|
|
two pasta dinners Tuesday, January 21 2020
It was a brutally cold day, though with highs and lows only about ten degrees colder than usual for this time of year. Gretchen had left for Baltimore early this morning, so when I came home at the end of the day, I immediately took the dogs for a walk. We went down the Farm Road, where they quickly became distracted by something even as I made a loop without them through the abandoned go-cart track and then homeward atop the escarpment west of the Farm Road. Temperatures were in the 20s, though that was cold enough to make my face hurt. There was also enough of a leak in my rubber galoshes (I need new ones!) for a tablespoon of snow to intrude and numb my left heel.
Back at the house, I dined (as you might expect) on leftover pasta. One of our guests had made a "baked ziti" using penne instead of ziti, and penne is Gretchen's least-favorite pasta shape. (We actually joked before the party that we should've stipulated "no penne.") Tonight, though, it perfectly suited my mood. I was much less enthusiastic by the noodles in a second dinner after a bath. They were a sort of spaghetti alla puttanesca, with way too much olive flavor. I'm going to go ahead and say it right now: I am not a fan of puttanesca sauce.
While I was doing those things, I was downloading the Hulu original series The Act, a dramatization of the life of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Dee Dee, the crazy mother who kept her ensnared in a mesh of fabricated diseases, and (eventually, though I haven't seen these episodes yet) Nicholas Godejohn, the man who would save Gypsy. I wouldn't say it's a great dramatization; it looks like something you might see on the Lifetime Channel (but with more obscenities). Also, Patricia Arquette, the actress playing Dee Dee Blanchard, isn't nearly as obese as she needs to be to play the role. I suppose it's difficult to find experienced actors with such profound weight issues (since it's hard for them to even enter the industry without the sort of eating disorder that keeps them thin), but that role would've been a great chance to promote an unknown actress. Appalachia is full of women who look exactly like Dee Dee, and surely some of them at least once had dreams of acting.
Ramona and a quickly-moving Neville on the Farm Road this evening.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?200121 feedback previous | next |