Cocktails With Chris

Mother's Day Tipples

2010-05-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

I was looking for something light that wouldn't trash my Greatest Generation mom this Sunday. It should be noted that Mom could probably still--in her late eighties--drink most people under the table. You'd expect someone of her venerable years to like the World War Two era highballs when she's indulging, but around the time she turned 80, one of my mom's old friends got her onto apple martinis--a total club-kid drink. She enjoyed them mightily for a few years--seldom more than one, but those things are quite strong. One is plenty. We still have a bottle of that neon-colored apple pucker stuff in the house. Fortunately, it's gathering dust. It's odd and fakey. More suited to the cocktail bar scene in Star Wars than anything else.

This Fall, when my Dad (who's 90 in a couple of months, and tack-sharp still) was briefly in the hospital, Mom stayed with us, and I introduced her to a cocktail called a Presbyterian that I think I've mentioned in this blog and on the show. It's essentially a highball: ginger ale, bourbon, and fresh lime juice. A little less extreme, and she found that one of them suited her end-of-the-day desires just fine. Dad's just fine, too, by the way. I know. I'm lucky.

I'm thinking she may want only a glass of champagne with her brunch on Mother's Day (Mom LOVES the bubbly), but if she wants a mixed drink, I found this recipe that is light, refreshing, and good if you're going to be bad and have a drink with a festive mid-day meal.

Gypsy Punch

1 and 1/2 oz. light rum

1/4 oz. real grenadine (make your own, or buy a brand that uses pomegranate juice and no corn syrup)

1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice

1/4 teaspoon bar sugar (to taste--or you could add a titch more granadine)

Shake the above ingredients in an iced shaker, strain into a highball glass filled with ice, and fill with seltzer. Grate a little fresh nutmeg on top. Serve with a straw.

Crushed ice is nice in the highball glass, if you have the patience.

Happy Mother's Day! See you at Randoradio.com at 4 Eastern--and stay tuned for our big switch to Area 24 Radio--SOON!

Memory Challenges

2010-04-30T07:25:00.000-07:00

Of course the problem with being the resident cocktail nerd among your friends is that you can't travel with all your vintage and repro cocktail manuals--and it would be Very Bad to spill a Jupiter into your laptop after you'd used the 'puter to look up that recipe online. So although a good cocktail can make you FORGET the cares of the day, let's face it: there are some things you just have to memorize.

For me that's a couple of basic rules. Rule one: a shot equals about an ounce and a half (two if you're being generous). Ice, mixer and a highball glass, and you have a highball.

Rule two: a basic sour is an ounce and a half of booze, 3/4 of an ounce of a sweet liqueur(s), and 3/4 of an ounce of a tart citrus juice(s) of your choosing. Do it with tequila, cointreau and lime and you've got a (very simple) Margarita. Do it with vodka, cointreau, lime and a splash of cranberry juice and it's a Cosmo. Use lime and rum and you've got a Daiquiri. And an Aviation is a gin sour, using lemon juice, maraschino and creme de violette. Shake 'em up, and strain 'em into a chilled cocktail glass and there you go; the same formula more or less holds for them all. Goose the citrus up a bit and goose the sweet down a tad to your taste. It makes a smallish cocktail, but I'm not of the school that a drink needs to be served in a goldfish bowl. (A good cocktail is a strong drink. Too much of a good thing is not a good thing.)

There are plenty of other drinks that like irregular verbs, make the language of cocktail-age richer and more maddening. Those you will need your books for. But some other drinks are easy to remember because they call for equal parts of all their ingredients: a classic Negroni is equal parts of gin, red vermouth, and Campari--although I've had the drink mixed in somewhat different proportions and enjoyed it.

Here's a drink I found this week that fits into equal parts of all category:

The Cafe Royal Special

Equal parts: Gin, fresh lemon juice, white vermouth, and sloe gin. Shake hard, serve in a cocktail glass, up.

It's an interesting drink, brilliant red as sloe gin drinks usually are, and not stupid-strong. The trick to having it not be too cotton-candy-ish (and sloe gin drinks can be like that) is to use good sloe gin. I have some OK stuff that I got at the local booze shop, but what really works best in this or any sloe gin drink is Plymouth Sloe Gin. It's considerably more expensive than the garden-variety stuff, and absolutely worth it.

See you at Randoradio.com at 4 Eastern today!!

Gilroy Was Here

2010-04-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

Another hectic week!

Darling goddaughter's 18th, celebrated high atop the Potter building, was a smash hit, thanks to Herr Potter elbowing out the kitchen staff and preparing some of his famed Indiana Fried Chicken. I guess it's not news to anyone who actually LIVES with high school seniors that they can eat like a plague of locusts in the Old Testament. As a couple who seem to have forgotten to produce offspring, we can only marvel.

Weather was mostly springy-perfect, if you like your days peppered with itchy eyes and prolonged sneeze-fits. I read somewhere that you need higher mathematics to express the pollen count that has been kicking up allergies we didn't even know we had in this swanky neighborhood near you.

Last spring and summer, I made a lot of Mai Tais and Singapore Slings. They were tropical and seemed like the thing, but this year, I'm a little bored with them. And yet, like the little girl I once was, the one who once loved the cherry life saver the best out of all the candies in the roll, I still crave something on the sweet side in this sweet in-between season. Mind you, nothing icky, but a nuanced application of Cherry Heering can be a pleasant thing.

I experimented a bit with a drink called a Gilroy this week. Don't know the precise history of it, but what it tastes like is a slightly more concentrated, slightly less sweet Singapore Sling. It's served up, in a cocktail glass. Here's where I'm at with the recipe:

The Gilroy

1/2 oz lemon juice (at least--you could go up to 3/4 oz)

1/2 oz good dry vermouth

3/4 oz Cherry Heering (or a little, wee bit less)

3/4 oz gin--I used Plymouth, but you could go a bit heavier with the aromatics in your choice of brand

a couple good dashes of orange bitters

Taste before you shake, for balance. There's a sweet/sour/herbal/bitter thing going on here, and it should all be present.

Shake HARD--you want this one cold--and serve in a chilled cocktail glass, up. I used a quarter of a lemon wheel, perched on the rim of the glass, as a garnish. Could also see, for folks who really like tart, running one of the spent lemons over the rim of the glass but NOT sugaring it.

It's an interesting drink, just the thing for a mild spring evening when the apple blossoms are just beginning to drift down like benign snow. I don't have it quite nailed yet, though, so feel free to play with the proportions. It absolutely doesn't have to be sweeter, but I don't think it should be too bracingly sour.

I read of an older version of this drink, that skips the lemon and orange bitters, and uses kirsch. Might be interesting, but it sounded wintery. Besides, any excuse to use orange bitters is a good thing, I think!

Drink up, and see you at 4 Eastern today on Randoradio.com!

Legalities, tax day--A Bacardi Cocktail

2010-04-15T11:13:00.000-07:00

This will be short, because I'm on the fly today. My darling goddaughter is celebrating her 18th birthday tomorrow, so Cocktails with Chris is going on the air a day early--that's today, Tax Day, April 15th, at 4 Eastern.

And because it is Tax Day and a warm, springy one, I thought a cocktail with a legal history would be good today. Hence, The Bacardi Cocktail, which legally MUST be made with Bacardi rum. There was actually a court case back in the day. I went straight to their website, thinking it would be good to obey the law in all things today.

So sign your forms, drop 'em in the mail, and mix this one up:

The Bacardi Cocktail

2 parts Bacardi rum. Silver works best, I think, but you COULD use amber

2/3 part fresh lime juice

1/4 part real pomegranate grenadine (Bacardi suggests Monin, but you can make your own easily enough by simple syrup-izing some Pom)

Shake really, really hard with a mix of ice cubes and crushed ice (Bacardi specifies this, t00), and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish? They say "a preserved cherry" (could be good), but I'd rather a half a lime wheel.

Cheers! I'll see you at Rando at 4!

Another Cloudy Friday...

2010-04-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

One forgets how deeply strange Spring can be from year to year, no matter how many times one (in this case yours truly) has been through it. Right now, I'm looking out the window high atop the Potter building at a sulky grey sky that's actually some sort of misty moisty thing trying to burn off, although it's almost noon and it should have done that by now. Maybe the weather is feeling as lazy as I've been. But it's cooler, at least...

COOLER at least, you say? You want COOLER in the spring? Yeah, I do. It was 91 degrees in our swanky neighborhood near you earlier this week, and we're talking full-bore Hudson River Valley 91 degrees: schweaty schweaty sweat. I staggered into a few shops in a fever dream in search of sleeveless girly tops that I hadn't worn to death last August. Decided I was too hot to try anything on, and staggered back out.

Today, it's 55 degrees, and it'll get a little warmer, but not much. It was warm enough on Sunday last to have Easter dinner outside--and to HAVE to grill the lamb because roasting it in the house would have made the folks gathered there to celebrate the Resurrection miserable. That is, if they hadn't all been outside, anyway. It's been so unseasonably hot here that I'm sort of lost in time. WAS last Sunday actually only Easter? It could be June...or early September...or late July. The ancient apple tree just outside my office, having miraculously cheated death once again despite the nasty winter storms of only about a month and a half ago (!!), is in bloom. We'll have apples again in the fall, but who knows what temperature it'll be by then?

The knee-jerk thing would be to make a blender drink with melons and rum and mint, but I'm resisting that for now. I've been into a lot of antique gin drinks lately, and I think we'll be enjoying this one today, in honor of Robyn Hitchcock's new CD, released just around the time the temperature started going nuts.

The English Rose

2 oz gin (I'm thinking Plymouth, nothing too funky. You could use Hendricks, I think, too)

1 oz dry vermouth

1 oz apricot-flavored brandy

1/2 oz lemon juice

1 tsp real grenadine

Shake hard, serve up, garnish with a brandied cherry.

The Internet Cocktail Database suggests a sugar rim for this drink, but I'm thinking that unless you pretty much doubled the amount of lemon juice, it would be too sweet that way. And you should ABSOLUTELY taste before you shake--a little less apricot brandy and a little more lemon juice might be more to your liking.

It sort of fits this week--a recipe I'm still playing with to see if it's going to be sweet or tart. Kinda like the weather.

See you at four Eastern on Randoradio.com!!

Falernum, again...

2010-04-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

...and a gorgeous spring day on which to think about it.

The first time I tasted Falernum (I'd bought a bottle to experiment with some Tiki drinks, in which it's a sometimes ingredient), I figured that it was what the Captain Morgan people were really after--except that it was more like a liqueur than a plain old strong spirit. It's sweet. Wikipedia says there are non-alcoholic versions of it, but I've never seen one.

It improves many, many drinks, though, especially ones made with rum. And so I will celebrate this lovely spring day (after many days of soaking rain) with a Mai Tai, a very good example of a drink that you can make without Falernum, but is MUCH better with a bit thrown in.

There's a lot of back and forth over what is a true, historic, Don The Beachcomber kinda Mai Tai. I'm not Tiki enough to worry about that sort of thing, but here's the ICB recipe for the drink, which does include the golden potion in question:

Shake in iced cocktail shaker & strain

1 oz light rum (3 cl, 1/4 gills)

1 oz dark rum (3 cl, 1/4 gills)

1 1/2 oz fresh lime juice (4.5 cl, 3/8 gills)

1/2 oz orange curacao (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)

1/4 oz grenadine (6 dashes, 1/16 gills)

1/2 oz orgeat syrup (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)

1/4 oz falernum (6 dashes, 1/16 gills)

A Mai Tai is properly served in a tall glass filled with crushed ice, and sipped through a straw, I think. I like a mint leaf garnish. If you're making a bunch of these, taste before you shake for lime juice/sweet balance. You shouldn't have something as tart as--say--an Aviation--but you should be aware of the lime. And as I have found out lately, the better the curacao you use, the better the drink will be. Shop around and spend a few bucks. The stuff goes a long way.

In other news, I've finally got the new ROBYN HITCHCOCK! And so Cocktails with Chris goes forth live on the intertubes at www.randoradio.com today at 4 PM! We're on the air a day early to kick off the Easter weekend, and to allow a certain otherwise impossibly groovy radio host to sing in her husband's choir tomorrow...

Honeymoons and Spring Fake-outs...

2010-03-26T08:43:00.001-07:00

It was warm enough last week, high atop the Potter building, to have all the windows open and to paint the yard furniture. But yesterday, the clouds rolled in again. Today, a nasty thin wind just turned over the garden umbrella we'd rather optimistically raised over two rocking chairs outside my study. The temperature is thirty seven degrees and the unchanging light is the dull, even sort of stuff you get during a snowstorm.

Ken bought me a couple of little azalea plants to put on the porch last week, and I'm going to have to remember to take them inside tonight. When the clouds blow away later, it's supposed to go down into the twenties.

Such is March, and an odd month it's been--health care reform finally passed, Alex Chilton and Fess Parker gone, a week of sunshine and balmy breezes dotting the ends of the bare tree branches with green...and today, murk and shuddery cold. After I do my radio show tonight, and Ken gets back from practicing, we'll probably light the first fire we've had since the big snowstorms of just a few weeks back.

One could spite the turn in the weather with a tropical drink, but I'm thinking something soothing might be more to the point. In my continued exploration of the Ted Haigh Cocktail book, I ran across The Honeymoon Cocktail last weekend. It's a good drink for a night like this: not too winter-heavy, a tad on the sweet side but not cloyingly so. It's a venerable drink, supposedly from The Brown Derby chain in LA. I swore I wasn't going to quote any more of Haigh's recipes in this blog, but after playing with his formula some, I simply can't beat it--with the caveat that although he calls for Calvados, I do use Applejack, which he says is OK. There are other formulations kicking around the web, but many of them call for far too much Benedictine, which will give you something that tastes too medicine-y for me.

Here's what I do:

2 oz applejack

1/2 oz Benedictine

1/2 oz orange curacao

1/2 oz lemon juice

Shake hard, serve up in a cocktail glass with a lemon twist. Haigh suggests flaming the lemon twist (putting a lighter to it while you're twisting it over the drink to spark up some of the oil that will emerge, a tricky fillip). That last thing is perhaps advisable to impress your guests or Significant Other on the first round, but if you make a second round, please don't do it. You'll burn your fingers for sure! A plain old lemon twist, while not as sexy as the flamed one, is just fine in this interesting drink.

Anything with applejack in it is bound to be tasty, and with the nicely balanced proportions of Haigh's recipe, the complex flavors of the Benedictine won't overwhelm any amateurs in your crowd. Cheers!

See you at 4 EDT on Randoradio.com!

No Penny Whistles--just soda bread and whisky, please...

2010-03-12T08:34:00.000-08:00

I don't know how Irish I really am. My dad is pretty thoroughly Irish, but he always claimed that there was French-Canadian in his family. My maiden name is Blanck, which is really Dutch. There are only two things I know for sure about my heritage: a) I'm an Irish/German/English mutt, for the most part and b) I couldn't be a bigger WASP unless my first name were Muffie. Although my friend Tom (Randoradio's Logovore) says Irish people don't count as WASPS. He's probably right--Irish folks are Celts-- but you can't pronounce WCPS. And that doesn't even get into the whole Protestant/Catholic thing...

It's complicated, as they say on Feetsbook.

I do like St. Patrick's Day, though. I don't like the barroom version, where folks put sequined shamrock glasses on and start drinking at 9AM. Nor do I especially love the penny-whistled drenched, misty moisty green public TV version. I like a dinner party with a few friends and family, and I put the cocktail shaker away for this one. Jamesons and water or Guiness to drink, corned beef and cabbage, soda bread, and some simple sweet for dessert. This year I'm thinking of a chocolate cake from the French housewife classic I Know How To Cook. A French cake on St. Pat's is fine, I think. I've actually had terrific French food in Dublin. Anyway: a few Irish cheese and some crackers and fig jam before hand.

Corned beef is something I've loved for years, even the nasty commercial stuff, but if you shop around a little, you can often find butchers who brine their own at this time of year. It's worth the extra effort to do so. DiCicco's in Rockland and Westchester Counties (downstate NY) usually has a barrel of the stuff out.

Here, by the way, is my genuine family recipe for Soda Bread. Notice that it does use white flour, caraway, and raisins or currents. It's Irish-American, not trad Irish. But we've been making the stuff for fifty years anyway, and it's good: neither too sweet nor too crumbly. Toasts up great for days, too. I standardized some (but not all) of my great-aunt's eyeball-it measurements:

Irish Soda Bread

4 cups flour (unbleached is best)

1 to 2 tablespoons caraway seeds (to taste)

1 and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons sugar

a generous 1/2 stick (4 and 1/2--5 tablespoons) melted butter--use the frying pan you will bake this in to melt the butter

about 1/2 medium box of raisins (can mix golden and brown, or use currents)

2 eggs

2 cups buttermilk

Greased cast iron fry pan to bake it in.

Preheat oven to 325.

In a large bowl, whisk the flour with the salt, sugar, and baking soda. Beat the eggs in a smaller bowl and add to them the buttermilk and the melted butter. Mix wet ingredients well. Sprinkle half the seeds and the raisins into the dry mixture and begin to add the wet mixture on top of it, mixing with a rubbermaid spatula. When you’ve given it a few turns, add the rest of the seeds and raisins, and the rest of the wet ingredients. Gently mix the dough until wet and dry mixtures are combined. Do not overmix. You want a folding motion, and a few lumps are OK as long as everything is moistened and holding together. Dough will be stiff--perhaps like drop biscuits. You may need a tablespoon or two more buttermilk on a dry day.

