A light posting

The house is near capacity – filled with out-of-towners, some experiencing the “Midwest” for the first time. Where to take them? What to do?

It’s the perennial problem: Madison is a great place to live in, a harder city to show off to an outsider.
                                                                                                    
Today’s plan was simple: a tour of the campus + home. Simple? Maybe not so much. The last of the visitors, arriving today, was to occupy a room that is rarely used. In freshening things up, I noticed that the light switch was temperamental: sometimes it produced light, sometimes it stubbornly remained oblivious to my prodding. I called the electrician and this morning she arrived. Yes, she. Aside from the 1960s TV ad featuring Josephine the lady plumber, I have not seen a single female in any of the service rounds I’ve had to schedule with plumbers, electricians and the like. Not even in Poland. Actually there were no service rounds in Poland, but the Ukrainian whom you hired on the side and paid under the table to resolve your electrical issues was never a female either.

“Josephine” came and took three hours (really) to assess the problem. Ultimately she deemed it unfixable, short of rewiring the entire lower portion of the house. Our last guest was scheduled to arrive this evening. I said “go for it!”Many hours and hundreds and hundreds of dollars later the problem was (sort of)  fixed (even though it was only 'sort of' a problem to begin with): the light is now 75 % un-temperamental, so that on the rare, once in a decade occasion that someone actually uses the subterranean room (for lack of space elsewhere), they now have fairly reliable light.

Many things are spinning through my mind. Such as – did the house really need to be rewired (given that the light success rate has risen from 35% to only 75%)? And am I doubting this because she was a woman and therefore, in my conditioned eyes, somehow less electrically savvy? Was it worth almost taking out a second mortgage for this project, given that our very easy-going guest could well have adapted to the couch upstairs? And finally, now that this project is over and done with, how else may we amuse all these  people that are passing through?

Just so you know, I don’t pamper guests. Today I forced all three to go out and gather fruits and berries for their supper. As a result they got me to bake the cake that was a household favorite for many many years. It’s called the F.B.I. cake (in honor of J.Edgar, who loved it) and it comes from Maida Heatter – all chocolate, freshly whipped cream (skip the sugar! Good quality cream rarely needs sweetening), and backyard berries. A tiny photo for the blog to commemorate a remembrance of things past.

chocolate, berries and cream 

What should be moving – the earth under my feet or the feet on the dance floor?

 
I am to join friends tomorrow for a night of clubbing and dancing. I have a concern. I have always thought myself to be a bit of a wild dancer. We’re talking about the height of my dancing activity – late 60s through 70s. Perhaps the label was given because I arrived back in Poland at a time when couples were still twirling each other in traditional rock ‘n roll movements. I didn’t even KNOW the traditional spins and twirls and so I broke loose. Eventually things evened out because Poles, too, started waving, jumping, swaying and generally making spectacles of themselves on the dance floor, just like their American counterparts. Still, my energy level being on the high side, I think I was rather excessive.
 
These days I never dance anywhere except in the privacy of my own quarters. But others who have observed me have noted that I dance in the “70s” way. What does that even mean, I want to know? I have been told that jumping from foot to foot in little steps is just not DONE and hasn’t been done for maybe two decades. Well, fine, I can contain myself, but then, do you mean you lose all that leg motion? Dancing with feet glued to the floor? What sense does that make?
 
So this, then, is the dilemma – dance like I once did and have people smile benevolently, or adapt to the new, feet-glued-to-the-floor mode (so far as I can tell) and get the hips to take over? It’s all very nerve racking.
 
Oh, for the easy days of the Polish dance floor… [Below is a shot from my Warsaw high school senior prom in the spring of ’69 so I am a fresh and eager 16 year-old; frankly my partner and I look whacked out – like we’ve tangoed our way through the gates of hell; I think I forgot that this was supposed to be a sedate and more formal event.)]

yes, yes, they had senior proms back in the Old Country (spring, 1969)