Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

On Wednesday, we stepped out after dinner to hear a jazz performance at the Good Shepherd Center a couple blocks from the house. I’d been tipped off about the performance because I’m on an email list from a bass player that has been one of our favorite musicians over the past decade. His name is Paul Kemmish, but most often he goes by “PK”. He plays both upright string bass and electric bass guitar.

We had never heard of the trio he was performing with Wednesday and didn’t know what to expect, but no matter what incarnation we’ve heard him in, we’ve seldom been disappointed.

The Good Shepherd Center and the adjacent property is a former nunnery and home for “wayward girls” that the Catholic Church sold to the city back in the 70s. It’s a huge hulk of a building that now houses a senior center, a private elementary school and various headquarters for non-profit organizations. As often as I’ve been in and around the building, I’ve never been to the upper floors.

This performance, then introduced me to a chapel space that I’d never known about, located on the fourth floor of the building. It’s not that often that we’re seated concert-style for a PK performance - it’s most often in a bar or a nightclub-style music venue.

The music this trio played was mostly improvisational, although it seemed “tight” in the sense that they knew where they were headed and were very attentive to each other. It was interesting to see PK playing outside his more familiar funk and groove riffs. The pickup on the video below is not the best, but you can see how hard the guy works and pick up a few of his riffs:

We latched onto PK back in 1998 0r 99 when he was part of a groove jazz trio called Rockin’ Teenage Combo. I had just returned from a business trip and we were hosting a young co-worker who wanted to visit Seattle for the weekend, and Mrs. Perils had read an interesting review of RTC. So up to Pike Street we went. By the time they had played 5 bars, I was hanging over the rail in rapt attention. They were a trio of PK on bass, a woman named Dara Quinn on keys and several different drummers. They played a driving, yet intricate acid-funk-jazz that you could either stand and drink in or boogie down to. Dara was a gifted keyboard player who was just as comfortable with a baby grand as she was with a Roland and a synth.

We stalked them (and a couple of other bands) around town after that, and they sort of became our house band. We hired them to play for both of our 50th birthday parties. Mrs. Perils’ was really cool, held in a loft in a warehouse south of downtown. RTC’s drummer that night was Jason McGerr, now the drummer for Seattle band Death Cab for Cutie.

Here’s a podcast of a few selections that I really like. The first is sort of breezy and poppy, and you can feel PK providing the solid foundation. In the second number, PK is playing bass guitar and Dara is playing her Roland electric keys. The other numbers are there if you like it and want a soundtrack for awhile.

[audio:RTCPodcast.mp3]

RTC broke up a few years ago. I think you might still be able to purchase their cd’s here.  I’m still going to make a podcast some day of bands that we’ve killed with our attention.

This weekend, back in my hometown in Ohio, they held my 40th high school class reunion. I had originally planned to go, tagging on a hop across Lake Michigan after working last week in Milwaukee. It would have worked out nicely, since my mom still lives in town and I could have combined the festivities with a visit with her and chores around her house. However, my client decided he wanted me in Milwaukee a week earlier, so I sent my regrets.

Since my high school social life revolved almost exclusively around the band, my friends were drawn from 5 or 6 different classes (older and younger) rather than just my graduating class. And while it’s true that Mrs. Perils and I met in high school band, she was in the class of ‘69. For these reasons, plus the fact that we’ve lived in Seattle for the last 33 years, I don’t have super-strong ties to anyone from my class. There are people I’d enjoy seeing, but it’s not like we correspond, or even send Christmas cards.

Still, it’s a milestone of sorts, another chink in my armor. The reunion committee did a really nice job of reaching out to find people, and I got nicely reacquainted through a website they set up to post photos and stories. Some of the stories, of course, were startling in their portrayal of lives that you could never have imagined for certain individuals.

Maybe I’ll make the 50th. From my senior class yearbook:

(Click to enlarge)

Guess I wasn’t what you’d call a varsity athlete! Pitiable male pride probably led me to list “Intramurals”. Sheesh. Also, they misspelled my name - it’s one “l”. Yeah, I was on the yearbook staff, but I did the sports. Still, you’d think I’d check my own entry.

