Tonight for supper I decided to experiment a bit and make my own homemade corned beef hash. I had a good big of the potatoes and carrots, as well as the cabbage, left over from yesterday's dinner (had some nice slices of the meat too, in case you're wondering about that) and I figured if I just heated up the veggies, I'd get the same-old, same-old argument from the kids about not wanting to eat that because they don't like potatoes, or they don't like carrots and they don't like that other vegetable in that mixture either. (Yesterday, when they each pointed to the cabbage and asked what that was, I started out just telling them it was a vegetable and didn't say the name as I knew just hearing "Cabbage" would set them into an uproar. Eventually Maya asked more questions about the vegetable, being the little question box she is, ya know, so I ended up telling them the name of the vegetable was simply the "C" vegetable. Maya also wanted to know why it was named the "C" vegetable and I finally got out of that story by just saying that I didn't know why, but that's what it is called.)
So I figured if I fed this leftover stuff, all of it, into my little food chopper and chopped it up, then tried to brown it a tad in the frying pan, the cabbage would get kind of ground up and mixed in then with the potatoes, carrots and the couple pieces of meat I chopped up like that too. And it did sort of work in that Maya did eat most of the serving of hash that Mandy gave her. As an added attraction, when I stuck this combo in the oven, I added eggs to the mix by making a little indentation in the hash and cracking an egg into that so then the eggs "baked" -got kind of like poached eggs on the hash ya know. Maya did eat the egg on her serving along with most of the hash but Kurtis was his normal picky little self and took a couple of bites then ate toast. Oh well. Mandy and I both enjoyed the hash a lot anyway.
Towards the end of the meal, Kurtis decided it was high time that someone gave him some milk to drink, so Mandy poured a small glass for each of the kids. (Actually, only Kurt had milk as Maya wanted water.) Anyway, as he picked up his glass to take a drink, he asked us if there is water in milk. We told him no and Maya, being the little instructor now on virtually everything, decided she was going to explain about milke to Kurtis.
"Milk doesn't have water in it because it comes from cows," she very matter-of-factly informed her little brother. Then she started to try to give him a visual by demonstrating a little with her hands about cows and how they have these things that hang down and you grab hold of them and pull on them and that's how you get milk! It was really a cute demonstration on her part and she then asked Mandy what those things are called so sure, we both answered her question by telling her they are called udders.
But anyway, Mandy and I thought it was a really cute, pretty accurate description -"udderly correct" as a matter of fact -of where and how you get milk from cows!
This evening, I decided to check out what was on the PBS channel tonight since all it said for the evening viewing tonight on that channel was "Viewers Favorites" -which translated means pretty much it was a pot luck thing if you clicked that channel on as you wouldn't know in advance if it was going to be a favorite program of yours or perhaps of 50 million other viewers and was one you really didn't like at all.
However, I really lucked out tonight there as the show was a video made in 1980 of a reunion of "The Weavers" - a really great quartet singing group from the 50s primarily who ended up being black-balled back then due to Sen. McCarthy and his anti-communist hearings.
The program -two hours worth -was well worth watching! Great music to listen to them singing and also, the dialogue between the singers too was so interesting -Pete Seeger was one of the best known musicians in that group.
What was really sad though watching this group in clips from way back and also from the Reunion Concert in 1980 at Carnegie Hall, was how many years this group was unable to ply their craft -their music -because they had been black-balled. Such a waste there, ya know, to have no studio willing to record their music and no dj's who would play it, no clubs who would book them to sing. That, to my mind, was pure and simple, a criminal act in and of itself.
Listening to that music though took me back in time to memories of the first apartment I shared with three other young girls who, like I was at that time, were also employees of the FBI in the mid-60s.
Like almost all other young women living with a couple roommates back then in the D.C. suburbs, weekends were party time! And one of the groups my old roomies and I hung around with was a group of kids who were students at Catholic University -well, all except one guy who was attending the University of Maryland -and when they would show up at one of our weekend parties, it was inevitable that everyone would gather back in the larger of the two bedrooms in our apartment for our own version of a "Hootenany." (If you recall that show from the mid-60s, then you'll know what I am talking about there.)
Anyway, remembering how much fun we always had when two guys in particular would show up who were part of the group from Catholic University bringin their guitars and we would sing-along to whatever songs they picked out for us. The guys from Catholic U called their group a Social Fraternity and called themselves "The Senators." I don't remember names of most of the group -just a couple of them -Joe Srour, Jim Gallagher and Jack Campbell. There was a guy named Paul, who was really a riot, very funny, but I can't for the life of me remember his last name now. (And Jack Campbell was the one lone member of that group -honorary member I think he was -who went to the University of Maryland.)
But anyway, this was a great bunch of guys and we always had so much fun when they showed up. Nothing out-of-line at all -just good clean-cut fun with a little drinking thrown in!
Jack and Joe told me once that they knew where almost every party was being held around the D.C./Md/Va area every weekend because they had such an extensive line of communication with folks and they would get calls all week long telling them about a party at this apartment or that one.
Upon hearing that proclamation from those two clowns, I had challenged Jack that he couldn't possibly know where there was a party going on all over the entire radius of the D.C. area until one night, he proved it to me.
I remember it was a Friday night and at that time, I had moved from Maryland (SE, Prince George's County) over to Arlington, VA where I was sharing an apartment with another girl there. There was a good bit of commotion going on out in the hall outside our apartment about 9 p.m. and soon there was a banging too on our door. I remember answering the door to find Jack standing there and giving me the devil for having a party and not inviting him.
Turns out, my roomie and I weren't having a party but the guy who lived behind us was and Jack had been driving by, on his way to one of the parties on his list and saw a bunch of people entering our building and assumed it was my roomie, Mary, and me who were entertaining that night. When he found out it wasn't us but was our neighbor, who neither Mary or I knew at all (nor did Jack), he insisted then that we crash the party next door and he bet me that once in there, he would encounter someone there that he knew.
And, to my surprise, that's exactly what happened too! We crashed the party and within 5-10 minutes, Jack had found someone there who he knew from some where or other!
That always amazed me about him!
And see that show tonight, remembering the good old days of my roomies and my friends and I having our own fun-filled hootenanny, also got me to thinking too about those guys and wondering what ever happened to them.
I lost contact with them in late 1966 after Jack graduated and got a job as an engineer of some kind down in North Carolina some place. Joe, I think if I remember correctly, was majoring in Physics and was a grad student at the time I knew that group but I never heard what became of him. Jim Gallagher I think was a pre-med student but you know how it goes after so many years, one does forget things like that or you get one person confused with someone else too at times.
But it sure would be fun to know if they are still around some where and what they've been doing with their lives all these 40 plus years now!
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