What I love! | Peaches Prattlings

{September 1, 2016} A girls night…we got kinky… we needed that!

We went to see Kinky Boots… what were you thinking!?

I was out with LJ last week and saw the marque for one of the theaters here in Chicago, Kinky Boots! I don’t know if you remember how much GES and I loved it when we went to see it in NYC last year! I looked it up and it was only going to be here for a week… who wants to go!

LJ and DLP both said yes, tickets were purchased and here we are! Then coordination is next. LJ is no longer on the project with us and DLP had been in Springfield and got back today. We all synchronized our watches and off we went!

We met at Vapaianos for dinner, it’s across from my hotel, drop our bags there, eat, it was DLP’s first time there, yum! Then Uber to the theater, didn’t want to take a chance of being late! Up, up, up…in the balcony, almost in the last row, huff, puff, lots of stairs!

Curtsins up and…sigh! I miss the theater! I feel that every time I go. Sometimes I regret not pursing it, but then it is kind of what I do every time I’m in front of a class teaching.

The show was great! And I did my best not to quote everything! I’m sorry girls… it was hard not to! I love the movie!!

The cast was great, Lola was amazing and we had a great time! Walk back to the hotel, said goodnight. I opened the window for the first time, nostalgic for sleeping with the window open as a kid. I guess it’s a NYC evening all the way around.

“Ladies… and gentlemem… and those who have yet to make up their minds”

“We are no longer making a range of shoes for men… are are making shoes for a range of men”

Go see it!

{August 31, 2016} A legend lost

Monday, the world lost a beloved legend.

I was saddened very much by the loss, as i saw so many people on Facebook felt the same. It’s sad news when someone passes and there are times that we are affected more than others. And it’s really interesting when it’s a celebrity.

We didn’t know him personally, well, I didn’t, but it still made me very sad, maybe because we knew about him, he enriched our lives, made us laugh and forget about reality when we watched his movies, we have a smile on our face.

A evident by the articles and posts, he was, of course, most well known for his role as Willy Wonka. It’s a role that crosses generations, there are stars that pass, older stars, that younger generations have no idea who they are or might know them from a role in their later years and i know from even before my time. But so many generations have seen Willy Wonka, because it’s a classic.

One of the things I loved about him was his love affair with the love of his life, Gilda Radner. They met while filming Hanky Panky. She was smitten immediately, “It felt like my life went from black and white to Technicolor”, wow!

“On the first night of filming near the Hudson River, she looked at me and started to cry,” Wilder said in a 2012 interview. “I asked, ‘Why are you crying?’ and she said, ‘because I know I’m going to marry you.’ I said, ‘We’re going a little fast here.‘”

“She was just so active about everything and the way she felt — her crying, her laughing, everything. Then when the film was over and she was going to fly back home, she kissed me and then said, ‘If you ever want to get in touch with me, tell my manager Bernie Brillstein, ‘The ducks are in the pond.’ When I got back home I suddenly dropped to my knees and started weeping that she wasn’t there. So, I called Bernie and told him, ‘The ducks are in the pond.’ He said, ‘OK, I understand,’ and we were together for a long time after that.”

What do you say to that!!!

One of the other things that struck me was that no one knew when he was ill and why. He said that her put a smile on people’s faces and her didn’t want to taint that. If he was recognized by a child, he didn’t want the smile to be followed by a discussion about illness. A true gentle soul.

I don’t think there is a Gene Wilder movie i haven’t seen, there are some tv roles people reminded me of, i may or may not have seen them, but the. Admittedly, not all are my favorites, but i did like them all. But…i am going to tell you about my favorites.

Willy Wonka is iconic, of course, and wackadoo! Ever wonder who was doing drugs when they filmed some of the scenes? Blazing Saddles, so many amazing quotes from that movie. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother, one many people have never seen or heard of, Young Frankenstein, how many times have you quoted this movie?

Haunted Honeymoon, not many people talk about this one, its a great one with Gilda Radner, among other great actors, follow that with Hanky Panky and the Woman in Red. Stir Crazy and Silver Streak, his collaboration with Richard Pryor was legendary.

Ever see Start The Revolution without Me? Last of the Red Hot Lovers? The Frisco Kid with Harrison Ford? Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid To Ask?

Some of these are my go- to movies, I’ve seen them hundreds of times and I might see them a hundred more.

“See this hand?” ‘Steady as a rock ‘ “yeah, but this is the hand i shoot with!”

“Puttin’ on the Ritz”

“What do you mean widower than what?”

You will be missed, thank you for what you gave us and brought to our lives…

Joy.

{August 28, 2016} A nice memory was triggered

Tonight I played gin.

I know, you’re wondering how I played a drink, ha ha. No, silly, I played a card game, some of you might know it as gin -rummy.

