Dog of the Day

When we were in Victoria, B.C., last fall, my granddaughter, Kirsten, asked, each day, "Don't you think that dog's cute? Don't you think it's the cutest dog we've seen so far today?" The rest of us nominated, as the day went on, other "cutest dogs", and in the evening we decided which one was the "dog of the day."

Last weekend was Pioneer Day. Dave and I celebrated with a flag in front of our house,

but also with a trip to the Farmer's Market to pick a "dog of the day.

As Dave relaxed with "young coconut juice," canned in Thailand, and Thai barbecue,

I auditioned dogs for "dog of the day status." Who do you think should win?

Next stop on this holiday weekend was This is the Place Heritage Park, for a taste of pioneer times. We walked through one-room cabins and historic buildings like a scale model of the Brigham Young Academy.

We checked out the barbers, the weavers, and pioneer types just lolling around.

We watched a pie eating contest, junior division.

We checked out the old-fashioned flowers, hollyhocks, which were much more common when I was a little girl.

And we checked out the pioneer costumes in the general store. I will need one for the Christmas in Nauvoo party Dave and I are planning for our ward.

And we checked out the handcart "floats," lined up for the holiday parade. The rivalry between the BYU Academy and the University of Utah was portrayed as already raging, back in pioneer times!

Finally, we spent the evening at Deer Valley, watching the sun go down as Lee Ann Rimes, famous country singer, performed with the Utah Symphony.

The only drawback--we got there late and could only find a seat back of the garbage cans! Oh, well, we lay back and relaxed, and the sound carried....

Footloose

Dave and I were footloose in Southern Utah the weekend of July 18--no responsibilities, no one to please but ourselves. Our goal was to have fun.

We watched two plays--"Private Lives" and "A Secret Garden." "Private Lives" was a classic Noel Coward play from the 1930s--a very witty society romance. A Secret Garden was a touching story of a little girl, orphaned in India, who finds love and a family in Scotland.


There were clever displays for each of the shows, highlighting fashions, furniture, and art from that time and place.

A fun part of any Shakespeare Festival experience is enjoying the preshow, with its attractive young performers.

I wandered around the campus, after the shows, enjoying the flowers, the waterfall, the carillon, the Shakespeare theater, and the statue of Nellie Unthank.

Nellie was a little girl in the Martin handcart company whose feet froze in the snows of Wyoming. Her legs were cut off below the knee, but she went on to become a plural wife and a mother of six children, living in Cedar City and remaining faithful despite an achingly hard life. President Hinckley dedicated this statue of "Nellie Unthank before Traveling West."

I also enjoyed a show by Southern Utah artists.


Just when I thought I understood the themes that interested those local artists, I was surprised.

On Saturday evening, Dave and I visited Dave's mom and admired her new, copper brown carpet.

We went to dinner at an excellent Italian restaurant, Scaldoni's.

We then attended the performance of "Footloose" at Tuacahn.

Again, the preshow activities were as fun as the show itself. We roamed through the gift store, searching for treasures.

We watched people ride the mechanical bull.

And we admired a rock band performing outside the amphitheater.

"Footloose," itself, had phenomenal dancing and music.

Searching for Culture in SLC

So why would anyone move home to SLC from New York, Boston, Seattle, or Chicago? Our museums are dinky, compared to the Met and Gugenheim. We have no Freedom Trail, Boston Pops, or JFK Library. Our Farmers Market lacks the fish throwers, brass pig, dozen flower stalls, and piroshkis of Pike Place Market. And the Church Office Building and Federal Heights can't compare, for architectural splendor, with the early 1900s skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan or Frank Lloyd Wright's homes in Chicago.

But SLC does have some culture. Dave and I went searching for it this week. We started with three art films at our seedy but beloved Broadway Theater.

Our favorite was "Departures," a Japanese film which won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. The plot--young man learns to love his job tucking dead people into caskets--doesn't do it justice.

We also loved "Whatever Works," Woody Allen's witty homage to accepting diversity in our relationshps. As Dave and I welcome people of incresingly diverse nationalities, ages, and sexual preferences into our circle of friends, we identify with that film!

And we were fascinated by "The Hurt Locker," an action film about defusing bombs in Iraq which was also a subtle character study.

Next stop was the Farmer's Market at Pioneer Park. The Market has morphed over the years, from just sellers of produce to entertainers and a weekly arts fair. I stopped by a one-man band, by a stall selling bonsai trees, by Utah's own Nutty Guys, and I finally succumbed at Great Basin Shrubs, buying 15 perennials bearing purple flowers for our backyard.

