Maybe go out, maybe stay home

At two-thirty in the morning our doorbell rang, massively freaking the cats. (They associate doorbells with vacuum cleaners. We have not been able to afford for people to come to our house with vacuum cleaners in four years, but the cats remember and they do not trust anything that rings.) After it rang a second and a third and possibly a fourth time, I went downstairs in my bathrobe to see if it was a crisis. It was a delivery guy with what smelled like Thai basil, trying to deliver takeout to the third-floor people. They were not answering their doorbell. They were not answering their phone. He finally asked if I could just give the order to them. I tried to explain that they were not housemates but other tenants with whom I interact mostly in passing on the stairs, but he insisted on handing it to me anyway.

The third-floor people did not answer when I knocked. I have left the food on their mat with a note on top of it explaining the situation and hoping it was something they actually ordered, although I can't really imagine swatting a person by sending them Thai food at half past two in the morning. spatch fears that they are elsewhere for the night and the order just reverted to their default address, which means that somewhere in Boston are two people really jonesing for their drunken noodles and wondering what went wrong with the all-night delivery. If so, I am confident that it will still be edible in the morning, but in the meantime the stairwell really smells like Thai basil and I feel it is heroic of me not to be eating my upstairs neighbors' food right now.

I hope it is not considered rude under the circumstances that we didn't tip.

[edit] THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED. The third-floor people left us a nicely handwritten note under the door explaining that they had canceled the order at one in the morning and were not expecting it to arrive hours later, after they had gone to sleep. They feel terrible that we had to deal with the delivery guy and the doorbell. I have assured them that we do not blame them for the balls-ups of the delivery service and we're just glad they weren't somewhere other than their apartment, missing late-night dinner.

Obviously, the moral of this story is that I should have eaten the food.

The ups and downs, the carousel

Technically we attended the Oysterfest at Bow Market in that we were on the premises at the same time as a great many oysters, but we were also on the premises at the same time as a great many people with beer standing in very long lines, so after a few minutes we got snacks from Buenas (their ham and cheese empanada advertises itself as "simple af" and spatch confirms that it is also that tasty; I liked the hearts of palm with fry sauce), were briefly greeted by bironic and bell and a small child who hid slightly behind their baseball cap, and did not run screaming into the night because it was about six o'clock and lazily sunny and crowded pop-up events happen. We browsed for a little while at Hub Comics. I need to catch up on Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story (2011–). We got home and did not feel like cooking complicatedly and made breakfast for dinner in the form of ham steak and eggs over easy and challah toast on which I put raspberry-cherry-redcurrant-strawberry jam; it was not something I had ever done for dinner before and it was fun. I just realized that I've missed all but the last film of Noir City: Boston and while I am sorry because I wanted to see several of those movies/on 35 mm, I am not bolting out of the house this second to try to catch it. I do not think that makes me a fake noir fan. I am happy to learn about a new love poem by Siegfried Sassoon. I have eaten three peaches in the last twenty-four hours and should like to eat more.

So just how far would you go for her?

I just heard from my mother that Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin's Hadestown has just won Best Musical at the Tony Awards, plus Best Director for Chavkin, Best Original Score for Mitchell, several technical awards, and Best Featured Actor for André de Shields as Hermes.

I have not seen the Broadway production. But I loved the show when I saw it off-Broadway in 2016 and I loved it in 2010 when it was a CD of a folk opera that I did not yet realize was a concept album, although I hoped even then to see it onstage. "In true epic fashion," I wrote, "I'd love to see it reperformed." And it was, and I heard about it, and I got to see one version, and now there's another, and it will keep going, hand to hand, mouth to ear, because that's how the folk tradition—the epic tradition—works.

(I can even feel a little as though I helped, because I know for a fact that some of the friends who wrote about seeing the Broadway version were the friends who learned about the album from me nine years ago. Ultimate credit goes to my mother, who heard Mitchell talking about her Orpheus and Eurydike retelling on one of the folk radio stations and correctly discerned I would love it. Grassroots, people! And the dark earth under all.)

It makes me happy.