Text 4078, 99 rader
Skriven 2008-03-20 21:36:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: trip 2 12
=================
NW5777 MEM XNA 1430 1545 CRJ 2A

Pleasant (given one's lowered expectations for Airlink
service) shortish (under an hour) flight. We took off a
tad late and landed a tad early. The Courvoisier here was
VS only but welcome nevertheless. Good flight attendant.

==
Meals eaten in Arkansas.

Boat Dock Cafe, Prairie Creek, AR - my friend Ella wanted
to go for a ride, and I nixed Eureka Springs, as I hate
cutesy shopping places, so we went down to Beaver Lake,
which is mighty scenic, plus there's this quaint floating
restaurant. We doubted that it would be open - usually it
opens April Fool's, but in fact it was serving lunch only.
We inquired, and it turned out that this year they decided
to open a month early "to cross everyone up." Ella had a
very large turkey club - this comes with chips or fries,
but for a buck extra you can get onion rings, which are
pretty good. I got Frito pah, which unfortunately didn't
come in a Frito bag but in a bowl: other than that, the
Fritos are fresh, the chili though mild was quite palatable
and had no beans, and the onions and shredded cheese came
on the side and not on top. You come to this place not for
the food exactly - it's wholesome but not very notable -
but for the fun of eating on a big old houseboat and
feeding your leftovers (I used the shredded cheese for this
purpose) to the enormous carp that hang around in the lake
expecting handouts. And also the pah. Ella had a slice of
chocolate, which was quite nice, not too too sweet, and I
had coconut cream, good but somehow the cream part tasted
like bananas (I bet that banana cream was being made the
same day).

Village Inn, Bentonville, AR - with Ella and Kenneth and
Faye. They had big plates of eggs and bacon and waffles
and pancakes and stuff, none of which except the bacon I
can tolerate much of. I had two pieces of pah - pecan,
fairly good for a commercial product, but my mother's was
much better, and coconut cream, which was different and
potentially better than that at the Boat Dock - the
custard was a regular custard (vanilla flavored rather
than coconut) topped with whipped cream (stale and tasting
of refrigerator, the main downgrade factor) and a handful
of toasted coconut shavings. After this meal I went into a
frank diabetic attack; in retrospect I should have had
a slice of pecan and a half slice of coconut, which would
have been my limit (they sell slices for $3 to $4 and
half slices for $2.50 to $3).

Kobe, Fayetteville, AR - with the conductor Lars or whatever
his name is, the music director Jeannine, the soloist Shannon
Lee, and a dozen or so other select orchestra members and
friends. It's a tradition that I take my buddy Bob Umiker to
lunch between the rehearsal and the concert, but Holly the
concertmaster (this is the only group I currently play in
that I'm not concertmaster of) asked me to lunch, so I told
Bob to tag along and I'd pay. It is, as it turns out, a
hibachi place. The kid doing the honors said he'd never had
such a big group all by himself - he had to deal with two
grills at once. He was clearly domestic and spoke with a
California accent but was fairly skillful and showmanlike
nonetheless. I had a large Fat Tire, which probably didn't
endear me to the conductor people but which Holly nodded
approvingly at, followed by the sirloin, about a 4 oz cut
done rare as ordered and then chopped up into a dozen little
pieces. Fried rice (okay) and grilled vegetables (nicely done
but as the luck of the draw would have it my portion was
mostly zucchini - I saw others' having carrots, broccoli,
onions, things that I would eat) came with. Bob had a piece
of salmon that was maybe twice as big as my meal for the
same price. This was my first Benihana-type experience. It
was amusing. The food was better than I'd feared.

==

Our concert, after numerous rehearsals during which the
guest conductor spent most of his time carping about the
intonation of the woodwinds and brass, went pretty well.
Not that the intonation is impeccable, mind, but rather
that spending more than a couple minutes at a time fussing
about it is beyond the pale. Shannon Lee is a 15-year-old
near-prodigy and plays quite well. Not substantially better
than I do, but she's just a kid and may become quite excellent
later. She also looks like my cousins. I asked her mom at
the luncheon about possible family connections, but she pled
ignorance (she's Toishanese and doesn't know the Lee family
very well). Shannon did the Mendelssohn violin concerto
pretty nicely. The rest of the program was Mozart - the
overture to Lucio Silla (one of his child-prodigy pieces)
and the Jupiter symphony (one of his last works). The
audience was much relieved by this programming, in contrast
to the Bartok Concerto for orchestra, which we did last time,
and showed it by numbering three or four times the size of
the audience for the other program.
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