Rolling On One

A few weeks ago, when I was in California at my high school reunion, I was in a conversation that went something like this:

“And where do you live now?”

“Massachusetts.”

“Oh, that’s one of those small states back East that are all on the same puzzle piece.”

“We call that New England.”

— but I had that same puzzle when I was a kid, and they are. Or really, five of the New England states were on one piece and Maine had its own piece.

I saw a raccoon on my street on the way home from klezmer tonight. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one. They were decimated by rabies about fourteen years ago. For several years before that we used to see them very often.

There have been a couple of recent posts about unintended meanings of product names (see Unfurnished Brooklyn for one and a link to the other) which reminded me of this van that Arlene and I saw in New Brunswick probably twelve years ago:

I guess it means something else in Acadian French.

On Friday evening we had Anne & Matt and Charley, Nicole, & Emma over for dinner for the first night of Rosh HaShanah. We ate early so Anne & Matt could get to Casco at a reasonable hour (and even so it would only have been reasonable at their age) and so Emma could get to bed at a reasonable kid hour. It was the first time Emma has been at our house. I got to juggle just a little (it was indoors, after all) for her.
The menu was: first, salad and chopped liver and smoked whitefish (instead of gefilte fish); chicken soup with kneydlakh (matzo balls); roast capon (and cranberry sauce),  pot roast in star anise (the Joyce Chen recipe, pretty much the only way Arlene does pot roast), roast asparagus, and baked delicata squash; and gluten-free chocolate cake (Charley said the texture was just like Devil Dogs) and fruit salad for dessert.

On Saturday night Arlene had invited her college & post-college roommate Judy over. Judy had just got back from a trip to Spain with another college friend Geri. We heard all about touring Spain, Gibralter, and a day trip to Tangiers.

I got another song into Finale, another of the four Goldenshteyn pieces we got last Tuesday in klezmer class. This one is his “Rushishe Sher”. A sher (pronounced like share, what you learn to do in kindergarten) is a lot like a square dance. It can go on and on, like a square dance, until each couple gets a turn at all the figures. Some shers are sort of medleys with snippets of all the Russian dance tunes you’ve ever heard.

Anyway, I finally am at the point where I love Finale. I’m finding easier ways to do what I want with it. Here are the key tricks I used:

1. Start with a piece orchestrated for two parts, violin and cornet. Enter all the music on the violin staff. When you use the mass edit tool to drag it to the cornet staff, it all transposes, pouf!

2. The mass edit tool does one measure at a time if you click inside a measure, but if you click above the staff you can drag a rectangle around a bunch of measures and copy them all at once.

3. You can change a note’s pitch by a half tone by pressing the numeric keypad + or – key while the note is highlighted.  When you’ve done that in a measure, further notes of that name (other b’s if you’ve changed a key-signature b-flat to natural) will have the same pitch as the first. You have to do that ALL the time in klezmer tunes, which have a lot of consistent accidentals. For instance, this one is written in the key of three flats, but all the b’s are naturals. So fix those pitches right away! This is much more convenient than using the “+ 1/2” tool on the simple entry palette, because it only effects the one selected note (and others of that name in the same measure) whereas the “+ 1/2” tool stays in effect until you click on it again.
4.  You can get a dotted note by pressing the keypad decimal point key when a note is highlighted.  Like the numeric keypad “+” versus the “+1/2” tool, this only effects one note  so you don’t have to move the mouse again to deselect it.

5. Use the numeric keypad to change note lengths as much as possible. Much faster than mousing to the note value palette.

Barry handed out four new pieces on Tuesday night at the first meeting of the klezmer band class for the year. They’re all attributed to Goldensteyn (no first name given), who’s not the composer but the musicologist who collected them. Someone collected a large number of klezmer tunes in the Soviet Union in the ’30s; I don’t know if that was this guy or someone else.

In any event, we tried playing a couple of them. I was having a terrible time sight reading them, because they’re written for C instruments in a fairly high register. I needed to take them down an octave and transpose them for trummpet at the same time. Sight reading slowly is usually OK. Down an octave is OK, once I have a good idea of how the tune goes. Transposing is marginal, if there are not a lot of accidentals, but in these pieces there are. All three at once, and I have all I can do to play an occasional riff without getting lost.

The only hope is to re-transcribe the pieces into Finale, get it to do the transposition, and print out parts that I can read in the right key and register. Well! Surprisingly, I got halfway through entering one piece last night. I learned shortcuts for dotted notes, got lots quicker at changing time values of notes, and got the first and second endings and repeat marks working. This morning I got the transposition to work the way I wanted, and printed it out, and practiced that half of the piece so it started to sound like music!

It’s a Khosidl, a slow dance that’s more stomp-y than runny-jumpy-kick-y. With luck and a little time over the weekend, I’ll know it by next Tuesday.

