Kentucky bound

There is this to say for Kentucky: what it loses in having a crappy, torn-up stretch of 65 at the Tennessee line, it makes up for in scenery. The middle section of the state rolls on in trees and wide swaths of grassland, including the famous bluegrass, which struck me more as a teal than a proper blue. Heading north, driving by flowering redbuds and dogwoods, I felt as if the Interstate were showing me a sort of bizarre backward time-lapse movie of April, culminating in yellow-green foliage and those damn oak pollen squigglies. (Surely there exists a scientific term for "oak squiggly", but I've never heard it.) The real payoff comes once you leave 65 for the Bluegrass Parkway: mountains, conifers, and long expanses of farms and forest. It's not nearly as dramatic as, say, West Virginia, but Kentucky offers a tamer version of the wilderness without the ridiculous number of tunnels.

Today...what can I say but one big string of "Well, that wasn't quite what I had planned" moments? I left almost 20 minutes late - not a big deal, but enough to annoy me - but my TomTom knew where I was going, and all seemed to be right with the world. The only real concern was whether we would be able to sign for our apartment today, and so, just to be safe, I pulled my phone from my purse so I wouldn't miss the call.

Quick: when one is desperately waiting for a phone call, which will be the one appliance one will forget to charge the night before?

Seeing the battery meter turn red did nothing to quell my nerves, but I pushed on, hopeful of an electronic miracle. Around Athens, however, the LOW BATTERY notice appeared, and so I pulled into the Shell station and ran inside, hoping they would sell chargers. They didn't, but the clerk pointed me to the Wal-Mart a mile up the road, which did carry chargers, and so, having thought to have my clamshell pre-opened, I plugged my phone into the lighter and sighed with relief as the juice started flowing.

Then I turned the TomTom back on and got nothing. Nada. It stayed stuck on its welcome screen all the way to Nashville, and then I turned it off in disgust. Thankfully, my printed Google Maps got me pointed in the right direction, and I headed off down the Bluegrass Parkway toward Frankfort.

As mentioned, the Parkway is gorgeous, sparsely developed, pleasantly winding, and - unfortunately - littered with the inevitable squashed raccoons and possums. By the time I hit it, lunch had come and gone, especially on Eastern Time. I began looking for a place to pull off, but saw few options amongst the prettiness. Finally, a sign came into view:

New Haven
Boston
2 Miles

Oh man, I thought, I've got to stop there, but alas, it was not to be; New Haven and Boston appeared to have a distinct lack of eateries near the Parkway, so I forced myself to push on to Bardstown, which at least had a cute historical district and a coffee shop-cum-café with a decent ham sandwich.

Now, I'm no stranger to odd roadside attractions - as my writing seminar knows too well, I spent a good deal of time looking them up for my dissertation novel last year. What got me today was the serendipitous juxtaposition of two signs along a stretch of Kentucky highway. On the left side of the road, a large billboard proclaimed:

HELL IS REAL

Just across the road, next to the tourist information center, an even larger billboard offered this to visitors:

ADULT

No need to specify - I had been seeing signs for this particular video and novelty store for a few miles. It's not the messages, but rather this mixture of roadside virtue and vice that gets me - it's so quintessentially American, and so much a part of the Southern Interstate experience.

Finally, after seven hours behind the wheel, I pulled into Frankfort, a capital city of roughly 30,000, and dropped my bags, including my busted TomTom, in my hotel room so I could take a quick walk. An hour later, we determined that the apartment was not to be, and then I determined that the TomTom was in inexplicably bad shape. Still, Frankfort has some cute shops, I had a lovely dinner (though the redneck next to me, who refused to take of his baseball cap during dinner, couldn't quite understand gnocchi), and then I stumbled onto the find of the evening - the local wine bar.

I need more quality wine bars in my life, and not those of the overpriced The Grape variety. These folks offered a variety of wines - including a large selection of Kentucky wines - and bourbons by the pour, plus cheese trays and other goodies. I'll need to pop back by tomorrow night, I think; it's two blocks from my hotel, and it's probably the most exciting thing happening in Frankfort after 6 p.m.

