… that La Kid performed with James Taylor at the Kennedy Center tonight. Also with Mavis Staples. Her chorus sang along with the two of them to a Hey Jude / Let It Be medley in honor of Paul McCartney.

Most of the chorus stood on the stage, but La Kid was part of a smaller group that walked from the rear of the hall down the aisles, distributing flash lights to audience members (Flash lights? This seems odd. But that’s what she told us she was going to do.) Then she walked up to the stage and joined everyone as they waved their hands in the air and did that endless

Na. Na-na. Nananana. Nananana. He-ey Jude…

Maybe they turned the concert hall lights down for this? A thousand points of light?

UD‘s kid will perform in the Kennedy Center Honors tonight (it’ll be broadcast on December 28).

During yesterday’s rehearsal, she watched Steve Tyler perform some Beatles songs (her group will also sing Beatles songs). I wasn’t supposed to blog about Tyler, because the honorees (Paul McCartney, in this case) aren’t supposed to know in advance who’s performing their songs.

But UD‘s sister just sent her this article, which reveals that McCartney asked for Tyler. So I’m not giving anything away.

There are two other performers with whom La Kid performs tonight — and those names I’ll continue to keep to myself.

… gets a wonderful write-up from Christopher Hitchens.

If you’ve been with me awhile, you know my kid performed with a gospel group at last year’s Kennedy Center Honors. (Here’s a YouTube of her group’s performance with Sting. La Kid‘s the blond in glasses who shows up at 1:43.)

She’ll do the same thing this year, in front of a new group of honorees. Including the cute Beatle.

UD will of course cover this event on her blog. (UD knows the spectacular singer her kid will accompany for this performance; she also knows the spectacular songs her group will sing. But she’s not allowed to tell you.)

You have to admit he’s original.

His is the last recipe on the page: Gabe: Roasted Turkey Ravioli. If you like it, subscribe, and then click on LIKE IT to vote for it. If Gabe gets enough votes, he wins a scholarship to attend the Culinary Institute of America.

You’ve met UD‘s Garrett Park neighbor, the insanely precocious chef Gabe Mandel, on this blog before.

He’s also been featured in the Washington Post.

Twice.

The consensus around here is that Ella, old, imperial, receiving human tribute as she lies in her barn, likes UD. “Two kisses! She gave you two.”

The llama kiss is not really a kiss. The llama brings her big head, her black eyes, hard against your face, and breathes.

Briefly you bathe in the breath of the llama.

It’s different with the goats. They bat their weird eyes at you and let you pet their faces and stroke their horns.

I sang them a song.

Because all goats are brothers
Wherever goats may be
One goatherd shall unite us
Forever proud and free…

The cats sprawl under pickups and ignore your mewl imitation until you start to walk away, at which point they drag their asses over and let you stroke their ears.

The farm has everything pour les types uds – a good library, a piano, silence, views… We even seem to be in what the farm calls the scholar’s room — appliqued images of books along the walls, paintings with books in them…

The four-poster bed’s so high you have to take a running leap to get on it.

You can play it unprettily and it still sounds pretty.

I’ve been playing from a virginal book tonight on my baby grand. In particular, I’ve been trying to master O Mistris myne, by William Byrd. (Here’s the book.) (At 1:21 on the YouTube: Hear the dissonance? Fun.)

My error-ridden rendition of this gorgeous tune and variations sounded so good that Mr UD, sitting nearby in the living room, protested when I stopped.

I’ve been trying to figure out why you can get away, when playing music for virginal, with being a bad pianist. It’s actually difficult to play these pieces (sometimes you think If it’s old, it’ll be easier than something new. Not so.); so it should sound a mess…

The best I can do is that this music combines a very strong and intensely charming tune, to which it returns very clearly again and again, even as the variations keep manically coming and going. The listener is in love with that tune, and seeks it out in a way that rather blurs the rest of the playing… The listener feels deep happiness each time his ear relocates the tune…

And, after all, the complex variations on the tune are … complex, so if your fingers are muddying them, maybe it sounds as though you’re following directions! The runs and trills, the accidents and ornaments — they merge with your modern messiness until things get all Elizabethan.

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Stephen Dedalus, with his impeccable taste, loved this same music, and in conversation with Leopold Bloom singled out a composer also in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: Sweelinck.

… and on the morning after a dinner party with old friends, UD records this poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, with commentary.

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Envoy

Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!

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The poet sends his book of verse to the world with best wishes.

Let’s see:

Flowers in the garden.

A few white flowers remain on one of my potted geraniums on the deck. Some of the hydrangea out front still seem flowery, though strictly speaking they’re not. Do pyracantha berries count? No.

