🍴:

Mon – TJ’s lemon ricotta ravioli with the end of a pack of speck and a leftover Comte cheese cream sauce with some horseradish, salad.

Tues – pink peppercorn steak frites, salad

Wed – vaguely SWANA-esque chicken thighs with lentils, asparagus

Thur – Thai-ish mussels

Fri – a borlotti lamon smash with roasted romanesco and fried caper vinaigrette. One of the best veg means we have ever, ever made.

Sat – Thai Harmony sushi before a show downtown.

Sun – duck breast with mash, English peas, and a red wine sauce. Thank goodness Hampton is the sauce king because a lot of people on the internet are wrong and he saved this one.

🥃: I accidentally added caramel latte Early Bird to my otherwise tropical spinach smoothie, instead of pink lemonade… and didn’t hate it. I have totally switched out my morning coffee for Early Bird’s PurCaf/electrolyte/antioxidant shenanigans over the past two years, and my teeth have never been happier.

🐶:

📚: my current white lady thriller talked trash about the minor league baseball team in my adopted hometown, which cracked me up. Fast-forward — since I didn’t post this on time and stayed up too late finishing it last night — and there was a twist at the 1/3 point so good, I had to go back and rescan the start the of the book. And Molloy did it again at the halfway mark! Much fun. I love being manipulated by a good author.

🎭: whoo, it was a busy show weekend. Saturday afternoon, I saw UNCSA’s Spring Dance. I love these concerts. There’s such an interesting combination of contemporary dance and ballet. My favorites this time were a very balletic piece from the dean featuring contemporary dancers and a contemporary ballet piece.

Before the show, I had the opportunity to lunch with colleagues from across the school, and a ballet faculty member spoke about how “contemporary” has an odd connotation… like, there were people called “contemporary” back in the ‘80s, which would be vintage now. So this is probably an essay to explore another time, but suffice it to say I very much enjoy genre-blending.

Saturday night we saw a friend in Feeding Beatrice, a non-mainstage show from LTWS. This script… needs a good edit, but Kady was phenomenal, and yay for community theatres doing weird shiz.

Sunday afternoon was the A.J. Fletcher Institute’s Ballymore. My biggest takeaway was that of course, from an Irish author, “winners” and “losers” have very opposite meanings. I should have switched which days I saw Spring Dance and the opera because I missed seeing some of my undergrad friends in the unexpectedly dual casting. But I did see other Piedmont Opera friends do great things and there were some other gals in the cast who were pretty outstanding.

I got home and started describing the show to Hampton, starting with that it was based on a 1960s Irish play, and before I got too far, he said, WAIT WAS THE AUTHOR BRIAN FRIEL, and yes, yes it was and he did a scene from the play the opera was based on his second year at the Theatre School of DePaul because of course he did.

Also: I “taught” my last of four tap classes and bought my first actual pair of tap shoes.