Posts tagged jennifer weiner
Bye Bye Matty :(
Dec 16th
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner. I’m only on the second page. I love only being on
the second page of a book. It’s such a feeling of anticipation. 
WHO I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO: I heard Todd Martin opening up for Matt a couple of weeks ago in Massachusetts
and I thought that he was good stuff. He’s very muscular, too. Like…the guitar looked small when he held it.
WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON: Well, I flew out to Mass to see Matt Nathanson play and visit my crazy friend Mark a
couple of weeks ago. He is one funny kid! I had so much fun. Mark picked me up at the airport (JFK) with his friend Lou and
we went and and picked up Zuzana and got on the road. A few hours, a diner meal, and a staunch refusal to listen to Barenaked
Ladies later…we arrived in Shelburne Falls. We ran into Sherilyn and chatted for a while, then went and talked with Megan
and Emily at Megan’s restaurant.
We checked into a hotel, chilled, got ready, ate, and got in line for the concert. It was a CCCOOLLLDDD couple of hours, but
it was broken up by a lively discussion of mark’s sexuality which random people jumped into with interesting results.
The show was THE SHIT! People were so quiet and respectful. I gave Matt the second part of my Christmas gift, the cast
recording of The Last Five Years (the first part having been an inscribed copy of Marc Acito’s How I Paid for College: A
Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater).
Then last weekend, I drove to San Francisco for Matt’s final show for a while. The length of the “while” has not been
specified by Matt’s team, so I am assuming it is a long while. I am preparing for the eventuality that I might not get to see
Matty play again until The Rock Boat. So sad. Not for Matt, of course, I’m sure he’s doing a happy dance. But sad for me.
Happy, also, for my bank balance, as I am not a sucker for throwing down cash for a cross-country trip for anyone but Matt.
The show in San Francisco was SSSOOO good. I am going to copy and paste my reviews from Matt’s board:
FIRST ONE:
awwww…what a great show! i loved it. so cool running into friends i haven’t seen since april. noreen, sarita and
ro…and noreen and i went to this very cool 24 hour diner after the show and had eats.
so, on the subject of “age ain’t nothin’ but a number” noreen was telling matt that her birthday was on tuesday. (HAPPY
BIRTHDAY!) naturally, he asked how old she was going to be. she told him. he couldn’t believe it. (without getting into
specifics, let’s just say that noreen is VERY young and hottie looking for her age ). matt was like, “no way. there is NO
WAY.” and noreen says, “it’s true. ask mel.” i confirmed, and matt says, “yeah, but melanie lies…”
so, i was telling my mom this story this morning (i took the opportunity of being in norcal anyway to come visit the fam),
and at the point in the story where matt says that i lie, she says, “yeah, but how does *he* know that?” HAHA! God. I’m like,
“MOM! He was joking! And I *don’t* lie!”
So my mom starts cracking up, and she says, “oh, no, that’s hilarious…i just thought…you know…you WILL lie to people to
make a joke funnier, you’ll go along with a joke. that’s all i meant. not like you’re some pathological liar.” haha.
and since i had, just previous to noreen chatting matt up, been trying to convince her to use her new haircut to fool him by
adopting the persona of a stripper named regina…well, i guess i can’t really argue with that.
NEXT ONE:
oh, i also wanted to point out how incredibly cool the crowd was at this show…they were very quiet and respectful
during the solemn, emotional songs, but at the rowdy parts, they were so rambunctious and funny!
my favorite part was this: a girl in the front row had requested “new coats & new hats” and matt said he would play it,
but that it had to wait a few songs. a little bit later, this guy in the back with a growly voice yelled loudly,
“VANDALIZED!” and matt stepped back from the mic with this startled look on his face like it scared him. then he says,
pointing out the girl in the front row, “I was supposed to play a song for you. but you’re not as angry as he is.” people
laughed and as it was dying down, she says, “I can be,” in this semi-threatening/semi-seductive tone of voice that was just
HILARIOUS if you heard it. And matt starts cracking up, and he’s all, “that’s kinda hot. i won’t lie to you and say that
didn’t turn me on.”
We love you, Matty Nay! Enjoy your rest but know we miss you.
Garlic Girls
Jul 27th
Welcome to my new resolution of updating my web journal every week!
Yah…we’ll see how the hell that goes.
