Almost Ravinia

Perhaps you've heard of Ravinia, the summer music venue in Chicago's North Shore suburbs.

It consists of four important elements.

1)  Music.  An orchestra plays.  What do they play?  It doesn't matter, especially if you sit in the cheap seats, i.e. the lawn.  To experience it more as background music and less like college-class appreciative listening is OK with me.

2)  The beauty of nature.  That would be the lawn, as I just mentioned, with its surrounding forest.  You could a film a movie of lords and ladies, bows, arrows and chain mail on Ravinia's grounds and probably get away with it.

3) People-watching.  Ok, no bows, arrows or chain mail showed up during my one time there.  But I'm quite sure the people parading past me and my folding chair were the lords of finance and the ladies of sorority life, people that were as accustomed to beauty and culture as I am accustomed to the aisles of Wal-Mart.  Yes, I was a tad bit out of my element.  But I paid the ticket price (the cheap lawn tickets), therefore I belonged.

4) Food.  We did the box dinner.  The sandwich was on thick artisan bread.  The brownie was solid as a brick, yet still chewable.  Stuffed with chocolate chips.  My, oh my, oh, my, what a brownie it was!  It was the kind of brownie that, when I finished, I looked over at my husband and hoped he couldn't finish his.  Too much for you?  Need any help with that?  

Sadly, my summer has not included any Ravinia.

So I did the next best thing, Indy's own Symphony on the Prairie.  This time, I packed the dinner.  I could hardly wait to get settled on the lawn and bite into Rice Krispie treats, watermelon and:

TURKEY SANDWICH WITH CRANBERRY SAUCE

The only spoiler to this sandwich experience was the October-like chill out there on the prairie.  I shivered through the music.  Lots of other music-lovers had the smarts to wear long pants and closed shoes.  I seem to have a problem imagining warm days turning into cool nights.  

Another small problem with this delicious sandwich:  I opened a can of cranberry sauce, used a little bit and wonder what to do with the rest of the stuff.   So I tried:

CRANBERRY SAUCE CHICKEN

Over on the Book Pile, I'm still working through Julia Glass' Three Junes.  I mentioned the Brits on vacation?  Actually, the story focuses on Paul--newspaper publisher, Scottish, widowed.  Switching  between his sight-seeing in Greece and flashbacks of his marriage, we learn that his wife seemed awfully devoted to her collie-breeding business.  Or maybe she was devoted to something or someone else?

Moving on the second June, Paul has now died.  His three sons gather for the memorial service.   We get the story from the oldest son, a gay man who chose America over family closeness.  Again, the story alternates between flashbacks of his life back in New York, where all his friends grow more emaciated with AIDS, and the "now," as the bereaved gather to remember Dad and wonder about Mom.  Then one member of the family asks somebody for a big favor.  And I mean, a BIG favor. 

I haven't gotten to the third June yet.

It's a pleasant but slow-moving story.   It's got some big cow patties, but I could see 'em coming and I flipped the page.  

Decisions, Decisions.

Can't say I've been reading books too much this week, but I sure have been staring at them lately.  I stared at this one:

and this one: 

and this one:

I've never had to make decisions like this before.

In the last year, you probably have fifteen friends that have published a book.  Well, count me in as number sixteen because, sometime in the next few weeks, Bye-Bye Nesquik will enter the fray.

So that's what I was doing at Barnes & Noble, pulling novels off the shelves, examining how much of the body or the building or the suitcase they put into the shot, why they used those colors and most of all, why that particular image summed up everything that happens between the pages.

And oh, there's more.  Like, what the heck is web-hosting?  And how do I let a lot of people know about my book?   And, for the author photo, do I pose with the rose between my teeth or do we use the log-flume shot they sold me at Six Flags?  (Just kidding!)

But I get ahead of myself.

In the past week or so, the cover artist has been busy snapping pictures of some children we know, and of a certain brown-haired man we know, then cobbling them all together in the drawing that will become the book's cover.

