an e-mail newsletter from Heather Dale, who is a Canadian folk artist I am very fond of. In the newsletter, she announced she was making up a Midwest U.S. tour, and she was looking for locations to have a house concert. On a whim, I sent in an e-mail saying I was interested, and after a few e-mails back and forth, Heather Dale was coming to my house on April 1st to do a house concert! Amazing.

I took the day off to tidy the house and to cook a ton of food. One of the things I was encouraged to do as a house concert host was to provide snacks, and to provide food for Heather and her partner/guitar player Ben. So, I spent the day making four loaves of bread, a huge pan of chocolate-peanut-butter bars, two pans of brownies, and two pizzas. I also had Mer buy sodas and fruit drinks, and chips and Oreos, and our friend Lesa was bringing stuffed grape leaves. Long after the concert was over, I realized I had forgotten to set out the chips and Oreos. Ooops.

Anyway, Heather and Ben showed up around 5:00, and are wonderfully friendly people. Heather is very gracious, and Ben looked at my instrument collection and offered to make some minor adjustments to my guitar. It turns out that Ben has advanced degrees in English with a focus on medieval studies. So, Ben and Ellen hit it off wonderfully. In an amusing/depressing moment, Ben joked that he left academia for the steady income of a folk singer. Anyway, Mer and Ellen and Ben and Heather and I all had pizza and chatted.

The guests for the concert started arriving at around 7:00 (for a 7:30 concert start). We ultimately had about 27 guests, about 2/3s of which were CVCA folks, and about 1/3 were Heather fans who had seen the concert listed on her website. I was touched that my friends would come out and support me, and I was very pleased to see Craig come at intermission from a service project, with 4 students in tow. The house concert was fairly packed.

Heather and Ben gave a magnificent concert. The music was lyrical, and Heather has a great voice. It turns out that she is also a great storyteller, and she used body language and gestures to act out the song she was singing. She always had a smile on her face, and just glowed with the joy of making music. I was also impressed that as Heather started the concert, she said hi to everyone and then proceeded to rattle off everyone’s name; she had not only made an effort to meet everyone, she had learned everyone’s name as well.

Anyway, the evening was a huge success. Mer and I bought two CDs we did not have, and I also bought a song book so we can play and sing Heather’s music at home. Heather and Ben stayed the night with us (it helps cut their costs), and Heather was gracious enough to sing a duet with Meredith at the table after everyone had gone. It was simply beautiful – Heather and Mer have similar ranges, so they blended beautifully. They sang the Christmas song “Coventry Carol,” which is one of Mer’s favorites and which Heather had recorded on a Christmas CD. After they were done, Heather got out of her chair and gave Mer a big hug and Ben expressed how they should have put that in the show. We talked and laughed (and Ben fixed my guitar) until after 12:00. What a great evening, and I hope that Heather and Ben can come back through Ohio soon.

Lavish Ohio was being lavish indeed.

This last week was spring break vacation four our friend Ellen. Ellen lives in Michigan, and is trying to finish up her doctoral dissertation in English. I can only assume that the stress of writing a large document like that is leading her to make bad decisions, because, with our invitation, she decided to spend her spring break with us. In Ohio.

Since I am always selfish and want all of my friends to live near me, I decided to create Lavish Ohio ™, and show off what NE Ohio has to offer. I had good success at showing off Ohio two years ago when Shannon, Jolene, and James came out, so I was pretty confident that I could help Ohio make a favorable impression.

Ohio helped me out a lot on its own. Ellen was here from Friday evening (the 26th) through today (the 4th), so she was here part or all of 10 days. For most of those 10 days, the weather was amazing – we actually had sun, and temperatures in the latter part of the week were in the 70s (and one day in the 80s). Of course, I told Ellen this was poor weather for Ohio, and it is usually much better. I don’t think she bought it.

