I had as lief the towncrier spoke my lines

(Hamlet, Act III, scene 2)

Nancy, Jeff and Sherry are playing some card game called "Five Crowns" while I write this recapitulation of our Sunday excursion.

It began with a drive to Imperial Beach, the town near the Mexican border where Jeff and Nancy lived for a few months when they were first married and Jeff was a newly commissioned Naval officer. We located the building they had lived in, and then got lost looking for the Tijuana River Estuary Wildlife Refuge that Sherry and I had stumbled on last Thursday. Was it Thursday? It's so hard to keep the days straight on vacation.

Anyway, after a few false starts we found it, and went for a stroll, but since by then it was noon, there wasn't a lot of wildlife about. A few thousand tiny crabs darting from hole to hole on a stream bank; some hummingbirds and egrets and such. Nothing remarkable, but all in all a pleasant way to kill an hour or so until it was time to head up the road to Coronado, where we had tickets waiting for us for the 13th Annual Free Coronado Shakespeare's production of Hamlet.

It being community theater, I wasn't expecting much, and I wasn't entirely disappointed. The scenery was sparse, the staging was straightforward, and the dialogue was "modernized" by leaving out most of the "thee's" and "thine's". Some of the more arcane words were rendered into modern English, and most of those changes were barely noticable; but I did take some umbrage at the change from the elegant (and fully comprehensible) line, "I am myself indifferent honest," to "I'm fairly honest myself."  A couple of the performances were creditable, notably Martin White as Claudius and Eva Kvaas as Gertrude. I found it hard to believe that even a small town like Coronado, lying as it does just a couple of miles from the nation's 9th largest city, couldn't find a few more reasonably competent actors, but they did manage to find a guy who could remember almost all of Hamlet's lines. A balding, 40-something ham named Terence J. Burke, who shot the words out as though, if he slowed down to think about them, he would forget which one followed which. I thought it somewhat ironic that he got to deliver the Bard's famous lines on how an actor should deliver his lines:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,

as many of your players do, I had as lief the

town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air

too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;

for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,

the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget

a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it

offends me to the soul to hear a robustious

periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to

very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who

for the most part are capable of nothing but

inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such

a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it

out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

And this guy was physically so unsuited to the role that I was surprised to find, when I consulted the program after the show, that he was not, in fact, the producer, and his name does not appear in the lists of Playhouse Foundations members and donors. He looked like Ted Danson, not as Sam Malone in Cheers, but as John Becker in Becker.

Still, it takes more than wooden acting and overwrought emoting to ruin one of Shakespeare's biggest hits, and we all had a great time. And, as Sherry said, the price was right.

stair, Glorietta Bay Inn

We drove a few blocks to visit, first, the Glorietta Bay Inn, where Nancy had once stayed, and then the Hotel del Coronado, a famous local landmark. The Glorietta Bay Inn was originally built as the home of the Spreckles family, one of the area's richest. Built in 1904, the house is not overlarge but is very elegantly appointed, with wood carvings and chandeliers that were the height of fashion for the time, and that have stood the all-important test of time.

One of Mr Spreckles's investments was in the Hotel del Coronado, built 15 years before his home. He financed the original developers, but when they went bust he ended up with controlling interest; although he kept one of them on as project manager. I guess he must've thought the other one was the problem.

I'm sure everyone has seen pictures of the Hotel Del, as they call it around here. Its 12-sided lobby building with the pointed red roof is practically the paradigmatic landmark for San Diego. The place has had its ups and downs, but right now it's on the up, and has been restored to a state of great elegance and seems to be a profitable business. It has a well-tended beach, extensive grounds and gardens, and all the toniest shops. It's not as old as the Menger, but is much larger, more fortuitous in its location, and more flamboyant in its grandeur. It's a Destination.

We drove back to San Diego, crossing the big bridge at sunset, and were home in time for margaritas and a dinner of arroz con pollo and zucchini. Which turned out very well, if I do say so myself.

Saturday's goings-on

I've noticed something unexpected about this place: there isn't any wind. Every other shoreline I've ever been on has almost constant wind, caused, I believe, by the ability of air to move without restriction across large expanses of water. But the palm trees out on the beach are motionless; my cigarette ash from Thursday afternoon lies unmolested on the balcony; the bit of litter someone dropped on the esplanade Friday morning has been stepped on and sniffed at by dogs and otherwise ignored for two days. There's no scent of salt water in the air. It's a little eerie.