Oh, and he sketched this in, too:

It's one of my vacation photos, snapped right on the college campus in the town where the book is set.  

The other night, he came over with his paints and we decided on colors for the man's tie and the lawn chair and the frosting on the cake (chocolate, of course.  What else would you expect from Bye-Bye Nesquik?)  

Oh, hey, and what about the font?  So I went and grabbed a few books currently in my possession and we discussed little picky particulars of how letters look on a page.  Hey, isn't quibbling over font usually a way to procrastinate writing that term paper or church talk?  Well, no procrastination here.  Things got done.  

Yeah, I've been staring at books a lot, just not reading them.  I managed to conquer a few pages in my current read.  So far, all I can say is that it's about some Brits touring Greece and there's a busybody in the tour group.  

If I've disappointed you with no book recommendation tonight, perhaps you can console yourself with these squishy, fragrant and strangely sweet HERBED DINNER ROLLS.

Half Marathons for the Untrained

I must have needed the nap.

We are not morning church people this year.  We get the pleasures of sleeping in versus the pleasures of the Sunday afternoon nap.  When we arrive home, all we want to do is eat.  Bye-Bye Nesquik, if she wishes to be loved by all, had best start frying up the sausages and hunting down the measuring spoons.

But today, Bye-Bye Nesquik sat on her bed, sinking further and further down until she gave in completely.  

Little wonder.

I'm used to walking, a lot.  I can do ten miles at a stretch and still be cheerful (probably because I promise myself a Butterfinger Blizzard when I'm done).  But Friday, I decided to go for twelve miles.

Packing along extra snacks and cold water, I set out.  There was the shady park, where bikers and runners blasted past me.  There was the remote path where, on my right, I could peek through the fence at the cars speeding by on the freeway and, on the left, I saw a backlot full of old bus shelters.  There was a little restaurant row in a neighborhood that is fighting its way back from neglect.  (It's 75% there.  Keep trying.)  Then there was the nice part of town where the day spas and the art galleries lead the way into hushed neighborhoods with beautiful landscaping.

All the way along the route, I worried that I couldn't finish.  One shoe hurt. Not to mention that I was all too aware that if I turned right at the private high school campus instead of turning left, I could cheat my way back to my car sooner.

But  I didn't cheat.  And I'm glad, because it would have been sad to miss the really nice street with the tree-lined promenade down the middle.

But it was work all the way.  Twelve miles, as my daughter tells me, is just short of a half marathon.  I'm not doin' it again unless I get a picnic and a nap somewhere in the middle.  

So who's surprised that I conked out today?

However, everybody got fed.  Kinda late, but it happened.

Our Fast Sunday tradition around here is to try all new recipes:

CHICAGO-STYLE PIZZA

FROZEN BUTTERFINGER PIE

Over on the Book Pile, we're attempting Toni Morrison's A Mercy.  Ms. Morrison deserves to sit at the right hand of the masterful William Faulkner.

Trouble is, I can't abide Faulkner.

Ms. Morrison's story jerks forward and backward.  I would like to like this book, but with all its artful ambiguity, I cannot keep everybody straight.  Now, who's on the farm?  Who is the mistress of all this?  Who's pregnant?  Who lost a baby? 

Does she think readers lock themselves away in a lonely cabin, wholly absorbed, stopping only to brew a cup of tea or stand on the deck and gaze out over the valley?  I myself squeeze in a few pages after adding up last month's receipts, and a few more sitting in the food court at the mall, and a few more while waiting for my grandson to punch and kick his way through karate class.  Every reading session feels like I'm opening an entirely new book.  It doesn't help that the horse is named Regina and the people are named Sorrow and Patrician, unless I am missing some five-star symbolism here.

I read on, pretty much lost.  I shouldn't have to work this hard.