Moving on

I slept in this morning, figuring God would forgive me. Two nights in a row of Porgy and Bess until 11 PM takes it out of you. Still, we received five stars, a first this year, and largely thanks to our incredible soloists, even if the BCC does have an "earthy presence"...whatever the hell that means. One memorable moment of the show happened on Friday night, when a moth flew into poor Bess's mouth and she spat it out, loudly. We laughed, the audience laughed, and Bess, pro that she is, carried on like nothing had happened. That is talent.

This afternoon, I almost got a car and an apartment.

When she begins grad school in August, Jen is taking her beloved Beetle with her, leaving me without wheels. My parents have graciously agreed to buy me a replacement car, and we think we may have found it - a cream and black MINI Cooper with many of the bells and whistles, including leather and a dual moon roof. It's a 2005 just shy of 25,000 miles, and it's in perfect order. If they can make the price work, it's mine. Sweet.

Now to the second part. Seeing as I've been back in Birmingham eight months, I'm beginning to think that it's time I got my own place - my folks are great, and I couldn't ask for more from them, but I'll be 24 this Saturday, and I'm thinking it's high time I found my first apartment and boomeranged back out of the nest. Brandon and I looked at a few yesterday (with Kat tagging along as Counsel/Chauffeur), and found a great complex within our budget. The manager showed us a unit they were advertising as a discounted special, and we both seemed to like it. My only concern was that the unit was, for all purposes, in the basement.

My mother dislikes basements, and asked to come along today. When we got back to the complex, she got the manager to show us two other units, including a much better one with a full pantry, second coat closet, living room mirror, and deck. The manager revealed that the new one was also discounted, and we set off to sign the papers. There's a lesson here: parents come in handy, and can keep sub-par apartments from being foisted on their kids.

Unfortunately, we hit a snag in the form of the credit check. Both of us had to fork over $60 to have our credit history checked, and when he ran mine, the machine came back with an "Insufficient Funds" note. (Of course I have insufficient funds if you assume I'm paying for the apartment by myself, idiot machine...) My mother offered to co-sign, and so we'll hear tomorrow whether we can have our apartment. Fingers crossed...

I can't...I have rehearsal

Midway through hell week for Porgy & Bess, I'm beginning to feel better about the weekend's show.

My choir is doing P&B with the ASO and a group of professional soloists on Friday and Saturday night. It's a sung performance, not acted, which makes the fact that all but two members of the choir are Caucasian slightly more acceptable. As I told my neighbor, I never feel whiter than when I'm asked to sing a spiritual, and P&B was written in dialect, to the point that we've actually had textual issues.

On one song, we have a one-line echo of the soloist, which many of us interpreted as "Since she lost her man." Nice and grammatically correct, right? Wrong. "Read the words!" our pianist finally told us in exasperation. "It's 'Since she lose her man!'"

Like I said, we sound so white. The soloists, fortunately, make up for this by being fabulous. Porgy and Crown are great, but if I make it through "It Ain't Necessarily So" without cracking up - he's that over-the-top - it's going to be a minor miracle.

Anyway, as this is the week before, we've been spending some quality time with Justin Brown and each other, to the point that my nights are shot. Almost makes me feel like I'm back in Glee Club...anyone want to bring Sir David Wilcocks down?

Be Kind

When I woke a moment ago and checked out the MSN headlines, I was reminded that I arrived at Yale for Bulldog Days six years ago today.

No, I didn't tattoo the date somewhere, nor did I stick a big gold star on my calendar in memory of the event. You see, today is April 20, and I had a rather...unusual...welcome.

My host, a Calhoun frosh, lived in the Bingham tower on Old Campus. I followed her across the uneven stone walkway I would come to love and despise, and stared up at the neo-Gothic architecture with joy. This was college, this was what higher learning was all about, tall trees and towering edifices of stone that looked vaguely European...

Several floors above us, a guy leaned out a window and spotted us coming up the walk. "Hey, Lindsay!" he yelled down, catching my host's attention. "Be kind!"

She rolled her eyes and swiped me in. "It's 4/20," she explained, noting my confusion. "He's nuts. Ignore him."

Nothing like a pot celebration to welcome the pre-frosh. Still, the first time I visited Yale was in the middle of a March nor'easter, and I woke in my host's LW room the next morning to find her and her boyfriend in the bunk beneath me. Her roommate, who had been chaperoning me, had taken the couch, and started yelling in French when I shook her awake.

