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Dug Hill Road Bread and Beckfast
Thursday, July 1 2004
It's a busy season up here at Dug Hill Road Bread and Beckfast. Not long after we'd said our goodbyes to Gretchen's distant relatives (I don't even know the names of my familial analogues), I was sent to pick up a couple of friends from the city who would be arriving at the Kingston bus stop. One of these was Doug, who had gone to high school with Gretchen and who now lives in Manhattan (he also came to our wedding 14 months ago). The other was Doug's new girlfriend Sharon.
We came back to the house and immediately started drinking leftover Keegan Ale and talking about whatever intellectual lefties talk about. Doug sort of reminds me of Dina in that his conversational style feels a little like an interview, almost to the point where it feels inappropriate to ask him questions. As for Sharon, she's a citizen of Canada and, though (like everyone else visiting this weekend) Jewish, she looks more like a Swede. (Her Swedish mother's conversion was so thorough that, according to Sharon, she even has "Holocaust paranoia.")
Later, before it became dark, I took Doug and Sharon for a walk on one of the larger loops of the Stick Trail system (Gretchen's still-recovering ankle prevented her from coming along). I'd forgotten how people act when they're newly in love, and it took me awhile to reconcile myself to the fact that they wanted to lag behind me ten or twenty paces and carry on animated conversations I was expected to ignore. Aside from that, they were genuinely excited about the hike.
Later we all ate out at La Pupuseria on Broadway for the best restaurant experience to be had in Kingston. While ordering in Spanish from our waitress (though she addresses us using the usted form, she knows I always get cinco pupusas que tienen queso y frijoles), Gretchen was alarmed to discover her limited grasp of Spanish had already started slipping away.
We ended the evening at Back Stage Productions (BSP) for their weekly open mike event. Something about the spectacle of the performances today left me feeling oddly depressed. It wasn't just that most of the performances were like fingernails on a chalkboard, it was also that nobody in the audience seemed to be paying much attention to the performers. At open mike, the best performances are always the extended jazz improvisations. But I'm just not a fan of that sort of music. Today our friend Mark the Straight Hairdresser was playing a muted trumpet while his bandmates did their jazz improvisation thing behind him. It was pretty good, I suppose, as this sort of music goes. But Mark had an echo effect hooked up to the microphone he was playing into, and he'd stop playing every now and then to shout things at the audience. Unfortunately, the echo was so strong it was impossible to make out what he was trying to say. It was a little thing, I know, but it nevertheless reminded me of a bad acid trip (not that I've ever actually had a completely bad acid trip).
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