Although if Ms. Morrison can find me a lonely cabin with a scenic back deck, I will really buckle down on this thing.  

On Lab Rats

Our lesson this week is:  give the author a chance.

When I opened M. T. Anderson's Octavian Nothing and read the first pages, I wasn't planning to stick with this story of a strangely grown-up-sounding boy surrounded by scholars.  They drill him in Greek and Latin and violin lessons.  They weigh everything he consumes, then weigh again when he excretes.  They exact capricious punishments when he answers a question wrong. 

But young Octavian grew on me.  He and his mother were captured in Africa.  She was royalty.  He has no memory of the old continent.  And now they are essentially lab rats at the Novanglian College of Lucidity.  Well, privileged lab rats.  When the college throws a soiree, the mother acts the hostess.  She's royalty, after all, a shimmering beauty with whom every man would like to converse.   

When the benefactor of the institute dies, a rich young lord from England arrives to examine the premises with a mind to sponsoring these scholars.  He strikes up a flirtation with Octavian's mother and makes her an offer--with a boatload of catches. 

This is Boston, just before the American Revolution.  The colonists' rumble with discontent.  Oh, and fear, too.  They suspect the British may foment a slaves' uprising, whence masters' throats will be slit as they sleep soundly in their beds.

So, no more Greek and Latin for Octavian.  He might get too smart.

Then there is the Pox Party.  Whether for the cause of pure science, or to keep war and soldiers at arms' length, the scientists sequester themselves with a few friends (and their slaves), infect them with a "mild" strain of smallpox, promising to nurse them through it with every modern remedy at their disposal.  This, we are told, is far preferable to getting one's smallpox epidemic-style. They can all play whist and stage evening music salons while they break out in pustules together.

I won't give away any more.

Anyway, for a book that held all the promise of a financial statement, the story sure picked up.


Neither did it hurt to read it while I sat on a fine bench in the town square of one of those charming suburbs that I love so much.  The "village" was having sidewalk sales that day and the streets were full of slim ladies in their yoga pants, shopping bags swinging from their arms as they tried on shirts, or strode past the granite walls of the bank building.  Children played in decorative tufts of prairie grass.  Stroller wheels clattered on the sidewalk bricks.  A couple commuter trains clanged by.  And cicadas sang.

Every town should be like this.  We especially need a version where we don't all have to spend a million or so to buy a house there.

Now that I'm back to ordinary life, operating the ByeByeNesquik College of Recipe Experimentation, it's looks like the lab rats are in for a week of sandwiches.  The fanciest one is BROCCOLI HAM RING.

The Cobb Salad of Books

I would just like to know how many Post-It Notes littered Michael Connelly's walls as he worked out the plot to The Brass Verdict. 

We introduced the hero, Mickey Haller, last week.   Remember the man doing all the lawyer homework?  Yes, well, as his movie producer case proceeds to trial, the reader may want to take few notes, just to keep track of the bribes and the double agents and the grainy photos of people with possibly fake mustaches and maybe even the detective that brings Mickey these photos and acts as if he's protecting Mickey from all the murders going around.

I don't know whether to admire an author that can assemble such a Mexican train of surprises, or worry that he has counted up all the plot twists in his competitors' books and vowed to outdo them.

The result is a lot of action swirling around people I didn't care a whole lot about.  But if gets you through a plane ride, well, job security for Mr. Connelly. 

The tossed-in feel of Brass Verdict isn't so much different than what we ate this week.  Some lady in Iowa took a simple piece of chicken and kept adding things.  When you do something like that, how do you know when to stop?  All I know is, I liked it better this week than the first time I fixed it.

MONTEREY BARBECUED CHICKEN

After eating this delicious chicken, I opened the microwave the next day and found the bacon still sitting on its greasy paper towel.  

I wonder if Mr. Connelly found a few Post-It Notes he forgot to use in his book. 