Saturday was Jeff's birthday. I went the whole day without teasing him about getting old, because I feel sorry for people who are aging while I remain forever forty-nine.

We watched the tail end of the Portsmouth-Everton match on TV and took a walk up the shoreline as far as Tourmaline Surf Park, a small bay which, I guess, has reliably good waves. I've noticed that surfing is as popular with aging baby-boomers as with Gen-X'ers, but there seem to be very few younger people out on the water. This is a disappointment, because the attraction to me is being able to watch the hot young bodies and reminisce about when I was that age, and more or less fit. (I never really was that fit, except in those memories, denied to me here by all those fifty-something men and women -- mostly men; I'd say 20-to-1 -- dragging their sorry asses up the beach, and standing in small groups on the shore, talking about the surgeries they and their friends have had.)

Our first destination for the day was the USS Midway, the big aircraft carrier that was retired to San Diego harbor as a museum. I missed the driveway, so we turned into Tuna Harbor Park, the next pier on the shoreline, and took some pictures of the statues celebrating the great Allied victory in World War II. Then we went to the carrier. It almost turned out to be our only destination; we spent much longer touring the ship than we expected, and I still had to skip the last third of the tour.

The ship is, of course, huge. By naval standards (according to Jeff, who spent time on a destroyer), it's quite roomy, but seems to have been built for short, skinny people. Perhaps not coincidentally, all the servicemen in the hundreds of old photos on the walls are short and skinny. The officers are a little heftier, but still on the short side.

When I was in my teens, I gave some thought to joining the Navy. Someone with more sense talked me out of it, and after seeing the galleys and laundry rooms on that ship, I'm glad they did. Because I know that that's where I would have done my time. Jeff assures me that the engine room would have been worse, but this doesn't make me any less sure that I made the right choice in bypassing the service as a career.

I suppose it's natural to compare the Midway to the Lexington, the older, smaller carrier moored in Corpus Christi. The Lex is more interesting to me as an artifact of history, as it actually served the glorious cause in World War II: the Lex is a bloodied spear, where the Midway is a laurel wreath. But the people in charge of the Midway have done a much better job at making the tour interesting, informative and educational. Maybe the Lex's layout doesn't lend itself to the sort of self-guided tour available on the Midway, but I'm inclined to think that the real difference is in funding: the Midway is moored in a big Navy town, and a wealthy one at that, while the Lex is moored in a smallish, out-of-the-way city with little Navy history.

Once we tore ourselves away from the ship, we rushed across the harbor to get to Cabrillo National Monument before it closed at 5pm. There's a beautiful view from there, and we got our National Park Passport stamp (the most important thing), but since the monument is on a nuclear submarine base, everybody gets thrown out at closing time. Another stupid post-9/11 panic measure. The fog rolled in, obscuring the lighthouse on the point, then hiding the point itself. There was a ceremony taking place at the statue of Señor Cabrillo, celebrating the 467th anniversary of his landing to claim California for Spain, and when that was over, the rangers politely asked everyone to return to their cars. We drove home, fixed dinner (Nancy cooked southwestern mac & cheese, one of my favourite recipes. Yummy.) Afterwards we took Jeff out for birthday ice cream, then came back and played cards until no one could keep their eyes open.

Another good day.

Friday in the park

Friday

The fog rolled back out to sea as quickly as it had rolled in, leaving behind a sky as clear and blue as the finish on a clean Jaguar.

(I just wanted to work the car in somehow; I miss it.)

Well, the sky really was that blue. Bluer, even.

We spent the morning negotiating our plans for the week: where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go there, who was going to cook when. Who'd've known it could take four reasonable people with no hidden agendas so long to decide? It's just because there are so many things we want to do. Most of them overlap, and those are the things we'll end up doing.

At a certain point I decided that I'd said all I needed to say, so I went and showered and then drove down the street to the grocery store, and did our shopping while the others hashed out the details. On returning to the apartment, I did a little online research and found that getting to Black's Beach was not worth the effort. Black's is a beach that, according to what I'd read, has three attributes that interested me greatly: (1) it is a "semi-official" nude beach; (2) it has spectacular cliffs that drop dramatically down to the narrow strand, providing some of the most majestic scenery in southern California; and (3) there is a gliderport at the top of the cliffs, and from the beach you can watch people hang-gliding off the cliffs.