Put dough into frying pan in which you have melted the butter (you will also have wiped the extra butter up the sides of it, so the dough won’t stick).

Bake at 325 for about an hour. To check for doneness, take the bread out of the oven and gently invert the fry pan, catching the bread in your other (hot gloved!!!) hand. Insert a roasting thermometer. Properly cooked soda bread should be 190 to 195 degrees, and the top will be golden brown.

Eat warm or cool, with butter. This is also good toasted, and will keep in a plastic bag for two or three days.

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I'm on Randoradio.com today--Friday the 12th--at 4 PM, as always.

Stirrings of Spring

2010-03-05T11:33:00.001-08:00

The really peculiar thing about late winter is how intense it can be--and then it just disappears like an inch of overnight snow on a 50 degree afternoon. Which is what's happening high atop the Potter Building, this almost-spring. We're still having cocktails before the fire in the evenings, and it's still pretty dark outside by the dinner hour. But something is stirring.

That got me thinking about highballs today. Highballs, of course, are drinks in tall glasses with ice cubes in, the kind baby boomers like me remember our parents drinking. Nothing like that tinkly-ice-in-glasses sound to evoke a grown-up party of the past! But when I got into making cocktails, I was more interested in the ones you serve "up", in the stemmed, cone-shaped glasses. Those seemed way more Nick and Nora to me. Still, there's a time and a place.

And so today, as I put together thoughts for my radio show, I wandered over to the Internet Cocktail Database to see what their randomizer would come up with for me. Yikes! It was something called the People Eater. Well, at least it was a highball, and I HAD been thinking about highballs. You ready?

1 oz. 151 proof rum
1/4 oz lime juice

Pour over ice in a highball glass, fill with 7-up, and give it a stir.

Um...OK. Actually, I'm no huge fan of 7-up, but I do like highballs with ginger ale. My grandpa introduced me to cocktail hour at an age that would be considered scandalous these days with bourbon and gingers. Here are two drinks I've got the kitchen staff making today, again courtesy of the Internet Cocktail Database--and what a fine public resource it is!

The Buck Jones
1 and 1/2 oz light rum
1 and 1/2 oz cocktail sherry (dry)
3/4 oz lime juice

Pour over ice & fill the highball glass with ginger ale. Stir. I'd garnish with a lime slice.

The Ruby Rangoon
1 and 1/2 oz. gin
1 and 1/2 oz cranberry juice

Pour over ice & fill the highball glass with ginger ale. Stir. I imagine an orange garnish? One could play.

Of course, with any of these drinks, the quality of the finished product depends greatly upon your mixer. I'd go with a snooty ginger ale from a small company--something with some good flavor. Ginger beer might be a little too burny-intense. Leave that for the Dark & Stormies. And I'll tell you a dirty secret: although cocktail purists will scream and tear their hair, if you're watching sugar intake, decent-tasting diet G.A. works in a highball.

See you at 4 on www.randoradio.com!

Frozen Margarita Snowstorms

2010-02-27T09:49:00.000-08:00

Cocktails with Chris is on at 4 PM on Saturday for the first time ever this week. That's because it has been snowing in the swanky neighborhood around the Potter building...and snowing and snowing and snowing...and snowing some more. It snowed from Wednesday night straight through to Friday night this week, and trees fell down and folks' electricity went off. Although we did keep our juice High Atop The Potter Building, it was recommended to us that it would be insane to send our dogsled out in the direction of the studio.

So the party's today, instead.

Today, we are saluting the kind of snow we usually get in our downstate New York vicinity: frozen margarita-like in texture, it fries snow-blowers and torques the lower backs of enough folks trying to shovel it to keep the local chiropractors in BMW's. So why not go with the flow?

Or the slush.

When I first met my husband, he was famed among his friends for a drink he made with blue curacoa that he called The Tidy Bowl Margarita because of its garish hue. It turned tongues turquoise and resembled a cocktail version of that odd disinfectant folks used to put in their toilets back in the 70's. His recipe was simple: equal parts tequila, blue curacoa, and lime juice. Whirl in a blender with lots of ice until it is the consistency of a Slurpee. Pour into a big silly glass, garnish with a slice or lime (or better yet, a paper umbrella), and suck through a thick straw. That worked, but this is better:

The Tidy-Bowl Margie, refined

3 oz tequila

2 oz lime

1 oz blue curacoa

about a cup of ice, preferably crushed

Whirl in a blender, serve the same way. Make sure you whirl LONG enough. You want a very fine consistency so it will go through the straw easily.

Slush outside? Slush inside!

See you on the air!

More Champagne! It's the Prancing Boys!

2010-02-19T08:18:00.000-08:00

I'll admit it. I'm just as strung out on the figure skating in the winter Olympics as any other female or gay male in the United States of America. Fortunately, my sister is visiting, so I have someone with whom to watch what her husband refers to as "The Prancing Boys". My own husband just goes upstairs and runs through his Tivo'd collection of old Brit coms. That's another scene. HE's another scene...

"What?" said a very fabulous member of the Episcopal clergy to my sister when she explained to him that she was Otherwise Engaged on a certain evening this week because she'd promised to watch the couples' short program with me. "Doesn't Christine have any gay friends?"

Well, of COURSE I do, silly.

What's been really great this year is that straight comedians and even Olympic commentators have been loose enough to engage in a little affectionate camp humor. That's what I call progress. For real.

You know what's really weird? What's really weird is how butch the American gal half-pipe athletes on their snowboards in their plaid flannel hoodies look, especially next to the feather-fingered Firebird ice-dancing gold medalist of the men's singles.

It's enough to make you crave a cocktail. I searched for things that mentioned "gold medal" in my cocktail books and online, and could only come up with one that seemed appropro, but it sounds fabulous, and fabulous is what is needed here. Again, it's the Internet Cocktail Database to the rescue:

The Olympia Gold Cup

1/2 oz cognac (I'll betcha plain old brandy would be fine)

1/2 oz Grand Marnier (don't skimp here)

Shake hard in an iced shaker.

Top off with 2 oz of champagne, and garnish with half-wheels of lemon and orange and a few cherries (I'd go with brandied ones).

See you on Randoradio.com at 4 PM!!

Who Eats Dinner on Valentine's Day?

2010-02-12T10:05:00.000-08:00

...well, everyone, it seems. You'd better already have that restaurant reservation. And there's the matter of champagne, also necessary. For the purpose of...um...you know darn well what.

And it's all nuts. Not that I don't like all the red hearts and lace, and not that there's anything WRONG with champagne. Champagne is a delightful wine, and it plays well with others. We've talked about the French 75 and how to make a non-fake, worth-drinking Mimosa on Cocktails with Chris before. But here are the facts, and you don't need me to tell them to you:

1) If you eat a big dinner, no matter how romantic and rare the ingredients of it are, you are going to get into bed and fall asleep...and...

2) If you drink a lot of wine, the same thing is going to happen.

Well, maybe not if you are male and 24. In that case, nothing is going to slow you down. But folks like me, richly endowed with the benefits accrued by decades of life, will drift into dreamland. And even when I was young (and quite the fox if I do say so), butter-rich haute cuisine washed down with good wine tended to move me more towards slumber than towards l'amour.

My recommendation: a champagne cocktail or two with some dainty tastes of smoked salmon something, or a bit of ordered-in sushi. Think appetizer portions. THEN get the business of the day underway. Have the main course afterwards. You will thank me for this sage advice later.

Meanwhile, a Cocktails with Chris review:

Two Champagne Cocktails--The French 75 and The Mimosa

1. The French 75

This drink was probably invented by Americans in France around World War One time, and is in fact named after a piece of artillery. It has a rep for knocking folks over, but it's really not that strong, and the unlikely combination of gin and champagne makes it an "up" drink. We're not talking Red Bull and Vodka here (and we never will--yuk), but it's not snooze-y.

The Internet Cocktail Database, often a good source for drink recipes, doesn't do too well with this one. It builds the drink in a tall glass, starting with 1 0z fresh lemon juice, 2 tsp bar sugar, and a whooping two oz of gin, which you stir, add ice, and top off with champagne. Much better is Paul Harrington's take in Cocktail: he uses 4 oz of champagne, and 1/4 oz each of gin, Cointreau, and lemon juice. One shakes everything except the champers in an iced shaker, pours it into a chilled flute, and tops off with the champagne. Tasty and a much better balance. You might want a bit more Cointreau, depending on the wine and lemon's acidity. A good cocktail book I own from Absinthe in San Francisco suggests brandied cherries as a garnish, and if you've got some, they are tasty here.

2. The Mimosa

My time-honored recipe is something one makes by the pitcher, and it might be a nice addition to a Sunday afternoon by the fireside. Take a good large water pitcher, add the juice of 3 or 4 good Florida oranges, a bottle of champagne (pour slowly), and a tablespoon or two of cassis, blackberry brandy or peach brandy. Stir very gently, ice, and serve (over more ice if you want) in chilled flutes. Fresh orange juice is a MUST here.

Happy Valentine's Day!! I can't promise an ultra romantic radio show today--no telling WHAT I'm going to play except I know some Miles Davis--but we'll be talking bubbly and chocolates! Do tune in at 4 on Friday on Randoradio.com--and send up a prayer that the new CD players work!! Glenn Carella and I are installing them in about an hour.

Drinking Commies, My Dr. Cocktail Obssession...

2010-02-05T07:53:00.000-08:00

...OK, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails by Ted Haigh (a man otherwise known as Doctor Cocktail) has captivated me. Up until Ken and I started playing with that book, we were of the firm opinion that there were two ways to come up with a good drink. One of them was to pull out our battered copy of Paul Harrington's 1990's book Cocktail, and the other one was to stick our noses in one of our vintage or vintage repro cocktail manuals (like The Savoy Cocktail Book). From time to time, we'd run across an interesting modern recipe, but we're into the Nick and Nora stuff; blueberries and Dutch gin is just kinda yicky.

Now the Harrington book is out of print and collectable. I just checked Amazon and they have a few new copies--for over a hundred and fifty smackeroos! But Haigh's book is a worthy next step. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it is the LOGICAL next step. A little gin-heavy, perhaps (but so many of the really good old recipes are gin-based). And one or two I've found just a wee bit sweet, but then it's always wise to taste any drink before adding the full amount of maraschino or triple sec or Grenadine or whatever. Lemons and limes differ in their tartness, and especially if you're a cocktail do-bee and make your own grenadine, you may have created something a tad more or less sugary than what Haigh calls for.

We'll be talking The Communist today on Cocktails with Chris.

Haigh calls for 1 oz of gin, 1 oz of orange juice, 3/4 oz of lemon juice and 1/2 oz of Cherry Heering (I wouldn't use anything less--no budget cherry brandy). Shake hard, serve up in a cocktail glass. I used a quarter of an orange slice for a garnish, but a lemon slice would probably work, too. A cocktail (brandied) cherry? No, not so much; it would get lost.

The Communist is a drink from the 30's, not too strong (so folks could have two if they wanted), and the appropriate pinko color. Very tasty and easy to like. I used Plymouth Gin.

And I'm not giving away any more of the good doctor's remedies. You'll have to buy the book yourself!!

Having just found out that Steeleye Span founder Tim Hart died on Christmas Eve (how did I miss that?), I'll be playing some of their music, and dipping into the rapidly expanding Randoradio new bin, too! Oh--and maybe a little Who, or at least some Pete Townshend, about whom I don't know quite how to feel with all these scurrilous things being said. But there is a song I'm thinking about that kind of explains it all...

...tune in at 4 EST, have a Commie, and listen up!

Prohibition

2010-01-22T08:26:00.000-08:00

My eighth grade history teacher said it straight-out: if you make something against the law, people will crave whatever that thing is. My thirteen-year-old self didn't quite agree; at that point in my life, I was terrified to break rules. I did all my homework, and although I often argued with my parents, I never would have actually DONE anything they told me not to. It was too scary. But I wrote it down in my blue, three-ring binder anyway: Prohibition failed because of the Forbidden Fruit craving that is a basic part of human nature.

And although I have gone through some periods of mildly rebellious activity, I'd make a pathetically timid criminal. Even in my forties, when I was first moving in with my now-husband before we were married, it felt like a big deal to give our new, shared phone number to the English Department Phone Tree for snow days. It was the 1990's! I was LIVING IN SIN!

So let me say that I don't think I would have been drawn to bathtub gin back in the day. But I'm not everybody, and obviously plenty of people were. I do believe that we're not doing college students any favors by prohibiting them from legally drinking until they are 21, and many university presidents agree with me. By forcing alcohol consumption underground, we are encouraging culture of binge-drinking among young adults. When I went to college in the early 70's, my friends and I went to cocktail parties along with our professors--and got so see some of them setting a less-than-sterling example of How To Handle One's Drinks. We rolled our eyes. Seeing someone who could be brilliant and devastating in the classroom get sloppy was actually a pretty stern lesson in What Not To Do.

Were there Animal House-style frat parties? Yeah, but nobody cool went to them. You could get drunk if you wanted to. There simply wasn't any urgency about it, and that was the difference. The tragic stories of kids who die after chugging vodka or Jack Daniels just weren't as common in my generation.

Samey-same with grass, I think. Make it as corporate as Coca-cola, and it'll soon enough lose its patchouli and headshop appeal. Plus a lot of states will fix their budgets in a hurry, as it seems to be the biggest cash crop in more than a few of them.

I've been experimenting with writing some young adult fiction lately, and it's gotten me thinking a lot about the differences between my (boomer) generation and the generation of teens and young adults coming up now. This group of kids seems so much older, and so much harder than we were. I've decided that's a result of the hovering kind of hyper-parenting that much of our generation has ended up doing. We've forced our kids to grow old fast in order to defeat it. The Woodstock Generation did not bring about World Peace. We tended to elect centrist to right-wing Presidents while biting our fingernails to the quick about letting our children walk to the bus stop solo, or about food additives and allergies and play dates and bicycle helmets. No wonder some of them are doing the Janis-Joplin-with-the-Southern-Comfort thing--they can't even go down to the campus pub and order a beer.

Yeah, it's fine for me to say. I didn't have kids. But I sure taught a lot of them.

Well, this certainly HAS turned into a rant. And so I think I'll propose a toast for the week:

The Twelve Mile Limit

This is another Ted Haigh resurrection, although I believe it's also in the Savoy Cocktail book. It's named for the distance out to sea a Prohibition-era cruise ship had to be before the bar could open. Make sure you use decent grenadine--not the supermarket kind. It's easy enough to grab some POM and simple-syrup-ize it by simmering it with slightly less than an equal amount of sugar stirred in for a minute or two, just until it turns clear. That works fine, and it keeps for weeks in the fridge.

1 oz white rum (or you can use silver if that's all you have)

1/2 oz each:

rye, brandy, lemon juice, and grenadine (you may not want to add the full amount of grenadine at first, depending upon how sweet what you're working with is)

Shake good and hard with plenty of ice, and serve up in a cocktail glass. Some sort of lemon-y garnish works well.

See you on the air at 4 PM at

http://www.randoradio.com

for a sip and some musical surprises!! I promise some Fugs and Holy Modals, too, in honor of Tuli Kupferberg, for whom a benefit is being thrown in Brooklyn tonight--which I sadly cannot attend due to church mouse activities in My Other Life.

A Stiff Upper Lip

2010-01-14T13:51:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd be someone who worried about being too cheerful. I've always had a bit of an Eeyore-Donkey streak in me. My husband, on the other hand, is like the sun rising on a clear morning.

"You know what I HATE about you?" I snapped at him once, in the midst of an especially intense Personal Cloud of Gloom, "You're an optimist! I hate optimists!"

Fortunately, Ken has lived with me long enough to know that I don't really hate a) optimists or b) him. This despite the fact that I privately believe any airplane I board is doomed. This despite the fact that I have only recently developed unshakable faith in the power of two tablespoons of melted butter, two tablespoons of flour and one cup of milk to make a white sauce--even though I've been making tuna-noodle casserole that way since the 7th grade Home Ec. Somehow, it's always a miracle when the sauce thickens. I know, I know...

But I found myself in an odd role at a funeral last week. I'm a soprano in my husband's choir in My Other Life, and I was standing with the rest of the singers just before the service. And I was making very quiet, cheerful funeral jokes--perhaps you know the kind I'm talking about. Not disrespectful, nasty guffaws, but the kind of small talk about kitties and new cell phones and Life Goes On that you do when you're trying not to cry. And for a minute, I wondered if I was being uncool in doing that, and then I realized that I most surely was not. And in fact that I had quite possibly graduated to a new level of gal-dom. By gal-dom, I mean the state being a gal, which is in my current vernacular a higher form of being a Grownup Woman. A gal has spunk. She is someone with good taste in makeup, the ability to pick up heavy objects without calling for a male, and (get this!!) a stiff upper lip.

And a stiff upper lip requires--gasp--faith, if not optimism.

This week, the news has been unbearable. One must respond, give money, loan one's Facebook status to Docs without Borders...and one must keep a still upper lip.

A drink helps. I like Ted Haigh's take on The Millionaire for this purpose. It's a sunny name for a drink, and we'll be having one on the show on Friday. Here is my take on what the esteemed Dr. Cocktail proposes in his fine volume, Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails:

For each drink:

1 and a half oz of Myer's Dark Rum (Gosling's would probably work fine, too)

3/4 oz sloe gin (London sloe gin is good)

3/4 oz apricot brandy

about one ounce of freshly squeezed lime juice, to taste.

