Erratica Reduex

My Dad was a W.W.II veteran, and my mom still is, so I'm having a drink in their honor. By all rights I should by honoring my mom with a glass of Merlot or Chardonnay (ick!), and my dad with a glass of Jack Daniels bought on sale at Right Aid, with me driving him to the store when my mother wasn't around like a conspirator in a bank hold-up. But I think a Lemon Drop will suffice.

My Dad worked for the army air force, the details are hazy. Evidently he had a health defect that kept him from active duty, so he went to Lockheed Martin, and worked as an engineer for the bombers. He had a ceremonial piston valve from a B-12 Liberator, which is huge compared to the ones from a car. I used to pretend it was a spaceship when I was a kid and reading Heinlein novels. Later, he worked as a safety engineer for NASA during the moonshots, and the aircraft companies that were the hot, glamorous tech firms of the 50s and 60s. They remembered him; in the late 90s, he testified for the defense in a toxic waste dumping class action suit. He enjoyed the attention.

My mother was not a WAVE, she was a WAM. She says it stood for "Wide Ass Marine". She joined the Marines to get away from her schizophrenic mother, and ended up in the San Francisco Presidio, doing bureaucratic stuff. She would go dancing with the gay guys she knew, and evidently was quite popular. Later she became a teacher, and as a socialist with friends who had fought and died in the Lincoln Brigade, only avoided being blacklisted by resigning due to pregnancy. Later she became a principal, a member of the Thousand Oaks planning commission, and continued to defend the school system against interfering reactionaries with a subtlety that would impress an Akido master, and that I will never match. Later she opened one of the first centers in California for testing and teaching Learning Disabled children. She currently does a lot of weaving on her looms, and travels to shows.

My point, if I have one, is the memories I have of these veterans, neither of whom fired a bullet in anger, and who's lives continued long after their war, and in one case, is still continuing. And yet they did their duty in a time of crisis, and for that I salute them, and have a drink for them.

Wotta party. A great start to the holiday season. There was a lot less cookie making and a lot more alcohol, but hey, it was a toot.

Random thoughts:

I found a bowl of leftover chocolate sauce and ground graham crackers that had been intended to coat white chocolate and lemon treats. On impulse, I mixed the two together, rolled it out on wax paper, and froze it. I found out that it really needed to be cut before it froze, but the result was quite tasty. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to duplicate it- (ingredients? Measures? What's that?) but I did like the result.

Evil Dead the Musical turned out to be much better written and more funny than I thought it would be. It turned the problem of combining the first two Evil Dead movies into an opportunity for self-referential humor, and combined a variety of musical styles into the revue. The quality of singing was mixed, but the person they selected for Ash had the appearance down. And of course there were the one-liners from the movies. It was an excellent play to see with lots of sugar and alcohol.

Overall it was a grand time, as it always is when we gather a large bunch of friends for a party. I'm lucky to know so many wonderful people.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I need about a gallon of the hair of the dog.