I'll leave it to you to determine which two of those three really interest me.

Having ruled out Black's, I also called about the free performances of "Hamlet" that are put on every year out in Coronado. We have decided to make Sunday our Peninsular Day, doing all the stuff we want to do out on the so-called Island. We now have reservations for the performance that day, which unfortunately is a matinee. It would have been much more convenient if it came toward the end of the day, in an evening performance.

After lunch -- yes, it took that long to work out the schedule for the week -- we headed over to Balboa Park to buy our seven-day passes. There are so many things we want to see and do in that park that, even though we won't be going there every day, it works out cheaper to get that. Having our tickets burning in our hot little hands, we immediately went on a trawl through the Model Railroad Museum, which closes early and, we figured, wouldn't take all that much time.

Could've easily spent another hour in there. The layouts in various guages are incredible; some take up two large rooms. They're all works-in-progress, being put together in fantastic detail -- as in the model of a bum by a campfire under a trestle -- by members of the local model railroading clubs, which have about 300 members. They strive to accurately represent actual rail lines in southern California at various points in history. 

It was too late by the time we finished for another museum, so after a few minutes relaxing in the plaza outside, we headed for coffee at the Urban Grind, a coffee shop on Park Boulevard that the owner of Timo's, my hangout back home, recommended. It turns out that his friends, Richard and Charlotte, no longer own the place, but it was still very good. (Another café, which used to be next door and was also owned by a friend of Tim's, is no longer there.)

It was too late to get to Cabrillo National Monument before it closed, so we decided to spend the evening exploring the Gaslamp District. After finding a parking place in a garage at the farther end of the area, we walked all the way up to Broadway, browsing the shop windows and stopping only in the Beverley Hills Motor Car Company showroom, where they had a car exactly like mine for sale (the only difference being that it was a 2003 model, while mine's a 2002, and its interior had been renovated, and its wheels weren't chromed), along with a Rolls, a 1954 Jaguar XK-120, and a couple of dozen other nice cars, mostly classics; a couple of reproductions and a poorly-restored '57 Chevy kept the collection from being truly extraordinary.

The area is full of interesting and cheap restaurants: Indian, Afghan, Thai, Irish, Italian, American, Persian, Greek, Turkish, Lebanese, Spanish. We passed by all of those, and settled instead into a sidewalk table at a more upscale Italian place called (I think) Panevino, where I was gratified to find that the waiters were actually Italian, not transplants from Brooklyn. I passed our waiter on the way to wash my hands, and in a glance he took in the text of my T-shirt (il mio amico imaginario ha bisogno di una bevanda) and was joking about it when I got back to the table. Paesan! The food was outstanding -- Jeff and I had shrimp stuffed with shrimp, Sherry had eggplant ravioli, and Nancy had ... I don't remember what. We each had a glass of good Italian wine that was significantly cheaper than the same American varieties. Afterwards we strolled the streets a while longer, then headed home. A good day.

Big Brother Shops at Ralph's

Grocery shoppers in San Diego are getting ripped off.

I've just come from doing our krogering for the week at a Ralph's Market near this condo, and am of course aghast at the prices charged here. Everyplace I've ever been, prices on groceries seem at least a little higher than we pay in San Antonio (with certain local exceptions, of course); but the prices here are royally exorbitant.

I won't go into details, as that would be tedious, and even my best friends don't want to know exactly how much more a can of coffee is here than there. But what really gripes me is the "card savings prices." If you get a Ralph's Rewards card (and I did: it was free, and let them collect all the data on my shopping habits that they want) you get big big savings on many many items.

Now, I don't believe for a minute that Ralph's is taking a loss on those prices; even with the Rewards card, the prices are higher than we pay at home. So what that tells me is how valuable the store considers the detailed spending patterns it can glean from their computer banks. It also tells me that Ralph's is really soaking anybody who doesn't have a Rewards card, figuring that they don't shop there regularly anyway, and so won't provide a reliable source of sales.

So I'm leaving the little key-fob card on the condo key rings, in the hopes that future tenants of this place will earn me big big rewards with their purchases of coffee and breakfast cereal.