A Bard, a Brie and a Baguette

Last night was the formal opening of the 14th season of Shakespeare by the Sea; they presented the first of the year's two selections, "Much Ado About Nothing" at Point Fermin Park in San Pedro. "King Lear" will be assuming the throne in a couple of weeks. Catching the performance was the culmination of many years of pledges and promises.

Every year we have a summer get-together with our good friends Troy and Brittany Martin who live up in the rarefied air north of Monterrey. They travel down to the L.A. area to spend time with Troy's family and work the beaches. (Troy life-guards.) Troy and I are kindred spirits of sorts and have evolved an annual ritual where we sit around with good food, plenty of wine, and mounds of stinky cheeses and discuss philosophy, literature, theology and culture in general. We are very intellectual and it's all very high-brow of us. Now that we're both married with burgeoning families, the event is family-friendly with a lot more food, a little less wine, and a lots of interruptions in the brilliant analysis to kiss skinned knees, to wipe up spilled Kool-ade, and to admire interesting bugs and leaves brought by for our inspection. Thank goodness our kids have adopted the same sick fascination with rank dairy-products, so our get-togethers still feature plenty fruit of the cow.

Every year we have stated emphatically that we needed to get together and go to Shakespeare by the Sea, but every year there's some scheduling snafu that prevents it. Until this year. We finally got to go and get our fill of Elizabethan rabble-rousing, and since it's held in a park at 8pm, there was plenty of opportunity for a pre-show picnic. The Bard and stinky cheeses! What more could you ask for? Forsooth, there is nothing!

Our times with Troy and Brittany are so rare and so fun that we tend to get engrossed in the conversations and forget about all else. We brought a camera to the park with us, but no one had the presence of mind to actually take any pictures. The show runs from 8:00pm to a little after 10:00, so the kids are pretty wiped by the end of it, but it is gratifying to watch the entire brood locked into the show, eyes fixed on the stage, laughing and giggling when everyone else does, and taken-aback when the big dramatic scenes hit. I expected the kids would eventually get bored and sack out on Mommy or Daddy's lap, but the entire Martin/Perkins set were engaged to the merry end. (It was a comedy, after all.) We had some grumps in the church service this morning, but at least the evening went pretty darn smooth.

One additional benefit of the events last night was that when I was picking up the bovine aromatics for the evening, I picked up a few extra hunks of my old Swiss favorites - Emmentaler and Gruyer. Tonight they got shredded and drowned in some exceedingly cheap white wine and two rather suspicious kids got to slurp up the resulting goo on chunks of day-old baguette. N seemed perfectly happy piercing his little bread cubes on his fondue fork and swirling it around the molten lava, but that seems to be the extent of his interest. His plate had a dozen cheesy blobs lying uneaten and forlorn on it when we finally wrapped up the meal.