Nashville Confidential

everything's up to date there

Everytime I told someone we (my parents & my sister & I) were going to Kansas City during my Christmas holiday, they gave me that clever response. To those lyric-savvy people I say, please ask to see the picture of my dad at 12th & Vine. (Note to prospective KC visitors: This street sign is in the middle of a vacant lot, with public housing on adjacent parcels.)

Aside from that, Kansas City is fabulous. We really loved it. The weather was incredible -- near 60 degrees every day! -- and it is a classic Midwestern city with great architecture and history. My dad loved Union Station, of course, and my mom enjoyed the Country Club Plaza area (kind of the Oakbrook of Kansas City). My sister Foo dug the signage outside Foo's Fabulous Frozen Custard in beautiful suburban Brookside. We all loved the frozen custard.

Among our other stops were the 18th & Vine historic district, including the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and Harry S. Truman's home in Independence, Mo. The combination of these two stops only reinforced that Trent Lott is an absolute moron. The suggestions that segregation is preferable and that Strom Thurman would have been a better president than HST are ludicrous. (BTW, doesn't Strom look like Darth Vader's little shrunken head when they remove his mask at the end of "Return of the Jedi"? Check it out. You KNOW that Strom made a deal with the devil. He is 100 years old. A century of polluting public service.) We're all very happy that Bill Frist is now Senate majority leader. However, on the Tennessean.com website, that story took a backseat to "How to get Titans Playoff Tickets." Sad but true.

Well, it's good to be back in Music City. I'm partial to my own bed, and I missed the State Capitol. But this time was probably the hardest to return here and leave life in Peoria behind. This visit home was the first in which I realized I don't really live there anymore and things are happening there without me. (Yes, I kind of assumed that while my life moved on, everyone else's would just stay static, awaiting my return.) It's always good to be home (in Peoria). I haven't yet reached the "I'm too big for Peoria" phase and I hope I don't ever get there.

We had a white Christmas -- just three fluffy inches of snow, simply perfect. Hope yours was as relaxing, festive and enjoyable as ours was.

from the region that brought you sweet tea and krispy kreme donuts

Ever had chess pie? I hadn't until I moved down here. DeLaine, a co-worker, overheard me asking about it. Apparently it's a big holiday treat and Southerners are crazy about it. Today DeLaine brought in a chess pie she had made just for me. Isn't that sweet? The pie sure is. Check out the recipe (found this on the Internet, credited to a 1906 cookbook):

Take 4 eggs, 2 cups of sugar, 1 cup of sweet cream, 2/3 cup of butter and 1 tablespoonful of flour. Bake in a pie. Call cardiologist.

There are lots of variations of this custard-like pie (chocolate chess pie, lemon chess, etc.) and many recipes call for buttermilk and cornmeal. Delaine included those ingredients in her version. She also put meringue on top and was very upset that the meringue didn't hold up well overnight. But I thought the pie was simply swell.

So where did the name come from? Among the theories:

-- A slightly corrupted reference to the pie safe or "chest," in which the pie fared well during storage.
-- A Southern homemaker drawling to her husband that "It's jes' pie." (sounds like "chess pie")
-- An older tradition that called custards "cheese." (This choice seemed to get the most votes on cooking sites.)

On a different website, devoted to answering cooks' problems, a woman wrote in to say her chess pie looked ugly. The response: "Chess pie should rise and fall as it cooks and cools, and yes, because of that, it does tend towards homeliness. We've looked at a dozen recipes, and there is significant variation in the amounts of ingredients among them. Most have one or two whole eggs plus two or three yolks. Egg white is a great leavener, so it is possible that the whites are causing more lift in the pie than it needs, essentially causing unwanted stretch marks."

Eww, stretch marks. Glad I didn't read that until after I had my sliver.

the search continues

My apartment seems more like my own place now that I have posters and art up, thanks to Mom. When I moved here, I downsized considerably. That meant a complete reconfiguration of the furniture I use and the accessories I use, leaving many of the pieces behind and giving up quite a few lamps and tables. The artwork is probably the most familiar thing I brought from my previous house.

I miss my house sometimes. I miss the hardwood floors and the natural light and the garage and the closet space and the square footage. I don't miss anything related to a yard. Yesterday we drove around and looked at houses all over town because I've entertained fleeting, delusional thoughts of buying. It was wholly discouraging. There's nothing in my price range in a location I like or a house style I like. Plus I love downtown! Unfortunately there's nothing to buy in this "neighborhood" yet.

We covered a lot of ground on Saturday, even went up to Loves Circle to survey the city. A man and his wife drove up, he got out of the car and offered to take our picture. He thought we were tourists, which in a way we kind of are, still. In the late afternoon we went down to Franklin, where they'd closed off the streets in the downtown shopping district for "A Dickens Christmas," with costumed characters and carriage rides and all that. I love the holly everywhere and the magnolias. I also love anything historic, and that is an adjective they are quite fond of in Franklin.

a river runs through it

No holiday visit to Nashville is complete without a trip to the Opryland Hotel and its extravagantly decorated lobby. Usually I'd make a snide remark about the Opryland Hotel, because it's just big and commercial, but the decorations were impressive, for the scale if nothing else. There are smallish hot-air balloons floating above a botanical garden, a massive Christmas tree, about a trillion pointsettas, lighted gazebos, the works. In the lobby, you can take a gondola ride, buy Ben & Jerry's ice cream, go to a blues club and eat a fancy steak dinner. It's just bizarre.

