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| Dear All, May this find you each and everyone in the pink. We are. What a weekend this was. Friday my lady came out to Easton. It was torrential rain, and kept up so until Sunday evening. Flooding everywhere. Saturday morning was the morning of two breakfasts. At breakfast number one in downtown Easton my lady exited my car and out from the door pocket spilled all the 20% off coupons that every credit card company in the northern hemisphere sent to me owing to the crucially vital fact that in both hemispheres this month is my birthday. The coupons spilled out into the river of rainwater in the gutter, and we like let-loose-from-the-looney-bin personages chased the coupons "down river." We retrieved the important 20% off coupons. Namely, Bed Bath and Beyond, Linens and Things, Boscov's department store, Naturally Yours health food store et alii. Soaked to their essence of percentage offness. Thence we did some errands of the ordinary variety but which in that downpour proved to be adventures. Thence, exhausted , we repaired to a second breakfast at another downtown Easton coffee shop. Some more running around in rain that almost broke off the windshield wiper. Thence to a Greek Orthodox church. My lady had read in the local bugle which is pitched onto my front porch at four in the a. of m. by a delivery person whose car radio is so loud in the pitch dark that it rouses up the living dead that a local Greek church was having a "benefit" food court. The food court was in the Church's "community center" encased as it was in beautiful, classic 1950's fake wood paneling. Oh, how I remember too well the rage of the 1950s. Wood paneling in your basement. To be without same was to be of poor taste. We ordered roast chicken,and waited while same was prepared. The community center was row after row of bingo tables and metal chairs. And enough Greek Orthodox holy icons and paintings and photographs to keep you busy for a good hour or two, and, thus, ease passage to paradise. The chicken was superb. Out of this world. I had a diet coke, and my lady uncharacteristically had Greek wine. Later she said in response to my query in the premises, "it was pretty good." I said that Wine Spectator magazine would not accept that as a tasting review. We dashed out of the communjty center in a wall of water to my car. "Why are we doing all these things on a day like this"? "I need gas. Over on the New Jersey side of the river I can get my hi-test gas which Volkswagen says my computer is computed for, or else caboom motor, for $2.98." "Hurry over before they change the price." The gas station on the New Jersey side of the pregnantly swollen Delaware River is owned and operated by the Russian mafia who in the New York metropolitan area are getting to be dominant over the paisan' mafia. I am most reluctant to patronize the Russian mafia gas station, despite their prices. The gas jockeys, remember New Jersey is the only state in the Union to make illegal self-pumping of gasoline, have cigarettes dangling from their lips while they pump your gas. Then that Saturday evening we went to the theatre at Lafayette College five minutes from my house. We saw, and laughed non-stop as did the hugely attended audience , a three-man touring theatre group perform in one hour and ten minutes 85 of the world's greatest books. One of the performers threw out to the audience "test papers" about the 62 previous book reviews. A batch of those papers was bound, and up it sailed to the first row of the balcony where it smacked me dead in the eye. My left eye. The good one. Thank goodness for my glasses. The attendees around us during intermission were most solicitous in their inquires about my "head." I told them it was my eye. That got me even more solicitude. Sunday my lady went home, and I drove all the way (123 miles round trip) to the Princeton Art Museum where I sat for a lecture on "Ancient Greek Vase Paintings" which by the by is my current infatuation. The lecture-er was a number 2 pencil -thin ninth grader. A girl. I was put awry by the introduction that she was a third year PhD candidate at the Princeton Archeological School. She was more better than great. However, I did not correct her pronunciation of certain Greek terms. Her pronunciation was different from mine, and hence, incorrect. But I overlook such things. Gracious as ever I. Ciao a tutti, Beppe |