Welcome to a World of Spiritual Harmony

Well, I sure waited too long to get to this place! I almost got there last year - got to the door. Then my friend just wasn’t up for it. But it felt so good to me, just standing at the door, that I spent the intervening year occasionally trying to persuade friends to head out that way. I sure should have pushed harder!

So, Terry’s Turf Club, way out on Eastern Avenue in Linwood, nearly under the Beechmont Levee, is a burger place. If you’re not there when the door opens at 4 p m, you’ll be waiting 45 minutes or so. So just do it. Get a drink, or take a walk, or clean up your Blackberry. Or actually have a conversation. Whatever. I guarantee it will be worth it!

The outside looks like a cheap bar in the Florida Keys - and it has nearly as many signs inside as the American Sign Museum (which is moving from Walnut Hills to Camp Washington sometime soon, by the way). We took a walk, checking out the ‘hood and catching up with each other.

They don’t have a veggie burger - but they have a portobello mushroom burger. And great fries. And wonderful inventive creative fun toppings. I know it sounds like I’m raving - but they live up to it! Everyone is calm, nice, friendly, helpful. It just feels good. The burgers made with meat are cooked to order, and it takes a while ’cause the place is really packed. Just eat the peanuts and throw the shells on the floor (that reminds me of the old La Normandie) which you’re waiting. And check out the specialty drinks. And when your burger, as high as any sandwich Dagwood made, comes out with sauces and stuff everywhere - just ask them for a knife to cut it with.

This was very enjoyable. They could fix up the airconditioning. That’s the only thing not over-the-top good.

Okay, so Mayday is a bar, and not primarily a restaurant. But if you’re a hotdog fan, this is your kind of place!

At 4227 Spring Grove Avenue, corner of Dane, in Northside (near Spring Grove), this a comfy place for all kinds of humans. I really enjoyed being there - and having their vegetarian hotdog. The bun is amazing, the hotdog has the same shape and size as the real ones, the toppings are just terrific. And the real hotdogs are terrific, too - thus speaketh the folk at the meeting with me. And the bun is wonderful - not white bread death that balls up and stays in your stomach forever, but a sturdy whole grain pretzel bun. Just excellent!

So on your little personal menu, first you pick the kind of hotdog - lots of interesting choices, including vegetarian. Then you circle your side - chips or salad (and a fresh greens beautiful salad, at that!) Then you can pick from four signature dogs, or build your own, with great topping choices.

I picked the Mayday Dog - carmelized onion, grilled peppers, spicy mustard, house catsup and house relish. It was piled high and quite wonderful. Made me totally happy. I’m going to make my own choices next time - maybe the curry apricot catsup, spicy red relish - or maybe the sauerkraut. There’s also chili - both regular and vegetarian. And pbj, on that pretzel bun - made in house, as well.

Who knew such a place existed in the ‘Nati? Pool tables, an outdoor patio, special nights with music and all kinds of un-Cincinnati type things happening. And as comfy and homey as you’ll find. Go for it!

Red Azalea, a memoir written by Anchee Min, and published in 2006, is a young girl’s memory of growing up in Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution. Graphic and gritty, and surprisingly full of sex, it is a very dark picture of a very dark time in human history. I had not realized that the Cultural Revolution was the equivalent of the killing fields of Cambodia (with less direct murder, but murder nontheless), and of the insanity of other dictators who were willing to kill their people in order to force them to change back into simple children of the land.

Min’s first experience was being brainwashed / coached into denouncing her very best teacher ever. The description of the process was painful to read. The rest of her growing up included the family being forced into ever smaller and dingier quarters, less safe - largely because the parents were educated. This was a culture that saw virtue only in poverty and degradation, and declared it virtue.

Mao took one child (at least) from each middle class / city family and assigned them to become peasants - that is, to go work in the countryside on farms. Many adults were sent out into a world they were unaccustomed to, with awful results, as well. In Min’s case, at 17, she was sent to Red Fire Farm on the edge of the China Sea. Where the soil was not fit for farming, and the management was all about control, not about nurturing the earth and the participants. A mindless bureaucracy run at the lower levels by folk in their 20’s, expected and encouraged to use cruelty and authority to destroy the spirits of their charges.

The book is beautifully written, delicate in many places, and is a fast read - a simple narrative of events. It is also ugly and violent. And the truth. Read it at your own risk.

Blithe Spirit, being currently performed by the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, is a Noel Coward play set in 1941 in Kent, in Britain.

I’ve always liked the sophisticated / smart / spot on while being slightly acerbic wit of Noel Coward. Set in a British country house, depicting the Agatha Christie feel of those times. And of course this play includes a medium, a seance, and a ghost who wants her husband back - even though now, 7 years later, he’s married to someone else.