We had the exact opposite of the Opryland experience at our pre-odyssey dinner at Red Wagon in East Nashville. It's small and offbeat and personal and simply fabulous. We had a great dinner and wonderful conversation. Red Wagon is catching on; it has grown from a catering-only operation to lunch a few days a week to now lunch and dinner. The owner, Meg, just had a baby and has his picture taped to the cash register. At first, we were the only patrons in the place and walked in to find Meg chatting with her wait staff. She welcomed us and said, "Well, guess I'd better go cook."

If you come to Nashville, I'll take you there.

move over, martha stewart

My parents have come to see me together and separately now. My dad was here in September and my mom is here now. It's wonderful when they're here, in any combination.

My mom is the most domestic person I know. Yet she somehow gave birth to a woman who does not know the business end of a spatula. I surprised her by planning a recipe and having all the ingredients on hand so we could make dinner together. It really was enjoyable, since she did most of the work and makes it look so effortless. In my world, broil, saute, simmer, fold all come to the same result: burn. We listened to Christmas music on XM Radio and just enjoyed the wonder that is my tiny corner of downtown Nashville.

Then we walked over to the Ryman Auditorium to hear Nashville Symphony and Chorus perform "The Messiah" (well, selected parts -- the entire oratorio is longer than the latest Harry Potter movie). It was great. When we came home, the apartment still had the smell of the meal and the dishwasher was going. Hardly recognized the place as mine.

never a stranger

So I went to the NPR Bases Loaded event tonight by myself, which strangely I didn't want to do. I had two tickets due to the size of my WPLN pledge and it just seemed wasteful to eat one of them. But Saturday night during the holiday season in a big city is busy for most folks and, believe it or not, three public radio commentators on baseball are not the hottest commodity.

They even said so! Neal Conan, Frank Deford and Scott Simon took the stage to vigorous applause and one commented that it was probably the warmest reception that three guys without instruments ever got on a Nashville stage. Then another one said, basically, in a town this bustling, this is the best you could do on a Saturday night?

It's the closest I'll ever get to spending a Saturday night with Scott Simon. I'm still irked that he married that Frenchwoman instead of me -- to make matters worse, he brought her to the event! Yes, he threw her in my face. He is really witty and learned and handsome. Too bad he's a Cubs fan. (And that my pal HCB can't stand him ... HCB is very Will Rogers-like.)

surprise surprise

Today at work we had a disaster recovery exercise, a secret a core team has been planning for a couple weeks. Nothing pleases me more than a secret plan! I've been looking forward to this for some time, much to the amusement of the other secret planners. The whole point of the exercise is to assess whether we could resume core operations if we could not get into our building for some reason (like a massive influx of bubbles).

In short, a phone call (from a contract agency) announces the emergency to employees and advises the core team to gather at a pre-arranged safe location to work on laptops. This presupposes that people have their laptops at home each night. We did pretty well, I guess, although I take it a bit personally that my blitzkrieg of e-mails and signs didn't prompt people to review the plans. Even my "laptop owners should take their machines home each night" didn't get everybody to take their machines home each night.

Read into this what you will: two employees thought the phone call was a hoax. Honestly, they thought a co-worker had devised a scheme to get them out of bed at 5:30 a.m. One woman even asked for the password (the initial phone call begins only after the contract agency hears a pre-arranged password from us) to confirm that this wasn't some kind of hazing.

thus spake snowbird

One of the great things about our office is that it's located directly across from Vanderbilt University, and our conference room looks down on a statue of old Cornelius himself. It's a very beautiful campus and I like looking out over the rooftops and gables and towers of the stately edifices.

This morning we were in a conference call and chunks of bubbles kept wafting by the window. First came one blob ... then a couple more ... then suddenly the air over West End Avenue was speckled with these Styrofoam-like clumps.

Apparently some Vandy students poured soap in our outdoor fountain, which they do once or twice a year, much to the chagrin of the building maintenance crew. They don't enjoy this ritual like I do ...

Our employees also do not enjoy the ritual of answering phones for non-profit organizations like I do, but I was able to nag a dozen of them into showing up for Nashville Public Television tonight. We staffed the phone bank and our president had an on-air interview. She did a great job. (Our whole group did, really, although we had a couple people who balked at being on camera. Sheesh.)

Originally we had 15 people signed up for the event, but there was a "winter advisory," which in this neck of the woods carries the same weight as the phrase "nuclear alert." The minute the winter advisory is brought by the Muppet-like Snowbird, a little mascot on one of the news channels here, bread and milk fly out of the stores. So three people had canceled by 8:30 a.m.

I was mouthing off about the weak moral fiber of Southerners who would let some low temps keep them from their appointed rounds. This riled one of my co-workers, and looking back on it, I don't blame her. She vigorously pointed out that it's very hard to drive on ice, and because middle Tennessee is so hilly, it's doubly treacherous. Plus they don't have salt trucks and all the equipment so it's not fair to say that they are wimps or bad drivers. Point taken.

Maybe I'm just bitter because, living within walking distance from the office, I'll never be able to claim inclement weather as an excuse to stay home.

the chamber of commerce sent a thank-you card

Chris and Colleen were here last week and boy, was it fun. Having them here was like seeing Nashville for the first time, all over again. They love the town like I love the town: the music, the art, the history, the Arcade, all of it. And they want to do it all.

We breakfasted in Franklin, toured RCA's famed Studio B, met Webb Wilder at the Country Music Hall of Fame (I am now convinced he and Chris were separated at birth), marveled at Hatch Show Print, ate at some of the best restaurants (we saw Clint Black + the Mrs.), watched others shake a tail feather at Robert's Western Wear and generally blazed a trail down Lower Broadway.

Oh yes, we also saw the Rolling Stones at the impressive Gaylord Entertainment Center.