Three Beautiful Things 05/13/15: Doc Says I'm Fine, Black Beans and Rice, Parkland and Shindig

1.  I drove out to the Johns Hopkins clinic near Laurel and my doctor asked me about the incident Saturday when I blacked out and then he listened to my heart and poked around a bit, liked what he heard and felt -- and liked my answers to his questions, and sent me home.  "I think you're just fine. It was probably a one time thing."  I celebrated this good news by letting it rip with a cup of coffee and a cranberry orange scone at Starbucks at the Laurel Town Center.

2.  By sauteing onion with green and red pepper, adding garlic to it, and then adding black beans, hot sauce, red wine, red wine vinegar, cumin, oregano, and brown sugar, and pouring this tasty mixture over brown rice and topping it with shredded cheese and some Tostitos Hint of Lime corn chips, I fixed the Deke and me a very tasty dinner.  Oh! By the way, if you try this at home, I'm told sour cream (or yogurt) also is a good topping for this dish.

3.  I had started this movie a couple of nights ago and this evening I finished Parkland.  It tells the stories of the medical staff at the Parkland Hospital, the Dallas F.B.I. and Secret Service agents, Abraham Zapruder, and Lee Harvey Oswald's brother, Robert in the hours leading up to the JFK assassination and the few days immediately following.  Here's what I liked about this movie:  it was not a thesis movie.  It didn't work out any arguments about who killed Kennedy.  Rather, through rapid cross cutting between its four stories, successfully captured the chaos of those manic few days, taking us, I thought, into the things happening one or two degrees removed from the killing itself.  It's not a tidy movie.  It comes to no conclusions.  Its sympathies for certain characters are clear -- and I enjoyed that -- but mostly I enjoyed that this movie let those days be the chaotic mess that they were.

Then I watched a retrospective of the television show Shindig on YouTube.  I had forgotten how full of energy and great music Shindig was -- I was especially riveted by a Tina Turner/Marvin Gaye duet and medley.