Saturday, February 27, 2010

Happy Birthday, Joyce!

Another year has come around, and I'm so grateful to say that it is the birthday again of my beloved mom, Joyce Kennedy. We talked on the phone today, before she headed out with Wally-Dad for dinner at Brasa Rotisserie, followed by a performance by the extraordinary TU Dance at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis. It's a cabaret performance set to jazz standards, with dancers Toni-Pierce Sands and Uri Sands collaborating with the Jeremy Walker Quartet and actor/musician T. Mychael Rambo: chamber dances exploring concepts of respite in the city, drawing on Uri's memories of Central Park.

As Joyce put it: "Not a bad date for a woman in her eighties!" (Actually, she said "for an olede": old lady in Papua New Guinea pidgin.)


I'm so grateful for my kind and intelligent mother, who is shown here exploring respite in the woods, during a not-that-long-ago canoe trip.  Happy birthday, Mom! We love you.

3 comments:

elena said...

Hey Mom-Joyce,

How was your date? Jeanne noted (over on facebook) that that was a hot date for someone of any age! TU Dance is so extraordinary, and the Ritz is always divine. Hope you enjoyed the Brasa food too: pan-fried plantain rather than birthday cake? Michael Pollan would approve. xxElena

Joyce said...

Hey, Elena~ Thanks for the birthday shout! The hot date was great--TU in top form, as usual, and with a jazz quartet and two jazz singers, giving us Central Park on a cold winter's evening in Minneapolis. We didn't get to enjoy the Brasa food, though. The place was packed and we would have had to have waited for at least 25 minutes to get seated. Since we didn't want to miss Central Park, we went to a restaurant near the Ritz, the Erte, described as a "bohemian-chic" steakhouse. We didn't have steaks, though--we opted for more healthy fare, the kind that Michael Pollan would be more likely to approve of.

Kathy said...

Elena, thanks for honoring our dear Mom's birthday with your gratefulness. We are such fortunate offspring and siblings, to know such kindness, intelligence, and emotional beauty in our mother and father!

Actually, lapun meri is old woman in PNG tok pisin. Olede is Lepani family humor, coined by Thierry when he was 4 years old--making fun of my exhaustion after a hefty workout of play (spinning him around--"more, more!!") and my excuse that I couldn't keep going because I was an old lady!