The last two weeks at the Hilltop have been unusual, with what is likely to be our only snowfall of the season here in the Nashville area, and it ended up being several inches, with sub-freezing temperatures that made the snow stay there for a few days. It closed the schools and canceled my show rehearsals. Some years we only get a dusting here, and even this time, within a few more days it got up to 65 F and felt abruptly like spring.

I did venture forth one time during the snow days, bundled up, and crept the car over the ice to the nearby grocery store. Having read The Tucci Table cookbook (yes, written by the actor of that name), I used what energy I had that day to make an absolutely luxurious French beef stew in our Dutch oven. It is called “carbonnade de boef,” using three pounds of melt-in-your-mouth chuck pieces stewed for hours in dark beer and other tasty ingredients to create a glistening sauce. It is fun to try to pronounce “boef” in French. I say it over and over. In the last hour of cooking, I added almost three pounds of succulent mushrooms and served it on pillowy, wide pappardelle egg noodles.

We did get back to rehearsing my show, Dear Miss Barrett, which has been fun for me to attend. We have great directors, so I am really there mostly to be a fly on the wall, but also a resource if any questions arise. The theater has created their own new poster, which I really love. It shows my modern-day character on the left, back to back with the historic poetess, Elizabeth Barrett (of “How Do I Love Thee?” fame). There is a cup of tea, also part of the show, in the lower left corner. The dates here are wrong and will be corrected when they post it (should be March 1 – 10). Of course, the show logo on the show web site HERE will continue to be used as the primary logo for the show over time, but it is good to have a secondary one, too.

Meanwhile, we had a virtual meeting on Zoom of the Raffaella Ballet production team with fifteen of the team participating. It is impressive indeed to see them work as professionals on staging details, sets, costumes, lights, and the best ways to accomplish various effects like scrims and plastic snow. Here is a sneak peek at one of the costumes in progress – note, it’s not yet finished. This is to become Raffaella’s Village Peasant dress. With around 50 dancers, most of the costumes will have to be rented from various places – a big job for the costumers. Some of the scenes are to be set in a kind of Renaissance Italian village, and here are some wonderful preliminary set concepts for that (below), created by our executive producer, Duncan Stroik (who happens to be a famous architect). My work on the score, in coordination with the choreographer, continues.

One of our cats, the blonde one (Noah), has been very poorly since I last wrote and hiding himself away and not moving much. I finally took him to the vet, who discovered that he was in bad need of an enema! That’s not as simple as it sounds, because to get him cleaned out, they had to put him under general anesthetic, which can be risky for older cats, and then a strong antibiotic that makes him sleep all day. We’re trusting that soon he will be a new man! He also has a kind of laxative medicine that he will need to take for a while. That goes along with administering his brother Oliver’s thyroid medicine twice a day. It’s okay. It’s a labor of love.

Yesterday, Crystal and I had our annual photo shoot with our friend Jennifer George once again taking the photos. This is for our yearly Valentine card that we send out to about 200 people. Every year we dress as some historic romantic couple and pretend that the card is coming from them. I will post the photos here next time, which will be on Valentine’s day, so please wait till then to find out who it’s going to be! If you look at the past archives for this blog, I think you will find several of the photos from previous year’s Valentine cards. We like to do this, because people get so many Christmas cards that they can just become part of a pile, whereas I don’t think people get many Valentines in the mail any more, so it feels more special to us.