Mary Dan Eades, M.D.

Forgive my lengthy absence from the blog desk. As those of you who also read Mike’s blog know, I’ve been up to my eyeballs for the last month finishing a couple of major business projects and wearing my SB Choral Society President and soprano-in-the-chorus hats getting our Verdi Requiem behind us (which, as he’s already blogged about, was a smashing critical success, thank you very much) and as such all work on my blog got pushed to the back burner. Mea culpa!

Then before you could turn around and catch a breath, we were off on this trip to China.

We’ve never traveled in the East before and it has been something we were looking forward to doing, particularly as it involves food and nutrition. One big surprise has been the food. I came expecting rice and noodles and vegetables and not much in the way of protein and boy was I wrong.

I would have to say that rice or noodles have been a side dish, not a main dish, at most of our meals here. And there has been plenty of fish, poultry, beef, and pork…often all four at one meal.

For instance, the day we were in Jiang Men, we were treated to lunch at a Dim Sum restaurant. I was concerned that it would be all rice and dumplings with little tidbits of meat here and there.

The meal began with steamed stuff clams and fish cakes. Followed by a couple of dumplings

Pork Dumplings

Shrimp Dumplings

And the food just kept on coming.

Most of the food appeared in plates to be shared, placed on the giant lazy Susan always found in the center of a Chinese dining table. But everybody got his or her own ‘main dish’ which at this lunch was steak.

Steak with a brown sauce and fries

You’ll notice that there are a few fries artfully arranged (practically into a Chinese character) on the plate. That’s how many came with the steak. There were eight or nine (both lucky numbers in China–eight for wealth and nine for long life) fries about an inch and a half long on the plate. That’s it. Contrast that with the mountain of fries you’d get with a ’steak frite’ in the West.

Then a shared chicken dish that was just yummy…

Chicken with mushrooms and fresh cukes and tomatoes

and one of scallops and broccoli…

Scallops and Broccoli

…and a shared plate of corn and a purple sweet potato that is a locally grown specialty. I don’t eat much corn (though I love it) so I passed on the corn on the cob, but I tried a little of the purple sweet potato. Its consistency and taste is pretty much just like an orange one, but purple through and through, like a beet.

Corn and Purple Sweet Potatoes

And finally some little sweets, which I admit to having a taste of, just to try. They were actually quite hard to get into. The outer sticky rice ‘bread’ is soft and cold and really stretchy, a lot like the Ethiopian bread, called Injera, if you’ve ever had that. It was a struggle to get the thing open, but we weren’t alone; the locals struggled a bit, too. Inside was lightly sweet cream and bits of different kinds of fresh fruit, including watermelon.

Snowballs - Steamed Sticky Rice Sweets

Quite a feast…and for lunch, no less! Wait until Mike blogs about dinner that night. Sakes alive, what a meal!

Off to London this afternoon. Will be dining at The Fat Duck, so be prepared for a blow-by-blow on that experience.

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We were recently invited to join our friends, Mike and Debbie, to celebrate their anniversary with a weekend of wine tasting and golf in Napa. The acme of the trip–the clincher that made me instantly agree to join them the second Deb’s email hit my inbox–was dinner at Thomas Keller’s French Laundry, about which veteran readers of my darling husband’s blog have already heard an earful…or two.

While we’ve enjoyed lots of great meals in wonderful restaurants, cafes, and bistros in many trips to Napa (since it’s not far off the I-80 path we regularly travel between Santa Barbara and Tahoe) we’ve never planned far enough in advance to get reservations for TFL. The reservation drill, according to Debbie, is that you must call exactly 2 months in advance of the day you wish to dine and hope that the reservation and phone gods are with you. The first time, she hit redial for an hour and a half before having to finally give up. The next week, she recruited 3 of her employees to help her and all four of them hit redial for another hour and a half before one of them finally got through and was able to secure a table for 4.

Going in, you know it’s going to be expensive. You’ve heard that it is and you expect a stiff tariff. But it still sort of takes your breath away. (Though it’s less, per person I’ve heard, than a few of the toniest Vegas establishments.)

Upon being seated, the wait staff presents you with the menu, embossed with the signature French Laundry clothespin. Some courses offer a choice between two different dishes, but basically, the menu gives you only two alternative tracks: the Chef’s Tasting menu, which runs the gamut of every wonderful meaty, fishy, and fowly thing and the Vegetable Tasting, which is mostly veggie with a couple of choices that include some fish, though always juxtaposed against a purely vegetarian alternative choice.

