I had a whirlwind few days.

How lucky am I to have neighbors here on the Kirkmont commune who took us to a barn concert their friends in Gilroy have every September?

Up early he following morning for a couple days in San Francisco: lunch with a writer-friend, followed by first fall session of writing workshop (mea culpa, my bad, did no real writing on it all break). Then dinner at Michelin-rated Quince with friends. A night at the Galleria Hotel, followed by attending said playwright-theatre reviewer’s play at the San Francisco Fringe Festival.

Whew! Let me take them one at a time.
Rita Morena: Life Without Makeup at the Berkeley Rep
Berserkely is about an hour’s ride away, so when I was invited, I thought why the hell not? L and I met for dinner and to talk trash about all things. Among them: writing, sex and life. Life is a big category, but writing and sex are more interesting. If I said more, I’d have to kill you and that would be impractical. So let’s move on, shall we?

Rita Moreno is hot stuff, even at 80. Hot hot hot stuff. Oh, to look that good NOW much less in 20 years. She DANCES, new knee and all.

Fur Dixon & Steve Werner at The Barn in Gilroy
Wine, cheese, crackers and home-made hummus, good company and good music–what a nice Friday night! Gilroy is the garlic capital of the world, but for me, it’s been all about outlet malls and the halfway mark from SJC airport on my way home to Pacific Grove in Monterey County. Back in the day. So to spend an evening at a barn listening to music?

Dinner at Quince in San Francisco
I do love our friends T and P: bright, interesting, involved and FOODIES. It was at their suggestion that we tried Quince Saturday night. It was also their suggestion that we sign up for the cool car service, Uber. If they were a topic on Twitter, they’d be trending.

Oh, did I say T is a social media consultant? I do not hold it against her in the least, because she is also a lung cancer cure advocate and an all around fun girl.

P and M talked finance and money the whole night, do not ask me what that’s about because all I know is that we pay our bills because M knows all about this stuff. I, personally do not care to know more than that our bills are paid. Oh. Wait: did I tell you M. got named to Best Lawyers in America by his peers again this year? For the gazillionth time? (I only count the times since we’ve been remarried. But there were many, many other years, too. It’s just that they don’t count. To me.) This is how he pays the bills, but he’s also smart as shit, yes he is.

Oh yes, the food. Eh.

Jo and Shelley and Jo by Lee Brady at San Francisco Fringe
Some say Shakespeare’s their favorite playwright, others like Arthur Miller or even Edward Albee (God forbid; I have still not recovered from seeing The Goat and that was in 2005.) My favorite playwright is Lee Brady and I promise you it is not because she called me a neurotic bitch in one of her plays. Well, to be exact, she didn’t exactly say that, she stole the line from someone else who called me that (but who meant it in only the best of ways). I wear the title proudly. But let me not digress.

I could wax eloquent about the scores of emails she and I have exchanged when we run across fabulous snippets of dialogue or plot ideas (usually drawn from one of our lives and which she has to write because I only write memoir and if I really wrote any of it, well, I would have to kill not my readers, but myself) but instead let me say that Jo and Shelley and Jo