And here’s one from the Perils archive - that’s me and Mrs. Perils gettin’ down at the senior prom. Please be gentle if you comment (Click to engorge):

The weather here has been just spectacular, and on Wednesday, I played hooky and accompanied Mrs. Perils and a rock-climbing friend of hers on a day hike. Their agenda included a round of rock-climbing, so Wednesday morning found us leaving the house at an un-Perils-like 5:30. We drove up I-90 to Snoqualmie Pass and hiked into the Alpine Lakes Wilderness on a section of the Pacific Crest Trail that includes Kendall Katwalk, pictured below. The Katwalk was blasted across the face of a sheer rock face. You can see the trail itself in the upper right part of the photo. It looks narrower than it really is (about 3 feet), but it still gives the scrotum a tingle when you walk across it.

(Click any photo to enlarge)

The trail starts at 3000-ft Snoqualmie Pass and ascends 2700 feet over the 8 or 9 miles that I hiked. There are still lots of wildflowers at that elevation, and they’re real abundant once you break out of the forested part of the trail.

It’s called the Alpine Lakes Wilderness for a reason! (Ridge Lake below):

At about the 6 1/2 mile mark, Mrs. Perils and her companion peeled off the trail to scramble up to Mt. Thompson for their rock-climbing adventure. I thought I might accompany them up to the base of the mountain to photograph them a little, but I got off-track on the precipitous scramble and decided to go back down to the trail. I’m not really acrophobic, but in certain situations where the footing is sketchy and the trail (or non-trail, in this instance) is steep, I get paralyzed and, even though others have successfully proceeded before me, become convinced that gravity is not in my corner. I usually pull myself forward, whether on all 4s or gingerly walking, but on this day, I wasn’t going to be climbing anyway, so I just bagged it.

The bad thing was that I had most of our food in my pack, and they had gone so far beyond me when I turned back that they weren’t willing to come back for it. Lunch that day was one of the most guilty meals I’ve ever eaten. That’s the peak (Mt. Thompson) that they went climbing on in the righthand photo below:

Once back on the trail, I hiked a couple miles farther along, as Mt. Rainier to the south revealed itself more and more fully as I ascended.

My goal was to get to a point where I could shoot the mountain framed by the Gold Creek valley, lower right. I got to a ridge saddle where the trail turned back and descended in a different direction, so I couldn’t actually get the mountain centered in the valley. I don’t know why nature won’t cooperate with my photographic tastes.

I settled for a lunch stop on the ridge, with its panoramic views off each side, and lingered to read from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The idyl was punctuated all too frequently, however, by waves of vicious biting flies and mosquitoes. I zipped on the leggings of my convertible pants, pulled on a long-sleeved pullover and wrapped my head in a polypro shirt I’d brought in case of a chill. They still found ways to bite through the two shirt layers. Turned out Mrs. Perils had all of the bug repellent in her pack. I think I would have traded her even for the food at a couple points.

While I was on the ridge, two pairs of back-packing hikers passed by on their way to the interior of the Wilderness. One was going to spend the next 6 days on their way to Stevens Pass on Route 2; the other couple was hiking the PCT up to the Canadian border. In the left-hand photo below, you can see the PCT traversing the face of the mountain about halfway up from the lake.

Sick of the photos yet? Didn’t think so…here’re a few more:

It’s good to fly west into a 3-hour sunset and descend over the beckoning Cascades and a post-card view of Elliott Bay and downtown Seattle:
click any photo to enlarge

That’s Glacier Peak in the center of the mountain picture.

And while I can’t complain about the quality and service at my new Milwaukee coffee vendor, it’s comforting to return to the place where it’s an art form. Here’s a pair of drinks we got at Chocolati on a lazy Saturday morning:

The top is Mrs. Perils’ hot chocolate, the bottom is my double-shot nonfat mocha. Ahhhh.

Finally at the end of my week in Milwaukee. I’m chillin’ in the Milwaukee airport waiting for a slightly delayed plane and hoping that my Seattle connection in Minneapolis will still be good. As much flying as I do, I really haven’t had much trouble that hasn’t been self-inflicted.

