Yearly Archives: 2008

Becoming Dona

Reading, , , , ,

When I was in the 6th grade I had a friend (fittingly named Eugenia) who introduced me to romance (mostly gothic) novels. I began with Phyllis A. Whitney who, I just discovered, passed away earlier this year. I then moved on to Victoria Holt and all of her pseudonyms. Eventually I read some of the Brontës’ work. I never read Jane Austen.

One trait most of the women in these novels possesses is a sharp tongue and the habit of provoking bantering conversation with all men, but mostly the men they were interested in romantically. Being relatively sheltered and shy, I didn’t have much opportunity to converse with males other than my relatives, so I didn’t really know how to talk to them, especially guys I was interested in. So I took a cue from the romance novels I read and, in my imaginary conversations with guys, carried on sharp-witted banter with them in my head. Oh, I was witty. My fictitious retorts to imagined flirtations were brilliant.

My real conversations with guys wasn’t so successful. Either I’d blush and look down and stammer something unintelligible until they walked away, laughing; or I tried to be witty and the guys would look at me like I was insane. They never bantered back.

I didn’t realize that “normal” people didn’t talk like that. That it was just fiction. In fact, it wasn’t until the past ten years or so that I finally really understood that I was not going to find my perfect verbal sparring partner and that the banter I’d expected to experience just wasn’t going to be a reality in my life and, in fact, was a pretty annoying thing to listen to.

Clare and I started watching Becoming Jane last week. We got about a quarter of the way through it and couldn’t’ deal with the banter. Perhaps Jane Austen did talk like that. Perhaps men and women of the late 1700’s and early 1800’s bantered. Perhaps to be the ones bantering was exhilarating. But to listen to consistent banter? It’s downright irritating.

Dan again

Music

Dan Bern made his annual stop in the area last night. This time he played at Jammin’ Java in Vienna — probably my favorite place to see him — it’s intimate and the sound is great. He played a good mix of old and new stuff, and did a lot of chit-chatting in between songs. He seemed in great spirits as well. Pretty much a perfect show.

The audience was attentive and appreciative, if somewhat sparse. I didn’t recognize anyone — either all the folks I knew who used to go to Dan’s shows have moved to other artists or states — or I didn’t look closely enough.

Paul Kuhn played his cellocaster to accompony Dan for all of the songs and 1/3 of the way through the show, Holly Montgomery joined Dan and Paul on stage to sing along with some “oldies”.

Dan mentioned winning a new guitar in an egg-eating contest and claimed to be drinking zrii and vodka. He started singing one of his earlier songs a second time, but caught it before he got too far. He forgot the words to a couple of songs as well.  But he seemed to have a good time.

This is one of my favorites: Walking Through Glass

Here’s one of his most famous: Marilyn


 
My only complaint? No encore. I’m used to him coming back at least once to sing more — but the audience just got up and left when he said “Goodbye and thanks for coming.” Was it because it was a Sunday night and we had work the next day? Was it because the audience felt like it had enough? I can’t figure it out. I don’t blame the band — I blame the audience. I sat and clapped while people got up and left, then I got embarrassed and left too.
 

Another house dream

Dreams

So last night / this morning I had another dream about moving into another house. This time, however, the house was pretty normal — brand new, in fact. I was secretly pleased that it was brand new, although I profess to only like older homes. This time, also, we had not sold our current house, and were just checking the new house out by spending a couple of nights in the new house to see if we liked it.

We didn’t have any strong feelings about the house, one way or the other, so figured, why not… It was in Alexandria, Virginia — where we lived before Bethesda; and we discovered, after spending two nights at the house, it was built right next to the George Washington Masonic Memorial. I’d recently been thinking about that place because I thought the steps would be great practice for our trip to Ireland where we were planning on visiting Skellig Michael, an island that, if you walk up 600 steps, you’ll get to visit an ancient monastery.

We’d just decided on buying the house when I noticed that it was not only adjacent to the Memorial, but built in the middle of a cemetery. In fact, looking out one of the windows, I saw several very old tombstones. At first I thought that Clare would love it — being all into haunted places and all. Then I realized that I couldn’t live there because it was obvious that the builders had dug up graves to build the house.

Not sure where that dream came from, but it seems as if we’ve learned our lesson — don’t buy a house without touring the whole thing.