Ellen got to our place around 5:00 on Friday. Meredith had made a casserole (very yummy, but with a consistency of a thick stew), so we ate and caught up with Ellen. I had mulled over taking Meredith and Ellen to see a play in Cuyahoga Falls, but by the time we were done eating, we would have been hard pressed to make it on time. Plus, Ellen and Meredith were both fairly tired, so I modified my Lavish Ohio ™ plan on the fly. I had made my chocolate-peanut-butter bars for dessert, so I grabbed those and we headed over to the Churchills’ place.

Yes, I invited myself over unannounced, but the Churchills are very gracious people, and I was bearing a copious amount of dessert. I was hoping that would make up for any shock at seeing us on their doorstep. Zach and Londa took it in stride and seemed very pleased to see us. They took warmly to Ellen, and we sat around and ate, talked, and laughed for a little over an hour. It was a friendly and mellow introduction to Ohio for Ellen, and I was pleased that Zach and Londa got to meet Ellen.

Saturday was a mellow day with a big evening planned. I went running with Nate and Jason in the very early morning, and by the time we got back, Meredith and Ellen were awake. I introduced Nate and Jason to Ellen, who determined that three very tired and sore men were not the best advertisement for running as a fun hobby. Nate and Jason headed home, and I showered. Once I was ready, I took Mer and Ellen to a new local restaurant, Off the Wall. They use local Kent State artists to decorate the restaurant, and we had a very good brunch there.

We spent the rest of the early afternoon being mellow. Ellen had brought a DVD collection of the BBC’s version of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. We watched the first hour of the eight-hour series, and Mer and I were quickly hooked – good plot with very good characters.

I (sort of) had to work Saturday night – it was the CVCA Auction, which is CVCA’s biggest fundraiser of the year. I needed to be on hand to make sure the technology worked well – the auction uses computers to process credit cards and to keep track of bids and the like. The organizers of the auction always let me bring Meredith along, and that makes for a fun evening. We bought Ellen a ticket, so she was able to come as well. I had to be there at 4:00 to make sure things were ready for training the volunteers on the computers, and Meredith and Ellen showed up shortly after the doors opened at 5:00.

The theme for this year was “Under the Sea,” and the decorating people did a great job. It is remarkable when you can turn school hallways and gyms into pleasant dining areas, but the auction folks manage to do this every year, and this year they really did a great job. I was very impressed. The food was heavily seafood-based, but I managed to find chicken and potatoes that were very good (I am picky and am not overly fond of seafood).

Mer, Ellen, and I were seated at a table made up of auction referees – if two people want a silent auction item, the refs can step in and have a mini auction for those people. The refs were all CVCA people, and fun ones to have at a table. We had Dubbs and her sister, Nate and Rachel Gurnish, and Jay Tyree (the Athletic Director). There were students waiting on the tables, so we had a good time talking with them, and there were a lot of CVCA teachers and staff about to chat with as well.

The evening went smoothly from my perspective – only a few minor glitches that were easily taken care of. Mer had a good time bidding on a few items – she always tries to pick up a few gift cards to restaurants and/or to theaters, since we can make good use of those. She picked up $220 worth of gift certificates for $100, so she had a good evening. I think Ellen had a good time – there was good food, and Meredith kept her company for much of the evening when I was needed for computer things. Ellen managed to resist buying anything, but I still think it was a decent Day 2 of Lavish Ohio ™. Mer and Ellen left a little after 9:00, and I was able to get home at 10:00 or so myself.

Sunday was the most mellow day of the Lavish Ohio ™ week. We went to the second service at our church. Normally, we go to the first service, but we had been out late the might before with the CVCA Auction, so we slept in. Also, there was a short practice for the upcoming Good Friday service, which Mer and I were a part of, getting to read some Scripture passages. Ellen got to meet our pastor, Ken, and had a good talk with him while we practiced. We got home about 1:00, and the rest of the day was devoted to rest, puttering, eating, and Bleak House.

