Where to start?

It has been quite a busy week, so I will start where I last left off and work my way through. I had started this post last Friday, writing about the New York Times crossword puzzle from Thursday.

31 Across Clue:

Highest-paid TV star of 2014, by far (9 letters)

31 Across Answer:

JUDGEJUDY

I was incredulous so I googled and found that Judge Judy is far and away the highest paid person on television, according to TV Guide's fifth annual list. Judge Judy Sheindlin gets paid $47 million per year to negotiate petty disputes on the daytime show that bears her name.

Then I learned something else surprising: "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart is the second highest paid TV star, although he lags far behind Sheindlin at $25-30 million per year. Stewart apparently attracts a young, professional demographic that is sought by advertisers, and is the top-paid star of night-time television.

These figures simply boggle the mind.

We drove up to Sharon on Thursday morning and had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner: all the traditional dishes prepared and served beautifully by our daughters and sons-in-law. 

We had a delicious and enjoyable Friday evening dinner with Dina and family who had also invited a young family who are relatively new to Sharon. On Sabbath day, Joshua and Ella joined us for lunch while their parents and little sister went over to friends who have younger children. Since we were just preparing that one meal, we were able to relax and see a movie Friday afternoon.

We chose “The Theory of Everything,” which was playing on The Lux Level at the nearby Showcase Cinema. I was not expecting much, but was pleasantly surprised. The film was interesting and quite heartwarming, perfect end-of-year fare. This biographical film tells the story of Steven Hawking, a brilliant scientist who was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a motor neuron disorder) in his early twenties. Given two years to live, he completed his doctorate and married a fellow graduate student (in European literature) with whom he had three children. The film is based on Jane Hawking’s memoir, “Traveling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen.”

We were not familiar with the cast, which included Felicity Jones as Jane and Eddie Redmayne as Stephen. The two roles presented interesting challenges. For Mr. Redmayne, the physical limitations provided special challenges. The only part of his body over which he had any control was his eyes, which had to embody all of his emotions.

  

Ultimately, Stephen’s illness tested Jane’s resourcefulness, pulling her away from her own work and causing her much stress and worry. The movie is poignant and honest in showing how Jane and Stephen’s marriage leaves both of them exhausted and unfulfilled. Their marriage amazingly survived this unfathomable stress for thirty years, and Stephen is still alive at the age of 72.

Sabbath had been an exhausting day. We stayed at the Kiddush (refreshments) quite a while after morning services, socializing with friends. Usually I try to find someplace to sit but I stood for quite a while. Then we had the Joshua and Ella with us all afternoon, and Ella stayed on with us for a while after Sabbath ended. She was watching something on TV and I had gotten up to find a recipe I was planning to prepare on Sunday. I am still not sure just what happened, but the next thing I knew I was on the floor. I quickly noticed blood was dripping, and it turned out that I had gashed my lip. Barry helped me get settled with some ice and took Ella home. The bleeding just did not want to stop, and we debated going to a local emergency room but decided it was too late and too cold to venture out, so I continued icing it, put my pillow in a large plastic bag with an old towel on top, and tried to get some sleep. Fortunately, my lip stopped bleeding but we still thought it might be a good idea to go to urgent care on Sunday morning to have it looked at. The doctor there told me that I did exactly the right thing icing it, and since the cut was on the inside of my lip it could not be sutured. It is still healing, and I would not be surprised if someone were to ask me how the other guy looks! I have since discovered quite a bit of stiffness in and bruising on my right arm, which I must have used to try to catch myself.

What is funny is that we do not often stay for Kiddush. The room tends to be very crowded and stuffy, and I have had some breathing difficulties there. But for whatever reason, everything seemed fine this week. It is not a mistake I will make again soon. This is an activity best left to the younger folk.

Looking forward now…Bob Dylan is in New York this week doing some shows at The Beacon Theater. It is a long story, but we ended up with tickets for two of the shows, the one least night and the one tonight. We had no intention of going to both, and tonight’s seats were the better ones, so we decided to sell last night’s. We put them onto a site called StubHub. We were not looking to make money on them, but we started at a high price just to see how it would go. We lowered it a couple of times and then about a week ago we realized that, if we wanted to sell them, we needed to price them as low or lower than the others for sale in that section at that moment. Once we did that, they sold very quickly. We even made some money, although I plan to donate it to charity because that was not the point. However, it became a sort of game, with Barry going on every couple of hours yesterday to see how the remaining tickets were going. Once the concert time (8:00 pm) had passed, all remaining tickets were removed from the site. The truth is that Dylan did not seem to be quite the draw we expected him to be. So we should be pleased we were able to sell the tickets at all.

I will report back on Dylan. Meanwhile, stay warm and dry and be well.

Love,

Rebecca

Not just a turkey!