The Farmer's Market is the place to see and be seen, not just for people, but for dogs, too!

What about SLC museums? I lingered at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts for its special exhibit on Native American (Indian) art.

It was beautifully presented with "hands one" activities like samples of buckskin and rawhide to finger, as well as signs describing the objects' artistic and cultural significance.

The Museum, skimpy by big city standards, still had many items in its regular collection to ponder.

The trick is to appreciate what's there, rather than what's not. There were even a few paintings by Old Masters (Foschi, if not Raphael)

and even one painting by John Copley, that icon of Boston colonial painters.

Saturday evening, Dave and I enjoyed the Salt Lake Jazz Festival, just one of the many music festivals in SLC and at the ski resorts this summer.

We listened to a saxophonist and torch singer,

and to a big band.

As I ran errands Saturday, I noticed other SLC bits of culture, such as the Gilded Age lobby of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building

and the glowing fresh flowers in downtown parks and along the streets.

I even noted that the Energy Solutions Center, which brings not only the JAZZ but big name national entertainers to SLC, has been spruced up with sculptures outside its doors!

In our continuing search for culture, Dave and I attended the Tabernacle Choir braodcast on Sunday morning.

We lingered afterwards at the Chruch art exhibition displayed in the halls of the Conference Center. The styles and media of the works were as diverse as thsoe of the global Church. There were traditional depictions of Christ and his apostles,

a brilliant tapestry expressing the glory of the heavens,

religious paintings from Itally and Eastern Europe created in the style of icons,

and even a Cubist Hong Kong temple!

Every great city has diverse ethnic neighborhoods and great restaurants. Dave and I didn't visit The New Yorker, Happy Sumo, or even Market Street Broiler this weekend, but I did tempt Jonny and Jenny with a fejoida dinner, to introduce Jenny to Brazilian cooking and to remind Jonny of his mission in Brazil. I passed Sudanese and Ethiopian restaurants on Redwood Road Saturday afternoon, as I sought my goal--the Brazilian grocery/cafe where I could buy teh essential meats for fejoida--linguisa and carne seca. The chef at the cafe showed me his own kettle of fejoida and said my dish would be even better if I stopped at SuperSavers for pig feet and pig ears.

My fejoida was fabulous, even without pig ears.

Dave and I weren't able to fit in performance of Ballet West, the Utah Symphony, Pioneer Memorial Theater, or Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company last weekend, but we still found enough nuggets of culture, way out here in the provinces, to keep us challenged and amused until we cna make it back to one of America's greater cities. And, of course, one aspect of culture is good food with good talk and good friends.

Party Time!

See my new apron! Dave and I are head of the activities committee for our ward (church), so I bought a new outfit to reflect that lofty position. The July 4th breakfast is an event which has been sponsored by one ward or another in the Upper Avenues for 30 years, so we were stewards of a grand tradition. We did the decorating, but the real stars of the event were the cooks. That is a job jealously guarded by the old-timers from year to year!The party was full of good friends--Annie and Ron Poelman, Karen Derrick with daughter Cindy and her twins, and Elaine Green, riding in on her daughter's motorcycle.
Our next door neighbor, Han Mu, attended the breakfast, along with lots of other new friends from all around the neighborhood (and from all over the world).

Some partyers were just too cute!
After the last trash bag was filled, the last flag tucked away for next year, Dave and I headed for an afternoon at the cabin. We passed through Oakley, all decorated for the 4th, and we wished we'd come early enough for the parade.
The biggest treat of the week was picking Jonny and Jenny up at 11:30 p.m. on Saturday night, and then sharing Sunday dinner with them. We loved hearing about the two days they spent camping out in London in order to get center court tickets for the Wimbledon semi-finals!
Other family news: Michael spent the 4th in Washington, D.C., the heart of all the celebrations. Camille and Steve went to two swimming parties on the 4th, hosted by two different families in their ward. One of the parties was at the town "pond." "Swimming in ponds is not at all unusual in New England," Camille says. "Think Walden Pond." Lisa is finishing her last week of brush-up nursing classes at Renton Hospital in southern Seattle, and loving it. She is now applying for full-time jobs. Kyle is spending this week, as Scoutmaster, with Grant and Spencer at a Boy Scout camp on Puget Sound.