Man, I miss college.

Volkswagen saga

Several of my coworkers have been subjected to bits and pieces (or more) of this over the past two weeks, so if any of them happen to be reading this, ever, I apologize. Sincerely.

Sunday a week ago - April 6, this would have been - I was driving home from church, trying to avoid the semi in the other lane, when I noticed a new orange indicator on my dashboard. "CHECK ENGINE," it announced, and added a not-so-happy picture of what I assume is some portion of my engine, just in case I happened to be an illiterate Beetle owner with more than remedial knowledge of car repair.

Given that my knowledge of "car repair" extends roughly to filling the tank and washing bird poop off the windows, CHECK ENGINE gave me a nice cold shot of stomach-clenching dread. As I had been to my local dealership four months before to have a valve replaced, I knew that CHECK ENGINE didn't necessarily mean imminent flames, but I also knew it wasn't good. I called my parents and told them I was heading to the dealership, at which point they reminded me that it was Sunday afternoon, and that the dealership wasn't open.

One point to the parents.

On Monday morning, bright and early, I drove my car to the dealership and explained that the ominous orange light had flicked on. The service representative ran his diagnostics, then told me I had a bad turbo valve. My car wasn't about to explode, but I would have poor fuel economy until I had the thing fixed. The valve would be $40. Oh, and they were going to tack on another $30 for the time spent that morning, and it would cost me roughly $170 to have the valve installed, say in three or four days, after they ordered the part.

I told the man I had replaced a valve four months ago, and asked whether this would be a common thing. He assured me it would not be so.

Great, I thought, and tried to drive as little as possible until Friday, when I dropped the car off at 7, crossed my fingers, and hitched a ride to work on the courtesy shuttle. My driver, an old man from Michigan who sounded like a deep-bayou Louisianan, encouraged us to go see a redneck comedian that night - the bad rain, he had heard, was going to come through that morning.

Later Friday morning, the tech called and told me my car was ready for pickup (a call that, incidentally, pulled me out of the last five minutes of Java. Oy). The shuttle couldn't come to get me until 2, however, so I worked and stewed until the crusty Michigander returned to ferry me back to the dealership. We discussed why all the auto manufacturers are moving south, he ascertained that I'm not, in fact, British, and we slipped back to the ever-popular topic of weather. He had missed his prediction, and I planned to hang out with the weather radio back at the office for the rest of the day.

$170 and a conversation with a not-entirely-there tech later, I headed back to work, making sure to park under the deck. What followed wasn't pretty; long story short, I tried to leave, saw the rain coming behind me, started getting hailed upon, and turned back to the parking deck until it all blew over, because let's face it, no one likes frozen projectiles, especially not those of baseball size. On the way home, heading down Columbiana into Hoover, I was almost involved in a wreck when the car in front of me lost control, and then, in the midst of praying and attempting to make my adrenaline level subside, I noticed something new on my dashboard.

CHECK ENGINE.

The rant that followed wasn't pretty.

I coasted back to the dealership, rolled down my windows, and gave a couple of techs my best sarcastic smile as I pointed out that the problem I had waited five days to be fixed was botched again ten miles later. They told me to come back the next morning. "We don't take appointments," Not-Entirely-There Tech told me. "If you're late, you're at the bottom of the list."

Fearing that I was being fleeced, my mother accompanied me to the dealership the next morning when they opened - I was still fourth in line, as Not-Entirely-There Tech helpfully pointed out - and she expressed her displeasure with the service to that point. Nothing to worry about, we were informed. They'd take a look at the engine and give us a call.

Well, my mother had to make the calls, and we got my car back just as the dealership was closing for the day. It turned out that the new turbo valve had caused a hose to crack, and that was messing up the engine. Oh, and I had eight valves, so any of the remaining six could set off the indicator at any time. All I needed to remember was that unless the indicator started flashing, I was in no immediate danger of engine failure. Fair enough, I thought, and put it behind me.

Monday evening, I climbed back into the car to go to choir practice. When I was halfway to Briarwood, guess what dashboard indicator lit?

The rant that followed is best left to the imagination.

