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Dear friends,

Off I go to spend a Saturday in Bloomingdale’s, stocking up on underwear and socks for the month ahead, but if I’m going to get in and out of Bloomie’s without killing anybody, I’ll need to do two things:  1.  Drink a really, really, really strong coffee, which I am doing now, thanks to the beauteous Lloyd, who makes coffee so strong that it makes me bark like a dog.  2.  Fulfill my obligations to the Friday audblog.  Now it can be told:  this week’s post was The Baltimore Zoo, written by the charming and talented Molly Goatwax.  I couldn’t stop smiling the first time I read this, and it still makes me smile on the rereading of it.

Heaping platters of praise must go to Tvindy for hatching the Friday audblog.  I won’t be able to play along for a while, southward-bound and phoneless as I will be as of Tuesday, but I recommend, with enthusiasm, that you do.  Just listen…

Tvindy

Tim

Snowball

receptionista

Edit: Apparently there’s something still a bit hinky with TypePad, because the trackbacks aren’t showing up.  Maybe they’re just slow to show.  If you end up with two pings from me, that’s why.  Oy vey iz mir.  (Not to be confused with Mir, of course.)

At least that’s what Pogo would call it.  (Or am I thinking of Churchy La Femme instead?) Last week, Tvindy suggested a group audioblogging day on June 11.  Following Tvindy’s guidelines, which were revised slightly by Tim (who, in turn, has decided to make a weekly feature out of audioblogging—woo-hoo!), I have dipped my toe in the water of audioblogging.  I have to say, after my initial shrieking at the cold shock of hearing my voice on tape, that the water is just fine.

So the question must be posed:  If this is the Friday audioblog, what is it doing up on your site on Thursday night? As Graham Chapman said, a fair question, and one that recently has been much on my mind.  Until tonight, I was an audblog virgin, and I didn’t know how long it would take the post to post.  I thought it would be like moblogging pictures, which seem to take hours to transmit.  Stunned amazement!  audblog posted this about 15 seconds after I hung up the phone.  We love that in a service.

In accordance with Tvindy’s guidelines, I will identify the author of the post, and provide a link, on Saturday.

Bakerina reading the mystery post powered by audblog

It sounds like an ad agency (in my head I’m hearing John Cleese shouting “Welcome to Mousebat, Follicle, Goosecreature, Ampersand, Spong, Wapcaplet, Looseliver, Vendetta and Prang!"), but it is not.  Last week I put out a call for guest bloggers to keep PTMYB well-behaved and supervised, so that I wouldn’t come home to find my blog hanging out after school with the bad kids, making a ruckus on the subway and shoplifting bubblegum from CVS. The turnout, to put it mildly, was gratifying.

Dear friends, say hello to Anne, Courtney, goliard, Mir, ‘mouse, orionoir, Snowball, Tvindy and Walt, who will be guest-blogging in this space starting next Tuesday, when I head out for the Natural State, through July 15, when I return home.  Please do join them as they consider the nature of familiar food, strange food, good food, bad food, no food, all things food, anything in the world but food.  I, for one, can’t wait to see what they have to say.  Unfortunately, I’ll just have to.  Fortunately, you won’t.

The place: A Midtown outpost of a Burritorama (not its real name), on the ground floor of a glass-and-steel behemoth of an office building.

The time: Lunch, silly.

The players: Two attractive young office workers, mid-20’s, one male, one female, known in this space as, respectively, Malchik and Devushka, dressed in gender-appropriate office-to-dinner-to-club fashion-forward clothing.  One not-so-attractive, not-so-young desk monkey, mid-30’s, known in this space as Your Bakerina, dressed in black pinstripe trousers and black Calvin Klein t-shirt that no one knows is really part of her husband’s stash of black Calvin Klein undershirts.  (Or rather, no one knew it till now.  Blast!) One gentleman, late-60’s-to-early-70’s, dressed in beautiful and mysteriously unwrinkled light linen summer suit, known in this space as Robertson Davies, because, really, the resemblance is striking.

The scene: Malchik and Devushka are moving down the cashier line with their lunches, chatting animatedly about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  YB moves down the line behind them.  Everybody pays for their food, then moves over to the kiosk where one picks up plastic forks and napkins.  Because Malchik and Devushka are carrying on their conversation on either side of the napkin dispensers, YB pardons herself politely and reaches in between them.

Malchik:  I know, it’s outrageous.  I mean, you and I both remember a time when movies cost, like, five dollars…of course, that was really,really long ago.

Devushka:  Well, even back when we were in high school, it was still, like, [Malchik joins her in unison] seven dollars.

YB (to herself):  Well, that tears it.  I am officially older than God.

YB approaches exit, feels tap on shoulder, turns to face Robertson Davies, who, unbeknownst to her, has been watching the whole scene.

Robertson Davies:  I remember a time when it was cheaper to see a show on Broadway than to go to the movies.  (smiles beautifully)

It’s a safe bet that this week we won’t lack for coverage, opinions, hagiographies and rants about Ronald Reagan, so I figured that the last thing anyone needed to see here was Ronald Reagan:  One Bakerina’s Opinion (with accompanying mood music by Einsturzende Neubaten).  I was fine to let my pals do the heavy lifting for me.  Then I decided to check my stats, and discovered that someone had hit my page via Yahoo, searching on the phrase Ronald Reagan Lenin pie crust.

Well.  Did I really want to know what Lenin pie is?  Do you get meringue with that, so you can have Lenin meringue pie?  The mind boggled.

But not for long.  With a little thought, and with a peek at one of the more interesting links, I remembered that Reagan once made a speech in which he credited Lenin with the line that “promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken.” He also credited Lenin with an aphorism that there would be no need for a Communist takeover of the United States; all the Soviets would have to do was take over Europe, then Asia, then Africa, then South America, and then the United States “would fall into our outstretched hands like overripe fruit.” I don’t know who was responsible for the pie crust line, but the overripe fruit line was actually the brainchild of Robert Welch of the John Birch Society.  Either way, at the time (1983) I suspected that Reagan’s grasp of the facts might be a bit tenuous, not least because he kept referring to “Nikolai Lenin” (as opposed to Vladimir, which was, in fact, Lenin’s first name).

For those of you nostalgic or constitutionally strong enough for a walk down memory lane... Me, I had my fill at about the fifth time Larry Speakes defended Reagan’s use of folksy apocrypha with “It’s a good story, though, isn’t it?” or the astonishing “When you tell a story five times, it becomes the truth.”