WHAT I’M READING: I’m re-reading “Good in Bed” by Jennifer Weiner…it’s such a fabulous book! I feel like it explains what it’s like to be me…not an easy task LOL.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Just discovered Lucy Kaplansky…God, this lady is amazing! She has a PhD in psych and left her practice and professorship to tour with her guitar. Neato! Her music is bomb, too. So far, I particularly love “Guinevere” and “Broken Things”…but I’m just getting started. She’s playing at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz this September, so I need to order all her CD’s immediately so I can be fully prepared come Sept. Also, I’ve never been to the KJC, but one of my friends said that it is a REALLY cool venue, so I’m pretty psyched about that, as well.
I think the coolest venue I’ve ever been to was McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, CA. (Shout out to SoCal!) They have this cool room in the back that seats about 40 or 50, and it’s painted all black…guitars are hanging by their necks from the walls…great venue. Saw the Bobs there, and DaVinci’s Notebook made a surprise appearance. Great night, eh Evie!
I’ve also been listening to a lot of Carole King lately, by virtue of the fact that I am teaching my Second Grade class “Alligators All Around”, “Chicken Soup with Rice” and “Beautiful” right now. So those songs are terminally running through my head!
(MELANIE’S CREATIVE TEACHING IDEA NUMBER 67: Singing is an excellent choral reading activity! Repitition of text is what moves words from decodable text to sight words, and singing makes the repitition fun! You can also expose kids to cool music they might not otherwise hear…blues, jazz, etc. I have a cool lesson I like to do where I read them the story “Lookin’ for Bird in the Big City” and then we learn about and listen to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker music…screw Barney and crap! Kids are never too young for quality tunes!
WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON: So, today Cat and I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. IT WAS SO FREAKING HOT!!!!! And I don’t mean in the sense that it was a hip and happenin’ place…it was HOT…as in, heatstroke hot.
We are Food Network freaks, and Cat said that the Garlic Festival is a big deal on the Food Network. Last year, hottie Tyler Florence was there. He’s so cute! Evie has a jones for him, too. I have this fantasy where I pretend I have a Food 911 emergency and once I have hottie Tyler Florence in my kitchen….well, that’s a story for another time.
At any rate, the big culinary deal at the Garlic Festival is Garlic Ice Cream. Sounds disgusting, right? Well…it’s interesting. For some reason which made sense to me at the time, I ordered Garlic-Chocolate ice cream served in a half-cantaloupe. I believe it had something to do with the cantaloupe only costing 50 cents more. And for some other reason which has at this point escaped me, I continued to eat it even after I started feeling nauseous. I think that reason had to do with a “I paid for it, damn it, I’m eating it!” philosophy which has been proved unwise.
So, all in all, we spent about 35 minutes inside the gates of the Garlic Festival (there was 10 bucks well spent!), but the good thing is that now we can say that we have been to the thing…and that we consumed the famous (should be infamous!) Garlic Ice Cream.
STORY FROM THE JOHN MAYER CONCERT I FORGOT TO TELL: So, okay, the one bummer about the John Mayer concert was that I was sitting in the designated fuddie duddie section, apparently. All the people were sitting down, quietly listening…no one was singing along…damn it, I can do that at home! I wanna dance! But I was too self-conscious to stand up (I was in the front row of my section).
So, then, the three girls next to me stand up and start dancing…YIPPEE! Just as I am about to join them, this old guy from about six rows back yells, “Hey, sweetheart, I didn’t pay a hundred and sixty bucks for these seats to look at your ass!” and she turns around and yells at him, “You paid a hundred and sixty? I usually charge twice that to look at my ass, you got off cheap,” and continues to dance her heart out.
In the spirit of sisterhood (and because I had already wanted to anyway , I had to join them. Now there were four of us dancing in the front row of the fuddie duddie section!
Well, I would love to say that this began a wave of concert enthusiasm which spread throughout our section and inspired a lot more standing and boogie-ing like would happen in the movies, but actually, it just remained the four of us dancing throughout the concert and getting popcorn and crap thrown in our hair.
BUT…the moral of the story is this: I had a much better time because I did what I wanted to without worrying about what other people thought, AND I met three really cool chicks. So, shout out to the sassy chicks I met last Saturday, should they by some miracle end up reading this!
Ciao, ragazzi! Ci vediamo.
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