Rummy is a, card game played with seven cards, gin -rumy or just gin, is played with ten. http://rummy.com/ginrummy.html. It’s a great game, it takes skill, planning and a lot of luck, you don’t know what hand you’re going to be dealt to begin with and you have to build off of that, then you don’t know what cards are coming next in the deck or what your opposition is going to play.

Last night I had the pleasure of playing again after a long time. My opponent was an 11 year old, PN. She was good, her mom DTN, taught her recently. She was the champ the games to my two wins.

The nice memory for me was being taught by my grandma M, my mom’s mom, and we would play for hours. There were weekends I stayed with her, we would play until 2am!

She was amazing, she knew cards played, what I had put down, She would look at me and say “are you sure you want to play that?” She amazed me!!

I’ve played over the years with different people and I’ve enjoyed it and last night it brought back good memories of my grandma. Sigh…

{August 26, 2016} A difference of opinion…can a friendship survive it?

Especially when it comes to politics.

They say among friends, you should never discuss politics, religion or abortion. Is that true?
I am a Democrat… You are a Republican… or an Independent…or a Libertarian…or whatever your political affiliations are…We’re best friends.

We’ve had some pretty intense discussions about politics, but now the election rolls around and it gets heated. We’re both passionate about what we believe in, I mean really passionate.

We all do this..we discuss, we talk, we shout, but we aren’t going to make the other person see it from our point of view.

I was having a heated discussion with someone once, more like he was getting louder and louder and…I finally looked at him and said “the louder you get, the more clear your point does not get”.

Have you seen the mess on Facebook? True colors coming out, some not very pretty.

Politics is an interesting animal.

So…Can our friendship survive?

{August 23, 2016} Happy birthday

Today is a very special day.

Today was my mom’s birthday and her first cousin, JFS, who always said my mom was her 20th birthday present, I was always tickled by that.

I’ve told you stuff here and there about my mom, now I’ll tell you some more, and if I repeat myself, sorry. I guess that would be a compliment, telling you the same great stuff about her!

There was no one like her, that’s for sure. One of the smartest people I knew, could do almost anything, and knew everything, her flaw… She couldn’t add any variation of 8+5, that always baffled me, and her, as you can imagine.

She had a love of art, she could Spend hours in a museum looking at every painting and reading every single placard. It was great and exhausting! We loved a lot of the same artists,admired the same techniques, the brushstrokes and it was fun and interesting to hear her take on certain pieces.

She was great at playing trivial pursuit, especially geography, literature and science, she couldn’t be beat. She loved playing thinking games like Otello and Scrabble and we would play Boggle for days.

She was a foodie, loved to experiment with meals, : what’s for dinner mommy?” “Poison”. Oh, ok. and what she came up with was usually fabulous. There were times she could be down to earth with her pallet, pb&j, pizza, breakfast for dinner.

Travelling with her was both fun and frustrating, there were planned walks, most things were educational, a good thing, but boring to a 13 year old! She made sure we got something out of every experience.

One of the funny things… we would drive through the tunnels heading into NYC and she would comment on how dirty the walls/tiles were and would we, GES and I love to clean it and we would roll our eyes at her and as we got older, tease her about it. When GES and would ride through the tunnels in Boston, she started doing the same thing with her girls and now, when we’re all together, the girls say something about cleaning the tunnel, the tradition lives on.

I could go on for days about my mom, but what will I talk about next year?

My mom as gear, she taught us what it means to be a mom, the good and the bad and we learned. I saw her in me with my kids, my sister does with her kids, especially those things we never thought we’d say! My daughter told me ib taught her how to be a step mom, which meant the world to me and i see how my sister is raising her kids, can’t deny it, don’t want to!

She is never far from our thoughts. GES… let’s get those decorations from the barrel up!

Happy birthday mommy. I love you.

{August 22, 2016} Oh my…delicious!!

A really simple and fabulous meal in Chicago!

After work LJ and I needed some pampering, so mani for her and pedi for me. Let’s just say, I like blue, it’s not my favorite color, but apparently it was today! Fingers…aqua, ring..blue, sunglasses…aqua, sneakers…blue and now…toes, sounds good to me.

After our pampering…food! It was 8pm by now and lunch felt like yesterday! I know I’m exaggerating, just felt like it! So we headed to my hotel, dropped my bags off and went across the street to a place I’ve wanted to try, just haven’t hey, so we went, Viapano.

This was a great place! It’s nice and open, high ceilings, wooden just about everything, slightly rustic, but definitely modern, if that makes sense.

It’s a counter service, so, first, you get a card that you put on a tablet in the counter when you order, the chef puts in a code and you pay at the end from the card. There was pizza, pasta, soup, antipasto, insalata, lots of choices.

