Day 117: Suburban foraging

Sunday practices in Georgetown are now a regular part of the week, and I find it quite relaxing to get up on the early side for a Sunday, pop into Toscanini's for a coffee top-up, and swing by to grab various members of the crew for the drive up 93 and 95.  On the occasions when D. is with us, these mornings often bring foraged goodies into our lives during Act 1 (his character only shows up in the middle of Act 2).  Today we were in for a treat - may apples.  Rumor has it they are somewhat elusive and difficult to find around the Cambridge area, though apparently the suburbs of Georgetown were more forgiving; fact has it they are extraordinarily sweet. To eat them, you squeeze and suck out the juicy innards, which are so saccharine they remind me of Gushers (those things are like crack).

Treat #2 of the day was that the old-school members of the GTW (see the sign behind the may apples in the above pic?) were throwing a picnic complete with swimming pool and bocce ball (which S., our director, and I threw down at).  I could only stay for a bit because I had to high-tail it back to Cambridge to get to the second practice for the Mercury Orchestra chorus, which was being held at the Masonic Lodge in Porter Square.  So neat all the places being in this group is showing us!

The afternoon was complete with a bit more urban foraging in the form of nabbing some peaches (and pears, I believe) en route to a friend's place for dinner, where others had foraged some mushrooms for dining (S.B. made an amazing casserole with chicken mushrooms - was to die for).  Rounding out the evening with some guitar sing-along-ing made it a pretty much perfect Sunday.

Day 3: Gooey, Gobby, Gummy

Today I went for the first time to Gallery 263, an art gallery in Cambridgeport that a friend of mine helped get going and is still affiliated with. The space was small, but really open and very lovely. Tonight was a show opening (complete with delicious cheese and wine -- not that the cheese was first in this list!) for three artists, the art of each having a distinctive personality and yet all relating to a common theme: gooey, gobby, gummy. I must say that I thought the art was much more appetizing than the theme made it out to be :). The 3-D pieces were quite interesting (the most appealing to me being an actual small tree stump with what looked like yarnlike moss growing out of it from all angles), and yet some of my other favorites were paintings which, while still technically three-dimensional, somehow looked even more so from the sprinklings of metal elements dusted about them. At any rate, this is a gallery I hope to come to more often.

After the opening, a few of us went back to a friend's place and I had the rare chance to play a (good) electric keyboard for a little while, accompanied by guitar and sing-along, with some trading off (there were also at least three other instruments in the mix on and off: a banjo, a mini-accordian, and perhaps a ukelele?). This was followed by the usual Thursday-night karaoke, which I'll describe some other week.