R's rue: 06/27/21

A Birthday and a Tattoo !!!!!!

It’s my sister Ann’s birthday tomorrow .

The family met up today for a long lunch in her garden which was lovely

Both my sisters have a talent for gardening.

We shared our respective news over baby lamb chops

I didn’t tell them about the tattoo.

Oh, I haven’t told you lot either have I ?

Well I’m having a tattoo….

You can blame Gorgeous Dave if you like, for after a night out with him, during which he shared with me his recent booking for his tattoo, I hatched my plan to have one myself.

And all in a good cause

I will be having a tattoo in a fund raiser for my hospice.

I will publish details of how to sponsor me ( if anyone is interested) at a later date

But I will leave you with an illustration of what the tattoo will look like

Yes it’s classy and very small…it’s one of the Llandudno goats..an emblem that saved the hospice this year

Yes, it’s of one of the famous Llandudno goats

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Surfside

Please pray

For Surfside

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Like many people, the music that still haunts me is the music of my youth. In a way it is as if my musical tastes are more or less frozen in time. I still like Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Free and Jackson Browne, The Incredible String Band and Leonard Cohen. I associate much of "my" music with the time before adult responsibilities arrived - climbing up onto the conveyor belt of work and paying a mortgage and marriage and children.

As a consequence, I kind of missed out on a lot of great music that came along afterwards. Recently, more or less by accident, I have been paying more attention to the music of R.E.M. . For instance, there was a late night programme on the television called "R.E.M. at the BBC" and I was entranced by it.

Formed in 1980 at university in Georgia, they were a very tight band. They sought to be true to themselves and to their ideas. As most readers will know, the frontman was a wiry, elf-like fellow called Michael Stipe and as well as singing the songs he was the lyricist. Many of his ideas were original and poetic. There was a mysterious, plaintive quality about a lot of his lines and on stage he would often appear to live them as if mesmerised, reaching for something higher than ordinary life. It is said that Stipe came up with the band's strange name which he spotted randomly in a dictionary.

Michael Stipe is 61 years old now. R.E.M. split up in 2011 and it is unlikely that they will ever be heard live again. If I had been ten years younger they would surely been right up there on my favourites list but I kind of missed them. Behind them the band left a long history of touring the world, wowing audiences everywhere and of course they left a catalogue of memorable songs, like these three:-

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In The Heights

It grew in me, but I wasn’t blown away by it

This just about underlined what I thought about Lin Manual Miranda’s intensely personal production of

In The Heights.

Now you could tell from the get go that this sprawling depiction of Miranda’s home “town” of Washington Heights , the Latina quarter of New York, was going to be a nostalgic homage to a diverse community which is longing for home or indeed desperate to escape it but, for me despite the colour, the huge flamboyant set pieces and the rhythms, it was all a bit too much.

Anthony Ramos

Having said this, the cast was impeccable. Anthony Ramos is an instantly lovable leading man and Melissa Barrera and Leslie Grace stand out as two twenty something women who are both trying to forge themselves a place in a city who still view latina women as nothing more than waitresses and maids and

Olga Merediz also shines as the quarter’s gentle natured matriarch Abuela , an old lady who has never forgotten the poverty of her homeland of Cuba.

Enjoyable. Occasionally stunning, it’s worth seeing.

But I wasn’t blown away .

Olga Merediz

Chester races were on yesterday, so the city was buzzing with drunken race goers when we came out of the cinema. It felt like a Latina carnival itself.

It was nice to go for supper late in a restaurant overlooking Bridge Street and watch the world stagger by

Big thank you to the Storyhouse front of house who gave me one of her bespoke masks when I forgot mine

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