12.26.07

Christmas Cheer

On Christmas Day, Faith and I decided to see a movie. Naturally, being theater geeks, we chose Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street—which, by the way, I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s a bit abridged from the Broadway production, but still very much worthwhile. So anyway, about halfway through the movie, as Depp slit a series of throats with his straight razor, blood sprayed all over the dingy sets, and bodies fell down a chute into the bakery with a meaty thud, Faith leaned over to me and said, “This is the best Christmas ever!”

She was absolutely right.

Later that day we watched a documentary about the evolution of the English language and I cooked lamb braised in Guinness accompanied by mashed potatoes, green beans, and sautéed mushrooms. I can’t help wishing I’d had the foresight to bake up a couple of meat pies, instead.

I hope your Christmas was just as pleasant.

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10.01.07

A Religious Experience

Tagged as Faith

St. Faith, the Revealer Last Saturday, Faith and I went to Berkeley for a performance of my favorite play, King Lear—good production, by the way. The next day we went to San Francisco to see Ty and his lovely girlfriend. Getting together with Ty on a Sunday these days means getting invited to Glide, and although I’m an atheist and Faith is an agnostic, Glide is a fairly enjoyable experience, so we went.

In this particular service, there were three separate sermons by three different ministers. From a dramatic perspective (it was, as Faith put it, a performanceful weekend for us), the order should have been reversed: as it stood, the first sermon was pretty good, the second was OK but unfocused, and the third was a bit of a mess. I won’t go into too much detail here, but the gist of the final sermon as far as I can remember was that it’s not enough for two people in a relationship to love one another: there needs to be a third party. “It doesn’t matter what you call it,” the minister explained. “You can call it the Spirit, or God, or Allah, or a mystery….”

Faith leaned over to me and asked, “Can we call it Spencer the Wiggle-Fishie?”

Praise Spencer, I do love that woman. Incidentally, those of you who know Ty should ask him to do the Wiggle Fish Dance next time you see him. You’ll thank me later.

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