Deviled Eggs -- Flash Fiction

Without looking up from her laptop, she chirped "Here's one! Ham and egg lasagna. Twelve hard-boiled eggs, ham, Swiss cheese..."

"We had egg salad sandwiches for lunch," he put his tablet aside and got up from the couch.

"I know," she said. "But we need to use them up."

He went to the hall closet.

"The kids had so much fun hunting eggs. How about pickled eggs?" She called after him. "Eight boiled eggs, a jar of beets ...." She sent the recipe to the printer.

He came back through the dining room carrying his favorite day pack. He hoped they'd found them all. He didn't relish finding boiled eggs with the lawn mower weeks down the road.

"Bill? Did you hear? Pickled eggs?"

"Um hum. And beets," he said as he headed for the kitchen.

"I'm glad we didn't get plastic eggs," she said. "Here are a whole bunch of recipes for deviled eggs," she cried. "You like deviled eggs!"

He opened the refrigerator door. "I think I'll take Buddy for a walk."

Hearing his name and the magic word walk, the old Lab padded happily into the kitchen after his man.

"Buddy will like that. Greek deviled eggs. Italian deviled eggs. Mexican deviled eggs."

"Yes, dear," he said filling the day pack from the fridge while Buddy waited patiently at his feet.

"Crab stuffed deviled eggs. Real eggs are just so much more nutritious. Instead of all that chocolate for the kids."

"Nutritious," he echoed with an aside to Buddy, "For the coyotes and foxes and crows and coons."

Buddy pranced a bit in anticipation as Bill closed the refrigerator door and zipped the back pack.

"I just love Easter," she enthused as Bill and Buddy headed to the back door. "The kids do so enjoy dyeing eggs. Avocado Ranch deviled eggs." She hit the send button again and he could hear the printer spitting out yet another recipe for deviled eggs. "And they were so pretty."

"Yes. Very pretty," he said and snapped the leash onto the dog's collar. "They'll look very pretty indeed. Scattered in the pasture south of the neighborhood.

*   *   *

This bit of flash fiction is my piece for Days D and E in the 2018 A to Z Blogging Challenge for which I was too late to officially enter. So I'm just shadowing.

Technically, one is supposed to post a blog every day in April (except Sundays) and each post is supposed to be about something that begins with the letter for that day. April 1 was A, April 2 was B, and so on.

April Blogging Challenge

  

Today was  C Day in the 2018 April Blogging Challenge.
But Alas, I Belatedly Comprehended
that April had Begun and I Couldn't sign up.
Tomorrow will be D Day
Dammit.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel -- a Review

It is wonderful! It is marvelous. The costumes! The costumes are so Audrey Hepburn. The music is so Broadway. The street scenes are so New York! The humor! The humor is so funny! I love it!

The only caveat I have is that if you have tender ears, the language may be too coarse for you. But, then considering the current administration is also from New York, maybe it's just a sort of New York accent.

If, however, that is of no concern to you -- it is wonderful!

1958 New York City -- our vivacious, innocent (relatively,) enthusiastic heroine has graduated from Bryn Mawr, has been married to Mr. Right for four years, has two children (one of each,) and lives in a palatial apartment on NYC's Upper West Side (just a couple of floors down from her parents.) She follows the correct beauty regime, has the right kind of friends, is a wonderful cook, and is very supportive of her husband's dream to be a stand-up comedian.

What could go wrong?

Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you so bad. But I have this thing about spoilers. Suffice it to say, everything that goes wrong is surprising and great material for a stand-up comedy routine. And I don't mean HIS. Kudos to the creator and writer Amy Sherman-Palladino along with Daniel Palladino.

Rachel Brosnahan is our Miriam "Midge" Maisel. She's already received a Critics' Choice Award and The Golden Globe as Best Actress for her performance in the series. And she is perfect.

You will be forgiven if you alternate between remembering Audrey Hepburn and Marlo Thomas's That Girl. Add a dash of Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman and a great dollop of Joan Rivers and you've got The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

There are even shadows of Downton Abbey -- The Weissmans (Midge's parents -- he's a professor at Columbia and she's a doyenne) did not raise their daughter to work!



Is she an exaggeration? I don't know. Maybe. Probably. But I do remember that my own mother did not grow up expecting to work outside the home. And, although we lived in a very small town in the middle of a fly-over state, she always dressed to go into The City. That meant hat, gloves, and matching bag and shoes.

