Monthly Archives: May 2010

Supper Club: May 12, 2010

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Appetizer: Goat Cheese with Crackers.


Entree: Paprika Pork. Great weeknight dinner option. You only need 5 ingredients and probably 25 minutes. How simple is that?

Side Dish: Mashed Potatoes with Parsley Shallot Butter. By boiling garlic cloves along with the potatoes, it really infused the flavor into the potatoes. This was a enjoyable dish and another really easy recipe.


Dessert: Sweet Berry Popovers. This dessert actually came out more like a pie than a popover but it was still pretty good. Don’t judge a dish by it’s look.

A Shout-Out to My Wife, the NBA Widow

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Let me just come out and say that I am probably a pretty difficult guy to live with in May and June. I’m a huge NBA fan, to the point where I bring up Bill Simmons in casual conversation. If you don’t know who that is, don’t feel bad, as it only serves to validate my sneaking suspicion that no one else in St. Louis cares about NBA basketball as much as I do. And that is not a sentence that I write with pride. I often feel like my fandom, and specifically my love for the Phoenix Suns, is a bizarre fetish that I must keep hidden away. This is why the NBA playoffs are such an exciting and frustrating time for me. On one hand, it is thrilling to watch the best players in the world go head to head over the course of a series with personal legacies and the fate of entire cities (Hello, Cleveland!) in the balance. On the other hand, I kind of feel like an a-hole if I’m the only one who wants to watch the game. And at the gym? It’s a good thing I looked up Charter’s channel number for TNT (49 — DirecTV is 245) before I went because the guy running the counter had no idea where to look for the game last week.

So yeah, I’ve got this thing about me that nobody understands. Except, of course, for Jen. As far as sports-wives are concerned, she’s definitely a 10. She understands that sports are much better in glorious HD and is willing to watch her shows in the bedroom. She has managed, over the years, to be able to read a book or magazine without the TV distracting her so we can actually see each other in the evenings. Hell, she even knows the difference between Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash — and if that doesn’t sound impressive fellas, ask your ladies about it. The NBA is something that Jen has come into over the years, and while she certainly wouldn’t consider herself a fan, I recognize and appreciate her moderate interest in something that is so important to me.

High five, Jen. High five.

Annie’s Angels Trivia Night

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Saturday night, the Trivia Dream Team (my parents and sister, the Galles, Katie, Jen and myself) went to a trivia night in St. Charles to benefit The March of Dimes. After our disappointing showing at Breaths for Blake 2010, we were looking to get back on the winning track and this was the perfect venue. We started out strong and never looked back, taking a small lead in the third round and hanging on to the end, only to be caught by table two in the tenth round. Our final score was 90 points (out of 100), but our tiebreaker guess was 86 points and table two guessed 84, so we won!

Yay! Seriously, it felt really good to win again. We were beginning to wonder if we had lost our touch. But onto the important stuff: Jen and I brought chocolate chip cookies and chicken parm bites. Tom and Debbie came in with their famous guacamole and a beer bread that was made with Sprite instead of beer. Cheese, crackers, salami, non-pareils, and mini-muffins rounded out the spread. Tasty!

The categories were a fun mix as well:

  • TV Threesomes (Given 3 characters, name the show)
  • Sports (a surprisingly diverse and challenging sports category)
  • “Baby,” I love this song! (Songs with the word “Baby”)
  • Questions and Manswers (Stereotypically manly questions)
  • Potpurri
  • Freeze Frame (Guess the animated movie by a single image)
  • Reality Check (Reality TV questions)
  • Who’s Bad? (Michael Jackson trivia — Jen has the “Free Wily” song on lockdown!)
  • Get your mind out of the gutter (Double entendres – Sample answer: Lake Titicaca. Of course we dominated this category.)
  • Bar exam (Mixology)

As you can see, the categories were diverse. And since there wasn’t a Presidents category, we had a chance to win. Of course, we did miss the one president-related question. Anyway. It was a fun night and a good cause. We win a trivia night and I got this posted in the same month. Things really are getting back to normal.

One Hour Star Wars Trilogy

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So last week, Kim emails us to see if we wanted to see the One Hour Star Wars Trilogy as performed by the Magic Smoking Monkey Theatre, an offshoot of St. Louis Shakespeare. As the promotional materials promised “abolutely no Jar Jar Binks,” we decided to check it out. On Friday night, we went down to the Regional Arts Commision on Delmar (our first time there — it’s a nice place!) to see the show. We were seated in the third row of a small theater space. The show started with the classic title scroll and jumped straight into the action. The action came fast and furious, powering through all the movies in order. All of the classic quotable lines were there, and the plot of the movies was played straight, even as some of the individual scenes were played with a wink from time to time. Highlights included:

  • Han shooting first by a mile. In fact, Greedo barely gets “On tah bootah, Solo?” out before Han blasts him.
  • The attack on the Death Star had the actors “flying” in formation with Han and Chewie coming in from offstage to clear the way for Luke.
  • The Imperial AT-AT walkers were guys dressed all in black, with foil-covered shoe boxes on their heads, lumbering across the stage with walkers (like, the kind that help old people to walk). Their movements were eerily similar to the the AT-ATs on Hoth
  • Yoda was a Kermit the Frog puppet with ears added on. He was voiced by the actor who played Obi-Wan Kenobi.
  • After Luke defeats “Vader” in the cave on Dagobah, he picks up the decapitated Vader mask that has a prinout of his face on the front. He runs around screaming “It’s me! It’s my face! Oh God, it’s a metaphor!!!”
  • The actor playing Lando Calrissian was great. He brought out the Colt 45 cans at every opportunity, even dropping a Jovan Musk reference (“You forgot about that one, didn’t you?”) into the mix. He also did a great job with Moff Tarkin in the first act.
  • As Luke (who was played as an airhead) struggles to figure out who his sister is, Obi-Wan asks “How many girls do you know, Luke?” Of course, he then realizes that he kissed his sister early in Empire.
  • The Ewoks were hilarious. There was a lead Ewok (an actor in a bear suit) but the rest of the pack were stuffed bears strapped to the actors.
  • And yes, Leia was rocking the gold bikini.

All in all, it was quite funny. While it looks like this run is complete, I’d definitely recommend catching it again. I’ve heard of this being done before, as it is the perfect vehicle for community theater. Quick, funny, and since it’s a parody, you aren’t relying on the quality of the individual performances to enjoy the evening. Two thumbs up.