Jottings

After two years of working very hard with and for my brother and his ballet organization, I have decided it is time to move on. His organization is at a moment where there are major decisions to be made, actions to be taken, and choices to determine, but it is time for him to do that on his own. I am very proud of the work I did there, but to continue to do so would interfere with our relationship as brothers, and more importantly, with my own personal and professional path.

We are coming to the end of the semester at Niagara University, and I for one am very glad. It is not only the end of the semester; it is the end of a year of incredible change in my own life. A year ago today we were on the cusp of the benefit for my brother’s company; a year later, and the funds we raised have already been spent—invested, to a degree—in the production and production elements for Midsummer. In a couple of weeks it will be exactly two years since I moved to Western New York.

The amount of rain we have had this April has been a little depressing. There were a few sunny days and a really hot one on Monday, but I’m ready for genuine spring. For blue skies and drier air and daffodils and the color green. I noticed the other day that the grass in Delaware Park is now that vivid, after-rain green, so maybe there are some benefits to all that precipitation.

A couple of friends and I went out to dinner the other night for Dine Out For Life. We went to a restaurant called Left Bank, which is only a short walk from here, on Rhode Island Street. It was a noisy but adorable American bistro, and reminded me a lot of The Red Cat and The Harrison in New York City, where I used to work. The food was comfort food of the bistro kind with American, “homespun”touches. It’s the sort of place that serves an Angus strip steak on top of a piece of grilled bread and then tops the whole thing with bitter greens and parmesan and flashes it under the broiler. A real bistro would just serve the steak plain, but I didn’t mind the layering. I had enough for lunch the next day. The house salad has crispy slivers of what I think were fried wonton wrappers, sort of a skinnier version of those “crisps” you get at Chinese restaurants with a dish of duck sauce. I still don’t quite get the point of that and how all that started, but maybe the history of Chinese food in America I’m reading will have the reason. We skipped dessert; the portions were enormous.

Tonight I am going to see the Niagara Theatre department production of The Threepenny Opera. A friend who teaches in the Theatre Department there is the director, and he got us tickets. I will have to settle into final grading for the semester tomorrow, but that’s another day.