Oh and the characters around the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel! The most perfectly WRONG kind of friends.

First and foremost Susie, played by Alex Borstein, who does not live on the Upper West Side, didn't go to Bryn Mawr, and who grew up in a family that didn't give a damn what she did. But Susie gets Midge. She recognizes talent when she sees it. She can imagine a STAR.

Borstein was nominated for a Critics Choice Award as Best Supporting Actress.


And Lenny Bruce! Yes, THE Lenny Bruce.

When I asked my daughter Grace and her friend if they knew who Lenny Bruce was. That drew blank looks.

"Was he a writer?" she asked.

Books and writers. Bookstores and libraries. These are the things that I've raised my children with.

"No!" I said. "He was a comedian!"

She and her friend Spencer broke into the lyric from Rent's La Vie Boheme, "Lenny Bruce. Langston Hughes. To the stage!"

That got a blank look from me. I have seen Rent and I do like it. But I don't know the lyrics, for heaven's sake.

Spencer immediately googled Lenny Bruce on their phone. "He was prosecuted and convicted for obscenity."

"Yes! Yes! That was him," I cried. "A comedian."

They had no idea.

"You probably don't even know who Bella Abzug was, do you?" I accused. "Feminist? Congress Woman from New York?"

"No but we know who Shirley Chisholm and Betty Friedan were," they responded.

 At least that's something. However, none of these women have anything to do with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

I did suggest that perhaps Grace and Spencer were not old enough to enjoy the series.

Grace pointed out "You enjoy Downton Abbey and you're not that old."

Well, that did rather burst my bubble. Having spent my fervor, I admitted a couple of anachronisms that a good editor would have caught. Things that should not have been in the scripts because they didn't exist yet. Keeping in mind the story is set in 1958. There were musical nods to later Rock and Roll.

And "Midge mentions 'pantyhose' which we didn't start wearing until the mid-60s," I said.

Blank looks.

"Remember girdles and garter belts?" I asked.

More blank looks.

Maybe not as old as Downton Abbey, but oh my. When did I get this old?

Never mind.

Watch it with Google close at hand. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is available on Amazon Prime.

P.S. The second season starts filming in March. (Filming? They probably don't use film anymore. "Starts production" I should say to cover whatever it is they do these days.)

The Women's March

from the Denver Post

Two weeks ago yesterday people all over the country took to the streets. Denver's 2018 Women's March was more than 50,000 strong and I was one of them.

Last year I couldn't participate, because I was between knee surgeries. This year I could and did. My friend Lou and I caught the light rail at Federal Station, the second to western most stop on the  line. Waiting at the station were people of all ages and genders. A good number of marchers were already on the train. As we got closer to Denver the train filled nicely. My daughter Grace and her fiance Bob joined us at the Sheridan station. Along with many others on the train, Grace and Bob wore pink pussy hats. (Well, technically Bob's was a Pokemon hat, but it was pink with ears. Close enough.)

We stopped for breakfast, then took one of the 16th Street Mall buses to Civic Center Park. The Regional Transit District added cars to all the light rail lines and were running extra buses on 16th Street Mall.

Even so, the buses were packed. There were a few people on the bus who were trying to get to work. You should have seen all the jockying around and stepping off and back on to let them out. (Reminded me of those videos of the Japanese trains where uniformed transportation folk push and shove, packing riders into the train.)

Luckily Lou and I were able to get seats. It was a good thing, too. Even with our new knees the milling around in the park before the walk and then the walk were tough tests of our endurance.

         

                                   Grace and Bob had hats              I didn't, so I wore pink hair!

Early in the week, the weather forecast for The March was, cold and cloudy with snow flurries. By the day before The March, the local meteorologists were promising sunshine and no snow until after dark. It was still pretty chilly, so most everybody was layered up.

We got to Civic Center Park early. As you can see,

we had bluebird skies.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere a sign!

Some determined

   

            Several men and children carried these           And a bit of a tribute to Teddy Roosevelt.
             with their arrows pointing to all of us.

There were signs supporting a grand variety of Civil Rights Issues -- "Women's Rights are Civil Rights," "Girls just want to have fun-damental rights," "Black Lives Matter." Signs supporting DACA. Rainbows to include the LGBTQ members of our community. My favorite was "This is what Trans looks like" (carried by a very tall trans woman.)

 Many were anti-'rump and quite witty.    

