Author: Paul

The Little Theater tests the waters with movies by only giving them one showing. I was looking forward to the Joan Jett documentary and they have just announced it will be here for one screening, on a Wednesday this month when our band is playing in the Café. We’ll miss Dylan at the Auditorium because that too is a Wednesday. Tomorrow night “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda” plays the Little at 7pm. Our friend, Stan, called our attention it this one. Sakamoto was a member of the the Yellow Magic Orchestra and is an Oscar-winning film composer. After the Fukushima disaster he became an an outspoken social activist against nuclear power in Japan. A few weeks back I posted a link to a set of music he compiled for his favorite restaurant in NYC.

I’m starting to feel like that guy you see at every art opening chowing down the food. We went to two this weekend. On Friday we drove along the Parkway to Albion for Pete Monacelli’s “Searching For Home” show. This series is mostly flat, hard edged paintings with architectural shapes pulling and pushing the plane. On Sunday we stopped by Margaret Spevak’s opening in the Café. Her quilts happily cross the boundaries of craft and art. Both shows were delightful.

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Olcott and Wolcott, are both about the same distance from our house, one in the direction of Buffalo and the other on the way to Syracuse. Both are idyllic little towns on the shore of Lake Ontario, surrounded by fruit orchards. We visited both this summer and pushed it yesterday by continuing on to Fair Haven, the town after Wolcott.

Matthew was our guide. I had not been here since I was a kid and I was anxious to see the diving boards along the channel that runs off the lake into the state park. The hardware is still there but the boards are gone.

We parked in the center of town near the library, next to a street person who was sitting on the lawn. He was barefoot and wearing cut-offs, that’s it. Matthew introduced him to us and he stood up to say, “We’re going to touch” and he gave me a polite hug.

The town is charming. It swells in size over the summer and has three art galleries. We visited them all before heading to Little Sodus Inn, a dark funky bar right at the bottom of the bay. We passed a sign that read, “Curfew in Effect 10PM to 5AM Under 18 years of age.” The bartender’s top was cut really low yet it never ran out of tattoo covered breasts. We took our beers out in the sun but I could see spending some time in there.

Walking toward the lake by some dreamy cottages we stopped at the “Fly by Night Cookie Shop and Miniature Museum,” a fairytale like place run by a large German woman who looked like she stepped out of a Bruegal painting. We picked out cookies from glass jars, chocolate rum balls, “Hee Hee” cookies shaped like marijuana leaves and coconut almond macaroons.

Our next stop was a general store on Main Street with a “No Skateboarding or Loitering” sign out front. First thing that caught my eye was a shelf of gag items, a lollipop that will turn your tongue blue, birthday candles that you can’t blow out, and a bloody bandaid with a nail through it that you can wrap around your finger. A table near the door was stocked with local produce. We bought peaches, apples and eggs. The counter near the cash register was surrounded with tiers of Bic lighters, Bill’s Beef Sticks and five short stacks of “Big Slab” Beef Jerky in a big transparent case. Your choice of “Original, Black Pepper, Teriyaki, Sweet n’ Spicy and Cajun.”

Back at our car the shirtless guy was still on the lawn and a young couple, maybe eighteen years old or so, was sitting on a bench. The woman was was clearly strung out and she jumped up to pace with her phone. She walked around the building and returned holding the phone out to the guy and asking the person on the other end if they wanted to talk to daddy.

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I went to two high schools. This one, above, is Bishop Kearney. We walked by there yesterday on our way to Starbucks. I like how the Virgin Mary, flag and cross on top of the building line up. I went here for two years and couldn’t wait to get out. Back in the day the whole left side of the building was for girls and we were on the right. The nuns and Irish Christian brothers lived on the top floor. The gymnasium was straight ahead and there was a little closet-like room between the gym doors where the brothers would take you and apply corporal punishment if you misbehaved. It was a Catholic thing. We had dinner with Martha O’Connor the other night and determined that her brother, Kevin, was in my class. I think I remember him. It was a long time ago. RL Thomas, where I went for my second two years, was a lot more memorable.

Margaret Explosion plays the Little Theatre Café every Wednesday in September. Here’s Homeward from our last gig.

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Peggi’s phone read 93 degrees when we lost our cellular coverage so it stayed that way for two days while we were off the grid. It was too hot to do anything but sit and talk. And when dinnertime came Pete had some Tabouli, tomatoes and freshly pickled cucumbers ready to serve.

Out on the road the next morning we walked two and half miles toward Crown Point and before turning around. Long before the Revolutionary War the British fought the French at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. This is a dirt road and the only vehicle we saw was a logging truck.

The temperature dropped about forty degrees the next day. I dumped the rain water out of the rowboat and the four of us went out on the marsh. The sticker on the side of the boat said it held 400 pounds so it road pretty low. The boat didn’t have any oars so Pete worked a canoe paddle from the rear and Shelley sat up front with another paddle. Peggi and I sat in the middle and we floated through yellow pond lilies from one beaver dam to the next. It is incredibly beautiful up here.

We drank Gennys by candlelight and listen to tracks from the Gigunda vault.

