Quick Takes (2 cents)

1. Theater. "Sleeping Arrangements" at Theater J. A feel good fantasy memoir of growing up in the Bronx in a very odd family. Your father was killed in the war (OK, so there was no war going on, but you're just a kid), your mother dies when you are seven, you best friends get you into trouble, your summer camp experience is a disaster, you move in with your two odd (and too odd) uncles, and your wacky grandmother, Etka from Minsk, joins the household. It is not profound, but it is simple and it is cute and defintely worth seeing.

2. Movies. "Live and Become", about a non-Jewish Ethiopian boy who, at age 11, in pushed onto an Operation Moses plane by his mother to help him escape a refugee camp, and live and become. And never to tell anyone that he isn't Jewish. For the first half of the movie, the boy, adopted by a white French Jewish family, is extraordinary; in the second half, as he becomes a doctor, and joins Medicines sans Frontieres and returns to the camp in Sudan to work, it begins to unravel a bit only because it tries to do too much. Absolutely worth seeing; also provides very good visuals both of dusty African refugee camps and of parts of Israel not normally seen on the screen. Also saw two movies on television, "A Song for Bobby Long" with a graying John Travolta (he is in his mid-50s? I thought he was still 35) and Scarlet Johanson, and "Creche" a new French film. "Bobby Long" did not get terrific press, and it is clearly not a masterpiece, but it catches the rhythm of the city that was New Orleans as Johanson, returning to her estranged mother's house after her death, finds it inhabited by Bobby Long and a friend, and has to make do and accommodate. "Creche", having to do with strange messages and drawings being delivered to the home of a TV journalist, perhaps traced to a man from Algeria who the journalist's parents almost adopted as a young boy. We kept watching hoping something would happen that was both interesting and would pull the movie together. No such luck.

3. Book. Finished "A Matter of Opinion", the memoirs (part personal, part history) of Victor Navasky, long time editor and sometime publisher of 'The Nation' magazine. It bogs down in places, but it is by and large a fascinating story of American opinion magazines, and all of the extraordinary and well known people who wrote for them, and tried to keep them functioning. For anyone interested in the topic, the book is highly recommended.

4. Restaurants. "Frascati", an Italian restaurant in Bethesda which has been around a long time, was surprisingly good. We had a whole tilapia and osso bucco. I am not sure I would do the osso bucco again, but not because of the way it was prepared. Just not my favorite. Another good meal at Logan Tavern.