   

                                   
 

Some of the anti-Groper-in-Chief signs were in (shall we say) questionable taste and I didn't take pictures of them. There was one I wish I had. It said "Grab him by the mid-terms." And to that end there were people everywhere registering people to vote, though I think that most of us there, who were qualified to vote, were already registered.

There were so many people in the park that once it started, it took us more than an hour to get to the ACTUAL starting line. Grace described The March as more of a Shuffle. Between the sun and all that body heat we were coming out of our jackets.

The ACTUAL starting line.

By then Lou and I were about tuckered out, so we peeled off and headed back toward 16th Street Mall and somewhere for lunch.

All the eating places from sidewalk to upscale indoors dining were crowded with pink hats and signs!

There was no way to get on a bus to make our way back to the light rail. Too crowded. Sooooo, we walked  -- 22 more blocks, to be exact.

Next year, we're not going to wait in the park for The Women's March to begin. We are going directly to the ACTUAL starting line. And you can bet we're going to vote this fall.

The Post -- A Movie Review

          Real -- Then              Hollywood -- Now   

                             

Real headline from June 18, 1971, "Documents Reveal U.S. Effort in '54 to Delay Viet Election"
First of a Series
By Chalmers M. Roberts
By THE WASHINGTON POST

Real headline from the Denver Post which picked up the story from The Washington Post,
"Fitness devices expose troops"
By Liz Sly
By THE WASHINGTON POST
January 28, 2018 at 6:04 pm

A striking similarity, don't you think?

There are differences. The first headline was on a hard copy of a newspaper. Perhaps the tactile nature of the bearer of bad news made it all the more shocking. Not to mention the fact that newspapers, printed using Linotype machines to produce lines of type then set into the printer, left ink smudges on your breakfast hands.

The second headline showed up on my laptop as I read my digital edition of The Denver Post this morning. (For the curious reader. No printer's ink smudges here.)

Steven Spielberg has done it again. Another excellent movie. The Post staring Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks is about a newspaper that prints information the United States Government (You know, that government "of the people, by the people and for the people") would rather "the people" not know.

Actually, just as there was more to those days than the Vietnam war, there is much more to this movie. Women's rights, a mega-defensive President. (At least Nixon's expletives were deleted.)

What the movie got wrong. Not in the opening scenes where the soldiers pushed through threateningly quiet, dense jungle, unable to see their enemy. Or the soldiers amid the noise and chaos of injury and loss following a battle. And maybe the soldiers would have referred to the "long-hair," Daniel Ellsberg instead of "that old guy." What was wrong in the opening scenes was that the soldiers looked too old. The average age of American soldiers in Vietnam was 22 compared to WWII and Afghanistan when they were 26. Four years difference is not much, is it? They're all too young.

What The Post gets right is Robert McNamara's glasses and the part in his hair. And the times.

Meryl Streep's portrayal of Katherine Graham is stunning. She gives us a woman who grew up in luxury and privilege. She married. She raised children. She gave the best parties, attended by the best people, including Washington's great and powerful. A woman who lived like she was supposed to until her husband died. Worse yet. Her husband committed suicide and left her to run a newspaper.

As publisher, Graham was certainly not responsible for the business on a daily basis. She had a Board for that. All men. She had an Executive Editor responsible for the newspaper's content. Also a man.

Tom Hanks gives us the editor Ben Bradlee. His character is not nuanced. He's the gungho newspaper guy. His first concern is to beat the competition -- The New York Times. Which brings up the question of the Constitution's First Amendment right to a free press.

That, in turn, brings up the fact that Bradlee's Big Boss is a woman.

For my money, the absolute best scene in the movie is when Bradlee's wife describes for him precisely what Graham's situation is. She is not prepared by her background or her sex's recognized position in society to shoulder the responsibility of defending Freedom of the Press. Such a decision would require her to abandon her loyalties to friends high in the government. To that government itself. Not to mention the very real possibility that she could be imprisoned for publishing classified information from what would come to be called The Pentagon Papers.

Worst case scenario, Bradley might do some time in prison. He might lose his job. He would definitely become high-profile in the world of journalism and would be in high demand for another job.

Graham, on the other hand, could lose her family's business. Their income. The jobs of hundreds of people who worked for her. Her position in her community. Her friends. Her father and husband's legacies.

SPOILER ALERT!!! In case you weren't born when all this went down, were still doing your hippie-dippy drugs, or living your own life safe and secure oblivious to your country's crises of faith ....

She did decide to run the story. The audience where I watched the movie broke into applause. And that's not all. The movie ends with a night watchman calling in a possible break-in at the Watergate office building.