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We couldn’t decide which way to walk. When we got to the corner we paused and then went the way didn’t go yesterday. We discussed coffee and the headed toward Starbucks. We heard someone on a P.A. in the distance, maybe at the town hall, so we headed that way. There was garage sale going on in the old farm house on Culver, the one set way back from the road. I was looking at a Snoopy Pez dispenser and Peggi was looking at some wine glasses when the homeowner came over to say they were closing up shop and they were just going to take everything out to the curb. He offered to get us a box that we could fill up for five bucks. That was easy.

We grabbed the glasses, a Blue Ray box set of the Godfather movies, dvd of Mystic River and Kill Bill. I chose three eps, Tom Jones Live, Ray Charles Crying Time ad the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago which is primarily Lara’s Theme.We took a stack of books, As I lay Dying, Of Human Bondage, Main Street and the complete works of Shakespeare. And for good measure I through in a book called The Desire of Ages, the 1898 life of Christ by Ellen G. White. Each short chapter is illustrated. I might just cut the pictures out. We told the owner we would be back in a few hours to pick up the box.

A big band, comprised of old people and teens, was playing in the band stand behind Town Hall. That must have been what we heard earlier. They did “Happy” and then KC’s ”Boogie Shoes.” We had seen a sign for the Sea Breeze Fire Department Festival, something we had stumbled onto years ago while we were out biking, so we headed toward the lake on Kings Highway. We found a big cooler with a bag of ice and a five inch stack in individually wrapped American cheese slices in it. The festival was apparently the day before. We turned around and spotted a pair of Santa and Mrs. Claus gnomes, about ten inches high, sitting under a shrub in someone’s yard. So cute they must leave it up year round.

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Aman’s Farm Market picked up the slack when Abby Wambach’s parent’s place closed and they’ve been busier than ever. It’s family run as well but they have been around since 1867. They are great alternative to Wegman’s for fresh corn, strawberries and peaches. Their perennials are half price now so we put a few Vermillionaire plants in our backpacks and planted them out front by the four horseshoe chairs. Jim Mott painted the chairs and he was sitting in the fourth while he painted these three. They came from grandparents place on Gregory Hill Road but you can still get metal chairs just like them. We are delighted to find the small, orange, tubular flowers of the Vermillion plants are Hummingbird magnets.

We read this morning that the FBI was able to reconstruct shredded documents and use them to prosecute Trump’s lawyer, Micheal Cohen. I’m trying to imagine what that project must have been like.

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There was hardly anyone on the golf course when we cut through this afternoon. Maybe it was too wet. We saw the beer lady in her cart and she was just sitting under a tree studying her phone. We came across a dead skunk on one of the greens with a puncture wound in his stomach and surprisingly it didn’t stink.

At the lake we took Kings Highway up to the library. We walk on the shoulder going against traffic as cars act like its a drag strip in that isolated Stretch. The undeveloped part of the park was thick and lush, too thick to even walk through this time of year. We usually stop in the library, study the new releases, and use their bathrooms but we didn’t have any time for that today. We were headed over to Deborah Ronnen’s to check out some new prints. Our favorite was by Kiki Smith.

We passed a Harley up on the sidewalk and grey haired biker on his cell phone. It wasn’t until we were right on top of him that we were able to read his t-shirt. “Iron Cannibal Choppers.” At the end of street we spotted a big patch of orange Chanterelle mushrooms. While we were walking a I made a mental note to look up Genesee beer and BlackkKlansman when I got back. I thought someone would be talking about the Genesee neon signs in the bar scene. Either they carry the local beer in Colorado Springs or someone scored a strategic product placement. I didn’t find anything.

After our art preview we had the Sesame Tofu special at Lanai and talked to the chef, Rico, about Hawaii. Peggi complemented him on the soundtrack, most of which she first heard her mom play on weekends back in the first Polynesian wave.

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Jared’s grandkids broke his glass rain collector but he estimated we had almost two inches of rain the other night. Other parts of the county got up to nine. I expected to find some of our tomato plants laying on the ground but they were all still standing. Peggi brought home a bag of them and we plan on making gazpacho. We’ll use the cucumbers from next door. Maybe try this recipe. We were trying to estimate how tall these corn stalks are. Our best guess is fifteen feet.

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These are the kind chairs that you don’t sit at. They are in the front yard of house near us. We pass by often and we have never seen anyone sitting in them. They are nice looking and perhaps that is enough.

We started getting serious about putting away some money rather late. Our band was doing a Happy Hour gig at the Bug Jar and Steve Brown, one of the three original owners, was behind the bar those nights. He worked for Merrill in the day and he encouraged us stop by his office. He made it all fun, recommending a few things but mostly coaching us to buy what we like. Of course we bought some Apple. Steve moved on and these days we check in with Joe Marchese out at MCC every couple of years. He guides us toward a comfortable 60/40 balance of equities and fixed income. After a ten year bull market we had some shuffling to do. Our key strategy though is fairly simple. We just don’t spend that much.

It seems you can’t talk about anything these days with Trump coming up. I think we said said something about tariffs and Joe said, “I understand economics but we’re dealing with a nut case.”

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