A Table of Joe and a Song in My Heart

June is a good time of year to visit the south Jersey shore. It’s not quite high season, but all the tourist oriented businesses are open.  In June, you’re no longer in any danger of stubbing your toe on an iceberg when you take a dip in the Atlantic.  And finally, it’s too early in the season for medical waste to have washed up on shore: always a plus in New Jersey.  There wasn’t anything exciting on the gang's dance card—no living history Clamshell Toss or parasailing, so I checked out the Cape May County CVB website to see what was up.

What ho! as my fictional mentor, Bertie Wooster, would have said. There was a food truck festival in Sea Isle City. SIC, as it's known on white oval bumper stickers, is the town immediately across Townsends Inlet from Avalon (as in, it’s close) and has—at least in my experience—sort of a working class shore vibe. You wouldn’t be shocked if you saw the former cast members of MTV's Jersey Shore there, the way you would if you saw them in Avalon, Stone Harbor or Cape May. It’s a gym/tan/laundry sort of town.

As a hipster wannabe, I am all in for food trucks. I like their cute names, amusing graphics, and quirky menus. The food is often both tasty and cheap. Cheap is appealing to their “core constituency” of hipsters, who are often sleeping on their parents Castro Convertibles. And because food trucks have that aura of au courant-ness around them, not everyone realizes that, at the end of the day, you can eat pretty much the same deep fried crap that you’d get at a fair or a carnival.

In addition to the food truck festival there was theatre in Cape May. Everyone knows I’m not a theatre kind of guy.  But I occasionally go. This was one of those occasions. It wasn’t community theatre, but the actors were real Actors Equity members. And it got better….it wasn’t an evening of Chekov or Strindberg, but an evening of SHOW TUNES. Show tunes: the lingua franca of the gay community. And not just any old show tunes but tunes by Rodgers and Hart and Rodgers and Hammerstein. In other words, the evening was going to be knee deep in old chestnuts. After getting the gang's assent, I bought tickets using my cellphone quicker than you could say "Beer Bust at the Eagle!".

Before a pre-theatre dinner at the food truck festival, there was plenty of time to do chores around the house and in the yard.

I had to buy some plants to fill in the flower beds here and there. I like my yard to look tidy and well cared for, even if it doesn’t compete with the folks who have sprinkler systems and a landscape contractor who employs lots of people who are adept with a leaf blower and can tell you where to go for good, cheap, Mexican food.  And besides, I got the gardening gene. I can tell a delphinium from a dahlia and a lupine from a larkspur. The difference between Chekov and Strindberg, well...I'm a little shaky there.

So M. and I headed off the island to the garden center of choice. It’s on Route 9, which used to be the main drag from North Jersey to Cape May before the construction of the Garden State Parkway.  It’s still where you find garden centers, a golf course or two, and closer to Cape May, a gaggle of big box stores and strip malls.

Still, on the undeveloped portions of the highway, there are some vestiges of Old Jersey: old churches, small towns with antique shoppes, and some houses here and there.

Before we got to the garden center, we came to a huge sign for GARAGE SALE. It was near the site of a garage sale where I bought a great Cold War era photo of a meeting of Air Force generals that’s been a fixture in my downstairs bathroom for years. So, with that great purchase in mind, I pulled over to see to what was for sale. In theory, lighting can strike twice in the same spot.

Among the tables of insulated coffee carafes, video game cartridges, record albums and miscellaneous boxes filled with household crap I zeroed right in on the Pot O’ Gold.

Interestingly enough, everyone was ignoring it.

It was a table stacked with a giant scrum of mostly naked GI Joes enjoying what seemed to be one big Hasbro themed orgy. Hasbromance, I suppose.
 

My first thought was, is this how they celebrate Gay Pride in Middle Township? But alas and alack, there wasn’t a single rainbow flag, Cher album, or poster from Promises Promises starring Sean Hayes and Kristen Chenoweth to be found anywhere.
 

It turned out that the man who was selling them got them from his father, who drew for Marvel Comics in the 1980s. For whatever reason, Marvel sent his father LOTS of GI Joes to sketch.

 

And after a while, the father got bored with just the standard Joe (just like a guy, no?) and then decided to turn some of them into Zombies. As Dave Barry would say, no I am not making this up.

I was astonished that the folks having the garage sale didn't think it was at all noteworthy to be selling a pile of mostly naked GI Joes, some of whom were Zombies. They acted as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

And so right there, on a sunny Saturday in June, at a garage sale on Rte. 9 in Middle Township, NJ, I learned one of life’s more unusual lessons: you cannot take a bad photo of a pile of naked GI Joes.

Even though they were only a dollar each, I didn’t buy any.

As I'm sure you know, I have intimacy issues.

