A Night at the Opera
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Chaliapin as Godunov, 1913
This past Friday night I showered and shaved and dressed and rushed out of my elderly father-in-law’s apartment, Upper West Side of Manhattan, and hoofed it down to Lincoln Center, early curtain at the Metropolitan Opera. I got in the line for last-minute tickets and asked for the best seat available, knowing people often donate back their season seats at the last minute, also knowing it was a new production in its second performance, and sold out. But: Row J, orchestra center! A mere $210.00. Ticket in hand I rushed back uptown to get a slice of pizza (like four blocks away), wolfed it, and ran back, loving the new fountain in the refurbished Lincoln Center plaza, also the familiar and enormous Chagall hangings in the great windows of the opera house. Inside, I always love climbing the steps with all those dressed-up people (I’m always the one in blue jeans, or worse: one time I forgot the Leatherman on my belt of my shorts, got pulled aside–I showed Continue reading →
Corn Maze
categories: Cocktail Hour
4 comments
Good, Clean Fun
Saturday night [October 9, 2010] I was watching college football late, that great back-and-forth fourth quarter between USC and Stanford, two teams I don’t care much about, but a great game (I always root for the underdog when I’ve got no other particular loyalty, so USC, and they lost in the last seconds…). Around 11:00 or 11:30, I heard an engine rumbling outside on our rural road here in rural Maine. Nothing unusual in that, particularly, and the football game was exciting, so. Our house is close to the road in the old style—short driveway means short shoveling—and people are always stopping for one reason or another, maybe a pee on the little-travelled road, maybe a peek at the neighbor’s bison, maybe a make-out break, maybe anything. Saturday night and all that, teens cruising, Continue reading →
Attack of the Cashier
categories: Cocktail Hour
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A few months ago a flight attendant named Steven Slater made us all happy by grabbing a beer, giving folks the finger, and sliding off the plane through the emergency exit. If the end of my bookstore clerk wasn’t quite as dramatic, it was pretty close. Bill has written in this space about all the different jobs he has taken to support his writing/music life. For the story of one of my jobs, and its glorious end, click here: http://vimeo.com/15609976
(By the way, this was taped last month, on September 11th, for The Monti at the Carrboro Arts Center. Thanks to host and mastermind behind The Monti, Jeff Polish.)
Home and Cocktails
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We have lived in our new house for about a month and half. I have never owned a house before, but I spent my whole adult life dreaming of having a place to call home. It is strange that that house turns out to be in North Carolina, but less strange that it turns out to be on a salt marsh. Not only is the marsh a miraculous ecosystem where I can now daily hear the strange applause of clapper rails, but it connects me by water to the many other coastal places I have come to love over the years. I don’t mean this mystically, but practically. If one day I am feeling particularly ambitious, I can hop in my kayak and paddle down Hewlett’s Creek out to the Intracoastal Waterway and to the Atlantic beyond, and then, after banging a left, can paddle north back to New England until I reach the Kennebec River. There I can take another left, and another on the Sandy River and then a final left on Temple Stream, which I can follow until I hit Bill’s house up on the right.
Checking in With You, Gentle Dave
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Dave and Bill
Dave, it’s been an awesome six months, exhilarating, too, as we’ve seen that someone actually is out there, and proved that we have the stamina to keep the posts coming while also writing books and monitoring our massive Twitter following, and meanwhile moving into new houses (you), and attending demolition derbies (me), flying on the Cousteau team helicopter to the site of the BP oil platform explosion (you), and fishing with grizzly bears in Alaska (me). And in fact, it’s been a year or more since your brainstorm–took a while to get the site up and running, of course–a brainstorm that stemmed from a joke about our having a radio show based on NPR’s “Car Talk,” this one called “Book Talk.” Don’t read like my brutha! Don’t read like my brutha! I’ve really enjoyed Continue reading →
Checking in With you, Dear Reader
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We are coming right up on the six month birthday of Bill and Dave’s (as good a reason to have a drink as any) and I thought it would be a good time to check in with you, dear reader. Sometimes it’s a little lonely out here in the blogosphere. There are days when it feels like the cocktail hour is raging and it’s–as Homer Simpson once said–“the wittiest jig of the season.” On other days I’m alone with my beer in the corner.
You may have noticed that while Bill has taken up the slack, my posts have slowed down a bit of late (after the Gulf mania), and there’s a reason for that. One result of this blog was my trip to the Gulf and one result of that trip was selling a book called The Tarball Chronicles. In an effort to get that book together in record speed, I have been in crazy, Continue reading →
Odd Jobs #1: The Things A Writer Must Do (…an occasional series)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Cary Memorial Library
One of the pleasures of being a writer in Maine is that you get invited to read at Libraries in small towns and very small towns up and down and across the state. Reading in Presque Isle some years ago made me realize for the first time that you can drive six hours from Farmington (which has, by the way, a gorgeous, diminutive Carnegie library, solid stone) and still be in Maine. Quebec City is closer. Boston. Many of the smallest libraries are open but a couple of hours a week—enough time on a Sunday morning for the kids and the big readers to get their stack of books for the week, then shut the door again, occasionally even lock it. Bigger small towns have surprisingly active libraries, often open six or seven days a week, evenings too, longer summer hours, serious collections gathered by 150 or 200 years of head librarians, sometimes funded by old-line endowments, as often funded Continue reading →
Hair Thing
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Ponytail
Recently on Facebook I put up the following tongue-in-cheek but definitely heartfelt status:
Bill Roorbach would like every second American male born between 1946 and 1964 to grow his hair starting immediately. (Every second woman should go with tie-dyed skirt and peasant blouse. Peace sign pendants optional) There’s no longer a necessity to keep up appearances, folks. Remember how you said you’d grow it back when you reached 60? I’m weary carrying on the ponytail nearly alone in our demographic, hair thin as mine!
The answers were great, in quite a range, with a lot of likes, which I’m learning are fun to get, like pats on the back (can you tell I’m new at Facebook and too naive to know it’s the Devil’s work?): Continue reading →
My Danish Blood
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It is one thing to write about my father, long dead. But to write about other (living) people is another can of worms. As my wife Nina says, “If you say they are brilliant, beautiful, and charismatic they are okay with it. But if you say they are brilliant, beautiful, charismatic, and occasionally get in bad moods, they will hate you for it.”
Which brings me to my Mom’s role in the following piece. In real life she is beautiful, vibrant, smart, compassionate, artistic and athletic. In this piece she is just someone who crows about their health. Sorry, Mom…..on to the essay:
I come from a long line of egomaniacs on both sides of my family. As a memoirist, I’ve spent much of my time focusing on my paternal lineage and the particular Germanic tint of that egomania: the rushes of confidence and waves of insecurity, the glory and shame, the megalomaniacal glee and melancholy. But my maternal line offers a different flavor of ego. It’s a vain, simple, athletic overconfidence that loves to look itself in the mirror. Though my mother’s heritage is mixed, she will tell you that this proud vitality stems from what she calls our “Danish blood.”