Mer and I still had to work, so Monday we went off to CVCA and left Ellen to work on her dissertation. One of the ways Mer and I were able to get Ellen to come out to Ohio was the promise of several uninterrupted days to work on the dissertation. So, our having to leave for work was not a bad thing. I got home about 3:30, but then went running, so Ellen was able to work until almost 5:00. By them, Mer was home, and we ate more casserole (that was now behaving itself and had firmed up) and watched more Bleak House. Mer wanted me to help her grade a few projects at CVCA (she likes a second opinion on visual projects), so the three of us headed over to CVCA. Lavish Ohio indeed. Mer was able to show Ellen her room while I looked over the projects. It only took about 20 minutes, so then we took Ellen around CVCA and gave her the tour of the school Ellen liked the technology resources we have and decided she would apply for a computer projector and Smart board for her classroom when she got back.

To make up for dragging her to school, we drove over to Handel’s Ice Cream. Ellen is very fond of ice cream, and Mer and I think Handel’s has the best ice cream around, so it seemed like a good fit. Ellen did say it was excellent ice cream, although I am suspicious that anyone could make an educated judgment based off a small cone. Just sayin’.

Anyway, it was a fine, albeit slow, start to Lavish Ohio ™. Happily, the rest of the week was pretty packed, and coincided with the really spectacular weather as well.

Last Thursday after school, Mer and I headed over to Dubbs’ place for supper. I had made some bread, and Dubbs made some lasagna, and so we happily dove in pretty much right when we got there. Nate, Dubbs’ husband, was working, so he could not join us, but Dubbs’ two kitties kept us entertained, in addition to the eating and chat.

After supper, we heeded down to Akron’s public library. Dubbs is working on a major paper for a graduate class, and Mer needed to check out a copy of a movie of Death of a Salesman for her AP English classes. Since the library was only a block away from our ultimate destination, the music club Musica, we figured we could stop at the library. We spent almost an hour there (Dubbs checked out about 10 books), and then walked over to the club.

Bethesda, the band our friends Eric and Shanna are in, was playing that night. They were supposed to open the evening as the first of four bands. Sadly, when we got there (having tromped though a wet snow), they had been moved to third of four bands, which meant there were not going on at 8:00 as we had thought; they were now going on at 9:30. Mer and I had to be home to make an important phone call to our realtor, so we talked with Dubbs and we decided to leave and come back.

So, we headed back home and made our phone call, which turned out not to be needed yet (there was no new information). These things do happen from time to time. To make the best of it, we headed over to Handel’s Ice Cream (in a snowstorm), and got ice cream. Then we headed back to Musica to hear Bethesda.

We go there to hear the last song of the one-man-band that was on before Eric’s group, so our timing was good. Bethesda took only a little time to get set, and then they played for about 40 minutes or so. This was my second time hearing them, and this time the competing crowd noise was less than what was going on at their CD release party two months ago. The music was still turned up too loudly for an old fogey like me to get right down at the stage, but the quality of the music was very good, and they have an excellent stage presence – lots and lots and lots of energy with lots of movement from the band members while they sing and play.

We did get home after the concert around 10:50, and had a call from our realtor to call him if we could before 11:00. So, even that worked out.

Last Saturday, I started the day out with my friends Nate and Jason, and we headed down to the Valley to run on the Towpath at 6:45 am. I think marathon running shrivels the brain or something. Nate was on a short week, so he ran 13 miles with me and Jason, and we finished up with 5 more for a total of 18 miles. It was a good, strong run (with a very pretty sunrise).

After I got home and showered up, I decided I was hungry after burning 2500 calories, so I got Mer into the car to head to Akron. Jason had recommended Wally Waffle as a great breakfast place, and I wanted to try it. It was a very sunny and pretty day, and we had nothing on the agenda for the afternoon, so neither of us minded the 10-minute wait. After much agonizing, I decided I needed to try a chili omelet if only for the novelty. As it turns out, the chili was more like salsa, and so the omelet was okay instead of the exciting taste sensation I had hoped for. The home fries were great. Next time, I am certainly getting the chocolate chip waffle with whipped cream!