M. and I went back to the garden center in the afternoon and stopped again to take more photos. The guy told us that he was still waiting for his first sale of Joe. I gave him $2 and told him that it was for the photo rights. He laughed and invited us back on Sunday.

After reluctantly saying goodbye to the Joes, and planting the stuff I bought at the garden center, there was a bit of time for the beach. The water’s pretty cold, but once you’d gone past the shrinkage point it was really quite refreshing.

After a quick shower, we headed out to the food truck festival in Sea Isle City.

For starters, we were overdressed. And we could tell that pretty much as soon as we parked. You might have thought that they didn’t make horizontal stripes in those sizes, but they do.

The trucks were parked in a vacant lot behind a bar. There were about fifteen food trucks and they formed a U. in the middle of the U was a line of “vendors”, as in people who sell license plate holders about the Second Amendment, folks from the local animal shelter, and, believe it or not, someone selling Tupperware. Perhaps she was thinking that people might need to take something home in an EZ-2-Tote Deviled Egg Caddie, or the Overnight and Part of the Next Day Pineapple Schlepper.

We did a lap around the lot before splitting up to get the genuine food truck sourced Epicurean delight of our choice. I went with a boring pork BBQ, I wasn’t really in the mood for Alsatian Tempura on a Stick or Vegan Cactus Sliders on Home Made Matzo, not that I saw either of those things. The menus were pretty boring for the most part, except for some sort of Hungarian spiral bread called a spritzenflugel or volkdophschlaen or something like that.

Cutting to the chase, my Carolina pork BBQ was terrible. In fact, it was easily the worst Carolina pork BBQ I have ever had. Frankly, it didn’t even rise to the level of North Dakota Pork BBQ.  For starters, it took forever. I paid my $8 and gave them my name. And then waited and waited and waited. And they called Brandon and Jimmy and Kristen and Cassie and so on, and never Rick. The guy who ordered right before me got his sandwich, but alas not me.

Finally, a proto hipster in a pork pie hat asked me if I’d been waited on. I said that I had quite some time ago but was still waiting for my food. The woman who took my money, a middling student in charm school back in the day, informed me, in a tone postal workers save for people who fill out the wrong forms when they’re mailing boxes to countries with no vowels in their name, that they filled the orders in the order in which they were received and that my sandwich would be coming. I pointed out that Brandon, who’d ordered right before me, got his sandwich quite some time ago. That went over like the proverbial fart in church.

After the long wait, my sandwich arrived. It wasn’t Carolina Pork BBQ. It was some gristly roasted pork with a blob of what a dollar to a donut say was Heinz BBQ sauce plopped onto it. Ugh.  When I went back to the bit of standing cocktail table the gang was sharing with some perfect strangers, I told them all that it was the worst fucking pork BBQ I had ever had.

On the plus side, the milkshake I ordered at Shore Shake was really good even if opted for chocolate and not mango/persimmon/starfruit with candied ginger bits and quince flavored jimmies sprinkled on top.  But hey, the guy in the truck was wearing a hand crocheted visor and that made me feel hipper just by looking at him.

The rest of the gang liked their meals even down to the Hungarian ventlinzerfuble or whatever the hell that thing was. It was just my unlucky day.

After the food truck festival, we zipped down to Cape May for our evening of theatre.

Cape May is quaint and cute, especially at dusk.

"I can't believe I forgot the beach tags!"

The show was in the Presbyterian Church, which had some great 19th century stained glass windows. However, there was a large stage where the pulpit should be.  I’m not sure what that would do for Sunday service, but it did make a decent enough theatre.

The director spoke to us before the show and pointed out that the actors (two men, two women) were un-mic’ed, as they would have been in the old days so we would be hearing people as they sang when the songs were written. Cynical me thought, oh, well, the space isn’t very big and this saves them the cost of a sound guy. But hey, the singers projected from the diaphragm like old pros and a sound system wasn’t necessary.

But unlike in the old days, the accompanist played an electronic keyboard, which sounded like, well, an electronic keyboard. At least there weren’t Hammond Organ rhythm section. The world doesn’t need the sound of maracas in a cha-cha beat as the backdrop for “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No”.

And unlike in the old days, I don’t think there was any sort of costume professional managing the wardrobe. The women performed in home-ec class worthy sack dresses in a Liberty-esque floral print, and the men in our old friend, the goes-with-everything blue blazer. The costumes would have been nice enough had they not been fitted by someone who was used to work with Omar the Tentmaker. There was plenty of extra fabric in case the actors gorged on Hungarian zeppinstagpitzel from a nearby food truck between acts.

