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portobello pizzas
Friday, May 1 2015
Today was a beautiful May Day I finally got around to disposing of two full buckets of urine and pine needles by burying them in the main patch (Patch A) of the garden. One of the buckets came from the northeast corner of the house, where I have been collecting urine from my flushless urinal since 2007, and the other came from the brownhouse, where urine is segregated from the waste stream into bucket of its own (it accumulates much more slowly than urine from the urinal system does).
This evening, Gretchen and I drove up to Saugerties without the dogs to visit our friend Jeff and his newly-moved-in girlfriend Alanna. Jeff works as a cameraman for various reality shows (including Dog the Bounty Hunter) and he's a regular of the Kingston art opening scene. The other day Jeff and Gretchen had gotten to talking about Airplane!, what they both believe to be the funniest movie ever made, and he invited us over so the four of us could watch it. He'd also be preparing dinner.
Jeff & Alanna live on a beautiful side street near the center of Saugerties directly across from a massive grey-and-black funeral home. All the buildings on the street are large Victorian houses. It would all be rather grim were it not for all the big trees with tender little leaves and all the fresh blossoms of springtime. Jeff and Alanna's place is a Victorian that has been split down the middle into a duplex. The ceilings on the first floor look to be about 12 feet up. It had a tastefully cluttered look, with various highly-organized collections in various places: here the CDs, there the DVDs, and an impressive collection of liquors. There was also a good collection of art by local artists, including Mιchæl X Rοse and the late Warren Schmahl (an airplane made by the latter reminded me of the dough airplane from Maurice Sendak's In the Night Kitchen).
Dinner consisted of a salad and portobello mushroom caps that had been decorated with peppers, spices, and such to make them into tiny vegan pizzas (Jeff and Alanna are not vegans, but they know that we are). They were really good, though Jeff should have made 12 of them instead of six. For dessert, Gretchen had brought over six jars of s'mores (prepared based on a recipe found in a book about vegan food in jars). As for alchohol, I drank a series of beers I had never had before, including one brewed in old rum kegs, an good IPA, and a Belgian-style Pale Ale (that last one had a bit too much of the Belgian thing going on). When Alanna offered a drink from the bar, I opted for a Manhattan, saying I liked them because they are "alcoholics' drinks, not girlie drinks."
As for the featured attraction, I'm sorry to say that I find Airplane! less watchable every time I watch it. There are plenty of funny moments, but it's just too zany for my tastes and the humor often feels forced. That said, the idea of playing the humor straight (as opposed to playing it the way Robin Willians or Jim Carrey would've played it) was revolutionary for its time, and set the stage for much better comedy (such as Office Space and the Colbert Report, which make Williams & Carrey seem badly out-of-date by comparison.
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