The fish slip in on that track, I guess, because the so-called beady-eyed vegetarians, who eschew dining on charismatic mega-fauna (aka cows, sheep, deer, elk, bison, etc. ) will bend their principles to eat members of the animal or fish kingdom (i.e., chicken and fish) that have the genetic misfortune to possess beady-eyes, rather than big, brown Bambi eyes. Based on that philosophy, one can only speculate about the pig, which has neither Bambi eyes, nor exactly beady ones. Whatever; they usually eschew dining on pig as well.

At the bottom of the menu–under each track–you’re informed that the dinner is $240 per person prix fixe, service included. But not libations.

Debbie didn’t ask the price when she called (it was a landmark celebration and price wasn’t the object, after all) and they didn’t offer to enlighten her, which to my way of thinking, they should have. Or at the very least, they should send a nice email, confirming your reservation, and subtly informing you that you have limited choices in selection and that dining there is a prix fixe affair at a cost of $240 per person before wine, and giving you 24 hours to cancel your reservation without penalty if you so choose. It would be the fair and honorable thing to do to be sure that people know exactly what they’ve signed up to buy. Most would still come, but others might opt out and ought to be given the chance to do so. Some folks, who didn’t ask the cost and weren’t told, might really get blindsided and once seated feel obligated to stay, even at a price they could ill afford. (The $100 per person cancellation fee might also figure into their decision to stay and dine, since they’d be in for nearly half the price for none of the fun, if they chose to cut and run.)

Pricey though it is, even after the fact, I can see the value (about $6 a bite) in the incredible amount of skilled culinary labor that goes into each dish. Every one is a work of art, played out in delicious flavors, on a pure white porcelain canvas. The preparations begin early in the day, with under chefs out in the garden across the street at 8 o’clock in the morning, harvesting tender veggies and fragrant herbs for the night’s meal.

Where I parted ways with TFL was in their wine list, which to my mind was obscenely overpriced. There wasn’t a wine on the list under $125, a few in the $160 to $180 range, a few more in the $200s and $300s, but far and away most of the wines were $300 to $1000 per bottle and one was $6600.

I was once told, by a NY Times food writer/restaurant reviewer, that the rule of thumb for appropriate pricing of a wine list was that however extensive it might be, however far into the realm of phenomenally expensive wines it might wish to go, about one-third of its wines should be priced at or below the cost of the most expensive entree on the menu. Of course a fixed menu, such as TFL, doesn’t price the entree, so it’s a slightly different calculus. If one assumes the entree represents approximately one-half the food cost of a meal (with the salad, appetizer, and dessert making up the other half) then the ‘entree’ of the meal at TFL would run $120.

There was nothing on their quite extensive, shockingly expensive wine list at or below that price. And there was but one bottle that I can recall on their lengthy list that was close. You can’t tell me that they can’t find a dozen delicious wines, practically at their back door, that they would be able to sell at a fair price and still make money on. They’re in Napa, for crying out loud!

We ultimately chose a bottle of Peter Michael wine that I believe retails for about $160. Having been in the restaurant biz years ago, I suspect they got it for less than half of that and probably less than that. We paid $285 for the bottle, as I recall, which is a pretty nice mark up from the $80 or less that it likely cost them. But the wine is not what you go to TFL for.

The food is extraordinary and you can’t get a meal of equivalent beauty anywhere else in Napa that I know of. The wine, on the other hand, is the same bottle whether poured at TFL or down the street at Bistro Jeanty, which also has delicious food. It just costs a whole lot more pop the cork and pour it in the former, apparently. And for my money, the overblown pricing of their wine list mars the overall experience. It feels purely and simply like a gouge and totally unworthy of an establishment of this caliber.

But dining at TFL is not even just about the food that’s offered, which to me (and Mike and I disagree on this point) was quite spectacular, but how it’s offered. It’s not so much about eating, as the experience: every course plated to utter perfection, each a work of art, visually and in its combinations of taste and texture.

From the amuse bouche of teeny crispy cornets filled with tuna tartare to the hand-dipped truffles and chocolates that finished the meal, the execution was perfection itself.

But for me, the outstanding course of the evening–perhaps the single most delectable bites of food I’ve ever eaten in my entire life–was the Oysters and Pearls.

On a bed of warm, creamy, large-pearl tapioca–savory, not sweet–two tiny, succulent oysters lay on one side of a quenelle of black caviar. And not a small quenelle, either, a pretty healthy portion. The balance of salty caviar against the savory tapioca imparted a delicate sweetness to the tender, perfectly cooked oysters.

I could have had four of these and nothing else and gone away happy!

This recipe is in The French Laundry Cookbook, which is in my cookbook library in Santa Barbara. I plan to give it a whirl someday, though getting those tiny, tender oysters may prove a challenge.

