Currently at my dad’s place down in Durham NC to celebrate both his birthday (90!) and my brother’s. Sam’s is a week after Dad’s, but we’ll miss the actual date because Dad and I will have flown off to Vegas by then. So we’re taking him out this weekend before we leave.
I’d kinda hoped that we could celebrate Dad’s birthday with more people, but his lady friend was laid up with COVID and he doesn’t have a lot of buddies. It was just Dad, Sam and me at Parizade, which is a lovely restaurant we’ve done other big events at (such as Dad and Mom’s 60th wedding anniversary a few years ago, just weeks before Mom passed away). Anyway, it was great.
Our server was a thin older gentleman with a white curly beard (no, not Santa, really), very extroverted, very gay, who I thought was adorable. He was very touchy with me and Sam – I was all for it, Sam was like muttering ‘don’t touch me’, heh. Dad and I started with cocktails and the “Marouli salad”, which was a very simple, but amazingly tasty, romaine salad. Sam had an apple/squash (pumpkin?) soup that sounded great. Then Sam had salmon, I had the rigatoni, and Dad had some other seafood dish – and Dad and I had wine. Then we all had eggnog cheesecake with gingersnap crust for dessert! Really nice meal.
Other than that, Dad and I have been having simple meals at home and watching the news and reading and preparing for our trip, mainly putting together a list of sights and attractions for each city (and I’m now going and creating a reference doc with all the open days and hours for each). I think this is going to be a lot of fun. No one is being a little bitch or demanding about how we’re doing this or throwing sand into the works. We did figure out, unfortunately, that since we’re only going to be two nights in Vegas (the first being our flight out), and we’ll be three hours behind there, we probably won’t be awake enough to go to a real evening show, whether it be Cirque du Soleil, comedy or boobies. But we’ll spend our full day there just wandering around the Strip and seeing if anything catches our eye for entertainment for food. No pressure.
I planned this very much so I could keep an eye out on Dad and help him if he needed it, but he’s really in great shape. Totally together upstairs and not doing bad physically either. Yesterday, it was raining when we went to the grocery score and so he hustled to get from the car to the store and I had to scramble to keep up! Ninety years old, people.
The week before I left was nice and mellow, but still had quite a bit going on. I gave an audition coaching to my buddy Chaz, who was auditioning for the BHT spring show, “The Grand Duke”, which is being directed by my buddy Gary and which will involve all my friends. I’m looking forward to that cast list. Chaz and I went out for Mexican food afterward and had a great time, hadn’t hung out with him for a while. He just got cast in another production of “Company” in Brooklyn which I should go to, I haven’t seen that show onstage since the Doyle production.
Our company holiday party was another night – at a fun bar way way down at the south end of Manhattan, within visual range of the South Ferry terminal. So a schlep to get there, but really fun. The food and drinks were good – everyone was ordering the cocktail they were pushing, an espresso martini, but I dared to ask for a cosmo and the bartenders were fine with that. And then everyone was like, oooo, is that a cosmo? Heh.
They also did karaoke, which I don’t think I’ve seen at a company party before. My big boss Chris got the party started with some pop standard, I forget, which he did credibly. And no one else stepped up, so I decided to do one of my karaoke standards, “Your Song”, which went very well. (apparently, people were like, “shhh, Eric PETERSON is singing!”) Then the ice got broken, particularly when my co-worker Greg broke the ‘naughty’ ice by singing “Laid” by James, a song I’d never heard. The HR folks were like just ‘lalala I am not seeing or hearing anything’, it was really funny. Then we got a rhythm going and had a Bohemiam Rhapsody, Brandy, Faith (I should have followed that with Father Figure), a whole bunch of stuff. After my third cosmo, I was pondering doing “Popular”, but we sorta ran out of time. Would have been a hoot, though.
I really do like my co-workers and it was a ton of fun. I’m so glad I went.
Also had dinner with Miss Tessa, ostensibly so she could hand me the gift she always gives my dad for Christmas, a Wooden Boat calendar. We had a nice time too, getting caught up. She has decided to stay in New York rather than retiring to her native Argentina, and we are really happy about that.
Coming up – the wild shenanigans of the Petersons out west!
The Toast Point Page 