Shake hard and serve up in a chilled cocktail glass. I garnished with half a lime wheel. The drink comes out an astounding shade of deep red, and is a tad tart, and should be. Add more lime juice if it isn't. A lime will give you a little over an ounce of juice, usually.

Do NOT serve this drink while wearing a white garment, optimist though you might be.

We'll be listening to a little Hendrix-inspired music from Haiti this week, and Mingus' wonderful Haitian Fight Song from his 1957 CD "The Clown". See you on the air!

Still Cold, Still Suggesting Bourbon

2010-01-08T12:08:00.000-08:00

I'm on the air as I type these words, playing a cool cover of Yes' "Seen All Good People" by Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs--but I'm about to talk about a cocktail called a Derby. Yeah, it's from the Kentucky one, and it may be a warm weather race--but a Derby sure does taste good in January. Happy New Year, by the way--and here's the link to the Cocktail Data Base.

More writing later. Meanwhile, tune iin!!

http://www.cocktaildb.com/recipe_detail?id=2972

It's a Blizzard!

2009-12-18T10:32:00.000-08:00

...or maybe it's not. Weather.gov is hedging. OK, I was exaggerating when I said blizzard, actually, but a pretty good snow-dump. Looks like said snow-dump will be whiting the joint out at our favorite time: over Saturday night, so that my organist/choirmaster of a husband--who was diagnosed with flippin' Lyme Disease this week (more on that in a minute) and I will have some extra fun getting the car moving early on Sunday morn as we depart the Potter Building for his job.

The good news: the doc gave him the antibiotics and Ken's knee, which was the Presenting Symptom that got him to go see said doc, is better--MUCH better. He can play the organ and everything; he's just limping at bit. Amazing the way this stuff happens just before Christmas so often.

But it's still going to snow, most likely, a fact I usually greet with joy (I'm one of those sickos).

This time, I'm a little less joyful. But the Potter Building is full of friends and family to help us out and so all should be well.

Meanwhile, we'll be making St. Louis Blizzards on Cocktails with Chris today:

2 oz. bourbon

3/4 oz cranberry

1 oz lemon juice

and one tablespoon bar sugar or simple syrup, to taste

Pour over ice in an old-fashioned glass. Stir. Stare out the window. Tune in at 4 EST to Randoradio.com!!

Rum Swizzle

2009-12-04T10:47:00.000-08:00

The New York Times officially announced this week that it's OK for hipsters to drink rum instead of gin, especially if they use many bottles of aged and variously hued stuff and not the plain old corner-liquor-store Bacardi. I'm down with that, yo. And honestly, in some rum punches, although the gorgeous stuff you could sip is frankly better--Bacardi's is just fine to my palate. Or even some lesser-known silver or gold substance.

Maybe it's just that my taste buds take a looong time to get educated. I'm only just this last year or so getting snotty about gin, and everyone's already been a pill about that for quite some time now.

Anyway, I looked at the Times holiday drink article, its tiki-drink-in-bondage (for real) with habenero sauce in it and its gold rum and Benedictine martini-strength concoction and thought ew. There may be a reason that I usually prefer with classic drinks to the nouveau ones--test of time and all that.

But I do agree that rum is a Good Thing. Although it's used in many things we think of as summer drinks, there's something soothing about a rum cocktail that goes down well in December, something oddly appropriate about a Rum Swizzle in December. Let's face it: winter is when you start being able to get decent citrus fruits imported into the Swanky Neighborhood Near You if your non-virtual home is near the Potter Building.

Here's the link to the Wikipedia article on a Rum Swizzle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum_Swizzle

We talked Pineapple Swizzles this summer on Cocktails with Chris--but I like this more classic recipe better. And we get to use falernum! More about that and some good tunes on the air at http://www.randoradio.com today at 4 EST. Do join us!

The Ham, Part II

2009-11-29T15:19:00.000-08:00

Well, I said I would tell the whole story, and so I will.

I forgot how many times we changed the water while it was soaking, but we kept the ham (aka Meat Raisin, aka King Tut) wet for about 36 hours, and simmered it for maybe three and a half hours on Tuesday night, cooled it, and chilled it.

On Thanksgiving, I cut away the excess fat and the skin, and warmed reconstituted Tut covered tightly in foil in a very low oven for about an hour (I mean not even 200 degrees; I didn't want to dry it out). Then I removed the foil and glazed the ham. The glaze was something I winged that I really loved: dark brown sugar moistened with fig vinegar and seasoned with black pepper and ground cloves. I did score the ham lightly first in the traditional criss-cross pattern.

We served it just a bit above room temperature, along with the turkey and all the trad Thanksgiving trimmings. I made collards for the green veg, which was good with both meats.

Verdict from this Yankee girl: not bad, not bad at all. Yeah, it was majorly , majorly salty. But it was also really flavorful. I'll do a country ham again next year. But I might not be ready for the journey until then!

Listening to the after-show Treavor Hastings is doing on Rando right now. Gotta ask him how his turkey came out! He brought some kick-ass pumpkin cranberry bread to our house on Thursday!

Christmas Radio Show

2009-11-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

A quick couple of words:

Since Rando tends to rerun current shows, I thought that I'd make a tradition of my Christmas music Black Friday show. So, today: The Christmas Music Cocktails with Chris for Holiday '09!

Fish House Punch is the drink!

The Paul Harrington proportions (for about thirty servings)

36 oz dark rum

24 oz lemon juice

25 oz brandy

4 oz peach brandy

3/4 pound bar sugar (superfine, not confectioners)

40 oz water

...but this is open to some futzing with on strength and acid/sweet balance. Let your taste buds be your guide, either shake as a cocktail as needed or serve in a punch bowl, chilled and iced (in which case watch the water balance as it will get diluted, and be ready to refresh)

I'll chat more about it on the air today...

http://www.randoradio.com at 4 PM EST!!

Blogging the Country Ham

2009-11-23T07:40:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning knowing I had an ordeal in front of me that no Yankee woman should ever have to face: wrangling a country ham.

It happened because I weakened. I let the ham into my life. When I married a man from southern Indiana, which is practically Kentucky (and sounds like it when he talks), I should have known it would come to this. But it took over a decade and a half before it did. He managed to get a little weeny bit of country ham onto the Thanksgiving table last year, horrifying the health-conscious members of my clan (most of whom ate it anyway). This year, he started talking country ham right after Halloween.

So we found ourselves in the 125th St. Fairway in NYC last week, and I found myself making a deal with the Devil: two dozen Malpeque oysters for my dinner, shucked by him, for...guess what.

The oysters were delicious, and Ken shucks them like a pro. It's those keyboard-playing organist fingers that wield the oyster murder instrument so skillfully, I think.

Ah, but this morning...I had to start soaking The Beast. First, I undressed it; it came wearing a little frock made of muslin and printed with all sorts of claims about its colonial heritage. Inside, it was wrapped in butcher paper. I unwrapped that and beheld a giant meat raisin, lightly dusted with mold and black pepper. A pig leg mummy. Yikes. I'd been prepared by all the reading I've been doing: the mold is harmless and should be scrubbed off with a stiff brush while one is thoroughly rinsing the Meat Raisin. Fair enough. One cool thing: it smelled exactly like the inside of the smoke houses we visited in Williamsburg, Virginia.

But even my biggest stock pot would not hold the scary-looking thing. I woke up Ken, who was sleeping in.

"You got me into this. Now you're getting me out of it." I told him, and dispatched him to the restaurant supplier for bus bins (I'd needed them anyway) and an institutional-sized stock pot. Meanwhile I kept King Tut moist inside a water-filled garbage bag in the kitchen sink. Soon, Ken returned, bearing vessels. Tut ended up in a bus bin in our basement fridge, something I thought was an OTT investment when we put it in, and something I bless every time we have a big party or when the holidays come around. I have read that some people soak country ham at room temperature, but I'd be worried about that after the first huge tide of salt water washes away the saline preservative.

So, step one accomplished. Now, we have to change the water every five or six hours or so. I'm thinking--after having read a scad of recipes for country ham--that I'm soaking it for at least 24, maybe 36 hours before it gets simmered. Time for a bath; I just realized that I, too, now smell like the inside of a Williamsburg smokehouse, and I think that could get old fast.

My radio show this week will be my annual Black Friday Christmas music special. More on that anon. And on the drink, when I decide what it'll be.

Missouri Mules & Thanks Be To God

2009-11-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

Cocktails before Thanksgiving dinner are a tough call. I usually do Cosmos, because of the cranberry and everyone likes 'em. But they go down perhaps a little too easily, and folks unused to anything stronger than a beer tend to get tanked and fall over in the gravy. Well, not REALLY, but sometimes a little too much hilarity ensues. And I don't want to be part of someone's Black Friday headache.

I have a groovy old ice bucket and a hammered silver platter inherited from my great aunt. I was thinking for a while of putting out whiskey and water and ice...which seemed unimaginative. But I do love the taste of whiskey--especially bourbon--around Thanksgiving food, and so I played on the internet for a while. My buddy Ed Odell was talking about a champagne cocktail called a Moonwalk, and when I Googled it, I realized it came from the Savoy Bar in London, employer of the esteemed Joe Gilmore, a man who created drinks to honor the visits and special occasions of folks like Harry Truman, The Queen Mum, and Winston Churchill.

What's good enough for Give 'Em Hell Harry is good enough for me, so I mixed up a Missouri Mule. Here's the recipe, via Wikipedia:

Missouri Mule

2 parts bourbon

2 parts applejack

2 parts fresh lemon juice

1 part Campari

1 part Cointreau

Shake hard & serve up, in a chilled cocktail glass. I garnish with a long, thin strip of lemon zest, curled.

It's a slightly complicated drink--five ingredients--but you can make up a bunch in advance of guests arriving, to shake as needed. It's not sweet. It's almost grapefruit-y, because of the Campari/lemon juice combo. And the mellowness of the bourbon/applejack base plays nicely off that. Best of all, people don't down Mules like Cosmos and end up falling over. This is an interesting-tasting cocktail that will be sagely sipped.

My suggestion would be to also have some of the dinner wine open and breathing to offer folks who might be a bit challenged by a tart drink. AND you could also do Campari and soda for folks who like that, or make a couple of Jack Roses from any surplus applejack.

Problem solved.

My radio show today? I've got the new Rickie Lee Jones. And I'm suddenly (the better part of a decade behind the rest of the hip world) impressed with Sufjan Stevens. See you on the internets! Tune in!

Friday the 13th, Part One Million

2009-11-13T08:49:00.000-08:00

I was wandering outside to get the papers much earlier today--and yes, I still read them on actual paper except when I weaken and scan Huff Po, which has lately been pissing me off by being the NY Post of the left--and I was dressed in my usual morning attire: gym clothes and a pair of cute slipper boots my sis gave me last Christmas. I really like those slipper boots, except that I tripped over them and almost landed on my posterior on a set of stone steps.

But I didn't. I banged my hand a little, remained upright, managed to not even jam my back or scrape or even bruise anything. Just scared myself. When you fall down and you're a little kid, it's not a deal. But falling down as a grown-up is complicated. It often results in the need for more than a band-aid.

My question: is ALMOST falling down a lucky thing on a traditionally UNlucky day, Friday the 13th? One could argue that it is: after all, there was no harm done. And though I'll admit I still have the adorable booties on my tootsies, I'll be a lot more careful wearing them from now on. Perhaps it was a warning. That's lucky. Or was the almost-spill UNlucky? I mean, far luckier would be for me to have just proceeded on to the coffee machine and the Times Op Ed and Doonesbury in the local paper.

Or would it have been?

The next thing that happened was that my fancy-pants coffee machine, one of the deep joys of my life, started to shoot steam out the wrong places. That means I had to get my husband to play with it. It's a complicated machine with electronics and sometimes you have to pick it up and shake it (which is actually what they told us at the customer service line last time it misbehaved, and that seemed to work). It's also a heavy coffee machine, which is why I needed my husband. I also needed him because I tend to give up too fast when I think something is broken. Unlucky?

He was still on the snooze, so I got out my old coffeepot and made myself a cup of French press. Ken came downstairs a bit later and gave Fancy-pants Machine a good shake. Now it works. So it lives to brew another day. Lucky or un?

Derned if I know. I'll tell you if the thing gives me another cup when I finish this blog entry.

But this afternoon at 4 EST, I'm going to throw caution to the wind and suggest Satan's Whiskers today on Cocktails with Chris at http://www.randoradio.com

Satan's Whiskers Cocktails according to the Internet Cocktail Database, consist of one fifth part of the following: red vermouth, white vermouth, gin, orange juice, & Grand Marnier. Add a dash of orange bitters, shake and serve in a chilled cocktail glass. I'd garnish with a twist of orange rind.

Got me some interesting new CD's to spin for ya'll, too. See you there!

Tune in!!

The Answer to a Maiden's Prayer

2009-11-06T10:38:00.000-08:00

When I looked out at our rapidly-withering November garden, all that was still alive was a little late leaf lettuce, the unkillable mint, a few heads of celery and a still-lush growth of nasturtiums. But anything we don't use tonight will be dead tomorrow: it'll be below freezing in this swanky neighborhood near you tonight, and I'm SICK of mojitoes, so I think I'll let that mint go. The nasturtiums, celery, and lettuce? Sounds like salad. And the drink? A Maiden's Prayer, garnished with one of those peppery blossoms.

Paul Harrington's recipe for Maiden's Prayers calls for equal parts silver rum, gin, Cointreau, and lemon juice. It's a better drink than it sounds--and its tawdry history is something I intend to reveal on my radio show this afternoon at 4 EST, Randoradio.com.

As I flashed through some headlines on my way to the blog today, it seemed like another Hard Day on the Planet--someone shooting up a high rise in Orlando, Florida after yesterday's hideous spasm of violence at Fort Hood. Horrifying. It's been a long time since I've been an official maiden, but my prayer is that we as a nation and a world could just Cut This Stuff Out. And maybe have a cocktail and listen to some good music instead.

Tune in to my show if you're around.

Sidecars for Soupy!

2009-10-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

I won't go into the usual maudlin boomer banalities about Feeling Old When One's Childhood Idols die. Nobody gets out of here alive, famous or no...

But gee, I didn't need to hear about Soupy Sales on this "strange and mournful day," to quote the Paul Simon song. Soupy Sales was as much a hero in my growing-up household as Jean Shepherd and Ernie Kovacs. I remember when Ernie Kovacs died--way too young in an auto crash--that my parents were so upset I assumed he must have been a relative. I think I was well into my teens before I realized that he had not been. Jean Shepherd likewise; although he was a jerk in his personal life (and made a series of very creepy passes at Yours Truly when he visited my college radio station), I had to pull over my car and cry when I heard of his death one early morning on my way to work.

Not Soupy! Not yet!

And could he have been 83--roughly the same generation as my parents, this Mouse-doing sprite of a lunatic? I've been on Youtube all morning, amazed at the man's silly grace. He COULD dance. There's something a little wince-making about a clown, and Soupy was a clown. But he was a clown with the great clowns: shameless, corny, just delightful. He used to make me laugh until my face hurt.

Did anyone besides me see the show he did with Sammy Davis Jr? It was a Chez Bippy episode, and the pie fight got so intense that pies were being applied like deodorant, under the arms--something that I found so screamingly funny at the age of 13 that I could barely breathe.

I'm putting together a Cocktails with Chris for Randoradio.com, and there are no MP3 files of The Mouse anywhere! And of all the scratchy 45's we have up at the station, no "Mouse". Nevermind. It'll be all over the TV. I did find a silly take-off by Soupy of MacArthur Park and something called "It's My Ego". And we'll have after-dinner drinks today--stuff that goes with airborne pies. Tune in at 4 EDT today if you get the chance:

http://www.randoradio.com

RIP Soupy!

Creme de Violette!

2009-09-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

OK, I give.

I admit it.

An Aviation is much more flight-worthy with just a drop of the odd 'n' quasi-archaic liqueur in it. And it DOES seem to be an ingredient in the oldest recipes I've come across for this gin sour. AND it does also seem to be a topic of hot discussion in blogs that deal with cocktails only (instead of cocktails and free-form radio and the life of me like this blog).

I had a perfectly balanced, faintly violet-hued Aviation at Vessel in Seattle the weekend before last, and I'm here to tell you that I've had a conversion experience.

Spent some time back home here in NY trying to update my Aviation recipe. You have to be careful with Creme de Violette. Too much of the stuff and it does indeed taste like "licking a French whore's neck, and not in a good way", as another blogger has noted. The closest I've come to true Aviation satisfaction has been this spin on Paul Harrington's formulation from Cocktail:

1 and 1/2 oz. good gin (not Hendricks, though!)

3/4 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice

1/4 oz. maraschino

1/4 oz. creme de violette

Shake hard and serve up in an a chilled cocktail glass, garnished with a cherry. If this seems tart to you--and it is pretty tart--add a few drops more maraschino, not creme de violette. If you're going to the trouble of getting creme de violette, you might want to consider putting up your own cocktail cherries--not a big deal if you use the frozen ones that come pre-pitted but not sugared.