So we’ve been, now, on a pilgrimage to the famed Laundry, the Mecca of French Haute Cuisine in Napa. Would we go back? Mike says ‘no’! I say, probably so, though I’d likely take my own wine and pay the corkage fee (which is steep) next time.

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Thanks to the miracle that is the world wide web, our blogs reach people in all parts of the globe. Just the other day, for example, a reader from India wrote telling us that she had purchased our book Protein Power and was persuaded by it to commit to the diet to lose weight and improve her health. She loved the book, but wrote to point up what she felt was a glaring omission: no recipes in sync with her native Indian cuisine, particularly traditional Indian breakfast and lunch fare.

I had to admit that she had us there. While the book contains at least an entree recipe or two for dishes that derive from a wide array of ethnic cuisines (Tex-Mex, Korean, Finnish, Italian, Greek, and French) there aren’t any recipes specifically derivative of Indian cuisine.

I responded to her that there were a number of traditional Indian dishes that would work well, sans rice, for a low-carb lunch or dinner that are listed in the dining out section in Protein Power: tandoori chicken or lamb, chicken beef or lamb curry, chicken tikka or chicken masala, zukeni bhaghi (stewed zucchini and yellow squash) and saag paneer (creamy spinach) but that I had to admit that we were unfamiliar with traditional Indian breakfasts or other types of lunch fare. I offered that if she would send me a few recipes of her favorite traditional breakfast or lunch dishes, I would endeavor to adapt them for her. If and when she does, I will post them on the blog for all.

In the meantime, I decided to get started with what I currently could do and adapt a recipe for curry that caught my eye in a Healthy Plate column by Jim Romanoff that appeared recently in our local paper. While mine uses chicken, his used shrimp, which would work just fine, though you’d want to cut the cooking time down to a couple of minutes, cooking just until the shrimp were opaque and tender. Where his used cous cous, I built mine around our old low-carb friend, cauliflower.

Here it is, for all readers wanting/needing a little curry fix.

Curried Chicken and Veggie Cauli-Cauli
Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:

1 large head cauliflower, washed and trimmed
2 tablespoon olive oil (divided use)
2 tablespoons butter (divided use)
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped finely (divided use)
2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts (about 1 pound), diced to 1/2″ to 3/4″ cubes
1 cup chicken broth (divided use)
1/2 cup chopped scallions
1 cup broccoli, broken into small florets
1 small zucchini, diced
1 small red bell pepper, seeded and diced
2 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
1/2 teaspoon sea salt (divided use)
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (divided use)

1. Cut the raw cauliflower head in half and then each half into 1/2″ slices.
2. Place cauliflower slices into the food processor and pulse to chop evenly into small cous-cous sized bits. Set aside.
3. Put chicken pieces in a bowl and season with a little salt and pepper and 1 teaspoon of the curry powder. Toss to coat.
4. Heat 1 tablespoon oil and 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet large enough to hold the chicken. Add the garlic and saute until slightly limp. Add the chicken pieces and brown on all sides.
5. Add 1/2 cup of the chicken broth, stir to pick up the brown bits on the pan. Add the broccoli, zucchini and red bell pepper (not the scallions); cover and cook over medium low heat for another 5 or 6 minutes, until vegetables are tender. Turn heat off and hold, covered.
6. In another large skillet, heat the remaining olive oil and butter over medium heat. Add the remaining garlic and the scallions and saute for a few minutes until tender. Add the cauliflower, remaining salt, and pepper, stir to coat in the flavorful oil, then cook for another 3 or 4 minutes.
7. Meanwhile, return the chicken skillet to a low flame to heat the chicken through.
8. Add the remaining chicken broth to the cauliflower and continue to cook, uncovered, until cauliflower is tender and moisture is mostly gone.
9. When the cauliflower is ready, add the chicken and veggies and toss.
10. Serve with a glass of sugar free hot or iced chai.

Enjoy!

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Every good feast has to have a fish course. A few years back, we sprung the hinges on our wallet for some really good caviar for New Year’s Eve. We still had our Santa Fe casa then and were spending the holiday there. Some good friends flew out to join us for that New Year’s Eve celebration and we all decided we’d enjoy blinis with caviar as a part of the meal. We bundled up against the snowy cold and headed over to the Cookworks gourmet shop that used to be on Guadalupe Street where we knew we’d find something fabulous.

And we did. Granted, it set us back a pretty penny…or more like several pretty pennies, but it was worth every one of them. I’ve never enjoyed caviar more.

A view of the Hotel Loretto in Santa Fe at Christmas.

If you ever get the chance to enjoy a Christmas in Santa Fe, take it. It’s positively magical there: crisp cold air, bright stars in the clear night sky, the smell of pinon fires burning, pretty farolitos lining the rooftops all over town. But that’s another tale for another day…back to the fish story.