When I was working in Burlington, at my previous job, there was a big construction project going on across the street. First they were demolishing a big industrial building over there, with cranes and power shovels and wrecking balls. Then there was a period of blasting. When you heard the five minute warning whistle you could walk over to the other end of our building and watch at the windows closest to the site. A few times you would see the big steel mats rise in the air when the blast went off. They were starting to pour concrete about the time I left that job.
Eventually I found out that there was going to be a classy shopping complex going up over there. I’ve been wanting to see how it came out. Arlene recently saw an ad from West Elm that said, “Now open in Wayside Commons, Burlington.” That’s the place!

We drive past that exit (exit 33 from I-95/route 128) on our way to Maine. We got a slightly earlier than usual start last Friday and drove in to take a look.

Men with flashlights were waving cars into the parking lot. It was packed. We had stumbled onto the grand opening of the L. L. Bean store. We looked in it, almost bought a pair of wheels for a canoe but the checkout lines were longer than we wanted to deal with, and went up the escalator and out the other side of the store to the upper level parking lot. I guess (though I wasn’t thinking of it at the time) that some of that blasting had carved out the right rear of the first floor of Bean’s!

I have to say, that’s probably the most attractive shopping mall parking area I’ve ever seen. It’s not all parking lot; they saved a lot of space for wide walkways (raised, with curbs to keep the cars away from the stores), gardens, park benches, and trees. It’s small enough that you can walk from one end of the mall to the other, as contrasted with a shopping area in Braintree where there’s a Babies ‘R’ Us, a Big Buy, and a Linens ‘n’ Things (and a couple of others of that ilk) in a row, so far apart that if you want to shop at more than one store you want to drive from one to the next.

We walked down to West Elm, looked around inside it and found out that they and Bean’s had been open for about three weeks (though it was a grand opening, it wasn’t the first day for Bean’s), and felt that we were tourists in a new shopping center. If this kind of design is the wave of the future, I’m for it.

Today was the first meeting of Koleinu, but I’m not going to do it this year. There’s just not enough time during the week to get things done after work. But it was my sister Sari’s yahrtzeit, so we went to Temple Emanuel to say kaddish. Israeli dancing has been meeting Thursday evenings over most of the summer. We stayed for it, and still got home earlier than I would have been home from Koleinu.

There are two women who swap off leading the Israeli dancing. The leader tonight was Pam, whom I prefer. She may not be quite as graceful a dancer as Joan (I heard K. D. Lang talking about her song “Big Boned Woman” on the radio a couple of times this week — that could apply to Pam), but I find her a far far better teacher. Joan will teach the very basic beginning steps and then go on to teaching complex advanced dances at a pace that is OK for the advanced dancers. Pam is willing to review some relatively simple dances and to play a lot of them, and when she teaches a new dance she goes over the steps many times, until nobody asks for another time through.

So what I’m saying is, I got to dance a lot more than most times. Now I’m considering taking the class with Arlene Friday mornings at the JCC.

later… Arlene was just watching “Weeds” in the other room. I heard one of the dance tunes we did, went in to see if it was one of her dance CDs or the TV, and, TV, with a scene of dancing at a Jewish wedding (well, I didn’t stick around long enough to be sure what kind of celebration). The show gets extra points for using some music other than the H song!

When people in Pocatello say they’re going to Lava, they mean Lava Hot Springs. It’s about 30 miles, about 20 miles south on I-15 and 10 miles off the freeway. Once many years ago we went there to swim in the 50 meter swimming pool. This time it was to soak in the hot pools.

I don’t know if it’s the same area of magma that keeps Yellowstone going, but there’s something geothermal in the area. The hot springs are hot enough that the people who run the state park there have to add cold water to keep it down to a normal hot tub temperature.

I looked up from the pool at the mountainside to the north. I could understand what my mom means when she says it’s especially fun to go there in the winter, when you’re soaking in hot water outdoors, looking up at snow across the road. Then I looked around some more and realized that there were ridges around more than half the horizon, about the same height. The darn place is a secondhand volcano crater!

We were planning to eat in the Thai restaurant. It was packed, it being Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and we decided not to wait. We went back to Pocatello and had a remarkably good dinner at Remo’s.

There’s a painting hanging in the cellar hallway in my mom’s house that I didn’t remember ever having seen before. I asked her, “Who painted that picture of the young woman knitting? That could be you, in a wicker chair that could be on the porch in Milford?” She said, “Oh, I think Mimi did that.” So I’m pretty sure it is her.

My mom, painted by my aunt, probably in the late ’30s:

Last year when we visited my mom we read the memoirs my aunt recently wrote about working for the USO in hospitals in Europe around the end of WWII, doing sketches of hundreds of wounded GIs for them to send home.