Friday, January 01, 2010

Happy New Rear

So we went to a New Year's Eve party at the home of a couple we've known for a long time. The guests were all folks who are also old friends -- literally, since I was the youngest guy in the room, save for a couple.

Good food, good wine, good conversation. We brought six pounds of boiled shrimp and my homemade cocktail sauce and it seemed to be well-received. They ate it all. (Recipe: Three parts ketchup to one part yellow mustard; one part horse radish sauce, one-to-two parts lemon juice, dashes of Tabasco Sauce, soy sauce, and maple syrup, to taste.)

Several of the party-goers elected to stay over for a New Year's Day breakfast -- there were spare beds and rollaways scattered hither and yon, in a condo that is maybe four times as big as my house. Those folks got pretty plowed since they didn't have to drive. I nursed a glass of really good wine, and had half a flute of champagne at midnight to toast the new year, but since we were driving home, I kept it light.

Always fun to be sober in a room full of happy drunks, and all of them were that. Sweet people.

The hosts passed out copies of the Oregon Writer's Colony fundraiser calendar, in which I was Mr. October. This was cause for much merriment, hoots, and hollers ...

We clicked on the TV just before midnight and watched Dick Clark for the countdown in NYC -- delayed for our time zone. Jennifer Lopez's skintight spangled cat-suit was fun, but --

-- Clark, born in 1929, had a visage so smooth that it would put a baby's butt to shame. He had a stroke a few years back, and obviously some plastic surgery since, and it was spooky seeing an eighty-year-old man without a wrinkle on his forehead. You could bounce quarters off his face. His voice was not good, and you have to give him credit for trying, but it was kind of sad to see the world's oldest teenager trying so hard to hang on.

Of course, the alternative is Ryan Seacrest ...

4 comments:

joe said...

Happy New Year!

Are there fanfiction or authorized Matador stories that you haven't written?

How do you feel about that stuff?

Steve Perry said...

The Matadors are mine, and given the way the copyright laws work, I have to give specific permission to allow anybody else to play with them, or risk losing the law's protection.

The big franchises allow fanfic, with certain legal protections built in, but I'm not a franchise.

Only person I've allowed to play with them is Bobbe, for some short stuff.

Joe said...

Can you point us to bobbe's stuff?

Steve Perry said...

Bobbe's stuff? Probably down there below his belt, though you might need an electron microscope to see it ...

There's a link to his blog in my list, and you can see bits of his fiction there. I dunno if he's go any of the Matador pastiches up, though I've read a couple.