Fun play, excellent performances. And actually the psychic stuff was spot on as well. The only sour note was when Madame Arcati said she didn’t know what to do about the ghost who showed up. Basically, ghosts have to do what you tell them - after you ascertain what sort of spirit you have on your hands, that is.

The problem here was caused not by the ghost(s), but by an untrained psychic. Of course, since most everyone is psychic and few folk are trained, that problem exists all around us. But most folk are not really manifesters - don’t have the kind of focus / attention / powerful intention that can change the world. This one did. My thought is that the untrained one just said something, not out loud, but powerfully, like “I want this house all to myself.” And the train of events thus unleashed resulted in just that situation.

Not that any of that was talked about in the play itself, but it’s what I saw! Made for a rollicking good British mystery story, with some great characters and great acting putting it all in front of us.

You’ve got two more weekends to see it! The Perfect Summer Play!

I don’t think I’ve ever had another opera affect me more than La Boheme at Music Hall last night. Puccini, of course, produced real magic. So many of the arias and melodies have made their way into our culture. And the sad love story is over the top, as opera always is.

I had seen it before, and was expecting more of a workhorse/well worn opera. Instead, this remake, set in 1930’s Paris. had me from the first moments. The voices of the two principals, Rodolfo and Mimi, were perfection, and when they sang together, the entire audience melted. They fell in love at first sight, as she came to ask for help in re-lighting her candle. Then she lost her key, and when he found it, he kept quiet until she agreed to go out with he and his friends for supper. Where they encountered the sexy Musetta, who was an ex-lover of Rodolfo’s friend Marcello.

So we’re following two love stories, and the increasing cough of Mimi. The gray buildings in the background, with snow falling, as they try to work things out. And then her final visit to the apartment of Marcelo and Rodolfo - just after the 4 guy friends had really been celebrating and having fun, forgetting all their troubles.

The little touches Puccini inserted were so real, and the staging - so inventive, with two buildings moving into various configurations in nearly the blink of an eye. But it’s the music, those soaring voices, the beautiful singers who had us standing and applauding for at least 10 minutes after the last note.

Hurrah for Cincinnati Opera. Another star in their crown!

Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile - by Brit Gyles Brandreth - has certainly made me happy! At the turn of the 19th century into the 20th, Oscar was one of the most important writers of poetry, plays and books. and one of the best of all time Irish wits. He was also prosecuted essentially for being gay, and lived altogether a very interesting life.

And now, thanks to Gyles Brandreth, a biographer of Wilde’s, he is having another life - as a detective. I managed to find his third mystery on the bargain books table at Joseph-Beth, and it is just terrific. Quotes from Oscar and from his books, with a number of his friends - including Sarah Bernhardt and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

A treat of a mystery, set in Paris, involving a theater company. I’ll say no more. If you life upscale excellent writing, cultural commentary, and British mysteries - you can’t do better. I’m off to find the rest of the series.

My DC grandson is in town this week. He pops in 2 or 3 times a year for a week or so, we see movies, he goes to Kings Island with his cousins, we all eat a year’s worth of Skyline in that week.

Kyle loves Skyline. If he ever moves here - as we discuss pretty often - at least one meal a day will always be Skyline time.

He arrived around midnight Saturday night / Sunday morning. The rest of the family was in bed by that time in their various houses. I was still up, because Kyle was going to stay here. And he wanted his Skyline hit right then - if it wasn’t too late for his grandmother. No way was I going to say it was too late. So there we were at 1 a m, at the Clifton Skyline, with me eating their vegetarian black beans and rice.

The whole group of us saw Inception together on Sunday, with Skyline before and after. And I had the black beans and rice over a steamed potato. Monday was a day with cousins and uncles, car shopping and suit shopping. Then for supper, we went to Dewey’s for that great house salad and the Edgar Allen Poe, half and half with Kyle’s pepperoni and extra cheese. We came back to the house and did his semi-annual Tarot card reading.

Tuesday we hit Skyline before seeing Cyrus - I had the black bean burrito. Since I was teaching an Intuitive Development class that evening, Kyle hung out with cousins. Wednesday was lunch in Glendale with my sister at the Indian place, Taj Mahal, in Springdale. And a Second Degree Reiki class for me, with Kyle and his grandfather going to the Reds game (where I’m sure he had Gold Star coneys), so Kyle could see the Nats new star pitcher, Stephen Strasburg, beat the Reds. Exactly what he had in mind. Today they saw the day game, and played a round of golf.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow! And see how many more ways I can have those black beans and rice.