The week started off with a jolt (or the Jolt That Wasn’t) when I pulled up to a coffeehouse close to my client’s offices that I’ve relied on for the last four years, including as recently as last month, to find the place deserted and weeds already pushing up through the asphalt in the parking lot:

(click any photo to enlarge)

I was pretty sad, since I’d come to like the family people that ran the shop, and they knew my drinks and quirks. If there’s any difference between the two. They had opened the shop in an old gas station, getting some tax credits or other emoluments in exchange for fixing up a “brownfield” site. I presume that whatever essences still seeped from beneath the floor only added to the impact of the coffee and quality of the crema in my drinks.

Before this place opened, I actually carried a nifty little Capresso mini-espresso maker on business trips. Just about the time this shop opened, the steamer wand on the mini broke off from too many bendings and straightenings due to airline baggage mishaps.

Fortunately, espresso has percolated into the cultures of even the most stoic midwestern venues, and I’ve found a worthy replacement shop not too far from the hotel I use. One good early sign - they seem to have a whimsical sense of humor. Here’s the front door handle:

I’m having trouble getting my lobes around this headline:

AL Notes: Elbow soreness lands Colon on DL

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Yeah, I know I owe this blog a post about the rest of the Ashland trip, and I’ve been ruminating on it in the spare moments I’ve had this week as I try to transition from vacation to servicing clients in Seattle to trekking to Milwaukee (which I’m doing today). I promise I’ll have something to say for the archives - I’ve brought my Bloom along to Milwaukee - but I want to continue the conversation parallel to Ashland, just to get something posted.

Traveling is interesting today. I’ve made a little game of counting how many folks I’ve seen on the concourses and in the Northwest Worldclubs reading the just-released Harry Potter book. So far, it’s 13, and I haven’t been really invasive about my investigations. Most of the airport bookstores seem to have ample supplies of the book to sell. I wonder how much extra fuel is being expended by our already-financially-strapped airlines in transporting this weighty tome around the country today.

Last week was a dramatic turnaround from the unseasonable heat of the week before. I’d gotten to the point where I didn’t think I’d ever hear water pouring through the downspouts again. And then, there we were experiencing May weather in July.

The alternating moisture and heat are great for our garden (I know I’ve been pretty silent about it). I think we may actually get corn, if we get some August heat.

Meanwhile, berries of various species have been appearing on bushes and in the local farmer’s markets, and our resident (and only) son baked a delicious raspberry/blueberry pie last week.

He reduced the recommended amount of sugar, and the result was the almost-unalloyed taste of the berries.  Plus the vanilla ice cream that we glopped onto it just because we could.

Wednesday was a busy day for us, theater-wise.

Backstage Tour

We’ve signed up for a guided backstage tour for three straight years. They always take you to the same places in the 3 theaters, but we’ve had a different actor each year, and it’s interesting to hear the Ashland experience filtered through their individual lenses. Our guide this year was a young man who played Christian in Cyrano De Bergerac two years ago. We will be seeing him this year in On the Razzle. He’s married to an actress who is also a member of the company, and plays Rosalind in As You Like It. It wasn’t clear whether they met as members of the company, or accomplished the neat trick of separately landing positions and being able to work together over the extended season at Ashland. The actors work on one-season contracts. During the tour, he said that casting for next year’s season would be announced on Monday. Must be an exciting day for those two.

As You Like It

Ashland produced this play last in 2002. That year, they said that they were emphasizing the role of Rosalind as the more mature (as in wisdom, not age) of the pair of suitors (Orlando and Rosalind). In that production, the extended period in the Forest of Arden where, dressed as a man named Ganymede, she pretended to take Rosalind’s part as Orlando practices his mooning and courtship upon him/her, was posited as a period of tutelage, where she was “schooling” Orlando as a lover and a lifemate.

In this year’s production, Rosalind comes off as a little more ditzy and lovestruck, and with seemingly less of the moral authority that the more sober presentation in 2002 conferred on her. It’s interesting to me how different directors can cant a production and an interpretation of the same text in subtly different directions. Still, the cross-dressing convention allows her the latitude to basically drive the relationship, and in the plot and language, she is still by far the most interesting character in the play.

