We've had a couple more outings recently that I think I can combine into one post. On the 3rd, Dave and I went to an event with John Cleese. The show began with Cleese and an interviewer coming onto the stage and telling a couple stories about the early days of Monty Python and the making of The Holy Grail. The audience then watched the movie on a giant screen, and after an intermission, Cleese and the interviewer came back onto the stage and took questions from the audience. For the most part these were pretty basic questions, but Cleese made the answers interesting enough. Had the lines for asking questions been shorter or had we the opportunity to write our questions onto cards, this is what we would have asked:
Me: Eight years ago on this stage my husband asked for, and received, a kiss on the cheek from Carol Burnett, and now it's my turn to ask: Can my husband please have a kiss on the cheek?
Dave: My wife and I have been married for thirty-five years. What advice would you have for cutting marriage up into smaller, more palatable, chunks?
We had the VIP tickets to meet John Cleese and pose for this photo together after the show and it wasn't until days later that I realised I should have asked him to pretend to kiss Dave on the cheek. Overall: A very fun outing and Cleese was clever and funny during the Q&A and really quite lovely and charming during the meet and greet (I don't know why I had expected him to be gruff or crusty).
*****
The next evening, Kennedy asked me if I'd like to join her for a trip into Toronto. As I had written about recently, Kennedy received a lot of positive feedback from her participation in a comedy show last month and the director of a storytelling group (who tracked Kennedy down on Instagram) had asked Kennedy to come see a showcase, with a view to having Kennedy tell her own story at an upcoming show. Kennedy and I went into the city, had a nice dinner of Korean fried chicken, and went to watch the show. The director herself is a powerful storyteller — her partner wrote a wonderful story, but something seemed lost in the telling of it — and the other six participants were all just pretty good (including two storytellers who run such groups of their own). After the show, the director asked Kennedy if she could possibly write and polish her story for a showcase next month, and although she has no idea that Kennedy actually has a background in performance, Kennedy agreed to try what might be a bloodbath for anyone else. Here's hoping I have a happy story to tell about this in a couple more weeks!
*****
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This past Saturday, Dave, Mal and I met in Toronto to see David Byrne give a talk on his new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up. As the book had only been released a few days beforehand, I was the only one of the three of us who had had time to read it already (and judging from the reaction of the audience to Byrne's talk, I wouldn't think that many of them had had the time to read it beforehand either). We started with dinner at the repeatedly Michelin mentioned Lebanese restaurant Amal Toronto — absolutely fantastic from the food to the service to the atmosphere; we would definitely go back whether we had a vegan with us or not — and Mal was so excited to see David Byrne in person, less than a year after we went to see him perform the hits of the Talking Heads, that the content of the talk wasn't the most important part.
Our tendency as humans is often to imagine that the “story” of history leads us to where we are right now. We like to imagine ourselves as some sort of inevitable culmination — it all led to us. What we see, and what we judge as important and significant, viewed in the rearview mirror is determined by how we see ourselves at present.
As for the book: I thought it was just okay. I could see that it had been a passion project for Byrne — he begins by writing that he enjoys going down rabbit holes and for years had been collecting stories on ideas (from science to art and literature) that were popular at first, forgotten for up to centuries, and then rediscovered and widely accepted — and the collection as presented in the book seemed very particular to Byrne himself with little overreaching point. The lecture came off the same way: Byrne shared three of the stories from the book — modern vs Roman concrete, the paintings of Botticelli, and the symbiotic nature of chloroplasts and the mitochondria — and then added two new stories that never made it to the book: the concept of "zero" and the clitoris. He kind of stumbled through the lecture (I recognise that this is not his wheelhouse), but Dave and Mal were both so charmed by Byrne's enthusiasm that their satisfaction became my satisfaction. I'm glad I read the book (if only to relate to Mal through it) and delighted that we made an evening out of this. (Probably three and a half stars for the book.)
*****
And, finally, this was Thanksgiving weekend; the first Thanksgiving without Ken and Rudy. Kennedy and Zach put on their usual amazing feast (I can't believe we forgot to take a table selfie before all of the amazing food was cleared away; it's not super obvious that this was taken after Conor had left and Mal photoshopped him in for Nan and Pop's digital frame, right?), and they were generous enough to include the whole family, including Dan. Dave had a lovely toast about what we have lost this year and what we still have to be thankful for, and as ever, I am just so thankful for this family; so grateful that Dave and I have the means to buy into amazing experiences; grateful that we have adult kids who still want to hang out with us. Dave is right: even through the losses, we have so much.