This is a good summer movie, fluffy and fun pretty much of the time. A fair amount of sex, some unexpected bromance at the end, good acting, good story.

So the guy is lonely and miserable (and he’s really worked to get that way, we see that right off the bat). He’s still attached to his ex-wife, who’s now getting married. So he’s being forced out of his depression, and wants a new woman without having to do any work at all. There’s the mandatory urination scene (have you noticed that the vomiting scenes are disappearing?). And then a dance that starts out embarrassing and ends up being fun - and he winds up with his woman. Who turns out to be more work than expected - and is Marisa Tomei.

This is actually a pretty good right-in-the-middle-of-the-paradigm-shift movie. Five years ago it would have been different, and five years from now it would be very different as well. But this is smack dab where we are. Throw in some California-life style stuff, enjoy some angst with Cyrus, feel sorry for the new husband of the ex-wife, and have a good time. It is summer, after all. No thinking allowed.

The new Leonardo DiCaprio movie - Inception - is riveting from start to finish. It’s all about dreams, about planting ideas in dreamers, about - not said this way - lucid dreaming, where you know you’re dreaming, and act on that knowledge. The motivation for all this, in this case, is about money. (As most of us now believe all motivation is about money/power/stuff. This is actually a fairly recent phenomenon.) Leonardo’s motivation different, and more in line with the mythic / hero story.

As the team works with deep, deeper, deepest levels of dreams, I am fascinated by how much material is in here. And with how their awareness allows them to move among the levels, and to communicate across those stretches.

Having been in a dream group for a long time, we are always aiming toward awareness in dreams. And often choose a theme to ask for dreams about. For instance, we have asked ‘What does the Universe need from us now?’ Currently, that theme is healing.

Here’s the standard stuff in the movie: A big cast of characters, scenes on a plane, in a Board room and in a hotel, and in an Arctic fortress. Tough corporate guy, and tough hoodlum guys. Plus a chase scene in perhaps a bazaar somewhere in the Middle East. A fair amount of what I think of as ‘boy stuff’, now that I’ve been listening to 20-something friends talk about guys. Mayhem of all sorts, guns getting bigger and better. Which, in my time listening to lots of people’s dreams, I have never heard much of - in men’s or women’s dreams - so that was the least real part of the film for me.

The story thread about the wife and beautiful children is often very dreamlike, as is the perceptiveness of the woman architect on the team. She leaps to answers, as dreamers often will. Not a straight line logical process at all.

Maybe all of this is necessary to get us to think about our inner Universe, and how all the different levels of ourselves grow and evolve and shape each other. Whatever gets us thinking about dreams, and knowing more about who we are, is just fine with me! And this is a pretty fine film on every level.

I actually started this book a couple of years ago, and just picked it up and finished it last week. Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel, has this subtitle: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love.

It is a wonderful book, very human, and ties together lots of different threads of what I knew about that time, really put it all together for me, along with a feel for the people and the life they led. I gave it up a couple of years ago, over halfway through, because I could not bear the pain and injustice the Catholic Church was putting Galileo and his daughter, Suor Maria Celeste, through. Nothing much has changed inside the Church since the 1600’s, sounds like. Unreasonable, bureaucratic, power-hungry - and constantly shooting itself in the foot. Same as the headlines today in 2010, equating pedophile priests with women who would dare to think about being priests.

I came back to the book because I wanted to know the answers - how did Galileo manage? What kind of support did he have? How did his daughter do? (He had three children, but Virginie, born in 1600, who became Suor Maria Celeste, and he were exceptionally close.) She died in 1634, undoubtedly at least in part because of her concern for her father, care for the other sisters in the convent - and her neglect of herself, giving all her energy to her father and others. Galileo was allowed to return to his hometown, under house arrest for the rest of his life, just a few months before her death. Shall we add vindictive to our indictment of the Church? So at least they got to spend some time together.

Galileo professed himself mistaken about the sun being the center of our solar system, and continued to say that. He was too smart to believe it, one assumes. He had many supporters of his work in other parts of Europe, and had books published on other scientific topics, but not in Italy. He wrote another important book, Two New Sciences, again written as a dialogue, on motion, where he studied and measured and tested the falling and rolling of objects, really creating the rigor of the scientific method. He added into the book many other treatises, not knowing if he’d ever be able to publish again. Friends helped get the book to Holland.

He was physically slipping by this time, was already blind, had his son doing a drawing of a pendulum. He died in 1642, at the age of 78. Isaac Newton was born later that year.

And in 1992 Pope John Paul II publicly endorsed Galileo’s philosophy.