It's Not That She Didn't Rock My Casbah

This blog thing can be a deal to keep up with!

The title of this blog is a line from a Cowboy Mouth song called Joe Stummer, a song which ran through my head all night for obvious reasons you'll see below. "She had to go because she didn't know who Joe Strummer was."

TWO WEEKENDS AGO Peter and I ventured out on one of the first dark, cold nights of November. We searched for a restaurant not too far from Wrigleville called Rick's Cafe, yes, after the one in Casablanca. My good friends Ken and Natalia Jones recommended it. it's a small placed wedged between two other restaurants on Sheridan.

We had a time finding a parking place in this residential, permit only area, but once we did we were on our way with the bottle of wine Peter stuffed into his inner coat pocket. The place is byob.

We had a lovely time at Rick's. Getting there had seemed stressful, but within 10 minutes we settled into the cozy place. It's charming, about 10 tables, walls decorated with stills from the movie and a great mural of Bogie in his white dinner jacket. We liked the food, too. Very good. I had delicious mussels and salmon, and Peter had a wonderful, thick soup and then some ravioli for his main course. Our time at Rick's took the chill off the evening. I would definitely go back sometime. The only slight discomfort came from the overzealous waiter. His intentions were good though.


After dinner we drove over to one of the best places ever in Chicago, the Music Box movie theater on Southport. One of the top ten favorite things to do in Chicago for me is to see a film there. I love to be in that main theater with the Italianate murals and the pretend sky opening above me. We had come to see a documentary on Joe Strummer, the lead singer of the punk band The Clash. Peter felt I was skewing the evening toward his interests (which I was because I still can't plan a date night without thinking that way), but Stummer interests me. From bits of interviews I've seen with him, I find him very intriguing and somehow honest and attacking life. This documentary didn't disappoint. Even though it wasn't the best piece of filmmaking, to see Stummer shout to the audience from the stage to give him some anger because after all we are all living in this moment together gave me just what I was looking for in him. It's his connection with present time that captures my attention. I didn't know that he loved bonfires and the idea of people gathering around them and having an experience of being together in the moment. If you think about it, gathering around a bonfire would allow you to leave everything behind and concentrate on what's in front of you. Yes Strummer was odd, and as Peter says, he was probably an asshole, but he was trying to communicate something we all constantly miss, that life is happening right now in front of you.

So it was fun. We went home after that.

Now the following weekend we were in New Orleans with the kids for Thanksgiving. On Saturday night Peter and I went to the Rock and Bowl, one of my top favorite places to go in New Orleans and it should be yours, too, to see Tab Benoit play. The jury is still out as to whether or not it counts as an official date night because first, it wasn't intended as one, and second, it was Peter's weekend but my idea to see Tab (who is just wonderful!) . We'll see what happens this weekend. Meanwhile, Peter is busy as usual flying to opposite ends of the United States for Ketchum. He'll be back Thursday night, and from my viewpoint, he's got a date night to plan!

Little Oak Park

That's what Peter used to call Oak Park. Last Saturday night we were back in business on a new Date Night. The weekend before, Peter and Claire were in New Orleans exploring haunted houses and attending VooDoo Fest. But this past weekend we were back together. We had a lovely, gentle evening that revolved around little Oak Park. Peter took us to one of our favorite local restaurants, Marion Street Grill, which is really a hidden treasure in our village. The food is delicious, and there is a calmness to the place that makes you feel very easy and safe. We like to go to the small bar in the back to eat dinner. We've had many great evenings of conversation together there.

We started with glasses of wine and some appetizers, shrimp bisque, marinated and grilled portobellos and crab cakes, all delicious and the perfect amount of food to take us through the next part of our evening. We walked over to our local theater, the Lake, and settled into a two and a half hour movie, American Gangster. Very interesting flick, but I found the lead characters a bit sketchy. I got the feeling the director couldn't put everything in he wanted to or the movie would have been a monster, but that's the way it goes I think when you are working with real life stories. I'm always delighted by Russel Crowe and his commitment to a character. Did we really think those bad haircuts in the 70s had any redeeming attractiveness?


