monthly open circle

A sad day. The newest member of the team left town last night. For now, all we can do is wish him well.
One benefit of his brief stay is that the roadmap into the performance team began to be drawn and IB is navigating that path now. It was beautiful to watch Ian - fresh, new, uncertain - in the circle with the performance team at this afternoon's rehearsal. The rehearsal itself - at least as much as I stayed for - was great fun. Curt was just running the team through the active repertoire in alphabetical order to see what state each piece was in after the break - just one time through for each piece. The sudden discovery of forgotten notes made for amusing spontaneous improvisations.

Before the rehearsal, nine of us (including two non-TTA team visitors) circulated under Curt's suggestions for two hours. Good, intense work. Though I found myself selfishly wishing we could have circles like this without the visitors. It would be interesting to see where we could go with this work.

Months ago, I'd put Alice Water's 'The Art of Simple Food' on the wait-list at the library. Even though they have 39 copies in the library system, there were so many others in line for the book, I only now just got my hands on a copy. And I'm really enjoying it. I don't need to own this book (I'm still in my anti-acquisition state) but I wish I could savor it with a less rushed sense of reading it. It is the kind of cooking book I like best - she delineates the aspects of a recipe that need to be respected (and why!) and which are open to improvisation. As a result, this book actually teaches you how to cook! Last weekend, when I was trying to follow a couscous salad recipe from another book, I had misgivings about the amount of water the recipe called for. I scrimped when I measured the water, and still came out with soggy couscous. Clearly, I should have followed my instincts. That, and another experience I had mid-week with a polenta recipe, pointed out that sometimes recipes can be wrong! Funny that I'd never considered that before - and now - having finally begun to learn how to cook, I see that some of my early failures - failures that often caused me to restrain myself in the kitchen - may have simply been a case of a poorly written recipe or a bad proofreader.