A Most Excellent 70th Birthday Party

May 8, 2010

Thank you for your good wishes. I anticipated turning a quiet 70 years old yesterday.

By 7 am Glen and I had slipped down to the local Sainsbury Store to top up on 2% milk, bread, oranges and bananas, a quick stroll through early morning mist – not rain but the ground was wet and there was some moisture on our faces.

By 8:45 am nine of us were on the C2 bendy bus to Victoria Station, to line up for the day seats for Wicked. There are 24 seats for the matinee, and 24 seats for the night performance released at 10 am for the price of £25, first come, first served. Getting there at 8:45 am meant that we were already 13th in line and had to wait an hour and a quarter for the box office to open.

The coffee drinkers warmed up with white chocolate mocha lattes for they could see the wait would be a long wet cold one. I saw taxis form lines to pick up customers, and the line-up was so long that 3 security personnel have to manage the lines, telling the drivers when they can move up or turn another corner so that they get in the cue that is maintained allowing each taxi to gets its rightful share of customers. Laynie was trying to figure out the savings on the tickets, £22 pounds per ticket for 9 of us. I guess it would only be right to subtract the price of the lattees from the savings.

Before 10:30 am Greg was leading six of us down to the Borough Food Market, held under London Bridge on Saturday mornings. He says it is a lonely spot when he comes down there to meetings on weekdays and there are empty spaces and cobblestones under the bridge. The food market on Saturdays picks up the pace – Polish sausage, Parmesan from deep in Italy, the fresh smell of yeast breads, organic produce, stalks on which hang beautiful mint leaves, bottled balsamic vinegars of all qualities, prosciutto sliced from the leg of a pig which was clamped to the table with a wooden vice.

If one market was good, two were better and by noon we were on our way to Portobello, the world’s largest antique market. Greg has mentioned a number of times that he will miss the viener schnitzel he buys there, so that is what David and I lined up to purchase. “Do you know what schnitzel is?”, I asked David.

“No,” he said.

“I think it is breaded veal cutlets,” I replied.

“Where did you get that information from?”, he asked.

“I don’t know,” I laughingly replied. “I just looked way back into my memory and there is was – a piece of information floating around all by its self in a deep, dark, unfilled abyss.”

The shop clerk told to wait for 5 minutes for our order until the next batch was ready, so we watched 3 women and a man in a booth so small that they could not work their way around each other, except by using a complicated do-si-do step. The 3 women called out to the customers who were lined up 3 and 4 deep, “Yes, please” which meant, what is it you want? With tongs, they deftly laid sausages and spicy chicken into large buns they were holding, pocketing the payment and moving the customers on with a flick of the server’s wrists.

Transportation doesn’t always run smoothly and while Laynie and I thought we would have plenty of time after the markets to get to the corner of Seven Dials where Chicago was playing. That was not so, and in fact, Greg, seeing that we were not going to make it on time got us off at the Strand and we ran up the sloping clobble stoned streets, through Covent Garden, around buskers, hopping up a few cement steps, then down a few limestone steps and forcing our way through the centre of isles of small market shops lined with strolling pedestrians and racing in front of slow moving taxis – Greg leading the way.

We dashed into the theatre foyer 30 seconds before the curtain rose, looking to meet Wyona. She had left our tickets at the box office and preceded us into the theatre and was standing there so that our places four rows from the front were easy to spot.

Laynie was the one of our group who hadn’t seen Chicago before. Laynie leaned over to me that her gift to both of us was the theatre tickets for us. A good birthday treat for me!

And the present grew, for when we got home there was dinner for 12: beautiful lamp steaks soaked in a red wine and cranberry laden sauce, a spinach salad with a mustard, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, bright green broccoli, and all of that after a stunning cheese tray, specialty cheeses from the Borough Market.
That should have been enough for a birthday, but those Wicked tickets were yet to be used.

Nine of us hiked off to use the underground, but six of us heard the announcement, “Find an alternative route above ground, long delays are being experience on this line.” Wyona, however, was already underground and when the train doors opened to let people on she had already instructed Knud and Cathy Sorenson, “Stay close to me. Don’t let an inch separate us,” Her gesture to cement the importance of her rule was to grab hold of his leather coat and make that happen – pulling his jacket in through the doors, squeezing him into a tube car in which there was no room for him.

The shows are always good, but the adventures of getting there and getting home make it possible for a rush of fear that makes it possible to stay awake while the paid entertainment is going on. There is a lot of adrenalin in my body on each outing: some of it from racing to be on time, some of it from unexpected route changes, some of it from twisted ankles and toes, or flat out face plants on cobblestones.

On the way to the theatre, a double-decker bus laid on its horn to tell Janet she was too close to the curb. Her boys were murmuring to each other that they now have something to rejoice over next Thanksgiving Day: that they still have a mother.

Behind us on the top of the double decker bus, we heard a woman say to her date, “I told you London is shit,” She, too, was annoyed at having to travel on top of the ground for 35 minutes to take a trip that would have only been 2 stops if we had been underground. People were pouring up onto the streets from the undergrounds – pedestrians looking for alternative routes to their evening destinations. The nine of us peeled out of the bus and across the street to the theatre, hoping to make it to those front row seats that had cost 1 ½ hours of our time earlier in the morning.

Wicked from the front row is another show. The costumes of the performers were so close to us that we could see the boning in the petticoats, the soft , colour and dyed leather of the performers’ boots, the textures and colours of the fabric, and the soft chiffon of the men’s skirts, worn on men who were able to carry off that costuming as though being dressed like that in Oz is a perfectly normal way to be. I was close enough to study the wigs, held onto the head with taping that must be 1 ½ inches wide, and extends well over the forehead, ending only a couple of inches above the eyes. Then the wig is made invisible with clever make-up.

We were home by midnight. Now what kind of most excellent birthday party was that!

I am thinking that the whole decade is going to go that way: packed with good food, good entertainment, good friends, new adventures.

Thank you all for your birthday wishes.

Love,

Arta