After the movie we went back to the Marion Street Grill bar and had our second course, and a Kir Royale for me and wine for Peter. We both chose salads, mine with tenderloin and horseradish dressing, very yummy, and Peter's with seared tuna. It's always fun to just let the conversation flow. Towards the end we started talking to our exceptional bartender, Mike. We remembered that Mike is originally from Louisiana, and he always has stories to tell about growing up in the depths of the swamps. So he entertained us with some good ones.

One of my very favorite things to do in Oak Park is to walk at night. We walked home in the quiet under the trees holding hands. It doesn't get much better than that!

Special Anniversary Date Weekend!

We had a very different date night this past weekend, more like a date weekend!

Renee and I spent it in Louisiana where we spent our 17th wedding anniversary.
We started in NOLA on Thursday night, where we had a very special meal at Gallatoire's. Our waiter, and sommelier, Mark (shown with us above) was a big fan of Paso Robles wine. When he found out that Kevin and I had been bottling there five days earlier, he rolled out the red carpet. Amazing meal, and all the wine stewards, treated us like celebrities. We promised bottles of Bin 504 for everybody!

After another day in NOLA, we headed out Saturday morning to Lafayette for Festivals Acadien, the best Cajun festival in the world. Each year a band called Les Traiteurs, made up of some of the best Cajun musicians around, play a charity gig there. Their picture is above. Some of you might recognize the guitarist. He's Sonny Landreth, clearly one of the best guitarists you'll ever hear. He opened up Eric Clapton's Crossroads festival this year...and is probably best known as the guitarist on John Hiatt's classic albums, including "Slow Turning." Amazing slide guitarist...just draw-dropping. Well worth checking out his solo albums.

Another favorite, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, played Saturday night at a club called the Blue Moon Saloon, a great place to hear live music. Steve, who is a great friend of ours, and one of the best accordion players around, can be seen above smooching with Renee. The band smoked Saturday night! Just rocked the house.

That car shown above was our rental for the weekend, shown here piled high with treasures we bought on our annual pilgrimage to a shop in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, which you can see in the background. That's usually our final stop on the way back to New Orleans, right after brunch at Cafe des Amis, one of our top ten restaurants. You'd know why if you ever had the andouille cheese grits!

By the way, the quarter looked great! So clean it practically sparkled...you can get the idea from the picture above of the great balcony on Dauphine.

Needless to say, we left very reluctantly on Monday morning! A great weekend for reconnecting and reconnecting with each other and falling in love again with Louisiana!

Date Night Diaries Goes to Philly

Date Night Diaries took a trip last weekend to Philadelphia, and oh the things we did and saw!...and didn't see!

Peter and I met at the Ritz in Philadelphia this past Friday to celebrate our good friend Zoe's birthday. Zoe's husband, Jim, drove her down to Philadelphia from upstate New York under false pretenses so that running into us at the Ritz bar would be and was a total surprise! Happy Birthday, Zoe! The festivites continued from there. We ate dinner at a lovely restaurant called Davios on the second floor of a converted bank. ( Everything in Philadelphia seemed to be housed in converted banks, the Ritz, Davios, stores.) Exceptional waitress, exceptional food and lots of catch up since it's been a while since we have seen Jim and Zoe. Jim and Peter have known each other since 8th grade so they go way, way, way, way back.

On our walk back to the hotel we stopped at Chris' Jazz Club and made a new friend, Ronnie, at the door. Ronnie let us in without a cover charge and asked that we send him this picture which I did.