Distracted

This play, by Lisa Loomer, is about a contemporary woman whose son is exhibiting the distressing symptoms of what we used to call hyperactivity. When they’re young, and we can devote all of our attention to them, a kid like this (and we had one in spades) is interesting and charming. As events move on, and you have to entrust them to the care of others who are not so enamored of and invested in their personal quirks, you are confronted, inevitably, with the specter of having a kid labeled, either clinically, or colloquially by his instructors, as ADHD.

As events unfold, it becomes apparent that her husband is without doubt ADHD and not nearly as ready to accede to the notion that there’s anything wrong with their kid. They work through a couple of layers of testing and psychiatry, and are eventually confronted with the binary choice of drugging or not drugging.

The writing is smart and snappy, reminding me a bit of Nora Ephron in its facile grasp of a multifaceted popular culture. I’d like to see more by this playright.

I’ve got some catching up to do, as 5 plays have slipped by since my last post.

August Wilson’s oeuvre consists mainly of a “cycle” of 10 plays about the black American experience, one set in each decade of the 20th century. Gem was the 9th play written, but the earliest chronologically, set in 1904 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Its action begins when a black worker at a steel mill that employs many Hill residents, falsely accused of stealing a bucket of nails, jumps in a river and drowns rather than turn himself in and serve time. Many blame his death on Caesar, the local constable and black himself.

The entire play, however, takes place in the house of a matriarch named Aunt Ester, a character whose name resurfaces in other plays in the cycle and who comes to represent a spirituality older than and separate from the American African-American experience. As the action unfolds, Citizen Barlow, the young man who actually did steal the nails, arrives at the house much burdened with guilt, seeking healing from Aunt Ester. Aunt Ester sends him on a metaphysical journey to the City of Bones, a half-mile by half-mile area on the bottom of the Atlantic built with the bones of those who died at sea during the Middle Passage, borne in a paper boat she’s fashioned from her own slave’s bill of sale.

Citizen Barlow, in the process, is reattached to his culture and becomes a scion of it. This is an important, perhaps the overriding, theme of Wilson’s writing - the evocation of a culture and identity that he feels was lost in both the forced journey from Africa, and again in the migration from the agrarian south to the urban north:

Wilson’s plays clearly demonstrate the tensions between blacks who want to hold onto their African heritage and those who want to break away from it. As a result of being pulled in different directions, violence often breaks out among blacks in Wilson’s plays, yet that violence is often misdirected. (from an informative discussion of Wilson here)

Caesar, in attempting to begin assimilating into white culture, is disdained, and ultimately disowned when he arrives to arrest Aunt Ester for harboring accused criminals.

The play was cast using actors who have been in the Ashland company, some for many years. Although the Ashland audience has to be about 99% white, the Festival has been freely using black actors in traditional and non-traditional roles since we’ve been coming. It’s interesting, though, to see them performing as an ensemble.

The “message”, if you will, is definitely the foundation of the play, but Wilson’s writing and character development make it a rich and pleasing experience, and not merely an exercise in didactics and white guilt. While I’m close to “hitting for the cycle” with Shakespeare (I’ll have to check to see if there are any of his plays I haven’t seen), I’m interested in seeing all of Wilson’s cycle as well.

Tuesday we had just one evening play, so we (OK, I) dawdled a bit in the morning, and then drove about 10 miles south of town to Mt. Ashland. The Pacific Crest Trail winds through the Siskiyou Mountains around Ashland, and we hiked a stretch of it that we’ve liked in past trips. We had been promised a week of cloudless, sunny weather, if a bit toasty (low 100s F), and I was surprised to see this sprig of cloud. It kept building, however, and by evening we were having thunderstorms.

Click any photo to enlarge

Amidst the bone-dry terrain, there were a couple pockets of bog where bees, butterflies, wildflowers and birds were frantically dancing to the tune of their truncated summer. Mrs. Perils tells me the names of the wildflowers, but I can seldom remember them.

In the upper left, a yellow jacket of some kind is hauling a moth carcass down to a buried nest.  I had watched him struggle mightily with his bulky prize, wondering if he meant to fly off with it before I saw him heading for the hole.

OK, enough with the eye candy - tomorrow I’ll address some plays.  We see As You Like It and Distracted on Wednesday, as well as taking a guided backstage tour.