Sunday, February 27, 2011.
Crane Flies. VooDoo BBQ.
The crane flies have emerged from the lawn. How do they get inside the house and the cars? They look like enormous mosquitoes and give momentary fright. But they don't bite or do any other direct harm. The larvae look like stubby worms and eat grass roots. They always appear, in their slow, wavering flight, just as the cold weather begins to abate. I welcome them as a sign of that change.
Mary Ann had an orgy of self-recrimination for all the food she consumed yesterday. Her first dictum today is that she will not eat with me, no matter what. It's all my fault she overeats, after all. However, around eleven, she told me that she was getting hungry. But the only place she would go with me is VooDoo BBQ, where she will just eat the gris-gris greens. That's her favorite side dish, in a restaurant she says has the best side dishes of any barbecue joint around town.
We split a combo of brisket and chicken. The skinless barbecue chicken breast seems pretty harmless to a diet. I like VooDoo okay, but its meats are a little too moist, and never quite crusty enough around the edges for me. It looks as if the meats have been steamed for a long time after being smoked. Or maybe the smoker has a lot of steam in it.
We were both still hungry. I went back for a caesar salad topped with chicken. She ate some of that, too. Oh, how adept we dieters are at fooling ourselves!
In lieu of dinner, we crammed down the biggest possible tub of popcorn while watching a movie at the Hollywood Theater in Covington. Mary Ann wanted to see "The King's Speech." She's in love with Colin Firth, and the movie is a favorite to win a bunch of Oscars tonight. (Which it did, we saw later in the recorded broadcast.) I thought the movie was pretty good--a lot of cool radio stuff in it. But I thought Geoffrey Rush, who played the speech therapist, was better than Colin Firth was.
I already knew this whole story. An hour-long radio production of The King's Speech appeared on the BBC a few weeks ago, and I listened to it. The radio version covered more ground, but that's the nature of radio. A movie has many scenes with no dialog, but a radio production has to keep talking constantly. It can tell a story in a half-hour that would require a ninety-minute movie.
I was wary of watching this movie. I involuntarily mimic other people's speech patterns. I once came close to picking up a stammer from a radio announcer on WWNO. I am now battling the bad habit of getting stuck in the middle of a sentence. I got that from New York disk jockey Jonathan Schwartz, whose terrific program of American standards I listen to every Sunday. Works for him, but not for me.
We almost got another tub of popcorn.
VooDoo BBQ. Mandeville: 2999 Highway 190. 985-629-2021.
