Aunt Barbara
On Wednesday, my pal Dita and I attended an Aunt Barbara Tupperware party at Trio Restaurant to benefit the Long Island gay Men’s Chorus. I’ve been a fan of Auntie for some time now and I was excited for Dit to see for himself what she was all about, and Auntie B didn’t disappoint. For almost a full hour, we were kept in stitches by her unique brand of humor, sprinkled with 70’s pop culture references and hysterically funny product demonstrations. If you’ve never been to an Aunt Barbara event, you need to! I just published a review of the event here and you can see what a little of what she’s all about here:
Toots
Thursday night I had a reunion with one of my oldest friends. I’ve spoken of Marcia here before, most recently a few weeks back when her husband Brad had passed away. Well, “Toots” had a family wedding this weekend here on Long Island and so she came up with her daughter Layne and her family. Since she didn’t have much time, nor a car to get around in, I drove into Nassau County to have dinner with the bunch of them and it was like 20 years ago all over again!
Marcia and I go way back…all the way to 1984 or so, and we’ve been through a lot together. I know just about everything about her and she likewise. Her sister Susan came out from Queens to make that circle of my life almost fully complete (sans one person!). The whole night was like a fun family reunion…an evening full of reliving old memories and making new ones. Though she’ll be here in NY until Monday, wedding stuff will prevent me from seeing her again, which is too bad.
Of course, my buddy has got this understandably sad aura about her and I’m glad I was able to give her some joy out of life even if for a little while. I think this might be the year I return to Florida. It’s been a long time!
Really, the iPhone takes crappy pictures!
Meatloaf and ESL – An American Classic!
For the past several weeks, I’ve been teaching a food unit to my beginner ESL class. I’ve got four students who know very little English and part of teaching them at this stage of the game is giving them lots and lots of vocabulary. We started off with basic food items like fruits and vegetables, meat and poultry and the like, and then moved on to food packaging and words relating to the supermarket. I wanted to culminate the unit with cooking an entire meal, American-style of course, and planning it from beginning to end. I decided upon that classic American standard, meatloaf, which only one of the four had ever tried.
We started by taking a look at recipes and learning words relating to measurements, followed by words for kitchen utensils and kitchen verbs (mix, chop, stir, boil, etc.). We took a mini-field trip to the supermarket and made a list of what we’d need, prices and all. Our activity culminated on Wednesday morning with a trip to the Home Skills classroom, where we’d prepare our meal. The experience was a wonderful one, as the kids really got down to business and prepared an entire meal of meatloaf, mac n cheese, broccoli and a salad, which all of my other students got to enjoy. As always, I’m proud of them and the job that they did, and I know they learned a lot.
Well, that’s some of what’s happened in my busy week. We’ve got four days left until spring break and I am definitely looking forward to that! As always, thanks for reading and enjoy the weekend!
Image Sources:
NY Mag
My iPhone
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