After our brunch, we wandered outside into the bright Ohio sunshine, and lo! there was the Goodyear blimp. Even after nine years of seeing it fairly regularly, I still love seeing it. Mer and I also stopped and enjoyed the newly-blooming flowers in the small park outside of Akron’s Children’s Hospital. We then headed on home for a mellow afternoon.

The evening was a good time. One of our colleagues, Brittian, goes to a church where they have a fundraiser for a school in the Dominican Republic. The fundraiser proceeds go to feeding the children for one year. It was a pizza and dessert dinner, with a small silent auction, and…get this…competitive team trivia. Talk about a great combination – food and fierce displays of why I never had dates in high school.

Brittian told me that last year a guy at the church put together a team of pre-meds, and they cleaned up. So, Brittian put together his own team this year – Brittian and his wife, Dubbs (who knows a stupid amount of trivia), Meredith, me, Nancy (who was on Jeopardy!), and Brittian’s in-laws. It was a formidable team. We figured we would be competitive at the very least, and we were.

The trivia was harder than we had thought it would be, and that made for a challenging night. The church wisely sold “mulligans” that would allow you to pass on one question per round. There were 10 rounds of 10 questions. They had some bonus questions as well, so a perfect score would have been 120 points. They posted scores after every two rounds, and after round one, we were tied for second, behind by one point. After round four, we took over the lead and never gave it up. We ended the evening with 99 points (out of 120), which beat the second-place team by only three points. Much fun.

Meredith rocked the Arts category, knowing 9 out of 10 of the questions, and we used our mulligan on a question from Tom Sawyer (“What does Huck Finn say a dead cat is good for?” – curing warts). I actually contributed to the team, knowing:
– How Clementine (from the song) died – she drowned
– The first NBA player to score 100 points in a game – Wilt Chamberlain
– What URL stands for (which I got slightly wrong, saying Universal Resource Locator, but they gave it to me)
– I was able to identify Argentina’s flag, because it was “my” flag when we did luge in Maine
– I had correctly identified Gone With the Wind as the first $100 million film, but was overruled for Jaws (a very good guess)
Anyway, we did win, which meant we each won $40. Since it cost $20 to get in, we made $20 on the evening. The church raised $17,000 for the school in the Dominican Republic, and we had lots of good food. It is hard to do much better than that!

Last Thursday, Mer and I headed up to Hudson to see I Love a Piano, a musical review of the songs of Irving Berlin. This was another play in the season-ticket series that we were given as a gift. It was much fun.

Usually, we are pretty cool on musical reviews – they often do not have enough plot or story interest to be a “real play,” and they often fall short of being a “real concert” because the music is edited down to fit the review. In the case of I Love a Piano, the story arc, such as it was, mostly added either context or humor to the songs. Basically, several songs were sung as part of an era – a 1911 song shop, a 1920s speakeasy, 1940s wartime America, and a post-war period. Each period had very brief skits that allowed the actors to sing, and each skit was tied together by the character of an aging piano (with one bad key, as a running joke). The skits worked pretty well as an excuse to sing.

And, ahhhh, what songs. The play did part or all of 50 songs or so. What amazing talent Irving Berlin had. What a great set of music – fun and catchy. I especially liked the music from the 30s – I knew many of the songs from the Fred Astaire movies, and it made me smile to hear them again. Now I need a CD of the music!

The costumes were great – they kept changing with each era. The flappers of the 20s had especially fun costumes. The men were usually in a suit, a tux, or a uniform.

The show lasted about 90 minutes (plus an intermission). I certainly loved this piano!

Last Saturday was Mer’s day, and pretty mellow. I did start the day with a 16-mile run with my running partners Nate and Jason, but I was home and showered by 10:00, so it did not mess with Mer’s day too much. In fact, she got groceries, and I tried to nap, but was kept up by vocal kitties. That happens sometimes.