This year’s splurge, however, was the foie gras, so we decided to retain the blini theme, but topped them instead with a slice of good lox from wild caught salmon, a dollop of creme fraiche, and a sprinkling of tasty, if decidedly more pedestrian caviar.

Blinis are basically just little pancakes, therefore a touch on the carby side, unless you do a little adapting wizardry, particularly if you give in to temptation and eat too many of them. So I pulled out my Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything, flipped to his Fluffy Pancake recipe and promptly replaced half the flour in it with almond flour and the milk with cream to cut the carbs somewhat. I had the temptation part covered, since I planned to portion them out two to a person, with no extras to worry about.

The Bittman verison I adapted is a pretty standard pancake recipe: eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, touch of salt. All the usual suspects, meaning that any recipe would work for a blini. But the fluffiness in this one comes, as it often does in waffle recipes, from separating the eggs and beating the whites to soft peaks and folding them gently into the batter at the last moment; it lightens the batter and makes, just as the name says, Fluffy Pancakes. The technique is especially helpful when you’re substituting denser, fattier, heavier almond flour for the lighter, softer all purpose wheat flour.

Since all we were going to need was two small (about 2-inch) blinis for each of us, I only made half the recipe on the morning of the party. Like crepes, you can make the blinis ahead of time, cool them slightly on a rack, then put them between and under several thicknesses of paper towels on something oven proof, wrap them tightly with aluminum foil and tuck them into the refrigerator until the dinner gets going. When the time comes, you can reheat them, right in the foil packet, in a 200 degree oven for about 20 to 30 minutes or so and they’ll be perfect. They stay nice and moist in their packet and warm gently.

To save time between courses, I had portioned the lox into 16 little piles on a plate, covered it with plastic wrap, and popped it into the fridge earlier in the day. That way, when it came time for the fish course, I just had to take the warm blinis out of the oven, put two on each plate, top each one with a portion of lox, add a dollop of creme fraiche, and a bit of caviar and voila! Fish course.

Next on the New Year’s menu: the Cornish Hens.

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Those Sex in the City girls started it all a few years back by standing around in their Manolo Blahniks and Jimmie Choos, sipping Cosmos, and since then, the martini craze seems to have taken over the entire country. Every restaurant menu now sports a baker’s dozen options in the category, often concocted with some pretty far out ingredients.

But I can’t even see the word ‘martini’ without remembering my introduction to the species many years ago. Mike and I had invited some friends over for a casual ‘grill out’ supper at our house and they brought along all the accoutrement for making martinis. Not the new fangled tutti fruity kind, mind you, but the classic martini, made the old fashioned way with gin, a touch of vermouth, and a twist of lemon or an olive. Shaken not stirred.

The evening began early and we were all in the kitchen and on the deck by the grill. The hot wings were cooking away, Mike was playing the guitar, we were all singing, laughing, and chopping, and our friend, Jayme, was shaking up martinis. Her then-husband, Jack, and I kept an eye on the wings, Mike kept on strumming, and Jayme kept on shaking and topping off the martini glasses. Nobody much was paying attention, we were just having fun, enjoying ourselves.

Then, all at once, Mike put down his guitar and–I am not making this up–stretched out, prostrate, right in the middle of the kitchen floor, mumbling something about how good the cool tiles felt on his cheek and to please help him get to the pool. Right.

It was about then that we all–well at least 75% of us–realized that we’d been imbibing from a bottomless martini glass, had had no food, and were all pretty well sloshed. Dinner was ready, so those still vertical ate. Those horizontal continued to mumble unintelligibly from the cool tiles.

The Great Martini Fiasco, as we referred to that evening in later years, represented the first–and last–time I partook of a martini for about 25 years. Based on that episode, we made a tacit agreement never to drink another one.

Then a few months ago, that decades-long ban ended at a favorite restaurant of ours in Santa Barbara, called Bucatini. (Italian, yes, but they’ve got a most delicious Vegetable Minestrone that doesn’t have a whisper of a noodle or potato in it along with plenty of hearty meat and poultry dishes on the menu, not just pasta and the pizzas.) I was in the mood for something different and saw on the menu a drink called a Santa Barbara Sunset. It was basically a juiced up vodka martini, made with pomegranate juice and a splash of lime juice.

It sounded refreshing; I ordered one; and it was. Thus endeth the martini embargo.

Then, on a recent trip to Michigan to see Mike’s folks, his two sisters surprised us after dinner the first night with a Pumpkin Pie dessert martini, complete with whipped cream on the rim. At first, I couldn’t get my head around the notion of a pumpkin cocktail in the abstract, but I have to say that in fact it was pretty yummy.