Here we are folks -- 2018 almost half a century later. Less than a week before I saw the movie I took part in the Women's March. More than fifty-thousand of us in Denver. We were of all ages and ethnicities and genders and preferences. And there were many thousands more across this nation as we endure another crisis of faith in our country.

Freedom of the Press is included in the First Amendment to the Constitution for good reason. Remember:  “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, ... it expects what never was & never will be. Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.”  -- Thomas Jefferson

This I Believe

Footprint on the Moon (NASA Images)

It's now ten days into the new year. I know that this is a little late for the traditional stock-taking. The letting go of the past and starting fresh. At least theoretically.

Me, it seems I never let go of the past. The things I didn't understand get revisited and analyzed. Over and over again, until I understand them. Or think I do. Then I relish that bit of the past. It makes for good stories. Stories that help me more thoroughly understand, or, more often, understand differently.

Truth be told, I'm not much for letting go and starting fresh. I tend to let the day go and start again in the morning -- not "fresh" just start again where I left off.

For me, today's taking stock is an exploration of what I've come to believe.

This I believe:

I believe in and love People. Some of my best friends are people. We walk together and talk and laugh together. We worry together. But never in just the same way. We come from different countries. We've had very different growings-up. And very different adulthoods. Our politics are different. Some of us are faithfully religious. Some have our own faiths born of religion. And some have faith inspired by our experiences and educations. The one thing we have in common is that we all got to where we are by thoughtfully exploring our worlds and our lives. And we respect each other.

I believe in and love the Earth. It's my home. Its constancy reassures me. The Earth was here long before People and will be here long after us. Its atmosphere turns particles blown by solar winds into light shows. Its volcanoes burst full-flame into the night sky, building new lands. Tectonic plates shift and drift, forever changing Earth's face. Maybe not "alive" like mice and men, but Earth feels alive to me. And it sustains life.

I believe in and love Space. Space is the future of People and the Earth. From Space we can see Earth in its place in the Universe. How beautiful it is. How small. How much smaller are we. Earth, Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, is our birthplace in the Cosmos, where we have morphed from single-celled organism to sentient being. And now Earth is our staging ground.

Some of us have explored and colonized Earth's lands and waters until there is nowhere on Earth that we cannot go. Some of us will follow that explorer gene into Space. There will be new worlds, not to conquer, but to make new homes.

My middle name is not Pollyanna. I know there are difficulties among humans. There are Earth-borne catastrophes. There are dangers known and unknown in Space travel.

What I don't believe is that these negatives will be enough to stop us. We can and we will.

Into the Future!

What's in a Word -- A Study

Hands and Feet attributed to François Le Moyne (French, 1688–1737)
currently in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. 

(By-the-bye, if you buy tickets at the Metropolitan's ticket counter, the amount you pay is up to you. They do have suggested prices which seem to me to be most acceptable, but you truly can name your own price.)

An artist uses studies to perfect their drawing skills. Words are a writer's tools. They, too can be used in short pieces as studies.

Shakespeare wrote these words for Juliet to say. Don't you imagine he thought about it, maybe even said them out loud just to see how they sounded. "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet" meaning that what Romeo was called, a name belonging to a rival family, mattered not at all. Alas, we all know how that worked out.

Then along comes Gertrude Stein who writes "...a rose is a rose is a rose" meaning that the word says that it is a particular flower and that is what she means it is -- a rose. A plain spoken woman, is our Ms. Stein.

But not all roses are roses and had Romeo's name been plain John Brown, it's safe to say that story would have gone another way.

Just as this flower,

Rose of Sharon

 despite its name, is not one of the more than one hundred species of roses. 

It is an hibiscus (hibiscus syriacus to be exact.)

The gentleman rose from his chair as she entered. She wore a long gown. Silk, he thought. The color? Ashes of Roses. He remembered reading that somewhere. In her dark hair, a flower of rubies. Its leaves, tiny emeralds.

"Hello, Rose," he said, extending his hand.

(Which brings to mind another word that can sound very different when read, depending on the situation -- Hello.)

###

From the bottom of the well, "Hello," she called. "Is anybody up there?"

###

He held the phone to his ear. "Hello?"

"Hello," she said. "I'm sorry."

###

She opened the basement door and peered into the gloom, "Hello? Is anybody down there?"

(At which we all yell at the screen, "HELLO! DON'T GO DOWN THERE.")