Addition for Thanksgiving: Maya made this at school today. Notice the pattern, very carefully thought out, with interesting symmetries. That’s my girl!

Grammar lessons

We often find ourselves correcting our elementary school grandchildren’s use of the English language. Among the incorrect phrases they are often heard to say is “me and my friend played a game.” Our corrections motivate them to practice rolling their eyes.

We were a bit surprised to hear President Obama say the following last week (emphasis mine):

“To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”

The use of “my” or “me” in this sentence is actually rather complicated. A non-finite verb form that can function as a noun is called a gerund. The gerund is the form that names the action of the verb (for instance, “acting” is the action of "to act"). So in the sentence quoted here, “acting” is functioning as a noun, which would suggest that “my” would be the better choice. Another choice is to rework the sentence a bit, and say

“To those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the action I took when Congress failed to act, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”

But here is a somewhat less flattering thought. The phrase "me acting where Congress has failed" might seem as though the Congress does not object so much to what Mr. Obama did but rather simply does not like Mr. Obama personally. Is it possible that the President is a stickler for grammar and said precisely what he was trying to say?

I sit here listening to an endless stream of bad news from my home town of St. Louis. I am not sure I was ever in Florissant but I just took a look at Google Maps and it is only about 15 miles from where I lived as a girl. The pain of the family and community is very sad indeed.

For some years after our daughter Simmie was born 12 weeks prematurely, I found myself amazed at every full-term healthy baby born among our friends. Of course everyone knows that a healthy baby is a miracle, but fortunately most of us do not have to experience this feeling in such a stark way. That same sort of feeling has come over me quite a few times during the past 2½ years as I have seen a number of friends receive cancer diagnoses. But the latest is especially poignant: one of Barry’s students, a radiation oncology resident at Mt. Sinai, is now undergoing cancer treatment.

One of the really nice things that comes from being part of a traditional Jewish community is the way that people pitch in to help families in need. Not surprisingly, the primary activity revolves around food. Whether it is providing meals for families sitting shiva (the week of mourning) for a loved one or for families welcoming a new baby, there never seems to be a lack of volunteers. For some years I coordinated this activity for our synagogue in Riverdale. These days there are web sites that help to organize the meals and communicate the recipient family’s preferences and allergies, much easier than all those phone calls I used to make! What I never realized until now is that this is also done outside the traditional Jewish community. A couple of the other residents set up a page on Care Calendar, and we were honored to have an opportunity to prepare a dinner for the resident and her father, who has come to take care of her during treatment, and look forward to doing this again.

We are planning to head up to Sharon tomorrow morning. Let’s hope the weather cooperates, and the snow ends this evening with plenty of time to clear the roads.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Love,

Rebecca

Rosewater

Once again, a week has passed since my last post, but I sit at the computer feeling overwhelming sadness. Whatever I may have planned to write has been overshadowed by the news from Israel, the murder of four innocent men saying the morning prayers at a synagogue in Jerusalem. There are never many degrees of separation between traditional Jews. Even if we are not personally acquainted with the victims, it is not unusual for us to know someone who is related to or friends of the victim’s family. Last week, a young woman was killed whose family is well known to friends of ours. Today, one of the four victims of the attack was the brother of a woman who lives with her family diagonally across the street from us.  

We had been anxious to see Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, “Rosewater,” and were able to squeeze it in when we returned to New York. Given the recent events, this seemed an appropriate film to see. Although the reviews were not overwhelmingly positive (a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes), as fans of The Daily Show we just had to see it. Having said that, I have always had some trouble watching movies with violence, and at this point I generally try to completely steer clear of them. So I went into this with some trepidation, and I did have to close my eyes during some scenes.  

Rosewater is based on The New York Times best-selling memoir "Then They Came for Me: A Family's Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival," written by Maziar Bahari. Bahari was born and raised in Iran but moved to the UK as an adult, where he worked for the BBC. In 2009, he returned to Iran to interview Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who was the prime challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. After sending the BBC film footage of the street riots that followed the obviously rigged election, Bahari was arrested by police. What followed was a nightmarish 118 days during which he was interrogated and tortured by a man who frequently sprayed himself with rosewater. Unbeknownst to Bahari, as well as to moviegoers until the very end, his wife lead an international campaign to have her husband freed, and Western media outlets kept the story alive. Iranian authorities finally released Bahari on $300,000 bail and the promise he would act as a spy for the government.

Although I almost assuredly would never have seen this movie if not for Jon Stewart’s role in bringing it to the screen, I thought it was extremely well done. If you are able to watch such films, I highly recommend it, but it is definitely not a fun date night.

It is not yet winter, but the way it feels outside it might as well be. So stay warm and have a good week!

