Monday Night Music~Week III

This week, our third, really brought in the bigger crowd. Chris and Fran, from the Mud City Ramblers, usually draw the masses. Chris is held dear by most of this community and he'd just recently returned from a trip to San Diego. We borrowed a big grill and invited folks to bring along their own grillables and we offered another round of summer salads and soup.


It was a beautiful backyard show until it rained and we moved everything inside into the living room. I'll let the pics speak for themselves....starting from the end of the night and working backward. Only because I can't figure out how to put the pics in the right order.

Don't we just love Penny!!

Penny brings goodies from her garden and kitchen...

Penny brings her smile

.

Ella

She insists on rising at the crack of dawn and opening the shop with me.

She unwraps the baked goods.
Puts the deck chairs out on the porch.
She cracks some eggs.
Then she disappears.

This is where we find her.

Smashing Glass

Last week I accidentally scheduled myself to cover a shift for Holly on my regular day off. The only problem was that my mother-in-law (minus-the-law) was in town and it was my day to take she and Ella into Burlington for a birthday shoppy shop fest. My new girl Kate offered to cover the shift for me but she had never opened the shop before. I told her I'd meet her at the shop at 6am, spend an hour with her getting her set for the day (making eggs, baking, getting things set for the day) and then I'd head back home.

We've been sleeping in a tent in the yard for the past several weeks so I crawled out at the crack of dawn in my "jammies" and bed head, told Ella I'd be back in an hour to cuddle more, and drove into Johnson with the sun just coming up over the river.

When I got to the shop I found Kate, sick as a dog, taking occasional trips to the bathroom where I could hear terrible wretching sounds through the door. She offered to try to ride it out but basic ethical treatment of employees and state health code require that an employer should send a puking employee straight home to bed.

So.... there I was. Behind the bar in my jammies and bed head with a stranded Granny Jean and Ella Bean back at my decrepit old farm house wondering what ever happened to me. If it weren't for a built up week of stress I may have accepted this defeat with a better grace but.... I was pissed and bummed and on edge.

Dave came in after an all-night medic shift at Fletcher Allen and sat at the bar for a while. We got to talking about how way-back-when we lived in an old condemnable house in our hometown with way too many people and a very specific element of stress, he once found a most creative way for me to blow off my steam.

The basement of that house, much like this basement in places, was made of stone and dirt. One day way back then he loaded a milk crate (or four) with piled up ganky dirty dishes and took me by the hand into that basement, opened a door that led into a dark dank room with stone walls and placed one of those dishes in my hand.

After all four milk crates of everyone's dirty dishes were left in thousands of peieces in the corner of that little room, I ascended the stairs with a much better attitude and a much lighter heart. The house was eventually condemned so we never actually felt compelled to clean up the mess.... that was half of the satisfaction.

So, I asked Tara to just mind the counter for a minute or two and, in my jammies and bed head, Dave and I descended the basement stairs with a couple of little water glasses and made loud smashing sounds for a few minutes (with those two little water glasses and a wide array of other plates and bottles we found down there). Once again, fourteen years later, I ascended the stairs feeling sooo much better about things.

A few minutes later Penny came in... Penny, who ran the Stowe Coffee House for years and years, and she graciously offered to take my place for the afternoon behind the counter. All that smashing glass resonated out there into the universe (or at least out into the backyard and to her front door) like an S.O.S and sent help directly. I made it home by 10:30 am.

Anyone who remembers the band Weave (who had their hey day back in the early nineties in a little cafe called Prufrocks in Scranton) and anyone who remembers their song Smashing Glass.... it's been stuck on repeat in my brain for one solid week now.

So the corner of the basement of this house, with all the thousands of pieces of glass, is now coined the Therapy Corner. Anyone who needs it, feel free to stop by. You bring the stress. We'll supply the glass.

Approaching Week III of ~

So, I've mentioned before that Tara is the one who's been organizing Monday Night Music in the backyard. She was originally planning on opening a skate shop across the road and it kinda fell through.... so she's used the BackAlley name to draw events together in a really incredible way. She organized Johnson's first MudFest this spring... a four day event that brought music, sculptors and artisans to the area. Most of the legwork was done here on the shop computer and we all kind of watched her pull her hair out (in a most graceful way) as she booked bands, wrote up their bios, created the program for the weekend and made her pirate flags and banners to advertise for each venue.