The next morning the exceptional concierge at the Ritz steered us to the trendy Continental restaurant on Chesnut Street for brunch. The Continental has a retro 70s feel to it that makes you crave a martini even if you don't drink them! Rattan chairs hang from the ceiling around tables. Lots of aqua. The best, and I mean the best omelete I've ever had in my life. But the most intriguing thing about the Continental is the two way mirrors in the bathrooms. As you come down the stairs to the bathroom hallway you see people in the men's and women's bathrooms fussing in the mirror. Very voyeuristic and strangely uncomfortable and exhiliarating at the same time. You are embarrassed to look but you wanna look. An impromtu tour of the restaruant's retro rooftop nightspot by the Continental's manager, Steve, revealed another odd bathroom scenario. We later heard that an unusual bathroom experience is one of the trademarks of this restaurant's owner. Made me want to see what else he came up with in his other restaurants around town. It certainly made the Continental memorable.



It was Zoe's birthday Saturday, the actual day, September 22nd, so we took our lead from her for our next activity. And she didn't let us down! We walked through Philly looking for the Eastern State Penitentiary, one of the oldest prisions in the country dating back to the 1830s and the world's first penitentiary, a place designed to inspire true penitence in crimminals. The massive stone walls with a castle like entry way hold within them seven cell blocks radiating like spokes in a wheel from a circular center. The ESP (as it is known!) closed it's doors in the 1970's and is now the object of a preservation campaign. You can tour it but with caution. The first thing they ask you to do when you enter is to sign a waiver in case a part of the prison falls on your head during your tour. Al Capone was incarcerated there among other notable criminals. We did see an escape tunnel one of the inmates dug, and we were able to stand in the individual cells and experience the isolation so carefully designed into the building by the original architects. Overall the place is impressive, daunting, overwhelming and scary with an eerie beauty thrown in. It's also a photographer's paradise.


If going to the Eastern State Penitentiary wasn't bizarre enough, getting there gave us a surprise adventure. We ran into one of the oddest sights any of us has ever seen: a Hari Krishna parade. Ok, you might say, you've seen them yourself in your day, but did yours have a Scottish tattoo playing the Hari Krishna theme, and was yours attended by no one less than Ben Franklin in a horse drawn carriage? Well, ours did and was. We were glued to our corner on the boulevard because we couldn't believe what kept coming next.


Being in prison is thirsty business. We stopped at Triumph, a micro brewery, and sampled 8 different beers. We walked to Penn's Landing near the waterfront and convinced a very sweet street musician to serenade Zoe with the birthday song. He did better than that. He dedicated one of his own songs to her. You can't beat that on your birthday!

Several people had mentioned Monks in the Old City section as a fun place for dinner. Monks is a Belgian tavern specializing in Belgian beers and mussels. Noisy, crowded and solid, good food.


Saturday night, date night time back home in Chicago, we went to see the King Tut exhibit at the Philadelphia science museum. Although the show was selling out day after day, there were tickets for nighttime viewing. So at 9:30pm we headed over there to enjoy magnificent artifacts from King Tut's time, some of them found in his tomb. Somehow we missed the memo telling us that the King, himself, was not on this tour. In the final room, we were greeted with a tomb sized block decorated with a morphing digial image of King Tut lying in his tomb with several pieces of jewelry on him. No gold death mask for us. Our tickets came with entrance into the IMAX movie on mummies which we dutifully went to at 11 o'clock. By then we were running on fumes and the movie was disjointed and confusing. More than one of our party took a snooze during that one!


Sunday, our final day in Philly. Another great suggestion from our Ritz concierge James (why didn't I get a blog photo of him?!) was brunch at Rouge on Rittenhouse Square. A beautiful day, just perfect weather. The bistro style cafe opened onto the park. We met our friends Dorothy and John, Philly natives (he by way of Ireland) at Rouge so that Peter could hand off his keys to 822 to them.
They are staying at our New Orleans place for Voodoo Fest in October. Watching Peter relinquish his NOLA keys was like watching someone hand over a vital organ. I had to talk him into giving Dorothy BOTH keys convincing him she needed both to unlock all of the necessary doors.