You order at the counter and wait, then you load your food on a silver tray to take it to your table. Everything was self service, like a fast food chain or actually, I felt like I was back in school!

This is definitely not fast food as everything is cooked fresh to order. One line for appetizers and salad, another line for pasta, and so on. In got a small salad and bruchetta from one line, then on to the pasta. The pasta is in individual bags behind the chefs, you select what you want and they cook it right there in front of you, it tasted like fresh made pasta, yum! They cooked mine al dente, nice.

While the pasta cooks, they have the giant wok like pans to cook whatever you ordered with the pasta and the chefs check what you want, how spicy you want it. It’s ready in about 7-8 minutes, however long it takes to cook the pasta.

I ordered spaghetti with aglio e olio, garlic and olive oil, which I love and added fresh spinach. I liked the he threw a little salt in with it, cuts the bitterness and I don’t have to add it, very rare! The garlic, oil and salt were the perfect combination.

The presentation is very appealing and the taste…molto delizioso!

http://us.vapiano.com/en/magazine/

{August 21, 2016} TV commercials as previews?

Have we talked about this before? Sorry, if we have.

It’s been happening more and more when I go to the movies. Now, I don’t have tv, so I only see commercials when I’m at my sister’s, well, she DVRs everything, so no commercials there, or the hotel, when I channel surf, so I’ve seen a few commercials. Regardless, there are commercials mixed in with previews before the movie.

Why? It’s called a movie, and before the movie…trailers or previews, not movie, previews and commercials. Those are for TV at home.

Previews or trailers are for convincing me to see another movie, in the theater. Commercials are for convincing me to buy a product, from the comfort of my sofa. And what’s to guarantee I’m going to remember that product? Hmmm…

Previews..theater. Commercials…home.

Soapbox over.

{August 20, 2016} Bad Moms

I’m a bad mom, my sister’s a bad mom, are you a bad mom?

If you have the opportunity, go see this movie! GES and I both wanted to see Bad Moms and today was a good day for it.

We met at a theater in between us a while before the movie, walked around and talked, it was nice.

Then it was time for the movie, we got some popcorn, candy and drinks, exact movie watching food. We settled into our seats, reclined and settled in for 20 or 25 minutes of previews, I’m not sure if I could tell you what they were!

Mila Kunis is the lead, she’s the perfect mom, or so she thinks, two kids, husband, job, gets the kids where they need to go, everything is perfect…sure…now she’s the feed up mom

Christina Applegate is the stay at home perfect mom PTA president for the past six years and a tyrant. Jada Pinkett Smith is the judgy mom, Annie Mumolo is the very clueless mom, Kathryn Hahn is the single, and let’s face it, slutty mom, and Kristen Bell is the frazzled stay at home mom.

They want it all, but they are just human and can they really do it all? Ever worried that you’re a bad parent? Screwing up your kids lives? Been told, by your kids, that you suck, you don’t know what you’re talking about? Normal, yes, I said you’re normal.

I love my kids, but I remember days looking at them like they were aliens. I remember the day I got my first eye roll, the sigh, the I’m never going to be like you. I freaked out here and there, but no need, normal.

And that’s what this movie is about, women finally remembering that they’re people, human and allowed to cut loose, have a moment, let the kids go without brushing their teeth once, doing their homework on the bus, being, well…a bad mom. That makes you human.

So…are you a bad mom?

Go see this movie and find out!

{August 19, 2016} American Ultra

Um…yeah…

Stoner stone cold killer? Sure.

That’s pretty much it, Jesse Eisenberg is the stoner and Kristen Stewart is his stoner girlfriend. He works at a convenience store and has a severe fear of travel and leaving town.

Then…it turns out he was a sleeper agent who was reactivated and wow. Or I should say pow, smack, kill!

Lots of guns, blood, knives and death by frying pan, go figure.

All he wanted was to go home with his girlfriend, smoke weed and hide under the covers.

Not exactly how it ends, but they get there.

{August 18, 2016} Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour?!

What?

For those of you not in the know, you’re thinking this girl is crazy and does not know her history, maybe she was absent that day.

For those of you who knew instantly, rock on! Tonight, I went to a movie theater to see Animal House on the big screen! It was awesome!

I went with my friend from work, DLP. I asked her Monday if she wanted to go with me and she did! We left the office, went to have some dinner then movie! No previews, which was bad because we got there at 704pm, the restaurant was next door, and I needed the potty! I came in just as it was starting, there was a little intro from like you see on TCM, some background about the movie and the actors, then they were off!

I have to apologize to DLP, I quoted lines as it went, I’m usually pretty good about it, but I couldn’t help it tonight!

It was so much fun to see it on the big screen! I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this movie, but never on the big screen! It was awesome!

My one regret…not seeing it with my dad!

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