Mer did have plans for the evening, though. After supper, we headed down into the Valley, to Weathervane Community Theater, where we met up with our friends Dubbs and Nate (who ended up leaving at intermission because Dubbs was sick). The theater was putting on a youth production of Pride and Prejudice. The director introduced the play by indicating that the idea of youth theater was to give “actors under the age of 40 the chance to have a good role.” Most of the actors were college-aged. There were three adults – Mr. and Mrs. Bennet (the parents of the main character), and Lady Catherine, an older woman who holds her importance way too highly. Otherwise, all of the other roles were played by teenagers and actors in their early 20s.

The set was static (no rotating houses this time), but effective. The back of the stage was done up as the front of a nice two-story house, with an upper balcony. Characters could come out of the house onto the front of the stage, or could come out on the balcony. It worked just fine.

Pride and Prejudice was originally a novel, not a play, so this was an adaptation. In the book, one of the more interesting characters is the voice of the narrator, who is witty and even at times snide. This does not translate well to the stage (or the screen) without having a dedicated narrator, which is a bit odd to do on stage. To get around this, the playwright had the main characters give the narration during scene changes, and while still in character. It was not so good as the narrator in the book, but it worked pretty well.

A former CVCA student was on stage as Jane, the family beauty. It is much fun to see people you know on stage, and she did a very admirable job in playing Jane. The main character, Lizzy (or Elizabeth), is a long part, and the young actress did pretty well at it. It is a huge role, and she nailed all the lines (as far as I could tell), although I would have liked to see a broader range of emotions from her, especially when confronted by the love of Darcy, whom she abhors. My favorite character in this production was the selfish, dizzy, and man-crazy daughter, Lydia. The actress playing her was consistently vain and selfish, even while giving narration. I also liked the young man playing the dull preacher, Mr. Collins. He played Mr. Collins as very stiff and formal, with his voice cracking on stressed parts of the sentences. It worked well.

I was less happy with the portrayal of Mr. Bennet. In the book, it is key that he is a disappointed man in his marriage. He married young and for beauty, only to discover that he had married a woman for whom he had no respect. He badly wants to make sure his two oldest daughters (Jane and Lizzy) do not make the same mistake. I’m not sure if it was a director’s choice or not, but the Mr. Bennet of this play was played as an amused, almost happy-go-lucky man who seemed to genuinely like, if not love, his wife. It made the character of Mr. Bennet to be much more one-dimensional than he is portrayed in the book.

On the whole, though, I thought the play went very well. I only wish I had not been so sleepy – the 16-mile run on five-and-a-half hours of sleep made me a little less attentive than I normally am at plays.

Last Friday, Mer took me to Grove City College in Pennsylvania. Two of our former students were acting in An Enemy of the People at the school, and we were eager to see the play. I knew almost nothing about the play, although I had seen another play, The Doll’s House, by the same playwright. I had liked Doll’s House, but had not liked any of the characters, and since the play was translated from the original Norwegian, it had felt a little stiff to me. Anyway, I was looking forward to what Meredith calls “a pure viewing,” where I knew almost nothing of the play.

A quick storyline for those not familiar with it – it concerns a town that has invested heavily in medical baths/spas in the 19th century. The local doctor finds out the baths are contaminated with bacteria, and are therefore lethal to use. Closing the baths would ruin the local economy, but leaving them open would kill people. The play deals with the issues raised by this problem. (As an aside, it struck me as a small-scale version of the global warming debate, with many of the same tactics being used. I felt a lot less smug when I realized that.)

We ate in town at the Main Street Diner, where the food was good, but the service was a bit slow. We grabbed some Dairy Queen on the way to the theater for dessert, and we got to the theater about 15 minutes before the play started. We headed to the front row, which seems not to be taken at Grove City – we have sat in the front row for three productions there. As we sat down, we admired the set – a large wooden structure that was the inside of a house and, as we later found out, could be turned around to be the outside of buildings near a wharf. It was a great set. Meredith commented, “Isn’t it good – Norwegian wood?” I glared at her….

