1. Christy's birthday is January 9th.
Commonly, our nieces, Zoe and Cosette, come to Kellogg for the holidays, but are long gone by the time Christy's birthday rolls around.
We already had a New Year's Day Almost The Whole Family is in Town prime rib family dinner planned tonight.
Two or three days ago, Carol sent me a text announcing that since our nieces (her daughters) were still in town, we would have an EARLY surprise birthday party for Christy.
It worked!
Christy arrived for family dinner, kind of wondering why everyone else was already there, but also preoccupied with her potato dish needing more time in the oven and with handing out prizes/awards for the gingerbread house contest.
So when she saw that the dining area was festooned with streamers and balloons and a Happy Birthday sign hung on the wall and when she heard us all cry out, "Surprise!" as she made her way from the living room toward the kitchen, we caught her way off guard!
We had a superb Family New Year's Day Surprise Birthday dinner: a shrimp cocktail appetizer, and then prime rib, Yorkshire pudding, roasted potatoes, green salad, fruit salad, a sautéed zucchini dish, and happy spirits all around the table.
Toward the end of dinner, Carol turned on the television and played a video Debbie made in New York with the Diaz family, Langford family, and Patrick and Meagan singing "Happy Birthday" to Christy.
What an evening!
Gingerbread house awards. Carol created a birthday Mad Lib. We all contributed words to it and giggled at the result. Carol also created a game called "Is Christy Younger or Older Than . . . ?" and gave us twenty-five people, events, and other things and we all wrote down our guesses -- Is Christy younger or older than Ron Howard? Than G. I. Joe? Than the Slinky? And so on. I often don't enjoy games, but I enjoy trivia-ish games and this one was terrific. (I also enjoy Sorry!)
2. Carol assigned me to cook a vegetable side dish for tonight's dinner.
I got out my new electric fry pan, heated up some olive oil, and then sliced up a red onion (and my left pointing finger), cooked the onion for a while, and then added and sautéed slices of zucchini and yellow squash with crushed garlic, tarragon, Trader Joe's 21 Seasoning Salute, Everything but the Bagel Seasoning, also from Trader Joe's, and the fresh juice of a half a lemon.
When this had all cooked up, I thought the vegetables alone needed stretching, so I did the easiest possible thing: I cooked up a pot of couscous.
So, my sautéed zucchini dish became sautéed zucchini on a bed of couscous dish.
It worked!
3. Back to back episodes of Poker Face (Season 1, Episodes 5-6) feature women actors, S. Epatha Merkerson, Judith Light, and Ellen Barkin) in their very late sixties and early seventies.
I love how the creators of Poker Face cast them.
In episode 6, Ellen Barkin's character, Kathleen Townsend, an actor who is all but washed up, tells her former television acting partner, Michael Graves (played by Tim Meadows) that older women in movies and television go from being Mom to senator to dementia patient.
That line of Kathleen Townsend's was a cagey way for us, as audience, to be ironically informed that women, as Townsend puts it, "of a certain age" would not be confined to being Moms, senators, or dementia patients in Poker Face.
They play profane, embittered, scheming, dangerous criminals, driven by long held grievances, a hunger for revenge, and, in Kathleen Townsend's case, greed.
From my point of view, there was nothing stereotypical about them and these characters gave Merkerson, Light, and Barkin the opportunity to exercise the breadth and depth of their enormous acting abilities and strike real fear in the characters around them in these episodes and in me as a viewer.
My enjoyment of watching older actors in movies or on television began long before I became old myself.
One (of many) examples stands out.
In 1981 in Portland, I believe at the Bagdad Cinema and then again the next year in Eugene at Cinema 7, I saw Lee Grant's stunning work as the director of the Tillie Olsen story made into the movie Tell Me A Riddle, featuring Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova as an elderly husband and wife who have become distant from one another, but, in the course of the movie, close the gap between them.
I've got to watch it again. I know I've seen Tell Me a Riddle again since 1982. I also know it's been quite a while.
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