Potluck Casseroles and the new breed of Wild West Outlaw

This is amazing! For the first 25 years of my life I engaged in criminal activity and didn't even know it. If you live in Arizona, you've probably committed the crime, too.

It turns out that according to a strict reading of the law it is illegal to have a potluck dinner outside of the workplace in the state of Arizona.  "Noncommercial social events" are only exempt from food safety regulations and health department inspections if they occur "at a workplace."  By extension, that means if a potluck is held in your house or a non-business location like a church, it's against the law. People who break this law can be fined or even arrested for the crime.

In 2013, a dude hosting a potluck in his trailer at Golden Acres Mobile Home Park in Apache Junction, AZ, managed to upset his neighbor somehow. The neighbor complained to the authorities that the little-known potluck law was being flagrantly broken, leading to an investigation into whether the dude should be punished for allowing TaterTot Casserole and Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise onto the premises.

There's legislation underway to get the law modified to something less ridiculously prohibitive. (Arizona House of Representatives bill HB 2341 ...you can't make this stuff up.)

In the meantime, beware all you scofflaws and church potluck goers!
Beware all the lawbreaking baby shower hostesses!
You are the criminal element, and you didn't even realize it!

Béla Bartók and Eating your vegetables

Classical music is beautiful. It makes sense to the ears.

20th century modern music, on the other hand, sort of makes me want to either fall asleep or run from the room in self-defense to keep the heinous pseudo-music from making my ears bleed. It's dissonant, rhythmless, and thorny. It makes me feel like I'm not smart or classy enough to understand and appreciate it; like I'm endlessly trying to "get it" but never even remotely close to succeeding.


Basically, this creepy piece of modern art looks
how 20th century composers' music sounds.
I don't understand it. Please make it go away.
Crud, I just insulted art. Why am I so closed-minded?
Maybe if I shut my eyes and plug my ears
it will be gone when I open them?

Here's the trouble: It seems like whenever a conductor plans a concert, there's a nefarious plot to lure you in with promises of Mozart (yay!) or Beethoven (heck yes!), or Strauss and Liszt and Brahms (swoon!), all while secretly planning to pack the program chock full of weird bizarro random modern stuff while you're not looking. 
It's as though they feel a compulsion to make you eat your vegetables (Charles Ives) and drink your codliver oil (Antonín Dvořák) before you can have dessert (Bach).

For Valentine's Day, I went to see Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. True to form, the first hour of the program was spent fighting off the unwanted advances of 20th century composers. 
But then a strange thing happened: they played a Bartók piece and I didn't hate it. There were even moments that *gasp* I legitimately liked!

Naturally, the shock of it drove me toward reading up a little to figure out why this particular Bartók piece was so tolerably un-Bartók-ian. It turns out that there are a few good potential reasons for it. 

1. European and American composers in the late 1930's to early 1940's were all trending away from modern and back toward populist music at the time. Maybe he was simply staying on-trend?

2. He had been ill for several years with polycythemia, a condition in which the bone marrow makes too many red blood cells and not enough of anything else. He likely knew this would be his last concerto before he died. Perhaps he wanted to leave the world with something that was a little gentler on the ears as his final legacy?

3. This reason is my favorite:  He and his second wife, Ditta Pasztory Bartók (a concert pianist), had arrived penniless to New York just a few years earlier and they had no assets; no realistic means to support Ditta after Béla died. He wrote the 3rd concerto with her in mind, so that she could perform it to support herself after he was gone. It had to be something that
(A) she would like,
(B) she could play, and
(C) people would pay to hear. 
Given the circumstances, I'm betting the last criterion may have been the most important of all. So he lightened up on the uncompromising dissonance and the prickly untrackable rhythms, and finally used his enormous musical talents to kindly write some melodies and harmonies for us.
     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .

It gets a little sticky at that point if you think about it, though, doesn't it?
The composer lives his whole life with pretty rigid artistic integrity, trying to champion a type of musical progress that he believes in, only to backslide toward something more traditional at the very end?

 

Does writing something un-Bartók-ian for a final chance at financial security make him a sellout? Or a savvy business man? A good husband? Or a traitor to his own artistic cause?
Someone who has studied a lot more music history and theory would be better-suited to answer that. All I know is that I didn't hate it.

Unexpected Roses are red, Violets are blue...

I may run the risk of being expelled from the Female race for admitting this, but I've never understood the appeal of getting flowers.

For many years, it would've sounded like sour grapes to say that.
If (hypothetically, of course), this girl in red:

spends Valentine's Day sulking around muttering "What's the point of getting flowers, anyway?" it tends to smack of bitterness rather than honesty. (The story behind this picture is an entirely other blog post waiting to happen. Aren't those lovely sailboats in the background, though?)

But really, truly, honestly, with all the glorious adolescent years well behind me, I'm going to come out and say it.  What's the point of getting flowers, anyway?
If society has appointed a day, and created an expectation, and commercially done everything possible to coerce people into buying and giving flowers, doesn't that deflate the sweetness right out of the gesture?

But this week I think I finally understood it!
I came in to work after-hours to help a lady, and out of nowhere she gave me flowers to thank me.

These are them!
They're sitting on my kitchen table
causing happiness at this very moment.

There was no expectation, no social contract, no holiday obligation, no rule that told her she was supposed to do that. I didn't need them or anticipate them. I wouldn't have been resentful or embarrassed if she hadn't brought them.
And maybe that's exactly what made it so nice that she did.
I found myself walking home along a dark drizzling Seattle street, in possession of six beautiful roses in a delicate little vase, thinking how nice it is to get flowers.