For the cherries: Cook 'em up in a pan with a little simple syrup and water, maybe half a cup for a supermarket packet or two of frozen cherries (or use orgeat and water). Simmer just a minute or two. Scoop with a slotted spoon into a jar. Pour over them about 3/4 to one cup of not-precious brandy and top off with the cooking juices. Pop in a cinnamon stick if you want. These'll keep several weeks at least in the fridge.

This week on Cocktails with Chris--klezmer bluegrass, farewell to Mary Travers, and some Bumbershoot leftovers!

9/11 Again...and a cocktail radio show

2009-09-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

The rain we're getting outside the Potter building this morning as I put together this afternoon's radio show seems appropriate. It's the kind of day that never moves far away from twilight. We've had some dramatic downpours, but mostly just drizzle and gentle rain. Things seem very green outside.

I was in another life on 9/11, still teaching school. I was in the middle of starting my AP Lit class on Sons and Lovers and I barely knew students' names yet. Second period: that's when the attacks happened. I was unaware. Then, the bell rang and I went upstairs to the English Department office through oddly hushed halls. A line of parents snaked out of the principal's office, and I wondered why. None of my colleagues were drinking coffee at the long table where we usually gathered to hoot over various classroom silliness. My boss was on a personal leave day--that I knew--so I answered her phone when it rang.

It was her daughter, who worked in midtown NY, and just wanted her mom to know she was alright. When I told her I was delighted she was alright and asked why she might not be, she told me everything all at once: the towers on fire, the Pentagon, the plane down in Pennsylvania. I had a hard time taking my breath for a minute, and then snapped back to being Ms. Potter instead of Christine. I reminded her that her mom was off work that day and probably reachable by cell, but that I'd try to get in touch, too, and leave a message at least.

Of course. The other teachers were off where there were TV's, probably up in my friend Dave's video department. And the parents? Taking their kids home from school of course. I knew right away that I couldn't watch TV news or I wouldn't be able to stand in front of a class. I walked down the stairs and past a bunch of classrooms. My principal was standing in the hall, arms crossed over his chest, looking grim but calm.

"Whatever do we do?" I asked him.

"Teach the kids," he said. "Don't let your classes be too much about the attacks. Get through the day. Teach the kids."

It was the right advice, and I followed it.

Eight years has blunted the sense of the world turning over, but nothing can put things back the way they were before the attacks--for me or for any American.

A few years later, I retired from teaching, and now I do a cocktail radio show on Randoradio.com. I play music, and I talk about drinks. We had Manhattans at our house that awful night, I remember--and strong drinks though they were, it was like sipping iced tea. Today on Cocktails with Chris, I intend to be respectful but rocking. I'm thinking a whiskey sour might be soothing. I tasted an excellent one of them in Seattle this past weekend, where I went to the Bumbershoot festival. I'll be playing some music from there, too.

Tune in!

Don't Worry...

2009-08-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

From Mark Twain: "Don't worry. Providence protects children, and idiots."

Hmmm.

Well, maybe I can get under that umbrella with the Child-of-God dodge. But since we can ALL use that out (even folks who believe that Hawaii is not a part of the United States), it's going to be a crowded umbrella. And I'm not feeling especially childish today.

I'm feeling old. I've spent the last week worrying about the bat infestation in my Aged Parents' house (hundreds of 'em--no shit!), my mom's heart medication, and my poor kitty, Molly, who spent the night before last in the local animal hospital. The bats are gone, though, and the Aged Parents OK. Molly's a limp dishrag, poor kitty, but on the mend thanks to some powerful antibiotics (drugs!! It always comes down to drugs!!). Molly's beating stress by crashing out on her favorite pillow under a lamp that shines down warmly upon her.

I, however, am feeling it. Funny thing about a nuts week. It doesn't just go away all by itself. You have to give it a shove.

In my own doc's office this morning, in for my standard check-up, a colorful but NUTS street-gal type jumped into the middle of everything. I happened to be the talk of the waiting room: the receptionist had asked me about the bats (I live in a small town). Street-type gal took me to task for allowing my Aged Parents to live independently. As if that were my choice (try telling my parents to do anything they don't want to do. Go ahead. I dare you).

And then I got to have my blood pressure taken.

Owing to a newfound ability to feel like I want to yell SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP in someone's face while smiling like the properly-brought-up Episcopalian I am without spiking my vital signs, the BP was good. But today, I don't just want to do a cocktail show. I want a cocktail.

We'll meet at 4PM, on Randoradio.com, and have a Manhattan, OK?

What's your choice of bitters?

Pineapple Cocktails...

2009-08-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

Well, there are Singapore Slings, Mary Pickfords...and a tasty confection from the NY Times Mag a couple of weeks back called a Pineapple Swizzle. Here's a link to the recipe for that last thing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/magazine/09food-003.html

We'll be talking about the Pineapple Cocktail on Cocktails with Chris today--and do a brief salute to a listener-suggested Death In the Afternoon. Tune in! It's music & chit chat for a sultry day!

New Drink Recipe: Erdbeer-bowle

2009-08-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

A note, first, on my crappy German

Anyone following this blog with the slightest ability to spell or write in German has probably discovered an important fact: I lack even the most basic ability in the language. I do my best when I'm over there, and I am vastly grateful for the good nature and patience of the German people.

This is a punch that was served at our local green market in Prenzlauer Berg, and I've attempted to reproduce it here, back home in NY, with the best strawberries I could get my hands on. Sadly, they weren't the perfect little German berries--so fragrant and yummy. I had to settle for some not-so-ecologically correct organic ones jetted in from our West Coast. This punch is still worth making--pleasant and light.

I'm not sure whether the proper name is Erdbeer-bowle (strawberry bowl) or Erdbeeren-bowle, which I think would pluralize the berries (seems logical--you use more than one fer Heavens sake). But you'll forgive me when you sip this. The only challenge is keeping it cold enough for American tastes. Make sure you keep the wine really chilled before you put it out, and if it's a hot day, defy esthetics and put in some ice inside a sealed Zip-Lock. Don't ice it otherwise--diluted wine is icky, I think.

Erdbeer-bowle

A punch for a good-sized party

LOTS of cubed strawberries (I used two boxes of organic Driscolls), but on-season from the local farmer’s market is what you really want

2 bottles of not-too-dry white wine--German preferred--chilled

1 bottle of decent sparkling white (American Chandon is fine)--also chilled

A few spoons of simple syrup or bar sugar, or Agave syrup, to taste

Hull & cut up the berries--not too big; you want them to exude juices. Sprinkle with sweetener if they aren’t super-amazingly delicious (American ones won’t be). Let ‘em sit for about ten minutes and then pour over them the chilled white wine. Keep cold.

When ready to serve, put in a punch bowl and pour over the mixture of wine and berries the champagne. Taste and drip in a tiny bit of sweetener if needed--this shouldn’t be white-Zinfandel yucky sweet, but it should taste like a punch.

Ladle into glasses, giving everyone berries and punch both.

If it’s a hot day, you may have to sit your punch bowl on ice, or use some ice inside a plastic zip-lock bag right up until guests arrive. Germans don’t serve things as cold as Americans, but this shouldn’t be luke warm.

There's No Place Like Home...

2009-08-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

If only you could get back from Europe by clicking your ruby slippers together!! We flew in last Friday, and had an eight-hour flight turn into an almost-twelve hour ordeal. Headwinds made our usual non-stop have to refuel in Labrador, and we proceeded to circle the NY area for so long that we almost had to divert for more fuel again. Gads. My back is almost OK now, but I was Advil girl this weekend; much of the time we were circling the good old seatbelt sign was on and the plane was bumping along like a car with bad shocks. Ick.

When I look back over the pictures I took there, it feels like I should still be in Berlin. The whole experience washes over me again--and then I look up and I'm in New York. I guess that's the magic of flight, really, turbulence or no. You get to change channels on your life easier than using a DVR.

I'm still thinking about the things I saw in Germany, especially in the parts of Berlin that were formerly DDR. Our nabe was so Brooklyn Heights-esque that you could easily forget what used to be there if you wanted to (until you got down to the Communist Hero statue at the park down the street, that is). But just a few stops on the tram away was the Karl-Marx-Allee, the grand, Soviet-style showcase lined with what were supposed to be awe-inspiring buildings. Here's a link to it in the old days:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.german-architecture.info/028-Karl-Marx-Allee_Fernsehturm.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.german-architecture.info/BER-028.htm&h=300&w=400&sz=26&tbnid=Z2Qz-mCZytb_0M:&tbnh=93&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkarl%2Bmarx%2Ballee&usg=__4DjID71-_d-8cYgEUwDMhnbqDBc=&ei=W4V5SuuYDp-ltgfP09mWCQ&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=5&ct=image

Now, tiles are peeling off those steroidal buildings, and they're thoroughly decorated with swirls of the usual spray paint at street level. I guess some of the apartments are occupied, but they don't look really inviting; the neighborhood is loud with trams and traffic, and the whole feel of the place is gritty. We walked through on a hot day just before we left for home.

It's easy for Americans to forget what really brought down the DDR, and the old Communist system (much as Russia seems to be drifting back towards what it once was). Folks wanted more freedom, yes. In Germany, the movement against Stasi (the secret police) came out of a few very brave churches. But it was the economy, stupid, there as much as anywhere. People wanted rights--and a more comfortable life. The DDR was bankrupt. Russia's economy crashed in a way we can't even imagine here. Guards that had worked at the Berlin Wall were stranded without enough money to get home or even buy food. Those same churches that took a stand against them ended up feeding them--for real.

The dinosaur bones of a place like Karl-Marx-Allee remind me of What Can Happen if too much power ends up in the wrong hands. Folks being sold a Republican bill of goods and trying to derail the health care that our country so vitally needs should consider who WANTS them to disrupt the town halls. The German people managed to shake off a tragic abuse of power when the Wall came down, and if they can do that, for whatever reason, we should also keep our brains engaged as our country changes. Whoever actually believed that the medical/insurance/big pharma industry was just going to roll over and play dead?

Interesting side note: I learned this summer that when Reunification took place, there was a bit of a fight over women's reproductive rights. It was the Easterners who had more, and they fought to keep them. Another lesson: it's always a mistake to look at big words like Socialism and Democracy let them define any discussion. Seems to me that two little words might be more important: What Works.

I'm back on the air Friday at 4, and I'll be talking about Germany, giving out the recipes I adapted for food and drink, and playing my usual mix--spiced up with a little DDR-era psychedelia. See you there, comrade!

Dresden, Turning Towards Home

2009-07-27T02:23:00.000-07:00

We're on our last week in Germany. We fly out on Friday, and I have to say that home and thoughts of home have been tugging at me. I have loved being here. I've resolved (and I swear I'll follow through) to actually pick up a course in this language so that I can speak in something other than broken traveler's German to folks who look at my broad shoulders and my blonde hair and assume I live here. I need to come back.

But we're not done yet. And this last weekend, we went to Dresden and Leipzig, staying overnight in a hotel next door to the reconstructed Frauenkirche. As always, Dresden was intense. I hadn't been there since restorers first started sorting out the charred pile of rubble that was, along with a small, standing fragment of the nave, what remained of the Frauenkirche after the 1945 firestorm. The DDR had decided to leave the site in ruins. I well remember that last visit. We were driving, and it was a hot, brilliant day. We parked our car in an underground garage and walked out into the scalding sun, and even that--coming up from basement darkness into heat--was creepy.

Depending on whose account you believe, anywhere from about 25 thousand to over a hundred thousand people died over the course of two days in the Allied firebombing of Dresden, incinerated, or smothered in basements due to the inferno's hunger for oxygen. Depending on whose account you believe, the city's destruction was anything from necessary to prevent a second Battle of the Bulge to a criminal act of terrorism on an almost-undefended civilian population. I've never understood military strategy. It has always seemed to me to be a peculiar sort of sin to apply our logic to killing other human beings in an orderly fashion, but I'm not naive enough to believe that war is always preventable. It just--well, it makes my head spin. Kurt Vonnegut spoke at my college graduation when I got my BA in 1974. And so it goes.

At any rate, before the firebombing, Dresden--whatever else it was or was not--was a cultural center, a stunning baroque city. When I saw it the last time before my visit this weekend, its scars from those awful two days and its decidedly un-charming DDR rebuild were highly evident. I stood in the blazing sun and knew I was in a haunted place. We wandered in the crypt of the Frauenkirche, which was all that was really tour-able by the public then. The ruins of the church stood in the middle of nothing in the middle of a city. There were blank, Soviet-looking buildings around it, and a handful of structures with baroque detailing on them.

It's different, now.

The Frauenkirche, totally restored, anchors a city center that looks like Prague--which is about right; Prague, which took far less of a hit in the War, was the city film makers used for the pre-firebombed Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five. Ken and I had a beer at an outdoor cafe next to the church, listened to its bells ring for a wedding, and watched the wedding party arrive in a white-ribboned limo. We heard a glorious choral concert from the Bavarian Radio Chorus that night in the restored church's spectacular acoustic, sitting right next to the old cross from the top of the dome--the one they keep inside now as a reminder. It was withered by the heat of the firestorm, but now people light prayer candles and leave them glittering around it like burnt-down coals.

We'd eaten dinner in a beer hall across the way from the church, a place so perfectly old-German that if the exquisite woodwork in the room where we had our sauerbraten hadn't been so unscarred and perfectly new-looking, you'd swear it had been there since the church was first built. And from the well-placed windows, you couldn't see anything but lovingly restored and rebuilt baroque and Renaissance-looking architecture. But still.

In Dresden, there's always a But Still. That afternoon, my organist husband had done what he often does--dragged me to an organ recital, and it was a fine one, at the Kreuzkirche, a place not far from the Frauenkirche. The guy playing was HOT, and the instrument was tonally exciting. He played a bunch of jazz take-offs on favorite Bach pieces that were both fun to listen to and really smart, interesting music: cheerful stuff. Heavens, though, the heartbreaking Kreuzkirche! It would have been rude to take a picture, so I'll tell you what it looks like.

Outside it's the kind of baroque church you'd expect to see in its newly re-baroque'd surroundings. But it was restored early on, under the DDR, and they didn't do the computer-aided, bring-back-every-gilded-flourish kind of job that gave us the rescued Frauenkirche. Inside, you can see what was left of the old church from the floor on up, for about twenty feet. But it's blackened. And beyond that battered original stone is a kind of cottage-cheese-looking grey concrete that you often see in this neck of the woods in buildings restored during that period. The curves of the church's roof are defined in its almost-fuzzy texture. It's as if the church were dissolving into a ghost of itself.

Statues are without noses. Columns are battered. The artwork in back of the altar is in fine shape, but adorning (if that's the word) the choir loft is a row of angel faces. I think they must have been meant to be singing. But some of them are missing the backs of their heads. They're broken and charred in places. They look like they're crying out in pain.

So here's the question: which is a real restoration of the town? Is the eerie perfection of the new alte markt a sort of educational TV Disneyland? Or is it there because the world couldn't stand it if it weren't--if it were more like the inside of the Kreuzkirche--if it broke your heart just to think about it? I don't know the answer to that question.

Like I said, Dresden is intense. And I don't know what to think about what's really going on there now, except that it haunts me.

What a Buncha Babies!!

2009-07-19T12:01:00.001-07:00

Two more weeks in Germany. Half of me is homesick and looking forward to the arrival back in NY...and half of me wants an intensive language course and to Never Come Home.

It's an odd state. It feels kinda restless.

The oddity is compounded by our adopted nabe, which I've grown to love like I love my own at home, although it is overrun with BABIES. Babies here, babies there, babies everywhere. Any woman under forty-five seems to have about a fifty percent chance of being so pregnant that her poking-out belly button is showing through her distended t-shirt. I think I've mentioned before that Prenzlauer Berg is Baby Central--the highest birthrate in all of Germany. There are good schools here, it seems. Not to mention Something In The Air.

Now, I'd be a wee bit nervous if I hadn't aged out of the baby production thing a while back. Thank the Lord, I don't have a dog in this particular fight. But Heavens! Every morning, I wake up to someone pre-verbal ululating in one of the always-bustling cafes across the street. It's that ahhh-ahhh-ahhh thing that babies do the way birds greet the dawn with song. And I get up and look out my window to see the parade o' prams. We did the local flea markets today, and on the way home, a toddler in a stroller tragically lost her purple balloon (OK--I'll admit I liked hearing her complain about the "luft ballon" just like the old Nena song). Her young, uber-hip mom got her another one, which so angered the equally tiny son of a neighboring couple that he tried to stick her up for it. His folks, exhibiting what Young German Parents Do Right, averted the potential meltdown by picking him up and sweeping him away from temptation after he swatted the luft ballon owner. Hard. And then the tram came. Babies, babies, babies.

I asked my husband if he felt old today. He responded in the affirmative. Me, too.

Slate grey sky outside now. A wild, miniature rain storm (most of them over here seem to be miniature compared to American ones) swept over from just west of the TV tower as we were finishing our dinner out on the terrace. The temperature dropped about fifteen degrees in fifteen minutes (farenheit). And we finished the dead-ripe peaches we picked up at the green market yesterday inside.

Dinner tonight? O, we just had a little filet mignon...really. Got it at that same green market yesterday and it was expensive, but you don't need a lot of it. And there are these amazing wild mushrooms everywhere in Germany just now, so I threw them in the beurre noir that I made to go with the filets and cooked up some noodles with sage and brown butter and tossed a big salad full of local greens, cukes and tomatoes. The greens you can get at farmer's markets here are as good as having your own garden, no kiddin'. Proud to say that the sage came from our Berlin garden--a pot of sage and a pot of basil I bought and have been tending to on our terrace. However will I abandon it in two weeks?

