Saturday, August 26, 2017

A Living, Breathing Journal

I look down at my shirt and can trace what I've done in the last 24 hours.

There are bits of melted chocolate, which fell off of my Hagen Daaz bar last night, which I didn't notice at the time.

There's a little smear from the egg salad sandwich I had for lunch.

There is a spot where I spilled juice from the container of mandarin oranges I had in the middle of the afternoon.

There are lots of stains from the sauce I dipped my pieces of tempura in at the Japanese restaurant where we took Ned to celebrate his birthday

And there are a few drips from the ice cream that Ned served back at his house as we settled in to be the first people to see his Magnum Opus, All In, a film about which I will talk in more detail when it has had its real premiere, which I gather is not to be until next month, when the whole cast and crew can get together outside of school activities.

Polly used to come and "graze" on my shirt each night, to check if there was anything edible, but she has stopped doing that now.  I will toss this shirt into the laundry soon, but I wanted to keep it on long enough to do an assessment of the treasures that it held.

I have become one of  those fat old people who sit around all day, eating, spilling on themselves, and, since nobody is likely to see them, just leaving it until time to change into night clothes.  Ohmygawd...I've become my father!

It was a more or less quiet day.  I had plans to go to visit my mother, whom I have not seen since Tuesday, but I had email from my editor at the Davis Enterprise telling me about the nominations for the local community theater awards, the Ellys, and asking me to write a bit about the local nominees.
Theaters judged for these prestigious awards come from something like 20 miles west of here and maybe the same distance (or more) east.  There are lots and lots and lots of awards, and now that they have added youth theater groups, even more awards.  (The spreadsheet is 12 pages long!)

I actually hate doing this annual article because there are so few nominations for theaters I review and when the awards are handed out, I'm lucky if 3 people win awards, despite numerous nominations.  But I dutifully do it, year after year, and will be writing the article today, after having made my own spreadsheet of just local people who have been nominated.

So, making the spreadsheet took so long, I didn't get over to Atria after all, but that is on the schedule for today.  I fear that with my mother's increasing dementia, her inability to tell one day from another, and the fact that we rarely have anything to talk about, I am letting more days pass without seeing her....and she doesn't seem to notice.  When I arrive, she doesn't know if I was there yesterday or last month, but is always thrilled to see me.

So I worked on getting ready to write the article and then around 6, we got in the car to drive to Sacramento, where we were taking Ned to dinner.  Marta had some work to do, so she didn't join us.
We went to a Japanese restaurant and had wonderful tempura and teriyaki.  We drank a toast to Ned turning 50


I reminded Ned and Walt that when Walt turned 50 is when we had the huge celebration at the local theater, with about 100 people, and a roast that went on for about 2 hours....and I retired from party planning because I knew I could not possible top that one!


I told Ned it was his fault for not having any kids to plan a huge birthday party for him!

We were honored to be the first people (after Marta) to see the movie All In, which Ned made at the "Movie Camp" he held over the better part of a week at Lake Tahoe.  The movie is 25 minutes long and I was very impressed.  Ned is a good movie-maker to begin with and has great ideas and is able to get them to film, but this movie also included a number of special effects that showed how much he has learned of the movie making program he uses.

He wants me to interview him and write a story about Movie Camp, which I will probably post here, and also on Facebook before the movie comes out so people will hop over to You Tube to watch it.  Given the kids involved in making this movie, all of whom are children of now-adults who grew up in Davis and whose parents still live here, I can probably get the article in the newspaper as well.

It will surely be more fun to write than the Elly Nominations article!

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