Love,

Rebecca 

Finding roots

A week has passed since my last post, busy with relatively mundane activities. Dina was attending a workshop out of town for a couple of days, so we went up to Sharon to be grandparents. The older children had school and Julia went to her regular daycare while Barry worked I prepared dinners and Sabbath meals. The three days flew by, and somehow I never even got around to taking any pictures. We are heading back to Sharon this weekend. We will spend Shabbat with Simmie and family, and then on Sunday Barry and I are taking Joshua and Ella to a hockey game, the Providence Bruins (the development team for the Boston Bruins) vs. the Portland Pirates, the beginning of a bunch of tickets to sporting and theatrical events we have bought as Chanukah presents.

A few years ago I “friended” singer/songwriter Carole King on FaceBook. Although I only look at FB occasionally, she (or, more likely, her representatives) appears to post quite frequently. A few days ago I caught a blurb about an upcoming episode of the PBS series; “Finding Your Roots” called “Our People, Our Traditions” featuring Carole King, playwright Tony Kushner, and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.  Something reminded me about it yesterday, and I found it on-line. It is long (an hour) but is interesting and really quite moving. With the storm on its way to these parts, having already hit our Midwestern friends with snow and frigid temperatures, it is a good chance to fix yourself a cup of hot tea or cocoa and sit back and enjoy this.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365359298/

We also found a couple of hours to sneak out and see the new documentary, Citizenfour. The making of this movie is a pretty amazing story. In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was several years into making a film about surveillance in the post-9/11 era when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as "CITIZENFOUR," who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she and Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for The Guardian, flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes. 

There are many difficult questions raised by this story. How worried should we all be about the massive amounts of our personal information available to so many people? It goes without saying that much of the answer to this question depends on how the individuals accessing this data intend to use it. Most of us would agree that the lack of a repeat of September 11^th, 2001, is a very good thing, even at the cost of sacrificing some privacy. But do we need this much surveillance to prevent a repeat of that horrific event? How will we ever know? How worried should we be or do we have to be if we know we have not done and do not intend to do anything wrong? At the end of the day, Barry and I did not find Snowden all that much of a hero. I am in no position to judge how much damage he might have done to our national security, but I am not convinced that he found out anything we all needed to know about the overwhelming majority of citizens both here and abroad. As I have discussed about airline security, we need to become smarter and more focused in this work. Still, it is an incredibly well done documentary and worth seeing.

Have a good week, and stay warm!

Love,

Rebecca 

Great for the soul

I should read movie reviews more carefully before I go to see movies. An approval rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes does not guarantee that I will enjoy or appreciate a film. We did not want to go into the City on Sunday because of that little group of 50,000 runners participating in The New York City Marathon, so we chose a film that was playing at a small art-house theater in Westchester not far from here, “Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance.” I am hard pressed to call my relative ignorance “virtuous;” this was one very strange film. To be honest, I spent much of the two hours completely lost, and was only able to piece things together with some help from movie reviews read as I sat down to write this.

The main character is Riggan Thomas (played by very different Michael Keaton than “Mr. Mom” over thirty years ago), a once known but now washed up iconic super hero called "The Birdman" who had recently turned down a fourth installment of the franchise. Now washed up, he attempts to reinvent himself as a director by staging a new retelling of a classic Broadway dramatic play called "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." The days leading up to the premier find the cast suffering one disaster after another, including an on-set injury of the lead actor and a scramble to find a replacement. Riggan gives the role to a method actor who takes the job quite seriously. But Riggan has a hard time juggling between the set, his replacement actor, his troubled daughter, and a host of other disasters that prevent a proper staging of the play. Meanwhile, a New York Times critic who Riggan has to woo threatens to shut down production of the play before it even starts with a scathing review of the opening night performance. All of this is told going in and out of disturbing hallucinations Riggan experiences. Does Riggan have a hit on his hands or will he even make it past opening night? I do not want to share the ending lest any of you wish to see this film. But you might think about saving your time and money. 

There is a quintessential New York City grocery store on the Upper West Side (Broadway and 91^st Street) called Barzini’s. It is not an entirely kosher store but they happen to carry many kosher items, and they are located across the street from Kosher Marketplace, a kosher grocery and prepared food emporium that we tend to frequent. Some months ago Barry noticed that Barzini’s sells Chocolat Bonnat, a line of certified kosher chocolates from France. There are at least eight types of chocolates, with names like Ceylan, Madagascar, and Trinite (you can check these out at  

Chocolat Bonnat

When Barry is in that neighborhood he often stops in and buys them for me, even stockpiling them in some hidden place to whip out a new one when I have finished the previous one (yes, I can hear all the sighs and “what a sweet guy he is”).  

The wrappers on this chocolate all say “Pour Croquer.” I was curious what this meant, so I (1) put it into the Google translator and (2) asked my friend who teaches French to high school students, and both gave the same answer: it means “to chew,” which I assume means that it is chocolate for eating rather than cooking/baking. In addition, in searching around about this I found that there are some chocolates that specifically instruct not to chew, rather to just let them melt in the mouth. As far as I can see, these Bonnat chocolates are amazing either way.

