Tamburitzans!!

Every year the Duquesne University Tamburitzan dance and music troupe visits our state as part of their nine month tour. If you have never seen this Tamburitzan show you are missing something spectacular. According to their website, the Tamburitzans are "America's longest-running multicultural song and dance company, the Duquesne University TAMBURITZANS is a unique ensemble of talented young folk artists dedicated to the performance and preservation of the music, songs, and dances of Eastern Europe and neighboring folk cultures."

Wednesday's show started off with a group instrumental that highlighted many of the diverse instruments and beautiful costumes:










All the musicians play numerous instruments, some common and some not so common, such as this nose flute:








Needless to say, this got quite a reaction from the audience.






This year the dancing acts weren't as athletic or exciting as in years past, however we all agreed that the costumes were the most beautiful we had ever seen:

The dancers and musicians are are undergraduate college students and they must go through an intense audition process before being selected to participate in the group. According to the website, they go to "Tammie Camp" in the month of July where they learn and choreograph all their routines for the season's tour. This season's tour ran from August 13 2006 up to May 29 2007, an amazing 70 performances in all.






In addition to the more serious traditional Eastern European music and dances, the troupe also performs humorous acts such as the Siberian Wrestlers.

These guys were really short and wrestled all over the stage. It was hilarious. Of course it ended up being just one guy who had "wrestled" himself by crawling around on all fours. When he stood up and revealed himself the audience went wild.






The last dance was my favorite. It was a Romale gypsy song and dance and reminded me of some kind of gitanos meets West Side Story:

All in all it was an amazing evening of watching some unique and athletic performances. The only tiny negative was the asshole sitting next to me. He was very rude and kept leaning into me, but I heard him tell his wife he had a sore elbow so I "accidentally" bonked it and that stopped his invasion of my space. He also had gastric problems and belched throughout the performance, yuck. Luckily the music was mostly loud so I only heard his volcanic rumblings during the quiet songs. But other than that it was a perfectly marvelous evening.

See you next year Tamburitzans!!

"Truffle" oil, cuisine's nasty little secret

Oh dear, I just read in the paper that "Truffle" oil doesn't contain truffles at all, but rather a chemical compound called 2,4-dithiapentane. The story came out of the NY Times and can be read here.

This story does not surprise me, and for some time I have suspected this might be the case. A few years ago I began ordering truffles from Oregon. I began making my own truffle oil with the truffles I didn't immediately eat. I noticed that 1) I could never get that intense truffle aroma found in purchased oils and 2) the truffle aroma dissipated fairly quickly from my homemade oil as opposed to purchased truffle oils.

I never researched my suspicions. Maybe I didn't want to know the truth, maybe I just didn't have time. I stopped purchasing truffle oil and became a little more careful about making my own.

Here is my recipe:
1) Put 6 -8 small, ripe truffles in a quart of excellent EVOO.
2) Place in a cool, dark place for three weeks, shaking occasionally.
3) Keep this bottle of truffled olive oil in the refrigerator and decant small portions to be kept at room temperature and used as needed. This bottle lasts about a year until the next crop of truffles can be ordered.


(Here is my previous post on truffled eggs.)

It's tough to be a woman

Oh the horrors of waxing. Yesterday I decided it was time to do an upper lip wax. Luckily I'm not dark-haired so I don't have to go through this torture too frequently, and I only do the bikini wax prior to a long dive vacation, so basically every other year or so.

The first problem with yesterday's waxing was that I was out of wax. No big deal, I bopped over to the drugstore to pick up a pot of parrafin. They didn't have the stuff I usually get, which is basically just hardened cosmetic beeswax, melt it, smear it on, rip it off. No, they didn't have the easy stuff, they only had the fancy (bad sign #1), more complicated (bad sign #2), more expensive kind (bad sign #3). The dreadful goo that I bought turned out to be bright purple (bad sign #4), probably because of its fake lavender scent (bad sign #5).

The directions were titled Easy Directions (bad sign #6). So the deal with this wax is you have to warm it, apply a thin layer, put a piece of special paper on top (special anything, bad sign #7), then when you rip the paper off...voilà, all the pesky hair goes with it. So I followed the instructions exactly, when I ripped the paper off...voilà, the purple goo remained in place except for some which spread all over my lips and nose.

OK, I thought, I'll try the paper again...voilà, nothing happened, goo still on face. Now I was getting worried, how in the hell was I going to get the goo off? I tried to remove the goo with hand lotion, nada. I tried alcohol, nada. I tried witch hazel, purple goo still on face. I tried nailpolish remover, if anything the goo was getting harder and more solidified. I began to feel desperate, would I have to resort to acetone? Gawd I hoped not.

Tom was somewhere around the house and no way was I going to let him see me with the big smear of purple goo on my face. I would never live it down. I opened the bathroom door for a peek, I couldn't hear him so I thought maybe he stepped out. I crept to the garage where I hoped to find the acetone or paint thinner, both of which I dreaded putting on my face but it was better than the purple paste. As I got to the garage I could hear him talking to a neighbor! They were both in the garage. Drat!

