Passover Challenge

 We usually go to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's for the Passover seder. This year, though, they were not able to host it. So Dean and I decided to have a seder at our house. There are usually 13 people at our usual seder, but we would not be hosting that many. For one thing, our house is smallish. So we invited our son, daughter-in-law, two-year-old grandson, and the other set of grandparents.

We assembled the traditional seder plate. The menu needed to include matzah ball soup. My husband makes the absolute best gefilte fish. It takes all day, but it is a thousand times better than the jarred gefilte fish. Other than that, we just needed to avoid anything with leavening. So chicken, asparagus, and two casseroles the other grandma made. For dessert we had various cookies and chocolate matzah toffee. 

Matzah is truly not an interesting food to eat. Some have compared it to cardboard. But cover it with caramel and chocolate... it's wonderful. In case you want to try it (you don't need to wait for Passover!), here is the recipe:

Passover Matzah Toffee

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup butter

About 4 pieces of matzah

12 oz. bag of semi-sweet chocolate chips (get a high quality brand)

1 cup nuts, optional

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with aluminum foil and either spray with PAM or lightly grease with vegetable oil. Cover with matzahs - break to fit. Melt butter and sugar over low heat (on the stove). Turn to medium high and stir until bubbling (thick and gooey).  Pour the butter mixture over the matzahs and spread to cover them. Bake 5 minutes at 350. Then cover with 2 cups of chocolate chips. Bake 1 minute. Spread the chocolate with the back of a spoon. Sprinkle with nuts if using. Refrigerate. Once it is chilled and the chocolate is solidified, break the toffee into irregular pieces using a knife or your hands. 

I store it in the refrigerator, but you could probably keep it out. We like it cool and solid.

Post-Cruise Crud and Horn Baths

 My husband and I, along with our son, daughter-in-law, two-year-old grandson, and the other grandma, went on a Caribbean cruise about two weeks ago. We had fun, played with monkeys, went to a beach, and visited the oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere. 

Immediately upon returning to Illinois I got the worst cold I have had in decades. I have obviously lost my teacher immunity. My son calls it the ship crud. 

The main problem with being sick was that I had agreed to play a concert with a local community orchestra because they were short of (French) horn players. Not only that, but I agreed to play first horn on the Dvorak's New World Symphony. It's a well-known, popular work with really fun but challenging horn parts. 

Playing a brass instrument is somewhat similar to being an athlete. If you don't work out (practice), your muscles lose strength and flexibility. So as sick as I felt, I practiced every day once we got home. Cutting to the chase, the concert went well. First horn players often have assistant horn players who fill in on the loud tutti parts so the first horn can back off and save their chops for the exposed parts. I was so lucky and happy to have a friend playing assistant. 

So I have been blowing my germs into my horn for the past 8 days. Now my horn needs a bath to wash out those germs. 

Years ago I read a blog post online written by a British horn player about cleaning his horn after being sick. Actually, as I recall, he couldn't seem to shake the illness and kept getting sick repeatedly. The blog post was hilarious. He wrote about washing the horn in his bathtub and expelling a blob of something while soaking the entire bathroom, while laughing at the whole calamity. It was more dramatic than trying to wash a cat, (which I have done). (His blog post is no longer on line or I would post the link. I'm not naming him in case he wants to forget the whole horn bath experience.)

Once I stop coughing and sneezing, it will be bath time.

The Fateful Number Nine

 I just read franmcveigh's interesting post on numbers. I am not into sports, so my numbers will be differently oriented.

I am currently playing in the Waukegan Symphony (Illinois) and we are performing Dvorak's Symphony #9 in a few weeks. Nine has turned out to be a fateful number in classical music. Beethoven wrote nine symphonies before he died. Antonin Dvořák wrote nine symphonies. Gustav Mahler called his ninth symphony "The Song of the Earth" (Das Lied von der Erde) in order to escape the curse of the ninth. However, he then wrote his Symphony #9 and died before finishing number 10. Who else? Franz Schubert. Anton Bruckner died after his ninth symphony, but his first symphony is number zero (Symphony #0), so that makes ten in total. There are a number of lesser known composers who also wrote only nine symphonies ("only nine," as if that is somehow lacking!)

Dvořák's ninth symphony is subtitled "From the New World." He wrote it while living in NYC in 1893. He was working as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. He was fascinated by the music of African-Americans and Native Americans; these influences show up in the symphony. I will add that it's challenging but also really fun to play!

In researching who wrote nine symphonies, I came across the interesting trivia that Midsomer Murders has an episode (Synopsis: http://midsomermurders.org/curseninth2.htm) titled "The Curse of the Ninth." I have never watched this series, but now I might have to have a look.

If you are interested in who else wrote only nine symphonies, here are at least some of the composers: Alexander Glazunov,  Ralph Vaughan Williams, Alfred Schnittke, and Malcom Arnold.

On the other hand (more numbers), Franz Joseph Haydn wrote 106, Mozart wrote 41 numbered symphonies (there  is some dispute about exactly how many), Johannes Brahms wrote 4. Tchaikovsky wrote 6. Some well-known composers, like Frederic Chopin, wrote none, zero. 

The Musical that Isn't

 Stuck for ideas today (again!) I turned to 5-minute daiy writing prompts and picked this:

"Brainstorm ideas for a quirky musical that, as far as you know, has not been written."