It was apple harvest time in Michigan while we were there, which necessitated a trip to the nearby Franklin Cider Mill for some fresh cider, which we duly brought home and turned into Apple Cidertinis that night. A martini concoction du jour became a theme of the trip. And we enjoyed them all.

So in honor of Mike’s sisters and the upcoming holiday, I offer my version of a cranberry martini.

The Cranbertini
Makes 2 cocktails

6 fresh cranberries (optional for garnish)

2 ounces cranberry juice, chilled
2 ounces vodka, chilled
1 teaspoon Chambord
2 ounces Hansen’s sugar-free ginger ale, chilled
2 curls of orange zest for garnish

1. In advance, thread 3 cranberries onto each of 2 cocktail spears or long toothpicks, wrap in plastic, and freeze for an hour or more.
2. In a cocktail shaker, place several ice cubes and the remaining ingredients. Shake and strain into a stemmed cocktail (martini) glass.
3. Place cranberry skewer into glass to garnish and as an icy-cold swizzle stick.

A word of warning: These are tasty. Do not top off indiscriminately. It’s hard to cook a turkey with your cheeks on the cool tiles. Happy Thanksgiving!

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We arrived on July 14 in Florence and it was HOT HOT HOT. The temp was about 105 degrees and pretty humid, what with the Arno meandering through town and the town’s being situated in a broad valley that traps the heat. We had arranged tickets for the group for entrance into the Accademia (to see David) which Mike and I opted out of, having seen David a couple of times before. The group also had advance tickets for the Uffizi, which we opted to do, even though we’d also done it a couple of times before as well, figuring that at the Accademia there’s primarily the David (which is glorious) and a few other of Michelangelo’s works, but not the volume to see that there is at the Uffizi, which really deserves multiple visits. After this experience, I wouldn’t recommend doing it in the summer, however, since it is just people cheek by jowl and it’s tough to even get close enough to the Botticelli Venus (or anything else for that matter) to really study it much. You pretty much just get herded through in a flock and it’s not the most artistically satisfying way to do it.

Mike and I opted, instead of seeing David for the third time, to go to the Institute and Museum of the History of Science, which houses all manner of 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th Century scientific instruments (both real and reproductions) including some of Galileo’s actual telescopes and machines he constructed for determining physical properties, such as the velocity of falling objects. In addition, there are numerous other curiosities, including what’s reputed to be Galileo’s right middle finger bone, purportedly lopped off his hand when his corpse was moved from its initial resting place to the marble tomb in Chiesa Santa Croce that’s much more befitting his monumental contributions to the body of scientific understanding. The bony digit is now enclosed in an ornamented glass reliquary in the museum. Go figure why. Perhaps some Florentine’s idea of dark humor, to have Galileo flipping off the powers that be for all eternity.

We spent a few very hot and sticky, but interesting days in Florence, culminating in our concert there at San Stefano al Ponte Vecchio, right in the shadow of the Uffizi. The photo above, Mike took just after the end of our concert, after our accompanying orchestra (Nova Amadeus Orchestra, again) had left the stage. If we thought Rome was a sweltering venue, it wasn’t shucks up to the side of the heat in Florence, even by concert time at 9 pm. We again performed the Haydn Theresienmesse (which Mike avers we ‘nailed’ and said that it was our best performance ever of it) and the Lauridsen Lux Aeterna. By the time he took this photo, we were pretty limp and worn out, both from the exertion of singing those two major and demanding choral works back to back without intermission and from the heat. The venue was packed, without a seat remaining that I could see and the Florentine’s loved it.

We had arranged with a Florentine audio recording company to make a professional live recording of the performance, which will become a CD. When it does, I’ll post info about it.

On to Vicenza, to enjoy attending a performance of Verdi’s Aida at the Arena di Verona and to give our next two back to back performances (this time of our non-orchestral repertoire) in Asiago and at Villa Coldogna.

Caio for now!

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On July 14, we piled into our two big tour buses to make our way north from Rome to Florence, which is our next scheduled concert stop. Our tour guides had scheduled a lunch stop for us at Orvieto, which is a small hill town about half way along in our journey.

Big buses can’t enter the town, which you access via either the furnicular (which was out of order) or smaller city buses. Atop the hill, the little village spreads out from a central piazza dominated by a highly ornamented church (Duomo) that was built there after a miracle occurred during a mass celebration nearby. Apparently there had been some question about the bread for the mass not actually being the body of Christ, yet when the priest broke the bread, blood rand down his arms (the blood of Christ, one assumes) and dropped onto the altar cloth. In the Cappella del Corporal (a side chapel off the main sanctuary) the reliquary containing the cloth, with the two drops of blood still visible, sits encased in glass, displayed over the altar.