Meat in the hall.

Karyna, a gourmet cook, prepared a meaty Argentine stew for the evening. All I had to do was heat it on my stove.

A bin of wine.

“Get a good Rioja,” Karyna said, so Mr UD bought a Campellares Rioja.

A spice of wit.

The night was heavily spiced.

One of the guests recounted how, when she was a little girl, “old men were always coming up to me and saying dirty things. To this day I don’t know why I attracted so many. It happened all the time.”

This encouraged UD to recall how, decades ago, she and her mother were taken up Mt. Vesuvius by a guide, an old peasant. At one point the man directed UD‘s attention out to some distant hills, and as she gazed, he felt her up.

Another guest said that when he was young and beautiful, a drunk old guy on the subway tried to hump him.

Okay, none is this is what Stevenson meant by wit.

A house with lawns enclosing it.

Here I’m on extremely solid ground. Faithful readers know of UD‘s small Garrett Park house entirely surrounded by – at the moment – leaf-strewn lawns.

A living river by the door.

River of leaves? Leaves lie along the edges of the street by UD‘s door… And when it rains hard, a living river of water pours down the Rokeby Avenue hill… And if you’re willing to stretch things quite a bit, Rock Creek lies a quarter mile or so behind UD‘s house…

A nightingale in the sycamore.

An owl in the maple.

Drinking… fits comfortably with what some see as a just-regular-folks, anti-elitist strain in Wisconsin’s character. You know, the kind of people who would take an insult from Illinoisans – “cheesehead” – and turn it into a symbol of pride.

… Part of the anti-elitist attitude, [one observer says,] is a sense that we exemplify a true folk culture, and that “real people do these real things like getting drunk.”

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Last night, to toast her friend Courtney’s next stage in life (naval officer), UD sat at the bar at Sushi Damo in Rockville and hoisted an Asian Pear Martini. (Courtney had a Margarita.)

As an elitist, UD felt comfortable limiting herself to one low horsepower drink for the evening.

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Here is a long article (part of a series!) about why the state of Wisconsin leads the nation in drinking. (What does this have to do with universities? Hold on a minute!) It features a tidy paragraph of Reasons:

Climate. Ethnicity. The historical importance of the brewing industry. The interpersonal dynamics that govern how people learn to live comfortably in a group. The social nature of most drinking. A relative lack of newcomers who might foster change. The premium many here place on being just a regular person. The need for identity.

A shivery clannish German-derived person in search of identity… How can you stop being this and start being a temperate cosmopolitan solitude-seeking Jewish-derived person who puts a premium on being irregular?

Well, you can’t. You can’t make yourself over like that. Nor would you want to. You like being what you are just as much as UD likes being what she is.

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But when one of your state’s universities loses seven students in two years to alcohol, you have a problem. Administrators at the University of Wisconsin Stout are cracking down this way and that in an effort to save lives, keep students out of jail, and generally reduce mayhem and injury. They’re doing all the things universities do when they try to get out of the alcohol mess: Upping penalties for underage students in possession, and for riotous partying; begging some of the hundreds of bars just off campus to shut down or at least stop offering insanely cheap drinks; mandating alcohol education courses; increasing Friday classes…

But when even that high a body count has many Stout students taking to Facebook rebellion…

If you really wanted to place Snoburbia, though, Sullivan says you could do worse than the more affluent and advantaged parts of Montgomery: Chevy Chase, Garrett Park, Potomac, Kensington, Bethesda.

A blogger down the road from Garrett Park, in Kensington, chronicles the snobbery of Garrett Park residents like UD.

She will usher in 2011 with this fellow, in Vermont.

Regular readers know that Les UDs have spent many December/Januaries in chilly Vermont farmhouses with Peter.

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Update: Galbraith wins. Top vote-getter.

… Peter Benjamin, talks up their town.

A national historic district, a nuclear-free zone, an arboretum (yes, the whole town!), a true small community with its own town government.

Ania Soltan, Ireland, October 2010.

Regular readers know that UD‘s kid,
La Kid, is spending her junior year
abroad in Galway. She and her friends
go out two nights for Halloween. These
are photos from last night.

La Kid is the hippie with the headband.

Here she is with her roommates:
Michael Jackson, A Nerd, and Cowgirl.

Click on the photos for bigger pictures.

Half way up my half acre. It stops and looks at me. Like this.

A minute later, it slinks away, farther up the hill.

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Three hours later, I notice a Deer Tourism line of cars in front of my house.

An enormous buck relaxes in my front garden.

I go out and shout at him and he runs away.