Lots of delicious food and good conversation later, we went into the park across the way for a special tapping lesson from Jim. Jim has tremendous healing ability and is saying goodbye to several decades of practicing law to begin a new career in healing through hypnosis (visit his website at jimleehypnosis.com). He led us through a simple technique to alleviate and clear fears and anxiety. We sat on a bench in the park and performed this technique in the midst of all of the other Sunday afternoon activity happening around us.


Time to say goodbye. Thanks and good wishes all around as everyone headed back to their homes in Binghampton, Chicago and Philly.

Sweet Potato Fais Do Do

This was actually a really fun night, Renee's boring commentary does not do it justice! Granted, it was a bit surprising after my outstanding work planning last week's rendezvous with shellfish and sauerkraut that we went shopping on Michigan Avenue, but still it was great.

Renee picked up on my comment earlier in the week that I need a new look...and that I was sick of only having khakis in the closet as the only alternative to jeans and cargo pants. So she took me at my word and called my bet. I was initially completely out of my element, and distracted by a phonecall in Macy's from a friend whose father had just passed away.

But Renee took charge, threw clothes at me, kicked me into a changing room and let nature take its course.

Fun strolling along Michigan Avenue, one of the world's greatest streets...haven't had an evening stroll there in awhile.

Dinner was delicious and the conversation was fun....lots of laughing and some good wine.

And the picture above was of Renee interrogating our waiter, trying to get the name of my appetizer which was amazing. I thought he said Sweet Potato Fais Do Do -- of course, I think everybody is speaking Cajun all the time anyway. Turns out it was Sweet Potato Arrepas. Which I think may be also be the title of an Iguanas song.

All in all a great night.

Peter Goes Shopping

Last night I took my life into my hands by deciding that I wanted to take Peter shopping for new clothes as our date night. The look on his face in the Water Tower Place elevator in downtown Chicago when I finally revealed our purpose for going there. It was touch and go for the first 40 minutes or so. We wandered through Macys with no results. Peter asked to go to Banana Republic, but once we got there he continued to wander aimlessly. Finally, I grabbed four pairs of pants, shoved them into his arms and sent him to the dressing room. Well, three pairs made it home with some socks. Inspired by this success Peter started to look for more things but it seemed the pants were to be it for the night.

We went out onto Michigan Avenue as dusk came on and walked through the shoppers in perfect weather up to Ontario Street to dinner. I chose a new place for us to eat, Viand. Turns out by coincidence that the chef is from Cafe le Coq here in Oak Park. A little easel on our table displayed a welcome sign to the Picard party, a nice touch, but they wouldn't let us take it home! Dinner was delicious. We had a great meal and a great time talking. My meal, root vegetables with cous cous in a curry sauce, came under something that Peter said looked like a party hat. Tasty, though.

After dinner I toyed with the idea of adding a movie, but you know, the evening seemed perfect as it was. I opted to go home. We walked back along Magnificent Mile and headed to Oak Park, picking up Claire from her friend's block party on the way home.

apologies to sarah

I wanted to know more about Sarah Borges, the young woman we saw play at Fitzgeralds in Berwyn last Saturday night, and I looked her up online to find out I completely misspelled her name. So my apologies. You can find out more about her at sarahborges.com.

Another Episode of The Surreal Life

Man, we fit in a lot of action yesterday....one of the highlights was posing for pictures with this group of friendly folks from Minnesota at the German American festival at Lincoln Square. We had a ball dancing to the band, drinking steins of beer and eating brats and sauerkrat.

Weather was just perfect for both street fairs, and for sitting out at Fitzgerald's. Ran into Karl and Emily at Fitz's. The real highlight was, as Renee pointed out, the opening act. She was terrific!

Another stellar date night!

An Evening of Street Festivals

Yesterday, the weather was perfect here in Chicago -- blue, blue sky, temperature in the mid-70s -- street festival weather. The weather inspired Peter to take us to two of who knows how many street festivals happening this weekend around Chicago: the Guiness Oyster Fest and the German Fest. What a blast!