The brochure told us the actors would be ‘breaking the fourth wall”, and indeed the performer did leave the stage and come into the audience. One of the singers wanted me to dance with her as she sang, Ten Cents a Dance. Since I didn’t aspire to including a walk on role in an Equity show in Cape May on my resume, I channeled my inner stick-in-the-mud and passed on the chance.  I’m a gardener not a dancer, remember?

Since show tunes aren’t enough to put butts in seats, there was a trivia contest. We were asked to name twelve of the twenty-four songs AND the film or play where the song was heard first. Some of the songs were pretty easy but there were more than a few that I thought of as just a standard, and didn’t know that R&H had used them in a show.  Several of the people there looked as if they never missed a community theater production of Oklahoma!. I was sure that I didn’t have a chance.

After the show, we handed in our score sheets and the cast members performed an encore while the ushers tallied the scores. At the end of the song the head usher came out and called my name. What ho! My luck had changed!

I won a $25 gift certificate to the café at the Emlen Physick House, a local house museum designed by the well-known, at least to 19th century architecture nerds, Frank Furness. He’s no relation to Westinghouse pitchwoman Betty Furness.
 

Had I won a $25 gift certificate to a certain Cape May County garage sale, I would have bought a whole table of Joes. As it stands, I’ll be more than happy with a cup of Joe, and maybe even a piece of Hungarian grinzetmacfarch, if there’s a food truck nearby. I’m not sure when I’ll get to the Physick Estate, but I be sure to Whistle a Happy Tune when I do.

A Few Days in Mexico

I had the good fortune to be invited to spend a few days in mid-March in Mexico. My cousin Paul and his lovely wife Robyn invited me to spend quality time with them at their home near Puerto Vallarta. It was especially gracious of them to invite me since our friendship only goes back to our family reunion in 2009.

Willis, Sr. in a passport photo taken shortly after he traded combat with Pancho Villa for the more challenging opponent, my grandmother.

While Paul and Robyn have been semi-expats in Mexico for some time, when I think of Bryants in Mexico, I think of my grandfather, known in the family as Willis Senior (as opposed to Willis Seňor) and his time below the Rio Grande. No, he wasn’t in Juarez watching one of those shows with a donkey (I wouldn’t rule it out, but there's no documentation), but instead served under General John J. Pershing in 1916-1917 as part of what was then diplomatically called The Punitive Expedition, now known as the Pancho Villa Expedition.

Pancho Villa

If you were sick or perhaps paying more attention to your spontaneous erection at the thought of taking in-car driver training with the Rogers twins the day this was discussed in your high school A.P. History class, the U.S. of A. looked askance at Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa’s raid on the town of Columbus, New Mexico. One hundred years later, historians are still debating whether Villa was seeking to spend some leftover dollars or just wanted to be able to tell strangers in a bar, “Yeah, I’ve been to the Gadsden Purchase. Hasn’t everyone?” 

Woodrow Wilson

Venustiano Carranza

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson attempted to con Mexico’s president—a guy with the fabulous name of Venustiano Carranza— by claiming that the sending the US Army into Mexico was done with “scrupulous regard for the sovereignty of Mexico".  President Carranza, as one would expect, got his serape into a knot about the—as Henry Kissinger would say-- “incursion” into his country. Although Pershing was under orders to bring back Pancho Villa dead or alive, the United States gave up on the effort after eleven months. In those pre-Yelp days it took that long to learn that the Mexican food was better in Texas than it was in Mexico. Looking back from a vantage point of almost 100 years, no one considers this period to be a high point in the U.S. - Mexican relationship.

I am not a strong believer in omens but I knew that I was going to have an interesting trip when I looked at the fellow next to me in the departure lounge in the State College airport shortly before 6 AM to see that he was wearing bedroom slippers designed to look like some sort of little fuzzy animal. I think they might have been hamsters wearing Persian lamb coats. Apparently they are the perfect thing to go with sweats and a flat brim.

Manspreading in the departure lounge

When I checked in for my flight from Chicago to Puerto Vallarta I found that I could purchase an upgrade from steerage to business class, which is practically Net Jets compared to my usual spot in the middle seat between two folks who suffer from terminal flatulence while eating bottomless bags of bar-b-que potato chips. I weighed my grandmother’s dictum that “the back of the plane gets there at the same time as the front” with my father’s motto, “you don’t go on vacation to save money”. I came down firmly on the side of my father. I was all over that offer like a cheap suit. After entering my credit card credit card number and agreeing to terms and conditions that I never, ever, bother to read, I was practically a member of the leisure class. 

This meant that when it was time to board in Chicago, I was on the plane early, with my easy-to-spot compadres. They were mostly well dressed, except for guy in the row right in front of me, who thought that gym shorts and an Ohio State golf shirt made him GQ ready. His younger, but hardly trophy, wife sported an equally not-quite-dressy-enough for Walmart outfit. Fellow upgraders, I presumed.