A side note: we can testify that young children do not seem to appreciate these very dark chocolates, which is just as well!

Here is a little about the company that I found on-line:

Master chocolate makers, Raymond and Stéphane Bonnat, select only the finest cocoa classics to make their chocolates in Voiron which nestles right in the heart of the Chartreuse mountains. All of the cocoas used are shipped in from the finest cocoa plantations in the world in the form of beans. They are then roasted and transformed into the wonderful chocolates you are about to discover,  compare and taste. 

Bonnat is the story of a family’s long love affair with chocolate. It is a story which began back in 1884 when Félix Bonnat established his premises at number 8, cours Sénozan in Voiron (Isère region). 

All Bonnat’s customers in France and those making their way home for Christmas by boat from the French colonies looked forward to tasting the Voiron “Pavés” (Praline Chunks) and other Bonnat specialities. 

As time went by Félix Bonnat’s two sons, Armand and Gaston, began to help him more and more with the production and running of the family business. 

In 1956 Raymond Bonnat finally took over the firm. After studying business, he toured France, studied at the School of Chocolatiers in Basel, completed the COBA School and finally did a tour of Switzerland. He got married in 1959 and his wife Nicole, the daughter of well-known hoteliers in the region, helped him to run the business. Two of their four children, Cécile and Stéphane from the fourth generation, perpetuate the high quality tradition which has always formed the basis of the family business. 

Our shop in Voiron is a place of pilgrimage for unconditional Bonnat lovers where they are greeted by Nicole Bonnat and her daughter Cécile. 

Given that many tourists pass through Voiron on their way to the mountains, many of our foreign customers often stop off en route to see us. Our products are sold in Paris and in sixty other departments of France thanks to our network of sales representatives. Bonnat was dispatching its products out to the French colonies as early as 1919 – Africa, Indo-china, Asia. Because our business has always taken us to far away countries, having an affinity with and understanding the diverse mentalities of different continents is something which comes naturally. And of course our travels have also given us a real taste for the high seas. 

In France, as abroad, our priority is to preserve the chocolate- making traditions which have made the Bonnat name so famous. We believe that: "What is good to the taste is great for the soul" 

Chocolat Bonnat's 100% Cacao is made from 100% pure dark chocolate chocolate.     

I LOVE that last line, “what is good for the taste is great for the soul.” How very true!

Have a sweet week!

Love,

Rebecca

Over the rainbow

Even at a relatively young age, you begin to have an idea of where children may be headed. Joshua is passionate about watching and participating in sports, and somehow he may well find a way to have that interest play a major role in his life. Both Ella and Eliana say they want to be teachers, but that is, after all, the main working women they see. Maya says she wants to be an artist, and I posted one of her drawings here last week. Julia may be a bit young, but watching her determination on the following video, we may finally be watching a budding musician.

Tuesday evening we went to the 92^nd Street Y to see Amy Poehler interviewing Seth Meyers. As expected, this was over an hour of endless laughs. Although some of it was too rapid-fire for me to absorb, what I did catch was really funny. The catalyst for this speaking engagement was that Ms. Poehler has recently published a memoir, Yes Please, which I believe was released for general sale the next day. Along with the tickets came two signed first editions. We are anxious to read it.

Wednesday afternoon I had to go into the City for my monthly injection, so Barry and I met when that was done and decided to take in a movie. We saw “Dear White People.” Here is what A.O. Scott had to say:

“Dear White People” is the name of Justin Simien’s first feature film, and I’ll say right away that it is as smart and fearless a debut as I have seen from an American filmmaker in quite some time: knowing but not snarky, self-aware but not solipsistic, open to influence and confident in its own originality. It’s a clever campus comedy that juggles a handful of hot potatoes — race, sex, privilege, power — with elegant agility and only an occasional fumble. You want to see this movie, and you will want to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little awkward. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. There is great enjoyment to be found here, and very little comfort.

Reading this today (I had not before) I have to say it is really on the mark. There were many characters and I had a bit of trouble keeping them all straight, but the messages were quite clear, and at the end they showed newspaper clips and pictures of groups of students from universities across the country demonstrating that the issues the movie raises are still very much a part of campus life. Blacks constituted only a small minority of the students at the University of Rochester in the early 1970s, and they largely kept to themselves for reasons I could not entirely understand. So this movie was interesting for me.

It began to rain as we were leaving the movie theater and driving up the West Side Highway, but the sun was trying to shine through, and a beautiful rainbow formed over the Hudson River. I was able to take a picture because we were sitting in traffic, but it was still difficult to get a good one from behind the glass.

Be well, all.

Love,

Rebecca