Oyster Fest in the trendy Roscoe Village neighborhood was our first stop for oyster appetizers as Peter put it. Oyster Fest proved a gentle, somewhat upscale affair with lots of young professionals pushing around their first borns or wearing them face out on their chests. One little red headed baby strapped to his 30 something's father's chest this way earnestly dipped his whole hand into his father's beer while his dad talked to friends and then tasted his fingers with a scowl on his face looking as if his was a very serious assessment of what his dad was drinking. As we navigated through the street fair we wondered where the oysters were. We found the beer easily enough. Turns out you can only get oysters at one booth, and there is a line. Interesting, we thought, because you would assume that an Oyster Fest would be all about oysters, fried, Rockefeller, shooters. But no. This isn't Abbeville, Louisiana after all. The line moved quickly, though. They announced over a speaker system that over 12,000 oysters were sold at last year's fest. We had a dozen raw oysters, and bowl of very tasty marinated calimari.


We heard some music, too, rock and roll and then Irish rock and roll, and some ska. We were also treated to a group of highlanders playing all the bagpipe hits you can think of. There was an unusually high amount of very large dogs at this street fair. After a while we realized there was a booth dedicated to mastifs.... One smaller dog got pushed around in a baby carriage on a pillow.

On to dinner. German Fest takes place every year (apparently) in Lincoln Village. It's crowded into a corner there, and you've got to like brats and sauerkraut because that's all they serve. And beer. In special commemerative plastic souvenir steins. We loved our brats! A nice hearty meal which included potates, of course. We looked around for a bit and then settled in at the large beer hall style tent where a band of men in leiderhosen were setting up. Ya. A group of older people of German descent were all dressed up in colorful costumes complete with headgear. We decided they were our photo op. They were very accommodating and outrageously nice. They were from Minnesota, and one woman told me their carnivale season goes from November to Ash Wednesday. Hmmm. Who knew.

The band started up. Peter and I couldn't resist the oompa sounds of the German tunes and we were drawn to the dance floor to waltz and sway and sing along, whatever was demanded of us. The band peaked with a sing-a-long rendition of John Denver's Country Road.

It was only 8 o'clock when we left Lincoln Park to its jam packed celebration of al things German. We headed over to Fitzgerald's and sat outside in the still beautiful weather waiting for music and enjoying a chat and some Wishbone take out which is a very welcome addition to the Fitzgerald experience. We both loved the first band. Neither one of us had ever heard of this young woman Sara Porges, but what a personality and a great rocker. Word on the street is that she's from Massachusetts, maybe even Fall River (where my dad was from) and that she is Portugese. She seemed all-American to me last night and cute and funny as can be between rock outs. I'd see her again. The Iguanas came on next. They sounded good, but I was by then too tired to really enjoy them. Besides, without Derek Houston in the band, I can't seem to muster up my old enthusiasm for the Iguanas.

That was it the whole evening. Peter wants and gets credit for the longest datenight so far, and he is tied for the most number of venues in one datenight, but he's not competitive or anything.
Thanks, Peter, for a fun, adenturous date night. Much love, Renee

It was a fun night. We came away from our mixed up Wishbone meal with a gift certificate good for $10 at our next meal there. I KNOW the manager told us he would comp our meal!

Saturday, September 1

A special New Orleans-themed night planned by Renee.

Started with dinner al fresco at Wishbone. Despite an overmatched waiter -- with Peter's meal arriving before the appetizer, and way before Renee got any food -- it was a typically great Wishbone meal.

Round Two was a special screening of Kamp Katrina -- a quirky documentary of life in the Bywater post-Katrina featuring a couple who opened up their home to those left homeless by the hurricane. Very compelling movie...the screening was attended by the filmmakers who answered questions afterward.

And Round Three was terrific, too! A night at Fitzgerald's featuring the New Orleans Jazz Vipers in a very rare appearance outside of the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street (where Peter has seen them play dozens of times!) They were terrific and the crowd loved them.

The Vipers opened for Marcia Ball who played great, as usual, but the musical night belonged to Vipers.

A very satisying, complete night. Definitely an A!