Saturday, October 11, 2025
Keith got up early to go to a rehearsal in River Falls. I actually got up and worked on laundry and tackled the pile of cardboard in the living room. The cabinets aren’t done, but I wrangled the current cardboard. Because I am insane about reusing, I carefully cut the boxes into flat, useable pieces to save for the spring make-a-roller-coaster activity at Grey Cloud elementary. For the spring! I am nuts.
Keith got home and we went to White Bear Lake to see Red, a play about Mark Rothko and some murals he was painting for a very fancy restaurant in New York. Crime and Punishment got me thinking about people talking about philosophy etc and I said that people now just talk about the bottom line, everything is done for money. The art world, as late as the late 1950s with Rothko, was not about making money – although he had made money. It was about vision and creating something new and something meaningful. In the play, Rothko and his assistant are at odds as to what is art. I am not a Rothko fan, because it looks like something anyone could do. I do understand that anyone did NOT do it, but…it doesn’t grab me.
After the show, we went to the awesome sandwich place, Alleycat’s Gourmet Sandwiches. They were so busy we had to wait half an hour for our food. No worries. We had plenty of time and the star of the play we had just seen was sitting at the other outdoor table. We enjoyed the sunshine and listened to Rothko and his two friends who had come to the show talk about it. His friends had traveled several hours to come to the show. They asked a lot of questions about what different things in the show meant. I was very intrigued, because I think if something meant nothing to you as an audience member, it meant nothing. Rothko tried to explain that this play was centered around actual events but that they don’t know what actually happened in his studio and what the two guys actually said to each other. His wife is also an actor and his two preschoolers were at Gramma’s tonight (Magnus and something edgy I can’t remember. The friends’ kid is Ferris). They were interesting to listen to.
The food was just terrific. I had the same sammich as last time – including candied bacon. Keith had a shrimp po’boy Bay of Pigs style. That meant his sandwich had crispy smoked bacon and house-made sweet sriracha sauce. It was a total mess, but so delicious it didn’t matter.
We stopped briefly at home to bring in laundry that was out drying and then headed to a Cabaret Night at the Phipps. Zachary Scott Johnson and Jennifer Somebody (she reminded me of Amy Adams) sang songs from the 60s and 70s for us. Zach told funny stories and played guitar, harmonica, and piano. I have really been enjoying our dip into that timeframe lately – I am nostalgic for a time when I was actually alive!
Zach has been adding a song/day to his YouTube channel every day for about a dozen years. I am not in his league!