I love musicals. I grew up listening to the soundtracks of many musicals because my Dad also loved musicals. We had the songs from Carousel, The Sound of Music, West Side Story, South Pacific, and more that I don't remember at the moment on LPs. 

Most musicals, at least the old ones from my youth, came from books. I looked up lists of recent popular novels. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett has been made into an opera. We saw it at Lyric Opera of Chicago and liked it. 

But, a QUIRKY musical -- I want to take the character Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and put him in a story with Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice and Sherlock Holmes. Data would be delighted to be paired up with Holmes since he has already played that part in the Enterprise's Holodeck. But Elizabeth Bennet? What would he make of her? 

The plot would need to be a mystery to solve. 

Imagine my surprise when I googled "mystery ideas with Sherlock Holmes, Elizabeth Bennet and Data" and found that there is already a series (two books as of now) of mysteries with Holmes and Miss Elizabeth! I only need to add Data. And this has morphed into a novel, no longer a musical.

Time travel has happened in the Star Trek universe, so Data will travel back in time to the Regency Era and meet Miss Elizabeth. At a ball? That he accidentally finds himself at? Data will understand much about this time period, but not how to act so as not to draw attention to himself. Sherlock Holmes needs a logical reason to be in this story so he can investigate this strange being. Elizabeth will be her normal witty and observant self -- but what will she make of Data? 

This sounds like a lot of fun.

One Little Word 2025

 I was reminded by some of the blog posts last week that I hadn't found a OLW yet. Starting to work on ideas, I tried out some ideas.

How do I feel about 2025? 

Apprehensive. That's a terrible choice for an OLW.

So I'm thinking about the things that are important to me. Family. Community. Connection.

Family. It's just me and my husband at our home now. Our son lives nearby with his wife and our grandson. Our daughter lives in Houston where she plays in the Houston Ballet Orchestra and teaches many many young French horn players. My brother lives in Omaha and my sister in Columbus, Ohio. I have a nephew in NYC and a niece in Minneapolis, as well as a niece in Chicago. My husband's family - brother, sister-in-law, and children - all live in the Chicago area. 

It is so much easier to stay connected now. My siblings and me plus spouses have semi-regular Zoom get-togethers. I am very fortunate that we all get along, in spite of significant differences. My brother-in-law is a retired Lutheran minister, while my branch of the family is Jewish. We have wonderful chats on Zoom.

My niece (my brother's daughter) is getting married this summer in the middle of nowhere north of Minneapolis. That will be lovely and a chance to see everyone in person. 

So thinking about what I just wrote, I think my word for 2025 is FAMILY. Keeping those connections strong. 

A childhood memory?

I was trying to think what to write about today. I consulted 642 Things to Write About and decided on this one: "Late one night, you discover an abandoned UFO in the middle of a field outside an abandoned farmhouse."

When I was almost 12, my family moved from a small town in Wisconsin to Cos Cob, Connecticut. It was suburban, being on the train line to New York City, where my father went to work each weekday. But it was also very country-like. Our neighborhood was heavily wooded, no curbs on the streets, and everyone had septic tanks -- no sewers. Also no street lights. It was a friendly neighborhood where most people knew each other. Our house was the last one on one side of the road and was next to a small woods. 

One night we somehow got the news that there was something mysterious happening at the end of the street that ran perpendicular to ours. It dead-ended in another wooded area. Reports were confusing - had something crashed? What?

My dad and sister and I walked around the corner and down to the end of that street. A small group of our neighbors were there. Something had happened. And I still don't know what it was. We all stood around for a while but nothing conclusive happened -- unless the adults were keeping it from us. I don't  think anyone called the police. (Though we had a policeman living next door to us.)

Guesses? Someone hanging out in the woods? Teenagers? A stalled car? A "traveler" bedding down in the woods? 

Memory is a tricky thing. The experts say that every time you "take a memory out to look at," you alter it. And when adults don't explain to you what is happening, that compounds the memory issue. And none of those adults are around anymore to ask, if they would even remember this. 

Maybe the best thing to do with this memory? Use it in a story. 

A bitterweet Christmas memory

 This past Sunday Heidi Stevens, a columnist with the Chicago Tribune, wrote about her memories of Christmas trees as a divorced mother and how holidays don’t always look the way you think they should. It inspired me to think back on a particular Christmas about 10 or 12 years ago.

While in college, our daughter was dating a delightful young man whose family lived in a Chicago suburb about 45 minutes away from us. On this particular December, his mother had passed away fairly recently and his father and brother were both out of town. So he ended up staying mostly with us. I will call him J in this post.

Well, we don’t celebrate Christmas. Our family is Jewish. (Full disclosure, I was raised Lutheran but converted. This background turned out to be a plus in this situation.) J was obviously sad, and none of us blamed him for feeling that way. We knew there was no way we could create a Christmas like the one he was missing. But we wanted to do something. I bought a tiny tree, about 3 feet tall. J brought back a couple boxes of tree decorations from his house, and he and our daughter decorated the tree. We had presents, because, Chanukah, so they went sort of under the tiny tree. 

J sat by that tree for hours. My heart hurt for him. We welcomed him and treated him like family, but that doesn’t replace one’s family of origin. 

Christmas ended and the kids went back to college. Life continued.

Update: J and our daughter ultimately broke up. We don’t have contact with him because it was too painful for him to see us after the break up. He seems to be doing well, now living in a different state, across the country from us. 

You can find Heidi Stevens’ Balancing Act on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/254414918544059/) and also on X (@heidistevens13)