On the other hand, I do miss the creek and Randoradio LOTS. Lots. And this place is just FULL of babies!

Greenmarket, Prenzlauer Berg...turning into a local

2009-07-11T06:50:00.000-07:00

...or maybe the title of this blog entry should be I Got Kissed By A Drunken Iranian (or someone claiming to be Iranian).

I don't know. He looked kind of Iranian. He was certainly drunk, and merrily amplifying that state with a tasty-looking mug of dark beer. He'd been busy shaking Ken's hand when he asked if I was the wife, grabbed me by the shoulders, and planted a beery bus on each of my cheeks, muttering all the while in German about how pretty I was. It was one of those travel moments that you'd really like to see on the Rick Steves shows they run nonstop on public TV at marathon time. One asks oneself: What Would Rick Do?

"He said he was from Iran," said Ken.

"I see." I said. And we wandered on. To quote the sound collage at the beginning of Random Madness:

What's the significance? I DON'T KNOW.

It's been that kind of day. We started out with currywurst (the definitive Berlin street food) at a historic imbiss (snack) stand under a U-Bahn stop about a mile from our flat. The place has been dishing out the bratwurst drenched in mildly sweet, curry-flavored ketchup with a sprinkling of curry powder on top since 1901 or so, outlasting two world wars and the DDR besides. I know what you're thinking if you haven't spent time in Berlin. You are thinking this: why would anyone want to eat ketchup and curry powder? And I don't have an easy answer to your question except to tell you that I sat right down at the stand's shared tables to chow down mightily upon the stuff--and so did a French speaking couple across from us, and an English-speaking Asian family next to us...AND one of the ubiquitous Prenzlauer berg babies was getting his first lessons in currywurst from his local-looking parents one table over.

Currywurst: it's not just for breakfast anymore. And it's really kind of good. NOT LIKE Berlinerweisse, which is another famed local specialty--wheat beer (OK so far) with a nice big slug of red or green kinda berry-flavored syrup in it (ew). It's served in a goblet with a fat straw, and it tastes like soda pop. So if it's hot outside, you'll suck it right down like Orange Crush (which it's not unlike) and then get up and fall over--or worse, decide to have another. If you are in Berlin with someone who has been here before, chances are he will talk you into drinking one. I'd say Berlinerweisse is a joke the locals play on the touristas, but I've seen folks who give every appearance and sound of being From Here on the other end of one of those wide straws.

But back to the green market! I did have a good drink there: something called an Erdbeerenbowle. Berlin is strawberry-crazed just now, and intensely fragrant little local berries (erdberren) are everywhere in the city: in supermarkets, in green markets, and in odd little stands that sell nothing else and look like giant strawberries themselves. The gentleman who served my drink to me ladled it out of a pretty glass punch bowl. According to the sign next to his stand, it's made of French champagne, light white local wine, and chopped stawberries that have been allowed to steep in the mixture. It's both beautiful and delicious. We'll be having it high atop the Potter building soon.

We also stuck our nose into the Kulturbraurai, another GAGA-ish institution. It's an old brewery repurposed as an entertainment center, with clubs and places to see film. Seems a night-time kinda scene. I took some snaps.

Anyway, I have some peas to shell for our dinner, and a HUGE bag of local mushrooms to cook up with cream sauce, so I'm going to get hopping.

July 4th, Not Asbury Park Even A Little Bit

2009-07-05T02:17:00.000-07:00

I've only been away from the States on July 4th one other time. We were in Amsterdam, and had decided to visit the Heineken brewery, where there is a hard-drinking beer sampling at the tour's end. Around went the mugs and the small bits of Dutch cheese, and there was a Special Prize announced for anyone whose birthday it was on that day. Ken and I were sitting amidst a group of Very Dazed backpackers (one of whom had actually lit up a joint in the lift on his way up to the tour). And the Very Dazed backpackers began to chant, "USA! USA! USA!" There were a few loud exhortations about how All Americans There should get a Special Prize because it was our National Birthday. And then more drunken, stoned hooting.

O, Lord. We stared into our beers. This was just before the Bush administration ran our Ship of State onto the rocks. That episode also marked the first time I was ever out of the States and really REALLY embarrassed to be an American. This was before Iraq and torture, though. This was before Ken and I had our conversations about how we should just let the nice folks at the Edinburgh Festival (our next overseas jaunt) assume that we WERE Canadians, as Scots often will, hearing an accent that sounds like ours.

We spent the rest of that day in Amsterdam pretending we'd never heard of the Fourth of July.

It's different this year in Berlin.

First of all, we have a brilliant statesman for a President. OK, a lefty like me is going to have some issues with the guy, a man who's essentially a centrist Democrat who divides ideas into smart and dumb instead of left and right--but I refuse to be part of the circular firing squad that has been the American Left Wing for far too long. Loyal opposition is one thing. Essentially teaming up with the character assassins on the right without thinking about the results of policy is something else. But this is no time to get into all that.

Let's face it--Obama rocked Berlin, not too long ago. And despite whatever qualms anyone might have about him, America looks radically different over here than it used to, and it's a HUGE change for the better. For real.

Last night, we went to hear an organ concert. I happen to love organ music, even when it's not mixed into the background of an Arcade Fire track. Unfortunately, this one was a little bit like watching paint dry until the very last piece, Smetana's nationalistic "The Moldau". That rocked. And we walked back to our apartment. At Alexanderplatz, a Michael Jackson impersonator was moonwalking amidst the roses and candles at the local shrine to MJ.

Back at our apartment, a cool breeze blew in through the terrace, where we sat outside listening to Randoradio--Treavor Hasting's excellent July 4th show. It felt good to hear something American and 4th of July-ish. Treavor put on The Comedian Harmonists for us during voice breaks, and Robyn Hitchcock, of course, who defies national boundaries.

And you are not going to believe this, but I swear it's true--somewhere in this city last night, there were fireworks. We didn't see them, but we heard them for sure.

Off to Museum Island today...

Holiday in Berlin, Full-blown

2009-07-03T15:43:00.001-07:00

So I've had the Zappa song on my brain ever since the plane landed...was it only yesterday? The house sitters are taking care of the cats High Atop The Potter Building (and probably drinking up all our cocktail makings, but that's fine. They deserve it).

Yes, Rando fans, you are hearing me pre-recorded this month. And Tom Jones, just shut up about that being redundant. I KNOW it is, but it's what folks say. So there.

The good news is that you get to hear about what it's like for this American girl to live for a month just slightly east of where the Berlin Wall used to be, something that would have been inconceivable (not to mention downright impossible) for me as a child. As a child, I watched movies about people who got machine gunned for sneaking over The Wall, people who were SPIES. As a child, the kids in my neighborhood played War, which was always WWII, and they were always fighting the Krauts, a word that my parents told me was offensive, but I didn't need them to tell me that. I knew it in my stomach.

My grandma was German, and the first time I was ever in Germany and walked into a restaurant serving old-fashioned food, I got a nose full of a smell I hadn't smelled since Nana was alive. I was born in New York. I don't live here. I've been here three times, counting this trip. I don't speak the language, except to say hello to cats. But I'm from here. I am.

Enough time has passed since the War that when you say you are of German heritage, folks think more about the "Do you want to pet my monkey?" skit on SNL than make stupid assumptions about racism and anti-Semitism.

So, that was pretty heavy, but there you have it.

And it's sort of what's happened here: big shopping centers in what used to be a no-man's zone where the Wall was. Buildings that stood roofless after WWII now fashionably rehabbed and minus the shrapnel scars I saw even eight years ago, the last time I was back. And a kick-ass Russian restaurant a few blocks from the temporary home of the Potter building, here in East Berlin. No irony served with the borscht.

I had a gin and tonic tonight, for those of you on cocktail patrol. I wasn't into Visiting My Roots at that moment. It's hotter than the hinges of Hell here, and nothing's AC. But that's OK.

We were at the Berlin Zoo today, an old-fashioned people-centric place where you can actually see the animals up close and personal. It may not be as kind as the more modern zoos where all you ever see is a tail sticking out from behind some authentic African fauna, but it was a fine place to spend a hot afternoon. There was a blunt, honest sign in the lion house, advising visitors that the big cats will pee on them if they bother the big cats. Lions can do that. And in the right mood, I understand the temptation.

Think I'm going to have another sit out on the balcony and then hit the hay. It's scary late here.

I'll keep you all posted.

Is Mercury in Thermometer?

2009-06-26T11:48:00.001-07:00

...or is it in Retrorockets? What a week of train wrecks and misery it's been!! I have little to say in print except to urge anyone reading this to listen to Randoradio for fast, fast relief. Have a virtual gin & tonic with me today (Friday the 26th) at 4 EDT.

And let me know what YOUR favorite tonic water is!! Yeah, I'll play some Michael Jackson, even though everyone else is, too...

Two Summer Drink Recipes

2009-06-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

So I've been shooting my mouth off on the air about how to mix these things...seems only fair that I give you folks SOMETHING of a recipe to go on.

First of all: The Frozen Strawberry Daiquiri

A note--Blenderized drinks are just FINE. Really. I know the snobs down at Pegu in NYC aren't there yet, but as long as you use decent spirits and fresh fruit, you'll be fine. So here you go. This is enough for at LEAST six drinks, anyway. Probably seven or eight.

Ingredients:

A big (double-sized) box of good, fresh strawberries, organic if possible (strawberries are one of those things that really get nailed with nasty chemicals if you go with the conventional ones; it's worth shelling out)

12 oz of silver rum

4 oz each of FRESH lime juice and either triple sec or Cointreau

2 or 3 tablespoons Me Oko strawberry vodka OR blackberry brandy

Put the fruit and rum in the blender and liquify thoroughly. Pass through a fine strainer to try to get rid of as many seeds as you can (not absolutely necessary, but it makes for a more pleasant drink). Mix in a large pitcher with lime juice and cointreau. Taste for balance, adding a little more juice or liqueur if it seems too tart or too sweet.

Pour about half the mixture back into the blender and add about two cups of ice--cubed or cracked, either way. Blend well, stopping to stir a few times, until the texture is very smooth. You'll hear the blender make a slightly higher whirring sound as this happens.

Pour into whatever festive glasses you have, garnishing with a berry, a slice of lime, or a silly umbrella. Drink with straws.

*****************

And Second of all:

The Perfected White Sangria

White Sangria is the sort of thing that also gets eyeball-rolls from drinks snobs, but it's a fine drink for a summer brunch or for sipping on a really hot night. Again, ingredients are all: use decent spirits and fresh fruit and all will be well. Plenty of drinks come out of this generous recipe, the number depending on how much seltzer you end up adding in the last step--half and half works well, as the wine mix has LOTS of brandies in it.

1 LARGE (1.5 liters) bottle of white wine--something good enough to drink on its own, and not too light

1 half cup each of the following:

applejack

cointreau or triple sec

pear brandy

plain old grape brandy--nothing too fancy, here, but don't cheap out totally

One granny smith apple

Two or three ripe kiwi fruits

A good handful of seedless grapes, red or white

One ripe pear

a handful of mint (don't add until you are ready to serve)

Mix the wine with the brandy and liqueur in a large pitcher. Taste for sweetness. Some folks add a dash of simple syrup or bar sugar, but I find that OTT. Slice the fruit, except for the grapes, peeling the kiwis first. Add to the wine mixture. Cover and allow to steep for a few hours or overnight. Add the mint and stir. Serve, mixed about half and half with seltzer. You can keep the steeped fruit in the drink--the pears will be soft, but everything else will still be pretty--and/or garnish with a bit more fruit if you have some more around. DON'T be tempted to put citrus fruit in here--it'll blow the balance.

Cheers!

Spring and a Rando-versary

2009-05-04T12:17:00.000-07:00

How did all this dust get on this blog again? I'm sneezing--safely--into my elbow-pit. And ick. Sorry, but sneezing into your elbow-pit is kinda gross...

OK, OK! I digress. Could it be that I haven't written here since February?

Yeah. It could be. It could be indeed.

And so much has happened! Swine flu--or as Rando DJ Tom Jones likes to call it, Hini (pronounced high-knee) flu--! The stock market pointing (a bit shakily) in an upward direction! Spring! And the first year anniversary of Randoradio.com!

If we're talking about the viral spread of something, could we have it be Randoradio? I mean, that would mean a Better World For Us All, I think.

Why don't I just tell you about the GAGA arts festival and the Randoradio open studio stuff we did this weekend? I did three (count 'em, three) shows in three days, more daily broadcasting than I have done since the 1970's. That was cool on a purely ego-trip level, but I was babbling by the end of it all...

The real heroine of the weekend was Blue, who charmed the crowds coming through our radio station, loaded programming onto the Randopods (which we've taken to calling Creatures, after her suggestion), and rocked an amazing show on Sunday afternoon, putting up some pretty nice numbers of streams running.

It was rainy and cool, and there were a number of great moments, like the guy who used to play with The Left Bank who wandered in, and the guy who'd played with Pharaoh Saunders. Folks materialized and became Randoradio members, just like that. Plenty of people signed our email list. And we watched the number of streams we were running climb during the weekend. All in all, most gratifying.

I interviewed the marketing director of Me Oko vodka, which is made in the same arts complex where we have our studios. His name is Jeff Cohen, and we talked for some time about the pleasant libation that is his business these days--an interesting quaff made of vodka infused with huge amounts of either strawberries or ginger. The stuff is almost liqueur-sweet, but not quite. It's not fake-y tasting, either; it simply tastes like strawberry or ginger. Works well as a cocktail ingredient, and a little glass is also nice after dinner, with ice.

Other artists in the GAGA complex put our station on their computers for their guests to listen to, and suddenly, we were a local station as much as we have been a world-wide one. I closed my show on Sunday announcing a bathroom make-over raffle over a B-52's record. Now, don't get me wrong--we LOVE it when the ice station in Antarctica listens to Rando, and when our servicefolk in Iraq tune us in, and some of them do. But local buzz is just fun.

I'm listening to Tom, The Logovore, right now, and he's playing the Traffic cut I meant to get to on Saturday and didn't have time for. So it's all good.

Happy Birthday To Us.

And time for me to finally read the Times Magazine that I never got to yesterday.

Groundhogs and Men Forcing Things

2009-02-03T08:56:00.000-08:00

I cannot get enough of the videos on Youtube of Mayor Bloomberg getting bitten by Chuck G. Hogg, the Staten Island Groundhog. They delight me. It is so fitting to watch Mayor Michael Bloomberg get chomped.

Now, don't get me wrong. I don't hate Mayor Bloomberg. Up here high atop the Potter Building, we happen to like him tons more than we liked Rudy (except for about three hours after the attacks on 9/11, when we weren't thinking too clearly). But Bloomberg acted--forgive me, men--like such a old school GUY yesterday. Face it: men force things. If something doesn't work, men tend to shove it as hard as they can. And then it breaks and they have an opportunity to get out the power tools and make a real mess.

So the men who were obviously in charge at the Staten Island Zoo yesterday (Christine Quinn, who was also present, had the sense to stay out of the way) had decided that The Groundhog Would Not See His Shadow and Spring Would Come Early. They already had a little banner all made up for the TV cameras announcing this fact.

And then Chuck G. Hogg decided NOT to come out of the little birdhouse-looking thing they'd put him in, not for food, and not for kids chanting his name--this even though EVERYONE knows that lots of seven-year-olds chanting in their maniac Lord-of-the-Flies way is JUST what makes groundhogs long to display themselves to glaring TV lights. Some fool went for the standard grown-up hubba hubba joke: "C'mon out! Your girlfriend's out here!"

The mayor, a man of action, offered the groundhog some corn on the cob. The groundhog twice pulled it back into his house. The mayor took the corn away from the groundhog to tease him out with it. Predictably, the groundhog bit the mayor, hard, right through his fancy black leather gloves. And so, in true alpha-male fashion, the mayor Forced Things: grabbed the groundhog, who was by then attempting to escape, and held him up to the cameras. The miserable beast squirmed. His real handlers hustled him back into the safety of the cat carrier in which they'd brought him to the event, poor thing. And the Spring-is-coming banner was unfurled.

Mayor Bloomberg appeared later in the day with a band aid on his finger, cracking jokes about terrorist groundhogs and courageously keeping the city safe from same. News reports later noted that since the Chuck G. Hogg had been raised in captivity, that there was no rabies risk to the mayor--and that his tetanus shots were up to date.

I would like to note that it is snowing in New York today. Pretty hard, in fact. I love it when a plan comes together.

Mollycat, The Inauguration and A Winter Noontime

2009-01-26T09:11:00.000-08:00

The house is empty, and I have a few minutes to blog away.

Perhaps I should start with the mundane and work towards the profound. This morning, my cat Molly jumped up on the table next to me and attempted to steal a piece of bacon off my plate--a brazen and rude act of bad-kitty-ness never before attempted in our kitchen. I dumped her off the table, she glared at me from the floor, and I wondered what kind of metaphor that was. And then I suddenly thought of the chopper bearing the Bushes up, up and away from the White House.

Looting. I have been thinking about what looting means a lot lately.