I ran back to the bathroom, locked the door, and rummaged through the medicine cabinet where I found a bottle of Vitamin E oil. I dabbed a little bit on and the toxic waste started coming off. It took a while, but eventually between the smearing and the dabbing I was able to get it all off.

My upper lip was finally goo-free but also quite red and tortured-looking from all the rubbing. Worst of all, the odious "wax" never did get the hair off my lip. I suppose I should try it again but I'm still traumatized by yesterday's ordeal. The thought of doing that to my bikini area makes chills run down my back. I think I'd better go find the old-fashioned, non-fancy wax before I try it again.

Today when I got to work the office manager looked at me and asked, "Did you get a sunburn yesterday? Your face looks kind of red."

Stay away from this crap!!!

Snickering at Icky Snickers Salad

I was talking to a friend of mine from the upper midwest who went home to visit her mom last weekend. We got on the topic of bizarre foods that have somehow turned into family traditions. I mentioned the Pink Strawberry Jello Angel Food monstrosity that my cousins make every Easter.

Apparently in her family they serve Snickers Salad every Mother's Day. I consider myself to be fairly well versed on the subject of regrettable food, especially from the midwest where I have deep roots, but I had never heard of Snickers Salad.

She says there is hot regional debate on the best recipes, all of which include the basics of Snickers bars, Granny Smith apples, and Cool Whip. The non-purists, those who wish to gild the lily so to speak, will add such ingredients as nuts, cream cheese, sour cream, marshmallows, and vanilla pudding to name a few.

Her family are purists and here is their recipe:

SNICKERS SALAD
5-6 apples, cored and cubed

1 lg. container Cool Whip

3-4 SNICKERS® candy bars, cut into small pieces
Mix all of the above ingredients and refrigerate.

Is it a salad? It looks kind of like potato salad.

I can only imagine what my California friends would say if I brought this so-called "salad" to a pot-luck.

cinco de mayo - a belated Olé

Here is how I celebrated my Cinco de Mayo:


1) I made a Lucha Libre over-the-shoulder tote. It is the mask of El Santo in aluminized Kevlar appliqued onto black Sunbrella with a fluffy pink boa trim:







2) I went to Santa Cruz to do race committee for the Melges 24 Worlds warm-up races. I was on the committee boat setting marks, doing starts and finishes:


After the races I had a Margarita with a sailor named Pepe.



3) On my way home I listened to my Juanes CD, 'Mi Sangre', which is excellent, and then my Spanish vocabulary CD. CD in Spanish is CD, except that it's pronounced "say day."








4) After the regatta I went straight to Foothill Junior College's Psychotronix Film Festival. It was craptastic!! My favorite short of the evening was the Scopitone of Miss Joi Lansing singing "Trapped in the Web of Love." Check out the link!

During the break Sis, Erik, Tom and I went to the car for some cervezas, yum!! After the break they passed out 3-D glasses and we watched a silly 3-D film. It was a great festival but we finally got tired and went home.

May Day

Mayday originated in pagan Europe. It was a festive holy day celebrating the first spring planting. The ancient Celts and Saxons celebrated May 1st as Beltane or the day of fire. Bel was the Celtic god of the sun.

The Mayday celebrations were eventually outlawed by the Catholic church, but were still celebrated by peasants until the late 1700's. Revelers, led by Diana, Goddess of the Hunt,(sometimes played by a pagan-priest in women's clothing) and Herne, the Horned God, would travel up the hill shouting, chanting and singing, while blowing hunting horns.

As European peasants moved away from hunting gathering societies their gods and goddesses changed to reflect a more agrarian society. Thus Diana and Herne came to be seen by medieval villagers as fertility deities of the crops and fields. Diana became the Queen of the May and Herne became Robin Goodfellow (a predecessor of Robin Hood) or the Green Man, also known as Puck.

Besides the selection of the May Queen was the raising of the phallic Maypole, around which the young single men and women of the village would dance holding on to the ribbons until they became entwined, with their ( hoped for) new love.

And of course there was Robin Goodfellow who was the Lord of Misrule for this day. Mayday was a celebration of the common people, and Robin would be the King/Priest/Fool for a day. Priests and Lords were the butt of many jokes, and Robin and his supporters would make jokes and poke fun of the local authorities.

In honor of our four year anniversary of being at war maybe it's time to poke fun at our own fearless leader, and what better way to do it than by using his own words? Here are some Bushisms from almost exactly four years ago:

"We've got hundreds of sites to exploit, looking for the chemical and biological weapons that we know Saddam Hussein had prior to our entrance into Iraq."—Santa Clara, Calif., May 2, 2003

"We ended the rule of one of history's worst tyrants, and in so doing, we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure."—Crawford, Texas, May 3, 2003

"I think war is a dangerous place."—Washington, D.C., May 7, 2003

I think Robin Goodfellow should have the last word this Mayday:


"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
--Puck (Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream)