Solonor's Inkwell

One important thing I neglected to mention last night was that Kat and the Secret Boyfriend (one of those sleazy actor types) took us to Lollicup to experience the phenomenon known as bubble tea. It is also known as boba milk tea–“boba” being both the term for the large tapioca balls that get added to the drink to be sucked up your straw mid-gulp and a Cantonese slang term meaning “dominatrix of breasts.”

For those too lazy to click on the Wikipedia article above, bubble tea is a chilled mixture of tea and milk that gets these large, chewy, black “pearls” of tapioca added to it, along with various other flavors (fruits mostly, but also nuts and flowers like lavender). The attraction is both in the odd mix of flavors and in sucking up something chewy through the fat straw. I tried the safe banana flavor, while the SB went out on a limb and got avocado (which looked a sickly, pale green, but his head didn’t asplode or nuthin’).

I can’t say that I’m a huge fan, but it wasn’t bad. The drink itself was yummy. I’m just not so sure about the chewy pearls (which you can leave out, btw). In any case, I have checked another cultural experience off my life’s to-do list. Hurrah!

Just returned from a wonderful afternoon of theater thanks to the lovely Bitter Kat. She offered us 2 free tickets to see Henry Rathvon’s “Trapezium” at the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival, and we snapped them up so fast her fingers will be burning for a week. It’s not often that we are allowed out in polite society. So, the odds that we would skip the chance to spend time watching a play (for free!) were so infinitely small as to be incalculable.

To top that off, we hung around and watched another Rathvon play (“Quincunx”) in its workshop form and even stayed for the Q&A session afterward (my suggestion: keep the Abbot & Costello routine).

And to top that off, we followed Kat and her entourage to the Fiddler’s Green and tried to blend in with the crowd. We scored drinks and dinner before they figured out that we weren’t really members of the acting troupe and drove us off with a haughty heave-ho.

No, seriously, we met Mr. Rathvon and his partner, Emily Cox, along with several of the actors, and had a lovely dinner. Rathvon and Cox write cryptic crosswords for their normal living, and he has just begun to write plays. “Trapezium” is his first, and it is a riot. I won’t give up the details, but it is a farce loosely based on the love triangle of Tristan and Iseult, told from different points of view, sort of like Rashomon (but funnier). Best of all, he’s a Red Sox fan!

There’s a really good article on Trapezium at SouthFlorida.com.

Thank you, again, for inviting us Katharine.

It’s Sunday, which makes it a good time for a confession. The thing is, there is a part of me that wishes we were still in Maine right now. Not that I love 20-below temps, but I miss a “paralyzing, life-threatening blizzard” every once in a while. To misquote Curt Schilling, there’s nothing like seeing nature get a million New Yorkers to shut up (their doors and windows).

I realize that it’s not all fun and games (and hell to pay for when you finally have to dig out), but it was nice to get a break from the rat race of life two or three times a year. As long as the power didn’t go out, you’ve got your hot chocolate, your TV and computer, and your board games that sit behind the “break in case of emergency” glass. Better still, no school or work… unless, of course, you’re from Maine and you didn’t get the legal minimum snowfall to qualify for a cancellation from one or the other (which is about 3 feet, as I recall).

Enjoy your life-threatening blast of nature’s fury, y’all.

Ahhhhh, home at last. Holy hell it was cold! That was just what I needed to remind me why it is that I live in Florida. But on the bright side, while it is bad enough sweeping six inches of snow off the windows with no gloves, at least I didn’t have to use a credit card to scrape the ice (thanks, Avis)!

I will never whine about the temp getting down into the 50’s again. This week.