So here's what I decided: the nation has dumped Bush down onto the kitchen floor because he was looting and it took the stock market crash and the waves of misery spreading out from it to make us realize it. Lots of us could deal with him lying, but stealing--looting--that's when you buy a gun and stand in front of your hurricane-ravaged house with it. That's when you finally make the politcal phone calls and drag your friends to the polls.

In our case, in America's case, it had to get as brazen as Mollycat's bacon-grab before we finally got off our asses. But how gorgeous and inspiring and heartening that awakening, that rising to our national feet has been!

It hasn't hurt that we have an extraordinary, brilliant, and highly disciplined leader in Barack Obama. He ran a fabulous campaign, and he is setting up a dream team of an administration. He will certainly do things that will piss me off in the next four years. I wasn't nuts about the Rick Warren pick for the opening prayer at the Inaugural. But I understood where he was coming from and why he did it. He's everyone's President, not just mine.

I know there are folks who believe that my kind of thinking--looking for symbols and portents and metaphor in all manner of places--is irrational. And it is, but I believe that there are many kinds of wisdom, and that the intuitive can be as important as the logical. I think that the intuitive can dance in front of the logical, in fact.

The other big metaphor lately has been the Miracle On The Hudson, much derided by hard-nosed types who call it just good flying and good luck. But it all seems to be part of the same story: a disaster narrowly averted by a serious-minded, highly trained leader who did the right thing at at the right time. Maybe there was a bacon-grab here, too; perhaps the plane was stricken by cost-cutting by the airline as much as it was by a flock of birds. We'll know more about that in the weeks to come.

But it was like the Inauguration and the election. People, inspired by the captain's leadership AND because of their better angels, Did The Right Thing. They drove their ferryboats out to the plane and got other people off. The passengers mostly helped each other, although there was some folly and panic (hardly to be wondered at).

It feels like some vast corner has been turned, like we can all breathe a bit easier. And it feels like there are all these little portents, like love notes left around from God, it really does. Happy landings. A quiet house. The cat, seemingly penitent, purring in my lap.

After Christmas, Before The New Year

2008-12-30T10:23:00.001-08:00

I just blew the dust off this blog, and it's all over my computer!

I can't believe I haven't written since Thanksgiving, but that's the kind of nuts I got this holiday season. Between Randoradio shows and family (I am the designated celebrator), I have been hopping. My organist/choirmaster husband is born in December, just before Christmas. And in one of my other lives, I sing in his church choir.

Music has been committed. Choral music.

And I got Ken a theremin for his birthday. Clara Rockmore DVD perfomances and audio recordings have been a part of our life since. Tom Jones (Rando's Logovore) also received a theremin for Christmas. It's going to be sounding like Halloween ALL THE TIME at our house in the New Year--that is, when Ken's not practicing hymns on his home pipe organ. Tom played some Clara on his show this week, and I guess I should, too.

Christmas Day itself at our house was better than it's been in years. My family has a talent for having Awful Things happen on Christmas. Flu mini-epidemics. My mom had a cardiac incident on Christmas Eve a couple of years ago, before she had her Dick Cheney special defib/pacemaker installed. My parents are feisty folks in their late eighties and the feist sometimes gets a little into misery territory--at least for me.

Ken is a Christmas tree fanatic, so on recent Christmases, I've oft found myself looking at a simply glorious tree filled with vintage ornaments and light through a haze of worried or hurt tears. Not so this year. Folks remained healthy--my sis has a cold, but for us, that's nada--the prime rib was very good, thanks, and the Yorkshire pudding puffed nicely. My folks did not talk politics, or shout at each other or us. I forgot to put out Christmas crackers (we do the Brit traditions in our house), but I was rewarded by not having to sweep up the confetti from the same. Presents were well-received by "blood" family and my darling godchildren alike.

Ken got me a bunch of jadite bowls. OK, that sounds Martha Stewart-like, but I swear I was into them before she was. For years, my friends have been saying, "If it's green, it goes to Christine". And he got me other cool stuff, too. But for me, the biggest gift was the serenity and everyone healthy.

My goddaughter Blue, a Rando DJ herself, took THE WORST PICTURE OF ME ever taken, and promptly posted it on the 'net. I'm not sayin' where. I do NOT LOOK LIKE THAT, though. I love her profoundly. Listen to her show. We'll be making more of them soon.

And now, we're almost at the New Year, and I have errands to do and a gym to visit today. Or at least errands.

And as I think about taking the tree and all the window candles down on Epiphany, I still have real happiness in my heart. Randoradio is growing, thanks to you, dear listeners. And in just a few weeks, my country will have a president that we can be proud of again. Patriotism: what a thought!

I have no idea what kind of show I will be doing on Friday. I'll be bringing my Dad up to the station to do a show, soon, though. He wants to play Spike Jones. Maybe when we get the New Mixer (our Christmas present to ourselves) in and the studio as it will be...as always, stay tuned. Cocktails and music will reward you.

A Glad and Joyous New Year To ALL!!

Thanksgiving Day

2008-11-27T04:38:00.000-08:00

I've been nuts, Rando folk--

We've got a million people on their way to our house, some from cross country. My mother has a head cold. My dad is all worried about her. My sis is asleep downstairs. My cats want breakfast. I'm about to wrangle a 25 pound honker of a turkey.

And as head moderator at the Gazebo (www.alsopreview.com) and a poet--my other life--I've been spinning, too: three acceptances last week for new poems. And I'm already Christmas shopping like mad because December is insane when your husband is an organist/choir master. I promise a good radio show tomorrow, and more blogging maybe over the weekend.

Hope all is well with you, and do hold a prayer in your hearts for our friends in India.

Chow down!

A New World

2008-11-07T12:20:00.001-08:00

Late on Tuesday night, my husband and I were trying to find something to which we could compare Barack Obama's victory. We couldn't. As I was finally falling asleep, MSNBC still on the TV in the bedroom, I finally figured it out: it was the anti-9/11.

On 9/11, I felt like I'd fallen off the map. I'll spare you the story of where I was when the Towers fell, other than to say it was when I was still teaching high school. I made it through to the end of the school day by staying away from television images of the attacks, and glued myself to the media when I got home. The days--weeks, really--that followed were like trying to walk after you've been out in a boat during some rough weather; the floor felt bumpy. Nothing was firm underfoot.

Tuesday night was the same, except that every ounce of dread and grief I once felt had been replaced by joy and hope. Ken and I found a couple of old firecrackers in the basement and blew them up down by the creek. And then we just ran around the yard and hollered. We're off the map again, but this time, it's not scary. America feels like part of the world once more.

What a night! We tasted a cocktail published by The New York Times called The Obama-rama, a Cosmo-ish concoction with white grape juice replacing the cranberry juice, and a dash of blue curacao turning it the appropriate Democratic color. It was Not Good. A far better choice would have been Rachel Maddow's election night suggestion: a Joe Rickey, which is a good shot of bourbon over some ice in a highball glass, seltzer, and the juice of half a lime. Rachel is my bartending role model.

But cocktails were beside the point. They still seem beside the point.

We took our goddaughter Alyssum to see The Decemberists in NYC the next night. She's RandoRadio's Blue's big sis, by the way. Alyssum is a big Decemberist fan. It was also her first concert in a major club, and she had a blast. So did we, by the way. I love The Decemberists--and I had a lot of fun listening to their opening act, Loch Lomand, another Portland indie band, kinda freak-folkish in sound. But anyway, getting back to Obama, there he was at the show--as a cardboard cutout, that is. The Decemberists played that big rally in Portland for him last summer, remember? And not too surprisingly, the Obama cardboard cutout went crowd surfing. Folks handled it most respectfully--lovingly, even. And they called for the encore by chanting "Yes we can!"

Gee.

I mean, really, gee.

I can still cry pretty easily, thinking of all this.

Cocktails with Chris this week will be on more or less at 4 Friday; it's already in the can, having been recorded yesterday in a sneak peek live show. We're going to make a new Roots 'n' Ruckus in a few minutes, and I can't be in two places at once.

So you've got some cool post-election listening lined up.

And I've got to go wrangle Ed and Greg.

Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we did.

By the way: after the show, Alyssum told us she touched the Obama cutout in his surfing. She was really happy.

A Perfect Dinner!

2008-10-18T19:05:00.000-07:00

Hi, Rando fans--

(as my dear god daughter Blue says on her mic breaks during the shows she's recorded so far).

Just blowing a little dust off the blog and bragging about a perfect dinner we ate tonight. It was loosely Southern European, but basically 'Murican Liberal cuisine. But it was easy to make and since we like to share the doings of the kitchen staff from High Atop The Potter Building, I thought I'd offer a bit of detail.

I made Osama's Lamb (explanation follows), a Greek salad from Ken's description of such things in Greece, and a little pot of pasta pesto using some leftover pesto I'd frozen in August before we went away. We drank some Pinot Noir from Patagonia which was pretty OK, too.

First: Osama's Lamb

Yeah. That Osama. Here's the backstory. The Potter Building is not far from New York City, and we were pretty seriously freaked by 9/11--not that everyone else wasn't too, but I still maintain that NYC metro folks have a slightly different relationship to it than do other Americans. Ken and I fought back by cooking food and making cocktails, not too surprisingly. And one night, I made a marinade (almost more of a spice rub) for broiled or grilled lamb chops that we've always referred to since as Osama's Lamb. Why? Because Osama couldn't have any. Because we hoped the man behind killing a sweet girl who'd sung in a youth choir my husband had directed was in a cold, damp cave, eating dirt. Because good lefties that we are--I mean, Jeez, there are limits, and we were tired of trying to understand. The rule was that you couldn't leave any lamb on the platter because somehow, Osama would get it. I know. That's psycho, a bit. But it was strange times. Behold a recipe conceived in grief that I make all the time now that the sorrow has lifted.

Osama's Lamb

Lamb chops--whatever kind you like (we go for the teeny ones). This is designed for six or eight of those.

A ziplock bag

A huge shake or two of cumin

A smaller shake of coriander

Juice of one lemon

A good splash of balsamic vinegar

Enough olive oil to do a sort-of salad dressing looking thing

A couple of tablespoons of kosher salt

Many grinds of black pepper

Three or four cloves of garlic, pressed

Put everything except the lamb in the ziplock bag, close it, and squish it around with your hands. Add the lamb. Marinate for as much time as you have. An hour is good. Two or three is better. No longer than that. Broil or grill to medium rare.

The Greek Salad that Ken describes is easy, too: just chunk up some decent tomatoes. We've still got them locally in NY, but we're counting the days. Chunk up likewise some green peppers, and some kirby cukes. Crumble over the top the best feta you can find. Toss with good olive oil and vinegar (I'm a balsamic girl, although I think it not trad), and a few grinds of pepper. You may need a pinch of salt, depending on how much cheese you use and how salty it is. Sprinkle with some chopped thyme and oregano (or a little dried that you've rubbed between your hands). Throw in a few black olives if you have them, but this works without. Toss. Ken claims salad in Greece does not contain lettuce. Eat mass quantities.

As for the pesto? Heck--you know how to make that.

Cheers!

Bill Clinton! KD Lang!!

2008-10-06T20:43:00.000-07:00

Call me Cinderella.

My sister rang me up on the phone this morn, and said she had a couple of tickets to an Obama benefit at the gorgeous loft home of Steven and Judy Gluckstern 'way downtown in NYC . Joe Biden was supposed to speak but he couldn't 'cause his wife's mom had just died.

...but rumor had it Bill Clinton was going to fill in.

Wow, said I. And that's when my sis gave me the tickets 'cause she couldn't get to the party herself.

Have I mentioned KD Lang yet? Guess so. She was scheduled to sing, and sing she did. And Alice Waters of Chez Panisse did the cocktail snacks. How about a giant silver tureen of mac and cheese, topped with about a half a foot of lobster meat? People walked about smiling and eating it out of outsized martini glasses. Talk about a swanky neighborhood near you! Never ever could I match the company, the food, or the lovely, just-oaky-enough chardonnay.

So Ken and I went to the party, as I think you've gathered by now. And so did Bill Clinton.

I hardly know where to start.

Maybe I should tell you first about KD Lang. She sang only three songs, but HOLY COW. I was just bedazzled. Her keyboard player sat at the gorgous Victorian grand piano in the loft and she wandered barefoot through the delighted crowd. As she launched into a stellar cover of "Hallelujah", she was just a few feet from me. I was melted into a little square of blonde hair on the floor, but my husband snapped a couple of cell phone shots.

And BILL!!

OK, they say that it's like being in the room with Elvis, and that's basically right. And yeah, I'm still pissed at him for not putting the full force of his talent behind Obama sooner, but as I stood listening to him clarify the economic crisis in terms that my cat could understand but that were at the same time well-chosen and really profound, suddenly, I didn't feel like the world was out of control anymore. I felt like I could have a role in getting things back on track--and that we'd all survive, and that I live in a great country. I haven't felt like that in a long time...

...as KD sang just a few minutes later, "Hallelujah".

Speaking of cats, as Clinton stood at the base of a very modern and imposing staircase, the lovely Himalayan kitty who was lucky enough to live in that loft came downstairs and sat a few stairs above him, checking out his speech. Clinton proceeded to make the best case for Obama I have ever heard: that we hire presidents to LEAD and that Obama's got the stuff 'cause of his smarts and judgement. Sounds basic, but there you have it. And he's right. The kitty listened as carefully as the assembled crowd. But when KD Lang took over the mike, Kitty joined her in song. It was a moment.

I guess there are folks to whom this wouldn't be a big deal. But we'll be making some phone calls to battleground states from high atop the Potter building...

...and we'll celebrate having convinced some more folks to vote the right way this coming Friday at 4 Eastern. I promise to play some KD Lang.

Yes we CAN!

Pete Seeger, Sarah Palin...and my show tomorrow

2008-10-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I wrote anything here. Too long, in fact.

Glad I have a couple of minutes late tonight. We just watched the Vice Presidential debates. I'm pleased that the first few reactions I saw seemed to be on Biden's side. Sarah Palin is an ugly addiction; the media can't get enough of her. First there was the Coulter-esque convention speech, then the trainwreck of Paris Hilton proportions on the interview shows...and now this Adderall-dripping robotic lunacy of a debate with Joe Biden being way too polite for my tastes. I really wanted the courtroom scene from To Kill A Mockingbird with Mayella Ewell glaring through her overgrown bangs at Atticus: "a chiffarobe?" But I realize that would have been preaching to the choir. Plus folks would have thought Biden was being condescending.

Oh, well.

In more pleasant news, I got my hands on a copy of Pete Seeger's At 89, and I'm playing some of it tomorrow. Pete's a longtime hero of mine. He let me play onstage with him when I was 17, at an appearance he made at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY. I had written an awful song about ecology called "Garbage" and I sang it. He handed me his big 12-string guitar to play and backed me up on banjo. It's still a major high point of my life. Only college graduations and my wedding to Ken rank higher for me.

Don't know if I can play the mortality songs (sunny as any Seeger tunes, and just heart-rending) without totally melting into a puddle and being unable to work the mixing board, but I promise you'll hear a bunch of the record. What's the most remarkable about it, I think, is that it's just a Pete Seeger album. I remember buying a copy of Dangerous Songs back in the 60's. The mix of serious and light was the same. Seeger's voice is a bit shaky, but his guitar and banjo work are everything you'd expect them to be and more.

Did I mention that the album was released on my birthday, the 30th of September? It was. Call me selfish, but I like that. I got some nice presents this year, but this unexpected one might have been the best.

Don't know what the drink tomorrow will be, but I'm considering the Astoria, a martini-strength concoction with an interesting history. Tune in!!

The Storm Passes...

2008-09-06T18:45:00.000-07:00

Just a few words tonight. We're newly home. I miss Canada more than I'd have thought. It is POURING RAIN, but the wind seems to be less than the howling gale the weatherfolk had predicted. In short, Hanna had her soggy way with us, but the creek is not in our house, praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Radar imagery shows the bit of wet stuff just to the south of us and roaring to the north. My sympathies to my new friends 0n PEI. Let's hope this nasty gal of a storm has gotten some therapy and decided not to trash all her relationships quite so much by the time it reaches you.

I did a great show on Friday, and I hope y'all will keep listening. I'm going to sack out early tonight--gotta help Dr. Doolittle make some church music tomorrow.

Back in the USS, Back in the USSR!

2008-08-30T17:36:00.001-07:00

Today, we drove over the border from New Brunswick into Maine, and the CBC faded into static.

Fortunately, we'd managed to hear this week's "The Irrelevant Show," and some more interesting (to my 'Murican ears) Canadian indie rock played by a DJ named Sean who seemed to think a lot of himself, but was pretty amusing anyway. And we had the best fried clams I have had in about a million years at a place called Ossie's, not too far from the border crossing.

All of the sudden, there weren't a million different places to put your recycling. There were just garbage cans. And there were a lot more cop cars. And a lot more stores of every sort. We were in New England. Darn, I thought. I'm just now beginning to understand this calling-for-a-new-election thing. I'm not ready for McCain's out-there VP choice that's supposedly going to rend the Democratic party asunder by peeling off the PUMA's. I'm not ready for American idiocy and fish that's less than fresh and butter that doesn't taste like butter and and and plastic bags blowing around everywhere.

When we got out of the car in Bar Harbor, Maine, the air was warm and just a little bit humid. I could imagine Hudson River Valley air. It wasn't the oddball sideways mist of the Maritimes. I switched my jeans for a summer dress, and Ken and I plunged into the throngs wandering through eighty-five different venues where you can buy sweatshirts that say Bar Harbor and stuffed mooses and candles that smell aggressively of the piney forests.