Two hours of Porgy and Bess practice with a tension headache will put anyone in a foul mood, and I was less than charming when I drove into the dealership on Tuesday morning. "I'd like to go more than three days without visiting you," I told the tech who signed me in. "Look, I travel for my job. I need a functional car, alright?" He assured me they'd fix it, and once again, I caught the shuttle to work. The driver, another older man, asked whether I'd need a ride back, then told me to call and schedule a pickup when I heard from the dealership.

Once 1:30 rolled around, I began calling them. Voicemail. Messages. Mumbled assurances that my car was being examined. At 4, the tech asked if they could keep the car overnight. Sure, I told him, and my dad drove me home from work.

Wednesday morning, I waited for word from Volkswagen, but nothing came. I began calling at 11, when the flustered receptionist gave me one of the techs' answering machine. When I had yet to receive a call at 1:30, my mother phoned the dealership and, in true parental fashion, let the tech have it.

The car was ready on my way home. As it turned out, a small hose that's virtually inaccessible unless you disassemble the engine had cracked. To figure that out, the techs had replaced nearly all of my $40 valves.

My grand total was $33, for the new hose. Volkswagen, apparently, is heartily sorry.

It would have been nice if they'd called me as well as my mother, but hey, at least I get to drive to work tomorrow.

Spamalot

Back in late October or so, I heard that the traveling cast of Spamalot was coming to Birmingham in April. I got all excited, asked a few friends if they wanted to go, and promptly neglected to do anything about it, like...oh, I don't know...get tickets.

Last week, I happened to notice that Spamalot was here. Whoops...

Fortunately, I have a co-worker who is not averse to a) Monty Python, b) $36 tickets, or c) impromptu Thursday night shows, and so we got our nosebleed seats and two hours of Pythony goodness.

I love Holy Grail. I can't remember if we watched it in seventh-grade social studies (we did see other historical films in that class, like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Aladdin), but it's a wonderfully wacky take on the Arthurian canon. (It's even better after Malory.) The musical, by necessity, deviates in several places from the film, but if you go into it with the understanding that it's a completely different creature "lovingly ripped off" the original, it's quite entertaining. While Spamalot does stand alone, familiarity with the film helps, if only because you catch a few of the gags. (The first "show" listed in the Playbill, for instance, is about Finland and features a moose ballet troupe. And while Castle Anthrax never makes an appearance, those girls' white outfits look awfully familiar.) What's brilliant is that the writers took a film that poked fun at the vehicle and gave it a Broadway treatment - numbers like "Whatever Happened to My Part?" (and the post-Spears lyric changes) are priceless.

My favorite moment has to be the duet between Galahad and the Lady of the Lake, when they appear onstage in a tiny boat, under a chandelier that had to have been used in Phantom in another life, and sing the romantic ballad of the show, "The Song That Goes Like This":

I'll sing it in your face
While we both embrace
And then
We change
The key...

Brilliant.

I'm not dead

I just haven't had the time, energy, or inclination to write in a while. And yes, that can partly be construed as laziness.


I had planned on a glorious prop sale last Friday, but that was not to be. No, I was laid low by a visit from the Allergy Fairy, who gave my mom and me such a bad go of it that we had to finally visit the allergist. As it turns out, this allergist is the doctor of choice in my department, and she sent us home with goody bags of antihistamines. I got a special gift: a second inhaler. "You probably have at least seasonal asthma," she told me.


"How the heck does that work?" I asked.


She explained that my years of singing have probably taught me to compensate, then gave me a ten-minute breathing treatment before she would let me go to work. My lungs still aren't at full performance, but I got through Porgy and Bess rehearsal Monday night, and that was a blessing.

At least my friends scored some fabulous prop sale buys.

We were supposed to host my sister and her friends on Saturday night, but one of them, thinking like - well, like a young-twenty-something male - gave up their seats on the plane. Poor Jen had to overnight in Tampa, then sit through endless hassles at JFK on Sunday. She had intended to pick up her spring clothes and other important things, like her keys, on their return trip, but Mom had to mail it all to her instead. The box arrived a day late, too - this has been a great weekend for Jen.

The most exciting thing to happen in days was that I sat outside for an hour without wheezing this afternoon. It's always fun to catch pollen showering down on you out of the corner of your eye...