Snow Days

We've had, as I'm sure you know if you live in Seattle, or watch the news, a couple of snow storms, lately. Depending on which neighborhood you live in depends, greatly, on the amount of actual snow. Those folks north of the city and even south, definitely got some snow. My 'hood, not so much. Ice on the sidewalks and little side streets, though. Not much of a snow day, in my mind. When I was a little tyke, snow days meant big drifts on the roads making them unsafe for school buses. Frozen pipes were just a matter of course--did not merit a snow day. At my little elementary school, we'd have to save our milk cartons from lunch, rinse them out, and the cafeteria cooks would boil water for us to drink. It had to be boiled. Safer. Must have had some nasty toxins in those old pipes.



This is from last September, in the hallway of the afore mentioned Hollister Elementary. Amazing how buildings shrink as you age...especially this one. I mean, it was small to begin with. My grandmother went there for high school, back in the day. I think that everyone in my family went to this little school for at least a brief period. Oh. Not Dana. When my mom, Paige and Dana moved back out to Idaho, she was starting jr. high. Well, almost all of us spent some time in those little classrooms. It's not like they needed to be big. We were a teeny tiny community.

Snow days were every day, just about, when we lived in Utah. And school was not canceled for them. We had flood days in Phoenix. One year, the start of school was delayed about two days because of all the rain. No snow, though. Well, maybe once or twice, for a minute. And here, in Seattle, I'm too old to benefit from a snow day. I live within walking distance to work, so when it does snow, Linnet can go in. Lucky me.

I love the idea of a real snow day, though. The kind with so much snow that no one is driving around. It's all footprints and animal prints making tracks. You go to a cozy bar and have a bloody mary, or a vodka tonic. Sit in the glow of dim lights and the excitement of something out of the ordinary. Most folks loving the excuse to goof off and tromp around. And how about that crunch of untouched snow, huh? ooooo...gotta love that!

Lost

I lost an entry. I think this is the second time it's happened and I feel like I'm back at the ASU computing commons watching my entire paper disappear--more than once, ahhhh... those midnight to 7am rewriting frenzies--in front of my eyes because I didn't know the golden rule of writing on a computer: Save as you go. They didn't teach that when I was in high school. We only used a computer once in a blue while. (Did I just mix a metephor?)

Only, I TRIED to save this last lost entry, and the blogger site ignored me. Probably wasn't worth reading, anyway. Just about how I'm in this play that has always held a soft spot in my heart and then relating how seeing a reading of it, many years ago, and meeting the playwright started me on a journey that lead me here, to Seattle. This production was precast save for the role of the psychiatrist. The callback consisted of me and a man in his 50's. Could have gone either way and by the end I was convinced that it would go the other way. Still, there was a small part of me that suspected I might actually get the part. And I did. A small part, and fun and challenging in its way.

The irritation at losing the previous incarnation of the above paragraph, however, has not subsided and I continue to live in the past. To hold onto it and the grrrrrrrrrr feeling that causes my shoulders to creep up to my ears, my jaw to tighten and my teeth to clamp together at a slight angle, contorting my face into an off center scowl.

Highland Flings and Matt Walding

My mom asked me if I still knew how to do the highland fling. What? She says that I took a highland dancing class when I was in high school. And then she thought it might have been when we were living in Bountiful, which would have put me in grade school. I have no memory of that. I know there was a street named Highland, and even a high school, I think. But the dancing? Ballet. Check. Tap. Check. Jazz. Check. No flinging. There was a girl in my ballet class, I have a fuzzy recollection that maybe she took highland dance and maybe once I went with her?

I've always felt like my memory was pretty sharp. This has really thrown me. And here I was, thinking about some more trips down music memory lane....

Cowboy Junkies: Margot Timmons' voice, in general, makes me think of my friend Matt Walding. We went to see them at the Celebrity Theatre, they opened for John Prine. We did not know John Prine. We parked in some guy's parking lot and paid $10 because we saw Margot, et al, sitting outside the theatre and we wanted to say hello, so we pulled into the first available parking spot. If we'd driven into the theatre's it would have been free. Worth it to talk about peanut butter sandwiches and mortgage payments. (She'd just aquired one, Matt and I were mortgage free.) She was very kind. She even told us she'd be singing a couple of songs with Mr. Prine, which was our cue to stick around for his set, though we laughed through a lot of it. Matt shared with me his trick of pretending to know the words to songs and grinning while he faux mouthed lyrics that neither of us had ever heard before. (He cracked me up. I laugh over it to this day.) All to see Ms. Timmons come back out and sing.

I guess that's all I really wanted to say. I'd been thinking a lot about Matt, lately, and wondering what he was up to. We seem to keep in spotty contact with one another. A couple of months ago, I thought I'd found out where he was again and e-mailed the person I hoped was he. No answer. Oops, someone is wondering why I called him fat. (Matt and I have this silly little joke. While in high school, we'd read this title of a play on the back of one of those Samuel French publications, "My Fat Friend". We thought that was hi-lar-ee-us. Thus my fat friend Matt and my fat friend Linnet were christened.) Anyway, he e-mailed me back a few days ago! Eureeka! I found him! And then I was listening to a little Cowboy Junkies and on my way to the coffe shop to use fast internet to write him back, my mom calls with the highland dance thing.

And that's the way Linnet's brain often functions.