I stole the title for this entry from Michael Wex's book, Born to Kvetch just because I thought it was so clever. I really enjoyed the book, but don't want to say too much about it because I gave it to Robert and he may read this before he reads it. It's probably not of great interest to non-Jews and you have to be a bit of a language geek to care about some of the things he discusses (e.g. why my parents could argue for days about the proper way to pronounce "mun," meaning poppy seeds, instead of just eating the bloody mun cake without the argument). But, if you're interested in Yiddish language and culture, it's an excellent read.
This week wasn't particularly kvetch worthy. Yes, work is stressful, but I managed to influence some things to get a project going somewhat more in the direction I think it should be. It's looks like the decision about the future of the major program I work on is going to be fairly reasonable. Mary Joan was in town for a meeting and we had a nice dinner and gossip on Wednesday night at Coastal Flats, a restaurant I'd been wanting to try for a while. The food was good for the most part, though the cauliflower puree which accompanied my rockfish was too bland. I'm not sure cauliflower should be pureed, since the crunchiness seems to be much of the point of it for me.
Most importantly, I took a day and a half off to go to San Francisco, largely to spend (not quite enough) time with Robert. It was a particularly good visit with him, much of which I don't need to say more about publicly. We tried out a newish restaurant, called Blupointe, which was excellent. We split an appetizer of calamari and salsify. Robert had trout, while I had a red snapper special, that was very tasty, though somewhat awkward to eat as I had to be careful of bones. For dessert, we shared persimmon creme brulee. Since Robert is trying to avoid chocolate and nuts, that does make splitting desserts more complicated. (He's also avoiding alcohol, which is easy, and caffeine, which is easy for him but would have me non-functional.)
Other than eating (we also had breakfast at Sears Fine Foods, which curiously, he had never been to before) and the obvious, we did a lot of walking around. I'd walked a good part of the city before he got in, including a trip to the Cartoon Art Museum, which has a special exhibit on Gruesome and Gothic stuff (e.g. Charles Addams and Edward Gorey), as their permanent collection. More interestingly, I hadn't known that they had a special exhibit celebrating 30 years of "Travels With Farley," a San Francisco local comic that I liked a lot when I lived in Berkeley. The walk I took with Robert was amusing because of his aversion to hills. The thing is, you can actually avoid steep hills altogether if you know San Francisco well and are reasonably clever. Apparently, I know the city better than he does, so led him from Union Square through the Stockton Street tunnel, and around Chinatown. The other trick is that the side streets of Chinatown are far more interesting than the touristy stretch of Grant Avenue.
The final event of the trip was seeing the 42nd Street Moon production of "The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd." This theatre company specializes in "uncommon" musicals and a 1965 Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse show certainly qualifies. The score is enjoyable, and the two stars were excellent, so I had a good time. But the book is problemmatic. The plot is an allegory about the class system in England, but there's no subtlety to how it's done. It was worth seeing, but it's never likely to be on anybody's ten best list.
By the way, the travel all went surprisingly smoothly. In fact, coming back, the flight was early, I got the bus to the metro right away, and had just a couple of minutes wait for the train. All in all, about all I can complain about with the trip is a lack of things to kvetch over.
Copyright 2005 Miriam H. Nadel