Conductor Kevin Mallon

I just loved meeting Kevin Mallon yesterday, here in Seattle to lead Seattle Baroque Orchestra in Bach's cantatas at Town Hall Seattle. We laughed a lot! Here's a segment from our interview -

https://audioboo.fm/boos/2028635-kevin-mallon-07

moi...

My cartoon of pianist Yefim Bronfman, which I did shortly after interviewing him in Seattle.

Some folks from the online gallery where most of my art is, on a site called Toonpool, interviewed me a while back and they're featuring it again. Their questions don't have much to do with art, but I was so flattered to be chosen for a profile. Excerpt:

Toonpool: Tell me the biggest prank you've ever pulled on a friend. 

Me: I can’t think of a prank I pulled on someone else, but I remember a trick someone played on me. At an office Christmas party that was held at a nice hotel, one of my co-workers grabbed some silverware from a table setting and stuck it in my purse. I walked around all night with this silverware sticking out of my bag, and nobody told me! That’s the part I still can’t believe!


http://blog.toonpool.com/interview/letter-from-seattle/

No bitters? I'm...bitter

What my old fashioned has become. It looks the same, but it's not.

We returned to one of our fave Belltown bars after having been away for a few months, the Rob Roy. The atmosphere is insanely adorable - think Urban Outfitters' assistant-to-the-chief-assistant-buyer's take on a 60's-era gentlemen's club, with walls paneled in black leather (or pleather), a deep-toned oil (or acrylic) painting of a topless lady who resembles Bettie Page, a conspicuously situated turntable (though the music seems to be coming from somewhere else), and Pepperidge Farm goldfish in long polished bamboo boats. Pretentious in a Seattle hipster faux-nostalgic way, but fun.

Anyway, all that stuff's still the same, but what killed me is that the old fashioneds have changed. Rob Roy used to brag about their Prohibition-era (or pre-Prohibition era?) ice techniques. The old fashioneds I loved used that special ice that ice sculptures are made of - super-dense with no air bubbles, so it doesn't melt for forever. You get your drink refreshed, but the ice is the same. And it makes the whole drink heavier in your hand and somehow more interesting.

So you could watch the bartender standing there chiseling a nice-sized crystaline chunk from an iceberg the size of a car, all for you and your little drink. And these things tasted really spicy - I assume because of the bitters they use. It's a classic drink, right, so the bitters are essential, not optional. Am I wrong here?

The other night when I ordered my old fashioned, it looked different. The ice lump is still gigantic, but it's no longer a hand-chipped segment of a hunk of special ice - it's tap water (or something) just poured into a mold shaped like a rough chunk of the denser stuff. The place is dark, so I slid it in front of the candle to make sure. Yeah - not the kewl ice. I checked the menu again, and found no mention of the prohibition era ice techniques. And the bitters had also been take out of the list of the old fashioned ingredients. Sadness!

Frank assures me the mounds of orange slices are still in the latrine. Good to know they kept what really counts.