I hope he didn't get the turkey and swiss

Local photog Laurie Naiman sends me shots of Peninsula life now and then. I enjoy his eye for subtle humor. It's like someone dropping a dry bon mot and then moving on so quickly that you don't realize why you're smiling.

He took this at Trader Joe's in Mountain View, where birds sometimes fly in through the front doors. One is hanging out near an olive-eyed creature in the sandwich area.

Continuing in the feathered theme, here's another of Naiman's bird photos that has a particular spark to it. Someone feed that model a Twinkie.

A truly classic classic

Whenever I have friends in town, I always seem to take them to the Stanford Theatre. Even if the movie stinks (rare), everybody likes it when the theater organist disappears into the floor.

Recently we saw “Arsenic and Old Lace.” I will lose my membership in the People Who Really, Really Like Theater Club for saying this, but I have never seen the play or the film. I thought it would be something gloomy. Two old women driven to homicide by tragic events.

Nope. The movie was ridiculously funny, filled with slapstick, rushing-around humor, the kind of comedy that my actor sig-oth calls “a lot of door-slamming.” As for the old women, they happily admit to offing a dozen gentlemen callers. The whole family’s up in the clouds (including a guy who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt) except for poor nephew Cary Grant, who runs in circles trying to figure out what to do about the bodies in the cellar. Maybe you shouldn’t laugh so hard, but you do.

One of the movie's strengths is that it still feels like a play. Most of the plot takes place in the aunts' front room, which on film creates a claustrophobic effect and makes Grant seem even more ridiculously trapped. And everyone has comic timing fit for the theater.

It’s easy to think of Grant as just suave and to forget what a natural he was at humor. But he just keeps rolling it out, making even a silly joke seem fresh. (“I am not throwing you out of the house. I am not throwing you out of the house. I am not throwing you out of the house. Will you get out of here?”)

Today I went online to learn more about the movie, and learned from IMDb that Grant detested his performance in “Arsenic,” saying it was over the top. Oh, what does he know.

The next big thing

As I wrote in Friday's Weekly, the Gunn High School choirs have a pretty great line-up for their Dec. 20 concert: They're presenting all original music written by students, graduates, parents and staff.

Click below to hear some samples of the concert program.

Gunn math teacher Dave Deggeller croons from his love song "The Elf Next Door":
http://www.vocalu.com/media/aeblog/elf.mp3

Gunn senior Ben Christel set the poem "Namarie" from "Lord of the Rings" to haunting music. Here his sister Sophia, who also contributed a piece for the concert, sings Ben's composition.
http://www.vocalu.com/media/aeblog/lotr.mp3

Home is where the art is

Ah, bygone November, the month that I spent most of in Europe. It's crazy sunny in California, and was I really just walking in the snow in Budapest a few weeks ago?

It's never easy to leave Europe. You can try to bring some of it back, but a chausson aux pommes doesn't hold up well on an extended jet ride. On a related note, here's a great little article about building good sandwiches to take on planes. I want to write a similar story for the Weekly, but I need a Palo Alto angle.

Fortunately, there's always something good going on in the arts world to make you feel better. Last night's Chanticleer concert at Stanford's Memorial Church just about made up for not being on the Continent any more. I would fly long distances to hear those boys sing Biebl's "Ave Maria." They were in amazing voice last night, as always. If you closed your eyes, you were soaring, plane or no plane.

Every year, someone from Chanticleer always says how much the singers love MemChu, how they enjoy coming back to the Bay Area after all their traveling and touring during the year and finally feeling at home. Hmmph. Maybe they have a point.

Turo rudi also does not hold up well on planes. But it's nice that Wikipedia runs a photo of it.