The play was excellent and thought-provoking. My friend Kevin played a don’t-rock-the-boat middle-of-the-road businessman, and he played him with a worried and comic edge that worked very well. Mer’s student Austin played a young radical newspaper reporter who becomes less radical when the town is threatened. Kevin and Austin both did excellent jobs.

Kevin’s former roommate played the lead – the doctor (he had also played Higgins in My Fair Lady). He should have a fine acting career ahead – he was tremendous in the role, which is not an easy one. The doctor is a complex man and a complex role, and the audience ends up loving him and hating him.

After the play, Mer and I stuck around for a “talk-back,” where you can ask questions of the cast and crew. The director had a few remarks to get started, and she mentioned how hard it was to direct Act 5, the last act. So, when the question-time started, I asked her why Act 5 was so hard to direct, when I thought Act 4 was a more problematic act (where the doctor denounces the entire town). She answered that the last line can be seen as triumphant, but she could not go with that. She had tried many different ways to end the play, and she said she still was not convinced how to end it. It was interesting and informative. (Based on thinking about this, I thought the play should end with the doctor desperately clinging to the idea that he alone was right.)

A note to directors: be careful about talk-backs at colleges. I asked a question, and a good one, I thought. After that question, for 25-30 more minutes, the audience (made up of professors and other students) became a series of short lectures on drama and other English works. To the best of our recollections, Mer and I could not remember a single question being asked. It was both amusing and frustrating – I would have liked to have heard from the cast more, and the audience less.

I chatted with the director for a few minutes after the talk-back, and Mer chatted with Austin and Kevin. I did get to congratulate Kevin and Austin, and then we had to head out. We had a sleepy drive home (it was a late Friday, after all), and got home about 1:00. It was worth it – it was a chance to see a great, rarely-done play.

Mer has volunteered her services to help out with her 20th high school reunion. She needed to help check out a country club to see if it would work for the party, so she was to meet several people from her class at a county club in Canton. Since I had a gift certificate for a restaurant in Canton, and I needed to finish mounting Aunt Mary’s light, I went along with Mer down to Taggart’s – a restaurant in her old neighborhood that is known for ice cream and it is an institution, having opened in the 1920s. We met Aunt Mary there, and had a fine meal, where I ate too much, as I usually do when I go out to eat.

Mer went on her way to the country club, and Aunt Mary and I went to the Home Depot, to try to find the correct all-thread screws to mount her light. A man at the store was very helpful and insisted that we did not need a metric screw, so we went home with the same threaded screw as we already had, on the off chance that the all-thread I had tried before was cross-threaded (and messed up).

I tried the new all-thread, and it did not go in any more easily than the last ones. Aunt Mary ran back to her old place to get her all-in-one oil to see if lubricating the screw would work. While she was gone, I decided that maybe all I needed was a better grip, so I tried on Aunt Mary’s pink rubber gloves, and managed to get the older screws in place. After several attempts to get the length correct, I managed to get the new lamp fixture hung and it even worked. Score one for the good guys.

To celebrate, Aunt Mary and I watched Jeopardy! and I iced my knee (that has tendinitis). Mer came along just in time for Final Jeopardy, and then we headed home. Good food, a successful manly-outing, and Jeopardy! made for a good evening.

Thursday, Mer and I headed down to Clarice’s place for a game night. Clarice is one of the founding members of my improv group, in the first group back in 2005. She now helps me coach the current group, and she seems to like hanging out with me and Mer, which is gratifying. Clarice was hosting the game night, which included us, Clarice’s boyfriend, Matt, and two other Founding Fools – Josh and Kristen. Another student from the Class of 1996 made a cameo appearance, and it was good to see Rose again.

Anyway, we had much fun playing games. I was on the winning team (with Kristen) in Cranium. We beat the teams of Meredith/Matt and Josh/Clarice. We then randomly choose teams to play a game called 25 Words or Less, where you try to get your team to say five words on a card in as few words as possible. The random teams turned out to be males against females, and shockingly we won, 6-4. Go figure. I very much enjoyed the company of the evening – it was good to see everyone again.