Big Bucks Homework

At my age, I should be beyond dreaming that I'll be a ballerina or an astronaut when I grow up.  But Michael Connelly's The Brass Verdict has got me imagining that I can be a dandy defense lawyer someday.

That may be a weakness in his story.

His protagonist, Mickey Haller, stepped away from his law practice for awhile.  Something about getting hooked on pills.  Then a colleague turns up murdered and Mickey ends up with the man's entire practice.  First item on the to-do list: defend a movie producer accused of a double murder.

Isn't a lawyer novel supposed to have a lot of leaning against the dark wood of the witness stand and popping surprise witnesses on the prosecutor?  In this story, I'm getting more about Mickey writing stuff on his legal pad, or telling his staff where to meet him for a working lunch. 

It also didn't help that, just before I got serious about digging into the book, I watched a movie about a man taking a dreadfully dangerous business trip.  A movie like that uses up all one's adrenaline.  However, in this case, I saved some for reading Connelly's novel.

But it's all rather procedural, a lot of carrying around files instead of running from guys with knives and bombs.

So, even though Mickey Haller's problems don't have me worried like a weak bladder in a spook alley, at least I'm dabbling in my lawyer fantasies.  Yes, I too could stay late at the office, drawing a time-and-action flowchart of the night of the murders, studying crime scene photographs with a magnifying glass.  This is just homework with big bucks attached to it.  I'm sure I could get up to speed on this.  Although I think I'd stumble big time trying to guess the prosecutor's strategy.

Now, if I stayed late at the office all the time, making those big bucks, I wouldn't have time to make big dinners, would I?  But I might be able to throw together:

GRILLED CHEESE SALAD

I first tasted this at a restaurant called Tom + Chee, where they get creative with grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup (Ooh, another career idea!).   You can order up the basic sandwich, or you can go fancy and add some hummus, or even some macaroni and cheese. 

It's in-a-hurry simple:  Make a salad on your plate.  Besides greens and tomatoes, I think theirs included carrot chips, sliced mushrooms, maybe a few strips of bell pepper.  I'm pretty sure they threw some cucumber in there, too.

Next, make a grilled cheese sandwich.  Cut it up into about sixteen pieces, place it on top of the salad and you will never again feel the same about ordinary croutons.  

Pour on your favorite dressing.  I think French dressing is ideal.  It fits the tomato-soup theme and it looks pretty.

How handy it is, eating my grilled cheese sandwich with a fork.  Keeps me from staining my lawyer files   Kindle with buttery fingers. 

Gettin' All Beachy

Pretend with me now:

You have set aside the laundry and the kitchen and messy garage.  You have left behind the big-box stores and the roundabouts and the doctor appointments.  You have traded it all for a tastefully decorated house, the best part of which is that you didn't have to decide where to put the little pots of decorative beach grass, or the artfully-placed conch shells, or the wall hangings that proclaim "At the Shore."

Hopefully, this house is on a shady street in a sleepy town.  Hopefully, it has a settin' porch and no hurricanes to bother you while you sit out there.

What will you do with yourself?   I don't know.  Can you lift a heavy book?  Might you want to try Diana Gabaldon's Outlander Series?  It starts with The Outlander, wherein a World War II nurse visits Scotland with her husband and finds herself tossed back to 1743.  How will she hide all her 20th-century nursey knowledge?  How will she protect herself, all alone in the middle of a bunch of warrior-clansmen?  And how the heck does she get back to her dear modern-day husband?  How long might it take?  What will he think of her absence?  When she returns, might things get a little complicated?  Especially if she were pregnant?

But wait!  Before you get started, maybe you should make a little something to eat.  LAYERED PICNIC LOAVES won't take very long, and these sandwiches are supposed to sit in the fridge for a hour.  So assemble them, then read awhile, then take them off to a picnic, throw away the paper plates and read some more.  You might be up late tonight.  No, let me rephrase that: you will be up late.  (There's cow patties, but between married people.)