Saturday, April 26, 2014

Here's to the Ladies Who Lunch

What a fun lunch we had today!

I went over to Atria for my weekly lunch with my mother.  It was a deliciously rainy day and I was happy to find a parking place close to the building. On my way down to her apartment I ran into my friend Peggy and our friend Nancy.  Peggy, to my disappointment, has now moved to a different facility across town.  She has been the one who kept tabs on my mother and reported things to me when she was concerned, or told me when things were going great.  I miss her.  But she had come back for lunch with Nancy and they invited us to join them.

I went and got my mother and the four of us sat together.   Service in the restaurant was absolutely the best it has ever been.   I swear my meal (crab cakes and clam chowder) came within 5 minutes of ordering it.   I have been known to sit there for half an hour waiting for a bowl of soup.  

But today the service time was irrelevant.  We were having too much fun visiting.  Peggy, who in her time at Atria must have learned the name and back story of every person in the building, whether resident, server, or staff.   Everybody loved her and ever few minutes another person would stop by the table to say hello and ask how she liked her new place (where she is now is so close to her daughter's that her grandkids can walk over to visit)

Nancy and my mother are an interesting pair.  My mother is 94, Nancy is 90 and both have some degree of dementia.  But both enjoy each other and laugh at whatever they are saying to each other, whether it makes sense or not.  Peggy and I both treat them as if they have no problem at all and we all end up laughing a lot.

Ultimately I think our lunch lasted 2 hours and then Peggy had to leave to get her hair cut and my mother was ready for a nap.

I had some papers for her to sign.  I found out that California has a program for people with disabilities, including cognitive problems.  She can get a free telephone with big buttons that have pictures on them, so she doesn't have to remember where she put phone numbers. She signed the application, but is afraid it might be "too complicated" for her to understand.  We'll see...our state taxes have been paying for this program for years. Might as well see if we can get some benefit out of it.

In the afternoon I came home to take a nap before reviewing a show tonight.  I was not successful in getting to sleep, but the show was so good it kept me awake, so the nap was not necessary.  But in the late afternoon, I had one of my favorite kinds of internet experiences with Jeri.

She had been working on a production of Legally Blonde at Berklee College of Music.  I didn't get exactly what her role was with this show, but she had been working on the set and we discussed some of her feelings about it.  I asked if the show was going to be live streamed so I could watch it, and it was.

It was streamed last night, but I was working and couldn't see it, but it was streamed again tonight, and so at 4:30, Pacific time, I was connected to the Berklee College of Music theater in Boston watching the live production of Legally Blonde, while chatting by text with Jeri, who was in the orchestra pit of a theater across town at Boston College playing Thoroughly Modern Millie just before I had to leave the house go to review A Chorus Line here in Davis.

This is what it is to be part of a theater family!!

Today is Jeri's birthday.  I want to write something profound, but I did.  Several times:


and a group message I put together for her


Happy birthday to the woman who changed my life 48 years ago today.   Dad was right back then...life was never the same...it was better.  I love you, Jeri.

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