Starting Next Week (4 cents)

I am going to try something new. I am going to put together a weekly posting, to be published on Saturday or Sunday. I will write and edit it over the course of the week (editing will probably help, as everything you see now is first draft material). During the week, I will only put in short anecdotal pieces.

I have missed out listing or describing many things I have seen or done.

For example, what did I think about Amy Ziff's one-woman show, Accident, which is a Theater J "extra"? In many ways, I liked it, although I found that it too seemed too much a first draft, and thoughts that it needed a tighter weave. What did I like about it best? Probably, Ziff's memory of her father, who liked apple crisp, apple cake, apple pie, apple betty....anything with apples. I can identify with that.

How was dinner at Logan Tavern (as usual good, although my wine choice could have been better; I had a syrah along with my salmon)? How was dinner at Jaleo (quite good, and I especially recommend the Basque stew, for those whose diets permit it)? How was brunch at the Chevy Chase Bread and Chocolate (good eggs!)?

How about today's final baseball game at RFK? Nats beat the Phillies 5-3. They say the crowd was about 40,000 (Ha. Ha. Give or take 10,000). The day was beautiful. And I got to meet Chris and Joel (and German girl). And see Marsha and her daughter, whose name I have forgotten. (By the way, third baseball game in 8 days, a 2007 season record)

Speaking about forgetting names, when Rabbi Miller mentioned Tricia Nixon in her sermon, I began to think of the other Nixon daughter, the one who married David Eisenhower. I always liked her better. But I could not think of her name, so I sat during Yom Kippur services for about ten minutes running through every name I could think of before Julie popped into my head. This is a dangerous sign, isn't it? And what is Marsha's daughter's name?

I see that Franz Bader's book store (expensive art books) is going out of business in downtown DC, as well as Bonifant's Used Book Store in Wheaton. I didn't do anything to keep them alive, that's for sure. Also saw that Earl Allen's clothing store downtown is gone, and Continental Jewelers is on its way. What will replace them, and why can't strip retail last inside the city?

Did I say that I read Margot Livesey's "Criminals", a novel about one man who found a baby and one who lost the same baby? I think I might have.

I also read Lucille Eichengreen's very interesting book "Rumkowski and the Orphans of Lodz", a first hand account of the Lodz ghetto from 1939-1944. Very depressing obviously, but a fascinating picture of what life was like there and then. Rumkowski, you might remember from my review of the exhibit at the Holocaust museum on the Children of the Lodz ghetto was the orphanage director who was placed in charge of the ghetto by the Germans and who organized the ghetto for work, thinking that productivity was the way to the German hearts. Of course, he was wrong, as it turned out (and he and his family were sent to, and murdered in, Auschwitz), but he could have been correct, I guess. His administration was by and large a continuing series of 'Sophie's choices', decided who should live and who should die (sounds familiar on the day after Yom Kippur, huh?).

The twist in this book was portraying him as a child molester, amongst everything else (from first hand knowledge of the author, and of many she met during her years in captivity). I don't remember this being a focal point of the museum exhibit, and wonder why not.

And then there was the Smithsonian lecture on Timbuktu, by a man and woman who recently wrote the biography of the city. I wish that they had been better presenters or more sure of their topic. They clearly are not scholars, but there was a lot that I did not know that was fascinating.

Timbuktu, by the way, is in Mali. It has been around for perhaps 2000 years. It is on the Niger River and was once a great trading port, a center for the manufacture of iron goods and other weapons, surrounded on three sides by dense forests (now gone, all desert), and the intellectual capital of the Moslem world. It is a racially and ethnically diverse place, and always has been. It's oldest existing mosque was built about 1000, and is now being restored by the Aga Khan Foundation, it is very poor. There may be as many as 1,000,000 manuscripts in public and private collections there, most of which have never been translated or studied.

Did I talk about the Smithsonian's Portugal exhibit? Or the lecture that I attended on topics related to that exhibit? Or my disapppointing look at the Earl Cunningham exibit at the Museum of American Art?

So many things to mention. So little time.