Donna and I recently returned from a trip to the Golden State, seeing our son Jack and his wife Erin in L.A., visiting Donna’s brother Mike and sister Barb in Newport Beach, and sightseeing in San Diego, which neither of us had ever visited. It was a wonderful, whirlwind trip. Leg one: Mauled by Vicious Attack Dogs Our first stop brought us to a hotel in Universal City, home to Universal Studios and a five-minute drive to Jack and Erin’s home in beautiful Toluca Lake, a village whose houses are framed with colorful, fragrant gardens and the main street is lined with restaurants, boutiques, and two icons: the original Bob’s Big Boy (home of the “original double deck hamburger”), and Paty’s, a casual diner that is bustling at all hours. We met up with Jack and caught up on his various projects and pursuits (of which he always has several in the works). For protection, Jack and Erin have a trio of fierce attack animals that use their anteater tongues to lick their adversaries into s...
Do Donna and I like seeing Impressionist art? Did painter Edgar Degas have a thing for ballerinas? Yes and yes. So when we heard that the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. would be the only U.S. stop for an international touring show featuring the works from the first exhibition of Impressionism, in 1874, we made sure to see it. We went the Monday after Thanksgiving, when there were no throngs of student-field-trippers, and made a pre-holiday lunch-and-a-show date of it. The term Impressionism was coined by art critic Louis Leroy during that first show, which was sort of a protest by artists whose non-conformist works had been rejected by the Salon de Paris, the annual show organized by the powerful and conservative Academie des Beaux-Arts. Leroy used the term derisively in response to a painting by Claude Monet called Impression, Sunrise . The painting shows a busy seaport, looking across the water to the docks. The boats and their masts are hard to discern through t...