Monday Night Music was Tara's idea.... mostly because there was nothing else to do in town that night and she's capable of making it happen. After watching me spread myself way too thin this spring, she was quick to reassure that if I wanted to split after my long Monday shift, I was free to go and she would sail the ship.

Our first week I stuck around and we hosted Jeremy Harple.... had a good showing, made kick ass food, and called it a night by 10pm.

The menu consisted of several summer salads made with locally grown organic goodies

an incredible green salad picked and assembled by Penny.

Penny is our spicy Gemini who lives out back behind the shop in a house that sits beside the river. She lovingly tends bar at the bistro and she can usually be spotted out there in her backyard kneeling in her garden beds or at the bar here with stacks of cookbooks figuring out what on earth to make with all the produce she's producing.

So, we offered a cucumber, strawberry and mint salad.

A beet salad with beet greens, summer squash and feta. I made my incredible peanut noodles that I have to credit Molly Katzen for.

Oh, and there was a chilled yogurt cucumber soup, too.

The food prep and display was probably my most favorite aspect of all of this. I'm getting a chance to put out there the kind of food that I feel good about serving folks. Our daily menu of sandwiches is fine but the few organic ingredients I can throw into them just isn't enough for me. It's dawning on me how much my diesel impact on the planet has increased since I bought this place. It's hard to wrap my head around how much of what I purchase now-a-days comes from god knows where and uses how much oil to be shipped from California on refrigerated trucks??? Scary. So this little contribution to the local food economy brings me great joy and maybe, just maybe, it'll help lay the groundwork for more of the same in the future.

So, we're booked up for music the rest of July and the month of August. We've got some great folks from this area and some bluegrass bands from the Burlington area. Everyone seems alright with playing for tips and food and it'll be interesting to see how out of town musicians respond to this down and dirty little town of ours.

But the flowers are blooming and it looks gorgeous out there (Thank you Kalinas!!).

We have sculptures and lights and picnic tables and it feels so good to see it all occupied.

To check out Tara's new Mac skills,
get a little run down on who's playing
and hear samples of their music, go to:

www.myspace.com/lamoillecountycrew

...........i will
................be blogging.............
soon
soon
soon

Tip Jar

In order from left to right~
Jess (the real McCoy), Hannah and Holly(the plante girls), Mua and Sarah

Granted, some of us look more like chipmunks but the dollars come in anyway........

8am Saturday

Between putting the espresso machine together for the day, filling the brew pots and baking I started to hear a loud, kind of snorting noise outside somewhere. It sounded like a deer or a moose when you come up on them in the woods. Like they're blowing air forcefully through their nose but their nostrils are just so much bigger than our own. I heard it first outside the east window and looked out to the driveway, up to the scaffolding next door where they're painting the old Vermont Studios building... nada.

Walking past the sink, I heard it again outside that west window. Looked outside. Nothing. But I could see Penny and Ron on their porch with their necks crinked up to the sky. Even the roundish kind of fellow who lives next door to them and who never really walks the greyhound he rescues but just puts him on a short leash and walks in circles the size of a golf cart.... even he was on his porch looking skyward.

From the sink window I still couldn't see anything so I walked out to the side porch and above the building next door, practically dragging their toes along the metal roof, was a rainbow striped hot air balloon.... firing firing firing.....(snorting snorting snorting)..... to keep the balloon in the air. By the time I ran back inside, grabbed my camera and made it back out, I had to run out to Main Street to see it more. It landed, emergency-like, in the parking lot of the Grand Union.... seein' as how there aren't any pastures here in the village and there's never any cars in the parking lot of that dusty gross store anyway.

I dunno. They're gone now. A half hour later. But what a great way to start the day. The card on my camera was "blocked" but one of my regulars was out there with her camera. I'll be sure to post a pic if I can get a copy.

Update

I've been getting grief by the few who read this blog. I need to keep posting.

So, what's new at the Lovin Cup Cafe?.......

