Waiting for Guffman - thank you Christopher Guest

Friends have been calling and writing - are you okay? No blog since Thursday! Sorry to those of you keeping tabs, did not mean to cause concern. Before the pandemic I didn't blog every day, but since it started I've been doing so. Need some kind of record, chronicle, the sanity of being in touch with myself, with you.

Just now I was listening to Eleanor Wachtel on this grey rainy day - she played a clip of the cultured voice of Virginia Woolf. Yet again, thank God for the CBC, the voices floating out into my silent kitchen much of the day. Being in touch. Even with Virginia Woolf.

The usual: walkabout with Ruth and alone, Zoom meetings - a wonderful get-together Friday with old friends Jessica and Suzette, drinking glasses of wine together and laughing in our separate homes. Aperitif every day with Monique and Cathy and yesterday Monique's boyfriend Ron in the hot sun of late afternoon. Yesterday's weather was glorious.

And the unusual - my great stress. I'm not equipped for conflict and actually lost two pounds over the last few days. The Landlady Diet - I do not recommend it. However, things are resolving; my stomach heaving is diminished.

Yesterday's treat - I received my first box from FoodShare Toronto. Magnificent - there on my doorstep was a large cardboard box with fresh produce, some of it local: celery, baking potatoes, sprouts, lettuce, cucumber, and more, plus the exotic: oranges and a pineapple ready to eat. For $16. Amazing! It means figuring out what to cook with what arrives. There will be cheese and veg stuffed baked potatoes, for sure.

Enjoying very much reading Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - her tone gets a bit arch sometimes but it's a fine book full of important facts and information. Makes me more determined to raise my own veg - but this year, perhaps not.

Last night's treat - Waiting for Guffman, Christopher Guest's hilarious tribute to amateur theatre in small towns, with Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara among others. But it's Guest himself as the fey Corky who steals the show. What's so good is that though we are laughing at these people, it's affectionate, gentle laughter, not mocking and cruel, as with Sasha Baron Cohen. It's a loving tribute to what community theatre means to those who watch it and those who do it. The last minutes, Corky in his shop that sells show biz memorabilia, ends with him proudly showing us two little doll men in glasses sitting at a table - these are, he says, the "My Dinner With André action figures." Oh thank you for that, I so needed that laugh!

An even better laugh, someday: must watch This is Spinal Tap again.

I need a book. I need to read Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, have been wanting to read it for a long time. I hate to order it because apparently the post office is swamped, but soon I will. Perhaps I miss the library most of all. No, I miss the boys most. I miss the movies and seeing my far-flung friends.

But - nothing to complain about. As I was lying on the floor stretching with my Zoom exercise class today - coming live from Vancouver - through the back door I saw geese flying north in formation. The geese are coming home. It's spring.