Independence Day Picnic

I'm not sure I can stomach seeing myself at the top of my blog, so I'm starting with dessert.

We celebrated the Fourth of July with a trip to American Players Theatre in Spring Green where we saw a riveting performance of The Merchant of Venice. For the picnic dinner before hand, I made goat cheese flans w/ li'l toasts, cold spring pea soup (though it's hardly spring), herbed shrimp salad, and chocolate spice quickies, so called because they bake for a mere seven minutes.

The weather was glorious during dinner, but it began to sprinkle during the last scene. APT is outside, so the weather is key, not necessarily to my enjoyment of the event (we once had a grand time when a show was rained out), but to how much of the play one gets to see. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief after the curtain call... but as we made our way down the quarter-mile trail to the parking lot, the sky dumped buckets of rain on a mostly unprepared group of playgoers. I worried that someone might have a disastrous fall in the mud, but apart from that, the soaking was very summery and fun-- festive even. As tonight's dinner companion suggested, the rain washed away any troubling humors raised by a wonderfully complicated play.