Did I tell you that I finally read Anne of Green Gables, and I liked it? Turns out that the Canadian Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a proto-feminist tract, and better written than I would have expected.

I'm busy downloading music for my first show back home. I can't wait to hug my kitties, and to greet Treavor Hastings of Sonic Streams down in Round Pond on Monday. He's on a short Maine vacation, and we have some catching up to do. I'll be home on Wednesday night, and I'll be making fresh Cocktails with Chris on Friday at the usual time: four to six Eastern. By the way, that's five to seven, Atlantic. See you there.

Doctor Dolittle Strikes Again

2008-08-21T07:49:00.000-07:00

If you listen to my radio show, you know that my husband, Ken, talks to the animals. You know that at home, the mallards who live in our creek follow him around making little quacky muttering noises (full disclosure: he gives them cracked corn to eat). I once caught him on the other side of the creek, having a conversation with a deer, who was so transfixed by Ken's presence that you'd think I was married to a headlight. You know--deer? Headlight? Oh, never mind.

Ken has names for the groundhogs. Ken tells the golden finches that they are beautiful. They seem to listen.

So we're still on vacation, still on Prince Edward Island, and Ken has a whole raftload full of new animal pals. Yesterday, we visited the Anne of Green Gables house. Neither one of us had read the book before we came up here, me because I was a bitter and cynical youth & Anne was just too sweet for my tastes at the time. And Ken probably didn't read it because he wasn't a girl.

Ken's reading it. He loves it. He reads the purpler, more sentimental passages out loud to me. And he was the one who insisted upon the pilgrimage yesterday. I'm here to tell you the place that inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery is a lovely site, prettily restored in the appropriate late-Victorian fashion you'd expect, and surrounded by an exuberantly blooming English-style flower garden. There are nature trails, too, marked by the charming names Montgomery gave them in her book and filled with little critters for Ken to talk to. He made friends with a little brown squirrel yesterday in The Haunted Woods.

It talked back to him, making this odd little chirping sound that American grey squirrels don't make. Perhaps it was telling Ken that it was good that he was visiting Canada, and that maybe when we go back to the States, we'll remember our Canadian vacation & continue to compost our garbage. I don't know. But Ken was crouched down for quite a while, saying things like "You're a fine little fellow, aren't you?" to the squirrel while other Green Gable fans cut a wide swath around him.

Let me say that again: other Green Gable fans. Ken's love of the little brown squirrel was a little too sweet for other fans of Anne.

Yikes.

I was proud of him, though, really, as I always am, and even though I threatened to buy him the straw hat with the red pigtails on it in the gift shop afterwards, I was even prouder of him later that evening.

So. Act Two. We returned to our picturesque vacation rental, a barn/cottage sort of place outside Charlottetown. I started to cook dinner. Ken made me a delicious cocktail. And a rattle rattle bang bang bang came from the (happily un-lit) woodstove in the living room.

"What the Hell was that?" said I.

And it clattered again. Ken had been busily watching birds outside our window. A very dark thought struck him.

"I hope it's not a bird!! It could die in there!" said Ken. "I'm calling the landlord!"

The lucky couple who gets to rent to us lives right next door. I'm sure they were starting dinner preparations also. Robert came right over, bearing a tote bag. He and Ken took apart the woodstove, spilling plenty of soot around in the process. I went into a downstairs bedroom, to take a cell phone call from my sister. Somewhat later, Robert was gone and Ken was happy.

"It was a sweet little bat!" he said. "Look!"

Indeed, there was a little brown bat, outside our back door, looking a bit put out at being awakened before twilight. I sipped my cocktail and got back to cutting up the yummy tomatoes I'd just bought from a farm market nearby. My sister called back, to continue our conversation.

"It was a bat," I told her.

My sister is terrified of bats. She hates them.

"Ugh," she said.

"But you'd really like it here," I told her.

She didn't seem enthused.

"Um--there are no bear on Prince Edward Island," I said. "Or moose."

"Perhaps there will be some tomorrow," she said, "In your wood stove."

And a little while later, as if to prove her point, the stove clattered again.

Louder.

Ken got back on the phone. For the next twenty minutes or so, he and Robert spilled more soot, hauled the stove around, and tried to figure out what the heck was still in there. Robert finally left, but nothing else emerged. Five minutes after he was gone, the noise happened again. Ken got down to business. Soon a starling came flying out of the stove, crashed into the front windows, and allowed itself to be collected from the floor by Ken. The bird was a bit dazed, but uninjured. Ken gently put his hand around it, absolutely delighted.

"Wait till I show ROB!!" he shouted to me, and ran happily out the door into a cloud of vicious Prince Edward Island mosquitoes. The bird roused from its stupor a bit and began to scream. Rob's wife and family, seeing Ken's manic run toward their house, also spilled outside, holding back two dogs and a cat who would surely have thwarted Ken's Operation Starling Rescue in an ugly manner.

Rob came back to our place with Ken a little while later.

"Saint Francis of Assisi," he said, slightly under his breath. He said he'd put the wood stove back together sometime today. I felt for him--but I wouldn't be making this post if I weren't also really proud of the loon I married. Last night was his favorite night of the whole vacation.

And now it's time for both of us to go enjoy today's sunshine.

OK--Now I Get It...

2008-08-18T07:50:00.000-07:00

We've been on the road two weeks. Rando's still got some fresh Cocktails with Chris prerecorded for the show this Friday, fear not. And we'll start production of Roots 'n' Ruckus again as soon as I get back home after Labor Day. But it feels like we've been gone a long time. Canada is, although geographically nearby to those of us in the Northern US, a genuine Foreign Land. We're really a long way away. And it took me a while to get that.

Canada is what America could be, and what we aren't because we are too full of ourselves, perhaps a bit too unwilling to change, and probably too greedy. So I was stumbling over my old ALM high school French in Quebec, and finding their accent (which is indeed as thick as the French French complain it is) a bit impossible. Big deal. I should have prepared more.

Imagine respecting folks enough in the US to accept the fact that they might want to speak a language other than English. Imagine letting go of the jingoism surrounding--say--the way we regard immigrants from Spanish-speaking lands. In Canada, there is a province where you speak French. It's the official language there, the language of road signs, the language in which you will be greeted if you make a phone call for a dinner reservation. Most of the English speakers up here also speak French, the way Europeans speak more than one language. Remember the Separatist movement in the 1970's? This is part of how it got settled. Can you imagine something like that in the States? It boggles, it really does. And it is a good sort of boggle.

Here, recycling is the law. And you have to compost, even in city apartments. You can get a ticket for idling your car. There's a hefty sales tax...and people can afford their health care. It's front page news when nursing homes aren't absolutely up to snuff. And something gets done about it.

We're on Prince Edward Island right now, for two weeks. It's what Cape Cod would be if folks hadn't been so anxious to make a buck there--which is to say that most of it is totally gorgeous and unspoiled.

We've been watching the CBC coverage of the Olympics since we got here, and it's way less shiny-new than the NBC coverage, and a lot more honest. An anchor actually looked up an athlete's blog on his Dell the other night, and the camera man closed in the laptop screen--glare and crappy picture quality and all.

Broadcasters don't tiptoe around the uncomfortable issues that arise from having the Games in--let's face it--a country whose policies are pretty dern close to being fascist. The pro-Tibetan protesters from here who got kicked out were big news. On CBC radio news, there's no sense of slip-sliding around a government that would LOVE to muzzle them--the way NPR sometimes sounds to me, lately. Yeah, NPR still does some wonderful news coverage...but it's easy to pick out the story that's been included as "balance."

OK, I'm here in the summer. It's almost eighty degrees outside and sunny and the light is dancing on the lindens outside our cottage. But this country's looking pretty good to me right now. I get it. It's about being honest, sensible--and decent.

La Festival Internationale du Shut UP!

2008-08-10T03:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure I spelled "Festival Internationale" right. Although for years I have privately amused myself by translating things into French (especially when forced into boring conversations with folks I'd rather not be talking to), it takes a visit to a French-speaking area to realize how feeble one's second language really is. Makes it worse that I am essentially a product of 1960's ALM foreign language studies in which we sat in a thing called a language lab, listening over earphones to what were supposed to be French high school students (just like us, only continental and sophisticated) having conversations.

"Dis donc, out est la biblioteque?" we chorused into our microphones. This was supposed to teach us to speak rather than to just read. It didn't. And since my generation of college undergrads was allowed to major in anything that helped them actualize themselves--and that without a language requirement--I haven't advanced much further in La Francais. I know where the library is, but I'm useless with (say) road signs in Quebec. Did that one say something about the cow and the railroad track? I wonder. And off we hurtle into the mountains where the road crew at work is about to fait les explosions, our speedometer set to those thrilling kilometers (Wow, it says 105!!).

We have been considerably north of Quebec for several days. The only thing in English is The Discovery Channel, one Montreal newspaper that our hotel puts out for losers like us at breakfast, and the Olympic coverage on the CBC. So I find myself rooting for the Canadian women gymnasts. I caught my husband, who hates buying clothes like kids on Our Gang comedies used to hate taking cod liver oil, eyeing a cocktail dress on What Not To Wear.

Did I mention that it's been raining?

And that the food is--well--not great, although everything has French names and sounds like it should be. There's a lot of odd fast food: poulet BBQ, and a ton of Tim Hortons chain restaurants. For some reason or other, Subway is really big up here. The sky is huge, the mountains look like the Pacific Northwest a bit, and it's quite obvious that the electricity in this part of the world is enthusiastically, unabashedly hydroelectric. There are so many lines and towers that it looks like a toy train set. And there are festivals. Lord, are there festivals!

We barely made it out of the Quebec 400th (swarms of tourists wearing odd little pewter necklaces that get you into the festival events, many in 17th century garb)! And an oompah band that played the songs my old high school French teacher made us sing in class (French oompah--what a concept)--this last thing in a tent full of giant puppets featuring the heroes of French Canadian history! As well-educated Americans, we had only the dimmest recollection of who the puppets were supposed to be, but many of them appeared to be members of the clergy or royalty, all wearing manic smiles. One seemed to be a Canadian separatist songwriter of the 1970's--18 feet high.

And did I mention it has been POURING? It was even raining on the Olympics when we tuned in last night.

When we arrived in this charming little town, there was another festival by the local fjord, featuring a scary clown and a foot-pumped merry-go-round loaded with oddly quiet local children, spinning at about 78 rpm. The rain had let up a bit by then; it was just spitting. Last night, that festival seemed to have decamped to the main street of town and grown booths where you could get mojitos, and everyone within ninety miles had arrived to drink them and wear glow-in-the-dark devil horns on their heads.

Which was probably why it took us two hours to get a plate of mussels to eat in a local restaurant...We kept telling each other that American too-fast service with the courses piling up on the table before you can even finish eating them is uncivilized, but I'll be frank with you. I'm looking forward to Halifax. They speak English there.

Gad, I've said it. Forgive me. Don't tell Obama. Don't revoke my citizenship of the world.

It's morning now, and time to grab some dejeuner (NOT petit dejeuner in this part of the French-speaking world, but that's a trifle I'm not trifling with right now). We get to ride a ferry today. See you on the flip side.

Cocktails with Chris--On the Road

2008-08-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not being thrown from various moving vehicles--that would be Chuck the DJ (and would you look at him bounce!). I am on the move--but here's the good news for you, dear listener: Cocktails with Chris is still minty-fresh. All during July, I worked hard at creating new radio shows for August, so that no Cocktails fan would be left with a watery drink.

I say turn off that silly soundtrack for the Olympics on Friday the 8th and try watching TV with the radio on! There's a delightful Cocktails with Chris waiting to stream that night. And my special show with Juliet Quaglia, my link to what those crazy kids are listening to (for real--she's in 9th grade) is on the 15th. Yet another new new new show awaits you the week after. So Friday afternoon, 4 to 6, is still cocktail time!

I write these words from just outside Quebec City, having duly embarrassed myself with my high school French. Folks tend to answer me in English. And I thought I sounded just like Julia Child saying "Bonjour!" Merde.

Last night, Ken and I stayed at The Mountain View Resort up at the tip of New Hampster--a venerable sprawl of a place with sweeping views of the White Mountains and an elevator that needs an operator to run it. For real--the thing's from the thirties, and its door has a grate and everything. We had cocktails on the gorgeous front porch, watching the clouds gather over hills and hills and hills, all blue and green and amazing. Even our bathroom had a view. It was most swanky. We played Scrabble in the game room after dinner. Ken destroyed me. I think there were a couple of tiles missing, tho'....and he got all the darned vowels. When we returned to our room, we discoved that had it been winter, we could have booked a dogsled ride. A dogsled ride turns out to be very expensive--but a king sized room at The Mountain Resort costs about what the Holiday Inn does. The food's OK, not fab. But the place is simply cool. Recommended, if only for the Shining-esque long, long carpeted halls.

Have a listen to my show on Friday--I will :)! And check this space for further adventures of a Rando DJ on the loose!

A Few Words About Robyn In Piermont

2008-07-16T11:48:00.001-07:00

I got to see Robyn Hitchcock at Piermont, New York's The Turning Point last night. Showtime was 7:30 PM; it was still light outside, and Robyn joked about pretending that it was a lunchtime show at the opening of the gig. Although I have seen Robyn Hitchcock perform in the bright sunshine at a couple of West Coast outdoor concerts back in the 90's, this time it seemed odd to be witnessing his show before twilight. Robyn performed acoustically and solo, delivering an intense set punctuated with his usual surreal between-the-songs patter. My favorite of those was a tale of prisoners who were nightly returned to their jails by blimps to which they were tethered at their ankles. He steamed on through to the end of the show, taking no breaks.

The Turning Point is a great room in which to see someone like Robyn. It's in the basement of an early 19th-century house: a little dark, heavily air conditioned, and oddly cozy. It's also so small that the effect of seeing a show there is like being entertained at the private party of someone very fortunate. The sound and the sightlines are excellent.

The local Robyn Hitchcock faithful were out in force, singing along and keeping set lists. I make a point of NOT keeping a set list at shows by musicians I really love. I don't sneak in digital recorders or take pics on my cell phone, either. I like to just listen, and let the evening wash over me. And indeed, my choice to do so was rewarded last night. Still, it was nice being in the presence of other folks who express their pleasure at being present in other ways, though--a homecoming of sorts.

Robyn played two of my favorite songs: "Mr. Kennedy" and "Only The Stones Remain" "Ole Tarantula" worked fine unplugged. His intro to "Victorian Squid" was another example of the man's ability to prop open the door to his subconscious pretty much at will--and it's a great song, too.

I liked hearing "Adventure Rocketship," a bunch also. OK, I'll admit it: I was one of the folks who ponyed up to Yep Roc and put it as the ringtone on my cell. (And here I am bragging about being too cool to make set lists!) Honestly, though, the only reason I downloaded it was because I never figured out how to get the clip I grabbed of the opening guitar work from Element of Light's "Airscape"onto my phone instead. But let me be clear: I really like "Adventure Rocketship." I read somewhere that "The Yip Yip Song" is the theme to a childrens' TV show in the UK. "Adventure Rocketship" is the show I'd have really wanted to see as a little girl.

The crucifixion of Jesus seemed to be much on Robyn's mind last night. He mentioned it several times in his song intros, finally comparing it to the little toy penguin he had stood on the miniature green road cone beside him onstage. I don't know anyone else who could a) get away with that or b) get a laugh from doing so.

Hitchcock also mentioned Storefront Hitchcock , the Jonathan Demme concert flick of about ten years back, and got a round of applause for it. Demme was sitting at the table next to me, with his family; one of Demme's younger kids got the final benediction of the show from Robyn:"have a great time at camp." I liked that. Who gets a send-off from Robyn Hitchcock for summer camp?? Wonderful--kind of like getting to hear Robyn in a tiny room with the sun going down unnoticed on the Hudson River across the street.

After the show, I gave Robyn a RandoRadio T-shirt and suggested he put off doing his laundry for another day. Told him we play plenty of his music. I was too flummoxed to do my usual handshake and "Chris Potter from RandoRadio" routine; I'll admit it. I mean heck--it was Robyn Hitchcock I was talking to!! He said he could use a shirt as he'd lost a bag on the tour. I'd be honored if our own Adventure Rocketship T helped fill in the gap.

He's playing again tonight, Wednesday the 16th of July. OK, so I'm a true believer. But if you can, GO.

Juliet, My Fairy Goddaughter

2008-07-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

My pal Nancy calls me the Fairy Godmother of her two daughters Juliet and Alyssum. Alyssum's off in Italy this summer, almost all grown-up (junior year in high school come September!) but Jules is just going into 9th grade. Which means I get to have her around for a while longer, and that's a good thing.

The daughter of two artists (a painter and a glass artist), Jules has also always loved music with a passion. That and Japanese graphic arts of all descriptions. Did I tell you she also gets more in the way of royalties for a poem she wrote back in grade school than I have ever gotten for a single poem in my whole life? She does. It got picked up as a reading comp question in one of those dreaded standardized tests; it originally ran in Stone Soup. The kid's got talent.

And so she's taping a show with me today which will run in August in place of a Cocktails with Chris. There have been noises made about Japanese rap. I intend to play some of my usual tunes if I can get away with it. Will Jules be into playing some of Lou's amazing Warner Brothers loss leaders? The Shadow knows.