After a delicious lunch, about which Mike has already blogged, at the Trattoria del Etrusca, the church doors opened for a wedding and we were all able to get inside. The outside is spectacular enough to hold your attention, however, since the entire front façade of the building is covered in bright mosaics depicting various scenes of the life of Christ. Inside, the space is cool and, again, highly decorated.
Here’s a rather blurry image of our impromptu concert of a few motets, taken before Mike figured out how to do the low light clear picture maneuver on his new camera. I apologize for the blur, but at least you’ll get an idea of what it looks like inside.

Our tour guides were able to persuade the priest to allow us to sing a couple of motets in the space; the acoustics at the Duomo at Orvieta are even more perfectly suited for Renaissance music than St. Peter’s, because of Orvieto’s more intimate size. The sound of Ubi Caritas and Sicut Cervus done impromptu there is something none of us will forget.

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Sorry for being absent for the last couple of weeks, but as most of you know, Mike and I are with my Santa Barbara Choral Society European performance tour and the schedule has been nothing short of a forced march through Italy, since the group arrived on July 11.

In Rome, we had two opportunities to perform: the first, at Chiesa San Marcello al Corso, where we performed an evening concert of Josef Haydn’s Thereseinmesse and Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna for a packed house in absolutely brutal heat. The temperature in Rome during the heat of the day was between 96 and 102 degrees and it didn’t cool off all that much by 9 pm at concert time. Between the heat the church gathered during the day and the 65 singers on the altar steps and the hundreds of bodies in the audience producing plenty of BTUs, we were melting into hot, sweaty puddles inside our black concert gowns and tuxes by the end of the evening.

Despite the trying conditions, it was a glorious experience to hear the Lux Aeterna echo from the marble pillars and frescoed ceiling vaults. It was especially rewarding to introduce Italian audiences (and orchestra members) to Lauridsen, a still-active, modern American composer, whose work they were previously unfamiliar with. The members of Nova Amadeus Orchestra, who accompanied us both in Rome (where they’re based) and in Florence, were positively taken with the piece and gifted us with the loudest and most appreciative ovations and many, many personally communicated comments of Bravi! and Grazie mille!

At the conclusion as the last Alleluias still bounced around in the vaulted space and the piece had resolved itself into the final deep, quiet Amens, the audience thundered its approval and wanted more. So we complied. Our encore pieces were chosen from our repertoire of African-American Spirituals, which European audiences go absolutely nuts for. When we sang Soon Ah Will Be Done their applause shook the rafters.

The highlight in Rome, however, was singing the Friday evening mass at Basilica San Pietro.

It’s hard to imagine a more powerful setting in which to sing sacred motets. The acoustics are so lively that the harmonies echo back and back and back, even in that immense space. To sing at St. Peter’s requires application to the proper authority within the Vatican: a letter in Italian describing your requested date, who you are, a CD of your group in performance, and a ‘program’ detailing 4 or 5 motets suitable for the mass, that must be in Latin, along with the details of their composer and approximate dates of composition. We submitted the required information and received our nod of approval.

Our conductor, JoAnne Wasserman, chose as our repertoire for the mass: Sicut Cervus (Palestrina), Ubi Caritas (Durufle), O Nata Lux (Tallis), Vere Languores Nostros (Victoria), and Superflumina Babylonis (also Palestrina).

Here we are, in the choir stalls of St. Peter’s, just before the mass. When you perform renaissance music (or music written to the renaissance form) in a space like St. Peter’s, you feel somehow connected to hundreds of years of choral music history and to the monks and novices who sang the same songs in the same spaces centuries ago. There’s just no choral experience quite like it, to me. Afterward, a gentleman came up to our conductor and thanked her for including Durufle (his countryman) telling her that hearing Durufle there that day had made his trip to the Vatican special.

I wish you could have been there to hear it; fortunately, we were able to record a performance of these motets just prior to our concert in Florence a few days later, so if the recording comes out well, we’ll include it on the SB Choral Society CD of the Haydn and Lauridsen performance there and make it available to those who want to get it so you’ll be able to hear it for yourself if you choose.

Stay tuned…more on Florence, Verona, Vicenza, Asiago and Munich to follow.

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Those of you who are faithful reader of Mike’s blog already know that our flight from LA to London on Virgin (a day and a lot of headache and hassle later than planned) went pretty smoothly. After cooling our heels for an extra 24 hours at the Hilton LAX, I enjoyed a couple of glasses of champagne in the Virgin lounge before boarding and we headed to the plane, where I enjoyed a couple of three more glasses in my comfy seat with my feet propped up for take off.