• I paid all my quarterly taxes yesterday and squared up, finally, with the Department of Labor so that all of my employees are accounted for and I'm fully legit.... it's a little scary that I wasn't. My Quickbooks has a face-lift, is totally up to date. The business continues to make money and flourish... which means that my prior fear of crashing and burning has abated some. I've learned how to do all the entering of my deposits... which means that the financial care of my business has now transitioned fully into my own hands. Thank you Bill for one good year of management and for gracefully passing the baton. Take a deep breath. You now have more time in your life to call your own. Get in your new truck with your new surf board and hit an east coast shore for the weekend.
  
• School's out for summer. Translation: "Critter" (as Bean's been coined at the shop) is around a whole lot more. It's a fine balance of having someone to wipe tables and run errands for me and having someone underfoot pestering me for frosted baked goods and Blue Sky sodas. She's made so many great friends here... adults who really take time to talk with her, engage with her and teach her how to use num-chuks in the backyard. She learned to ride her bike this spring and is totally obsessed. This weekend she's at her first overnight camp (for Karate) and Monday she begins a week-long day camp for mountain biking called Dirt Divas. She'll be learning how to fully manage her bike ...fixing it, riding it, distributing her weight for good trail riding. They'll travel around this part of the state riding different trails and stopping to swim in rivers, gather in circles, talk girl stuff and make new friends. When the week is over, I can pick her brain about how to maintain my own bike and shift my own body weight properly when riding on trails.
  
• All those berries and all that vanilla ice cream are still sitting in my chest freezer. No frozen coffee drinks or smoothies as of yet.
  
• I started growing sprouts in a half gallon mason jar. Folks love it. I love it.
  
• I started swimming in my pond every night. It's the most spectacular way to decompress at the end of a day. The frogs are still going wild.
  
• Never did report on the prom. The night was spectacular. Full tilt. Purple and silver decorations. Good food. Strobe lights. Rotating disco ball. Smoke machine. A projected slide show of psychedelic prom scenes throughout movie history (Carrie, Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful....). We raised the roof. Then, just before midnight, the rowdies climbed the spider web infested clock tower, tripped out on old clock mechanics, woke the entire village of Waterville by ringing the bell every twenty minutes for, like, an hour and a half and, from what the town of Waterville tells me, broke a piece of the "historic, functioning Waterville Town Hall clock". I escaped a tar and feathering and then narrowly averted being burned at the stake on the town green. I published an apology letter to the entire town of Waterville and put individual apology letters in the mailboxes of all the village residents and I think.... I think I think I think.... my reputation has the remote possibility of eventually being restored. I love my little town and cried for four days when I believed nobody there liked me anymore. Literally. Cried for four days. At the drop of a hat. But I believe again that I am a good person and it will all blow over. In a decade or so. I'll post some pics of the gala next time around. I'll let you know the damages when I get the bill.
  
• Now that my beautiful new sign is hanging outside I get a wealth of new faces streaming in and out of this place. It creates a whole new dynamic and a fatter drawer at the end of the day. I still go outside occasionally just to look at it.
  
• We're beginning Acoustic Monday nights in the Backyard this upcoming Monday. Our friend Jeremy Harple will be kicking it off. We'll have light(er) fare than normal (my incredible beet salad, some peanut noodles, maybe a cold soup and some local bread) and will be offering our regular beverage menu. Tara, who is organizing the whole thing, will be in charge of closing the night down if I should choose to retire early and hit the sack... which is really the best part of the whole thing. Mondays are an ass kicker. Reliably. Every week. Nothing else in town is open so everyone who needs any sustenance at all that day comes here and we feed them and hydrate them and leave exhausted at the end of the day. So the option of not having to stay till the wee hours of the morning is appealing. Hopefully we'll get a killer showing and it'll provide the masses something to do that night. Monday, from what I understand, is the one night of the week that no other restaurants/bars in town provide any kind of entertainment. Hopefully we'll be filling the nitch.
  
• My gardens out back are bursting with all kinds of new beauties. Hollyhocks, a variety of tiger lilies, and a bunch of stuff I can't identify. But it's all gorgeous and it'll be a great backdrop for music.
• I started selling coconut water at the shop. (Because) It's my new favorite beverage.
• It's Friday. I wasn't supposed to open AND close today but I did and now I'm gonna sign off to reclaim what's left of the day by taking my bike (and my dog) for a long ride up my road while the sun goes down. If I'm lucky, my stallion of a Border Collie won't try to herd any of the passing vehicles by biting their rear tires. It really kind of sucks when he does that.