So stay tuned.

I'll be live on the air at my usual time this week: Friday 5 to 7, right after My Mid-life Crisis with Glenn. I'm going to see Robyn Hitchcock at The Turning Point tonight, so I'll have my thoughts on that concert.

See you real soon. Why? Because we LIKE you.

My Husband and the Hawk

2008-07-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

There is no Nora without Nick. That's just a fact. And so, before I go to the studio tomorrow to record a couple of new Roots 'n' Ruckus shows with Ed & Greg, I will let you in on a little true story from high atop the Potter building (in a swanky neighborhood near you)...

...Our swimming pool works again. It was out of commission during various renovations last year, but it's lovely and clear and inviting this summer, and Tom Jones had just finished his show on Randoradio about an hour before all this happened. Tom and Ken and I were bobbing in the warm water, chatting about Tom's latest Logovore project (the one about the private family words for stuff). Overhead, the sky was heading for sunset. The creek that runs by our house was burbling in the background and a member of the duck community that lives here was scarfing up the cracked corn we leave out for them under our apple tree.

Suddenly, the biggest red-tailed hawk I have ever seen swooped down and attempted to make a meal of the poor duck. Frantic quacking ensued. It was a female duck--not the mama that had marched her ducklings through our place this spring, but one we'd seen before. The hawk was trying to get its talons into her and she was not doing well at fighting the raptor off.

It was an ugly situation. No hawk can take a duck. Hawks eat their prey in the trees. The hawk could have horribly hurt or killed the duck, but couldn't have flown away with it.

Ken sprang out of the pool and ran at the hawk with his hands stretched high over his head.

"BLEEEAHHHH! BLAAAAAAA! BLEAAAH!" he bellowed.

The hawk cast a baleful eye at him. The duck stopped screaming.

"BLEEEAH!!!! BLAAAAAAAAA!" shouted Ken.

The hawk dropped the duck and flew across the creek. The duck began to quack again and flew into the creek. She swam upstream, seemingly uninjured.

Another crisis averted. Ken slid back into the pool to our applause.

I have no idea what music I will play or what drink I will mix on my Friday show to honor Ken's rescue of the innocent duck. I'll think of something. But I wanted to make note of my dear mate, who is not afraid of looking utterly ridiculous in order to save a critter who would have died needlessly.

Any suggestions for an appropriate set?

The Glorious Fourth

2008-07-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to figure out why someone with my cranky old-Lefty politics loves the big American holidays as much as I do. I mean, don't get me wrong; Christmas is great, but I'm a big Independence Day fan. Thanksgiving usually rocks, too.

July 4th, the better part of twenty years ago, I was ending one period of my life and beginning another, speeding down the road in my car with three vintage sundresses and my Robyn Hitchcock LP's, the only things I initially rescued from a relationship that had just died that evening. It was the only time in my life I'd ever traveled that light, but what I'd grabbed pretty much summed me up. I've long since forgiven my poor ex, and I hope he has me--but that Independence Day was the beginning of who I am now, and everything I've done with my life since. So I'm planning on lighting a sparkler for my country as well as myself this Friday.

And I'm going to be on the air at Rando, from 4 to 6 Eastern, streaming live. I'm thinking I'll read a little Twain, perhaps, and play a lot of American music of course. It'll be good.

You know, when I started writing this blog entry, I mentioned Thanksgiving and July 4th in the same breath. And now that I consider it, there's a reason for that. There's something to be thankful for on July 4th for all of us in this battered, confused, and suddenly hopeful nation. July 4th is really a holiday of gratitude, and I am grateful.

Let's make some potato salad together on Friday, dear listener--you and me. And some white sangria, I think. I'll give you my recipe on the air. It's great at a picnic, with fireworks.

A Perfect Dinner

2008-06-26T19:49:00.000-07:00

Why does it always come down to food and drink with me?

Well, it does. I 'spect it does with a lot of us. So I'll give you a preview of my tomorrow's show, and tell you about the ultimate comforting dinner.

Did you see the thing in the NY Times about blender cocktails being OK again? I was beginning to think they might be, as we make a couple of them that aren't spring break swill, and here on top of the Potter Building, we are very very cool. So I made the Cherry Flip out of that article. Twice. It's dern good: fresh cherries, bourbon, bitters, lemon juice, and just a little sugar. Blend with ice, garnish with mint. We did it for Tom Jones (check out HIS show on Rando--a true delight!!!) last night, but tonight, we realized what the author of that Good Grey article had neglected: a splash of maraschino. Cut back on the sugar if you do that, and maybe amp up the lemon juice just an eensy bit. You've heard me go on and on and on about maraschino on the air...it's not the juice in the cherry jar, etc. etc. 'Tis a clear, not overly-sweet liqueur found in a well-stocked booze store, or on the net if your place of residence allows you to buy alcohol that way.

I'm here to tell you that Cherry Flips rock. I'll have more to say on my show.

And here's (believe it or not) what I made for dinner:

From scratch Tuna-Noodle Casserole (mostly organic ingredients and shut up 'till I explain), and...

Salad from our garden with homemade pseudo-Thousand Island dressing. Pseudo-Thousand Island is mayo, a little buttermilk to thin it, ketchup, horseradish to taste, and a shake of dill weed.

From Scratch Tuna-Noodle:

1/2 pound decent pasta in a penne, rotini, or macaroni shape (can use Dreamfield's if you're low carbing it)

A big handful of chopped mushrooms--can be exotic or plain old

A smaller handful of finely chopped celery

5 tablespoons sweet butter

4 tablespoons flour

2 cups milk warmed in the nuker

a pouch of mass market tuna (better than the cans)

about four ounces of grated cheddar cheese

a small handful of decent grated parmesan cheese

a few shakes of hot sauce

salt and pepper to taste

worcestershire sauce to taste

a shake of sweet or hot paprika

In a good-sized saucepan over low heat, sweat the onions and mushrooms in the butter, which you will have melted. Add the flour when the veg are soft, and stir with a rubbermaid spatula until evenly distributed. Cook a minute or two, still on a gentle flame. Add the warm milk, turn up the heat to medium, and stir until thickened. Add parmesan, tuna, & salt & pepper. Season with worcestershire sauce and hot sauce.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta. Drain when just short of being cooked.

Mix the pasta and the white sauce mixture in the pot in which you cooked the white sauce. Turn into buttered casserole dish, sprinkle with grated cheddar, add a shake of paprika and maybe another grind of black pepper. Bake in a 350 oven, covered (with lid or tin foil), for about twenty minutes. Serve hot with salad.

OK, sneer. It's middle 'murican food. But the trick here is no fake ingredients--no cream of mushroom soup. We fake that by making what the soup was in the recipe to fake in the first place: a white sauce. It's easily enough made. But it's so tasty I defy you to not eat thirds.

And a Cherry Flip is just the thing before it--sorta like a Squishee from the Quickie Mart, only really really good.

I'm not heavily into irony unless you can eat it.

See you on the internet version of the airwaves tomorrow.

We Have Lifted Off

2008-06-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

So, denizens of the Randosphere--

We have achieved lift-off.

RandoRadio is officially LAUNCHED. The stream is running 24/7, we're readying new shows to upload, and all sorts of delightful treats are in store!

Want to know what it was like at the GaGa Arts Festival this weekend, sending our rocketship of a freeform internet radio station up? It was hot. I mean really hot--and not in the rock 'n' roll, sexy garments sense. I mean good old-fashioned Hudson River Valley heat & humidity. Lethal ozone levels. The kind of hellish blast that one associates with...um...well, how about Hell? As in "it was hotter than the hinges of Hell." It was.

True RandoRadio fact: our beloved station lives in a very groovy (very basic in terms of luxuries like AC and such) arts center north of NYC, on the west bank of the Hudson. We're in loftspace at GaGa, an old factory complex. Think Soho before it gentrified, or Mass MOCA before they restored it. It's cheap 'n' cheerful, and the company is great. Our control room is thoroughly air conditioned. But we needed to keep our office doors open to attract visitors during our launch party. The result? Lordy Lord.

How hot was it?

It was so hot that Ed Croft & Greg Schettino were actually slowed down, just a weeny, tiny bit. Which meant that normal human beings could almost comprehend their energy levels. Ed & Greg are, of course, the 17-year-old stars of Roots 'n' Ruckus, the one-hour live performance/oddball scratchy 78 rpm/rare C&W record show on Rando. Think of that--two young guys, not even old enough to vote, who channel Hank Williams. We've got 'em at Rando, and we're glad, even though it takes three of us oldsters to wrangle them when they come up for a show. File under: herding cats. Really talented cats, that is.

Ed, Greg, and their electric band, The Moonshiners, opened the GaGa Arts Festival with a set of early Dylan, Hank Williams, and some rootsy/reggae-inflected original music. They played outside under the music tent noontime this past Saturday. They were astonishingly, dazzlingly good. We have recorded evidence that they peeled the red paint off the old Haverstraw brick buildings surrounding them. Stay tuned for it on RandoRadio!

Throughout the weekend, we streamed all our shows live, with video at Ustream. Saturday was Glenn Carella with My Midlife Crisis, Kenny Pearson with The Black Coffee Hour (plus a bonus hour of Kenny performing his original songs and some great covers, too), Gus Mason's Lament, and The Father Of Us All, Lou Cannizzaro, with Random Madness. Sunday opened up with Giacomo Servetti's G Train, and steamed down the tracks pulling along Cocktails with Chris (starring moi), Treavor Hastings' Sonic Streamz, and the long-awaited debut of Tom Jones, better known back in the FM heyday as WRNW's Duke of Darkness. Treavor's fixing up the recordings of that rich stew right now. It'll be rerun on our stream very soon.

Visitors dripping sweat drifted through, waving at the DJ's behind the glass window. Temperatures in our offices hovered around about 90 degrees. It was meat-locker-ish in the control room though, and blessedly so, keeping radio hosts and computers from melting down. Glenn inaugurated the weekend with a fanfare that summed up the whole affair perfectly: The Portsmith Symphonia's utter demoliton of "Also Sprach Zarathustra".

The rest of us, eagerly awaiting our turn at the frosty & refreshing mic, alternately laid our heads on the desks and whimpered, drinking oceans of sugar-free ginger ale (courtesy of Lou), and bothering one another by singing the refrain to "B Double E Double Are You In? Beer Run! Beer Run!" Gus Mason completed the dreaded ear worm effect by playing the cursed thing on his show. He was locked in the control room so we didn't kill him.

But we also managed to meet lots of folks who love the idea of free form radio that includes what we include: Edith Piaf, Robyn Hitchcock, Psychedelic bands no one has ever heard of, Sun Ra, Kenny Young and the Eggplants...the list goes on...If one of those visitors was you, dear reader, welcome, welcome!

I spun all thirteen minutes of The Incredible String Band's "White Bird" on my show, along with my fave track from the Sex, Food, Death & Tarantulas (do I have the order right there?) Robyn Hitchcock CD. My old pal Sheila from Summit School stuck her head in--and then my god kid, Juliet. I'd cut down my RandoRadio T-shirt to a sleeveless Flash-dance sorta thing by then, which might not be quite the look for me, but at least I was cool enough to focus.

The video stream revealed me getting my hair caught in the headphones, getting the gauzy Grateful-Dead-concert-skirt I'd worn caught in the rolling chair, and exposing the side of my midriff to the world at large. I'll tell you, Ladies and Gentlemen, that's entertainment!! The audio stream was pretty darned good, though, if I do say so. And what a cool thing it was to actually be a little nervous on the air because LOTS OF FOLKS WERE WATCHING AND LISTENING.

God, I love this station.

You should have been there.

Most of the Rando DJ's ended up back at my house later that night, drinking the Mojitos we'd been so cruelly deprived of in our effort to be coherent for station visitors that weekend.

Friends, there is great joy in the Randosphere today. Keep listening! Keep listening!

Retro Lasagna

2008-05-24T19:09:00.000-07:00

Unreconstructed, 1960's variety Lasagna!!

There are a number of dinner recipes that work very well with listening to Cocktails With Chris, and in fact that just plain work well with cocktails & friends over for dinner.

I made lasagna for the first time in maybe twenty years tonight, and it rocked. Lasagna is something I used to make for my friends Back In the Day. What I'd forgotten about it is that you can get it all tucked into the oven to bake and have plenty of time for a drink with your pals who have shown up for dinner or your mate before sitting down to something that (let's face it) everyone really, really likes.

Here's what you need to make what I made tonight:

A box of good dried lasagna--Italian imported is best, but if you're counting carbs, Dreamfield's is pretty darned good, too.

2 big cans of decent crushed tomatoes. I like Muir Glen fire-roasted, organic.

2 medium sized onions, diced

7 cloves fresh garlic, chopped or run through a press

a few tablespoons of olive oil

a shake of crushed red pepper

a shake of fennel seeds

2/3-3/4 pound bulk sweet Italian sausage (or links)

about a cup of fresh sliced mushrooms (any variety)

One fifteen ounce container of ricotta

One egg

A pinch or about ten gratings of fresh nutmeg

One one pound ball of fresh mozzarella

either dried or fresh basil, to taste

a good handful of fresh parsley, chopped

a splash of leftover dry red wine

Sautee the onions in enough olive oil to keep them from sticking (2 tablespoons or a little more). When they begin to soften, throw in the sausage and the mushrooms. Add the garlic. If you're using bulk sausage, break it up with the spatula and saute. If you had to buy links, add them sliced, and cook them that way. Add crushed red pepper and fennel seeds. When the sausage and 'shrooms are mostly cooked, deglaze the pan with the red wine, dump in the tomatoes and cook for about ten minutes on medium/medium low heat. Taste and correct the seasoning. You may need a pinch of sugar (no more) if the sauce tastes acidy. Throw in the handful of parsley. Season with basil to taste.

Meanwhile, cook 12-14 pieces of dried lasagna in boiling water, using the largest pot you own. When it just begins to soften, drain and rinse with cool water. Grate or cut the mozarella cheese into tiny pieces. Beat the ricotta in a bowl with one egg and a few gratings of fresh nutmeg, or a pinch of the pre-grated.

Start to make the lasagna by ladling a bit of the sauce into the bottom of a long, shallow casserole dish. Top with three lasagne noodles and begin to layer sauce, ricotta mixture, and mozarella with the noodles until you use up the lasagna noodles. Top with a layer of sauce and a healthy scattering of mozarella and basil. Bake at 350 for about a half an hour.

*****************

The glory of this dish is that you can get it done before anyone shows up for dinner, and enjoy having a drink or just some good conversation with your company while it bakes. If you're an organized person, you can even have all the pots and knives and such that you used to prepare this meal cleaned before you put the lasagna in the oven.

This meal is good with a green salad and some good Italian bread, after just about any cocktail except the Tiki silliness ones (which have their other uses).

The Lovely Sound Of Shaken Ice Cubes

2008-05-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about the Nick and Nora movie where Nora summons Nick home from blocks away by shaking a cocktail. Sitting on a park bench, Nick suddenly lifts his head--message received.

Now, this is Not Healthy according to contemporary thought. I mean, have you ever counted how many drinks those two went through in a movie? Yikes. These days, she'd just pull out her iPhone, anyway. Of course, a Nick and Nora era cocktail was about a quarter of the size of contemporary martini glasses. But really, says the Voice of Reason, isn't it better to be additive-free?

There's nothing wrong with additive-free. And virtual cocktails can be just as effective as the liquid kind, anyway. A free-form radio show is kind of a cocktail in and of itself. By the way, there's also nothing wrong with free range, or the 100 mile diet, or...well, I won't go so far as endorsing low-fat because I think it MAKES you fat. Hmmm. I seem to have wandered off the topic. I do that.

But this blog is going to be on many topics, so it's all OK. Besides: it's MY BLOG. And it's MY BLOG about my radio show on RandoRadio.com, Cocktails with Chris. And also about the other Rando show of which I am proud to be a part, Roots 'n' Ruckus. On that show, I'm the perky older gal announcer being overrun by the incredible 17-year-old Hank Williams-esque energy of Ed Croft and his pal Greg Schettino. You have to listen to that show, my dear. I'll say more about it in another posting...

Meanwhile, I'm basking in the joy of having a copy of Steam Powered Aereoplain by John Hartford once again. I've played it on a couple of my shows lately. Speaking of blasts from the past, I was super-happy to download a copy of Nils Lofgren's "authorized bootleg" Back It Up! I--um--sorta knew someone from the late, lamented WRNW (as in he's my ex-husband) and we had a vinyl copy of that one. So cool that something that was first released only to radio stations is now available to us all! And you've probably also figured out that I really, really, really like the latest Steve Earle record. And Robyn Hitchcock's take on "Copper Kettle" on the Sex, Food, Death...and Tarantulas EP download is just wonderful. And also, I have to find out more about Prem Joshua.

Pausing for a breath...

I guess I should also 'fess up to being a poet with an internet forum at which I'm the head moderator, The Gazebo. It's at alsopreview.com . I also have a slender collection of verse called Zero Degrees At First Light which is published by David Robert Books (davidrobertbooks.com). I think it's pretty darned good, but that's me. I tend to keep the DJ end of my life and the poetry end of my life separate.

So we know each other, now.

And RandoRadio is FINALLY streaming!! Do join me--and us--on this cool adventure. I promise there will be plenty of refreshments along the way.