Night Out

Out on a Dinner Date with this Young Lady Last Night

After my fun morning of digging out from Saturday’s snow storm the rest of the day was consumed with normal Sunday chores and playoff football. That is until late in the day when our Saturday night dinner plans were resurrected. We joined the neighborhood Mafioso and a pair of their friends for a very enjoyable dinner at Peppercorn’s. Since it was a school night I prohibited myself from adult beverages but that did nothing to militate against the good times. Predictably, since we were blessed with grandchildren, most of the conversation swirled around that generation after next. We boasted the youngest of that generation but of course had more than enough to brag about to be competitive. It was a great way to spend a frigid Sunday night, good friends.

The Fun Group Last Night

The First Blog Reader, who’s ears should have been burning fiercely, actually demanded two Facetime calls with us yesterday. She tells her mother that she wants to call “abuela” and “ampa” but she soon wanders off when the conversations started. She’s making it a point to re-acquaint herself with her L.A. stockpile of toys which obviously was more important than swapping silly faces with her grandparents. It did not matter, we were charmed nevertheless. She has also taken to piling up dirt at the bottom of playground slides. We’re not exactly sure why, yet.

Midst of Dirt Piling

I’m kidding my wife about her hysterical reactions to finally spending some of the winter months in New England. She is not a fan of cold weather. She has however taken special interest in her beloved bougainvillea plants. They now have their own personal humidifier and sun lamps to see these tropical beasts through the austere winter.

The Bougainvillea Life Support Station

I didn’t even realize the Golden Globes were on last night but I was certainly reminded this morning with the uproar about Meryl Streep's speech where she took on the president elect was highlighted. Someone needs to take away the tweet button from him because his completely ungracious response only added fuel to the fire. I’ll be the first one to say actors usually lack the education and experience to make cogent political comment but as always Ms. Streep was elegant and insightful, here’s what she had to say:

“You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press. But who are we? And what is Hollywood anyway? It's just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper's cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island. Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids from Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Veneto, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in — no — in Ireland, I do believe, and she's here nominated for playing a small-town girl from Virginia. Ryan Gosling, like all the nicest people, is Canadian. And Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, is here for playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners, and if we kick them all out, you'll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts. They gave me three seconds to say this. So an actor's only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us and let you feel what that feels like, and there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that, breathtaking, compassionate work. But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hook in my heart not because it was good. It was — there was nothing good about it, but it was effective, and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart, and I saw it, and I still can't get it out of my head because it wasn't in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate when it's modeled by someone in the public platform by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence insights violence. When the powerful use definition to bully others, we all lose. Ok. Go on with that thing. OK. This brings me to the press. We need the principal press to hold power to account to call them on the carpet for every outrage.”