I decided to treat myself to one of Virgin’s front of the plane perks: the in-flight head and neck aromatherapy massage. Mike and I enjoyed our dinner across the table at my seat–with more wine–and then we settled into our respective duvet-lined beds for the night, he to listen to Michel Thomas’ Italian lessons on his iPod and I to watch Amazing Grace on the in-seat movie.

Afloat on a sea of bubbly, I needed no encouragement to fall asleep after the movie ended, but wishing to guarantee a full night’s sleep, Mike took an Ambien and slept soundly.

In fact, he slept so soundly that when the lovely flight attendant came to gently wake him for breakfast (which he’d ordered) she couldn’t wake him. When she woke me, I asked just for coffee, juice, and water (feeling a little dehydrated from my previous night of liquid refreshment) and saw that he was still sacked out. He continued to be sacked out as the cabin became the normal beehive of activity that landing soon occasions.

When the Captain came on to announce he’d be turning on the seat belt sign in 5 minutes and Mike was still sacked out, I gently shook him. He did not rouse. I shook harder and called his name. He did not stir. I could see him breathing, but he didn’t respond.

I shook more firmly still and slapped (gently) at his face and got nothing. And this began to worry me.

I stepped around to his berth and got him by the arm and pulled, exhorting him that it was time to get up, that we were landing soon.

Finally he opened his eyes and looked rather blankly at me. I kept repeating that he had to get up, that we had to get his bedding straightened up, so that we could convert the bed to a seat again. He stood up and seemed not to know what to do.

This, of course, is a very competent person, usually pretty quick on the uptake, but he just stood there looking like he didn’t know what planet he was from as I sort of elbowed him out of the way and straightened up his bedding.

When I told him to push the button to convert the bed to a seat again–the one right beside his thumb–he sort of touched it and let go and then didn’t understand that he needed to keep pushing it to raise the seat back…even after I told him two or three times. I raised the seat back and he sat down.

The flight attendant came by and he asked about breakfast–something I’d already told him a couple of times that he’d missed. She told him that she’d tried twice to wake him, but couldn’t and that breakfast was over. She offered him a quick cup of coffee, which he sat up and began to drink, with a blank, dull look on his face. The same look he turned on her each time she came back to ask if he was finished, so that she could clear the cup. She talked, he looked blank, didn’t respond, and she left…twice.

This behavior began to seriously worry me; I thought something awful must be wrong. Mike teases, cajoles, cracks jokes, laughs at all hours of the day and night; never does he sit, mute and confused.

Throughout the disembarkation process, I had to shepherd him along as I would imagine one would have to do with an elderly person suffering from dementia, constantly turning back to find him falling farther behind, having to almost pull him along the concourse, watching him list and weave and fumble and stare blankly when I spoke to him.

The lights were on and absolutely no one was home for several hours after we disembarked.

We dropped back to the back of the hoard of people making their way toward customs. Usually we’re sprinting ahead of everybody to get out and get on our way. Somehow, we made it through Passport control and Customs, but he now tells me he doesn’t remember any of it, including signing his declaration voucher (that I had to fill out for him).

I bought our tickets on the Heathrow Express train (something he usually does) and we slowly made our way into the bowels of the airport complex, down to the train platform, and onto the train into town.

We were under a tight time bind (or at least we’d put ourselves under one) trying to make it into London in time to grab lunch at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, before it closed at 2:30. It’s a pub around the corner from Samuel Johnson’s (of Dictionary fame) house and, in fact, the very establishment at which he and Boswell (not to mention even Charles Dickens) took many meals. The place has been there, as a dining establishment, since about 1538. It burned down in the great London Fire and was rebuilt on the same site (in about 1666-7). Our last trip there, he’d had a Steak and Kidney Pudding, glass of hard cider, and a bowl of Spotted Dick (a rich bread pudding speckled with raisins or currants and not in any way low carb, but delicious all the same) and I had ordered a stuffed pork tenderloin and veggies. Mine had been quite tasty, but the Steak and Kidney Pudding had been so memorable that I’d eaten half of his and foisted off half of my pork onto him. We wanted another round that we needn’t share and had been looking forward to going there to enjoy it on this trip.

All the more curious that I couldn’t seem to get him to move, talk, go. His was a one-act play: stand and stare.

We went straight to the hotel and checked in. He fell into bed and slept another three or four hours, then waked and was more like himself, but still sort of sluggish and dull.

My medical brain was spinning with differential diagnoses of what might be going on throughout the evening and after we returned to the hotel late and hit the sack: toxin? poison? stroke? He had no lateralizing neurologic signs, so I didn’t think it could be a stroke, but I must say the possibility of a TIA or RIND in the frontal, executive regions of the brain had me worried.

In the middle of the night, I awoke like a shot and knew what it had been. The Ambien (plus the copious booze) had caused a somnambulistic amnesia in him, just as it had done in those people splashed on the media who had taken the drug and suffered binge eating episodes in their sleep, walked about town, and even driven cars.

He had sleep-walked his way off the plane, through the concourse, through passport control, through Heathrow, onto the train, into a cab, to the hotel, and up to our room. He’d occasionally spoken, but most often, just looked blankly when asked a question.

I can see a little humor in it, now that I know he’s okay, but I can tell you that at the time, it was spooky and quite disturbing. And I’m…as my darling husband always reminds me…a medical man! By training and experience, I’m equipped to deal with such an episode. I cannot imagine how frightening a similar event would have been for someone without the knowledge and experience or worse yet, for someone traveling alone. Whether it was just a bad reaction to Ambien or specific to the situation of taking Ambien after drinking and being awakened instead of awakening when the drug wore off we may never know.
But for my money, I’m writing in my book of medical lore that Ambein and booze don’t mix! I can say, categorically, they’ll never get mixed again in the bloodstream of anyone I know.

Caveat snoozor!

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Sorry to have been away from the blogging desk, but as those of you who follow Mike’s blog will know, I’ve just completed a major covert operation: a large surprise birthday celebration for Mike back in our old stomping ground in Little Rock.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in cloak and dagger…well at least cloak, juggling secretive emails by the double dozen to all the different people who helped me set this whole thing up without his knowing anything. As I told all my willing co- conspirators: Mum was the word! In multiple decades of marriage, I’ve managed to surprise him exactly once. I was going for number 2 and though I had a few close calls, I made it!

I wanted to get all the kids and grandkids together in one place to wish him a happy (large number landmark birthday, specific number not to be disclosed) but because of school and work schedule conflicts, bringing them to California or Nevada wasn’t an option. The Dallas contingent couldn’t get there just for the weekend, nor could they stay longer at this particular time. We determined that Little Rock was close enough for just a weekend jaunt for them and so the place was set. Besides, we’ve got lots of friends and family there who would all want to wish him well on his big day.

To set the plan in motion, I told him there was going to be a reunion of my high school class in Hot Springs on June 23. We had our 35th reunion last summer (or tried to) but the showing was dismal, probably owing to trying to have it over the Fourth of July weekend.

A mistake they would not make again…

Only about 15 people posted out of a class of 413 last year. Most of our reunions have been very well attended, with several hundred or near that showing up for them, so it seemed reasonable, when the last one was such a bust, that we might try again this year, and thus it made a plausible ruse. At any rate, he bought the story, which was all that mattered in my plan.

As a part of our visit, Mike made big plans with my chief co-conspirator (our erstwhile next-door neighbor, Howard) to play golf on Saturday morning before we headed over to my reunion in Hot Springs (about an hour from Little Rock.)

Unbeknownst to him, all of our boys, their wives, and the three grandangels, and even one of his best golfing buddies from Santa Barbara were all converging on Little Rock on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. They dutifully kept their heads down until Saturday morning, although we almost collided with our daughter-in-law and grandsons in the Little Rock airport coming in. It was the narrowest of narrow escapes!

On Saturday morning, after I finally got Mike out the door to Howard’s house for his supposed round of golf, all of the rest of us, including all my Little Rock family, gathered in a private room at Howard’s golf club to await the unwitting birthday boy’s arrival.

Howard, who had helped me set up everything related to the golf outing and brunch, reeled him in like a mullet on the line with a story about having to check a party room for a friend of his who wanted Howard to host a party for him at the club. My dear mullet swallowed the tale hook, line, and sinker. Howard looked in one room and sent Mike up to check out the one we were quietly waiting in.

When Mike pushed the door open to check out the room, he thought he’d walked in on someone else’s party and shut the door. Howard pushed it back open and we all did the “Surprise!” thing and, I have to say, he truly was surprised. Which with him is no small feat, let me tell you. Somehow he always finds me out. I don’t know how, but fate just conspires to tip him off.

We enjoyed our breakfast (complete with mimosas and Bloody Marys) and sent two foursomes out to play golf on a sweltering Arkansas summer day. The rest of us dispersed to enjoy the day in other ways or were off to set up for a family birthday BBQ bash later that night at my sister’s house.

I have to say, I felt like I’d run a major campaign when it was finally over; I hid, dissembled, told secrets, and out-right-lied with a straight face for 6 or 8 weeks to pull this thing off. The strain was nearly intolerable…I can’t tell you how many times I almost slipped and said the wrong thing. I would not have made good spy fodder, that’s for sure. But it was worth it in the end to see the look of surprise on his face!

I’m just thankful that it’s over and until maybe birthday number 70 or 75, I won’t have to think of doing anything remotely similar!

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