Since Puerto Vallarta is supposed to be Mexico’s answer to Provincetown, Key West, and Rehoboth Beach rolled into one, I used the opportunity of boarding early and lounging in my seat scaled to actual human beings to check out (i.e. cruise) the sans-culottes as they passed by, struggling with their carry-on steamer trunks, anvils, live chickens, and whatever else people try to carry on a plane these days. Among the families and women dressed trampy-by-Las Vegas-standards, there were just two promisingly cute-ish guys. Otherwise, it was slim pickings. The line of passengers looked more like the communion line at State College Presbyterian Church than it looked like people headed south of the border for debauchery on the Mexican Riviera.

After a smooth flight, we landed in P.V., where the plane parked away from the terminal, and the ground crew rolled a stairs up to the side of the plane, just like in the old days. I was reminded of the postcard I bought in Dallas of JFK and Jackie—in her pink Chanel suit and pillbox hat—descending the stairs from Air Force One at Love Field, right before the famous motorcade.  I wondered, “Should I have packed by pillbox hat?”

When they opened the door of the plane, the sudden realization that—Wow! The heat and humidity are doing nothing for my natty outfit of navy blazer, white oxford, and khakis—brought me back to reality pretty quickly.  Oh well, I thought, if the British could subjugate an entire subcontinent in weather like this, surely I was up to the task of a few days of R and R. 

After a short trip through customs and immigration and I was met in the arrival lounge by my cousin Paul’s wife, Robyn.

Our first stop, on the two hour trek north to their house, was Walmart, where we loaded up on some staples and we (OK, I) marveled at the fact that Walmart in Mexico is pretty darned similar to Walmart in the U.S. I had no idea what anything cost since, as the ugly American, I had no idea how pesos translated into "real money". 

 The limes, however, were much limey-er than they are in America.

Speaking of limes, while R. and I were in the store shopping my cousin P. made sure that we stayed hydrated and enjoyed a prophylactic treatment against scurvy with a gin and tonic for the ride to the house.

The trip north from P.V. was quite beautiful, once you got away from bits of unattractive strip mall development, presumably put up to make Gringos like me feel at home.

We passed by more roadside stands than there are in Cape May County, NJ which is saying something. It was coconut season--they were stacked up at every fruit and veg stand like pumpkins before Halloween back home.  Paul pointed out one spot where a strip club was adjacent to a cemetery, the perfect spot for guys who never know if they’re coming or going.

From the coconut district we entered the watermelon district where there were piles after piles of watermelons for sale by the highway. We stopped to buy some. I don’t know how many pesos they were but it translated into not much in American dollars.

Not long after the watermelon district we came we arrived at their home, Casa Largarto just off the now no longer very busy coastal road.

It’s not so much a house as a grouping of three small buildings that take advantage of the steep, lushly landscaped hillside site.

The main entrance and garage were at the street level. The master suite is above the garage, and above that there’s a sky deck, or as P. and R. are learning to say in the local tongue, the mirador.

To me, Mirador is the name of a famous estate near Charlottesville, Virginia that was the girlhood home of Nancy Langhorne Astor, the first woman to serve in the British Parliament. It’s as stunning as P and R’s mirador, but in a different of way.

A few steps from the entrance building there’s a round two story masonry guest house with a thatched roof. Because of the sloping site, the main entrance to the property puts you on the second floor of the guest house. There was another guest room it at ground level.
 

The third building, a few steps further below the guest house, contained the kitchen, dining, and living spaces. Open on three sides, it was as much a thatch-covered patio as it was enclosed structure. It commanded a spectacular (and I do mean spectacular—on my first evening there we saw whales swim by) view of the little cove and the Pacific Ocean. The kitchen—an extravaganza of colorful tile and modern conveniences was located in the end of the building away from the ocean. P and R had the place decorated tastefully with a refreshing lack of tchotchkes.

A stairway leads from patio outside the living pavilion to the Pacific Ocean, about sixty feet below.

Soup to nuts, the place is beautiful. And you can go there too, since P and R have it on VRBO.

R. took me on a tour to get the lay of the land and to see see the other rock star houses in the 'hood.

Just add Mick, Keith, etc. and you're good to go!

The best part of the trip was the rare treat of hanging out with my cousins—two more arrived the day after me. They're bright, amusing, and fun to be around. We yammered about our family—who drank lighter fluid, who was crazy/a crossdresser/in a cult, who was on the Titanic/Hindenburg/Challenger, what did you really think of our grandmother, and so on.

Somehow I doubt that these are officially licensed NFL products.

During my four days there, we did some touristy stuff like going to a Mexican market.

I got quite a charge out of the Mexican approach to logos:

Nothing says tasty like a cow smacking his lips at his hindquarters being turned into a steak.

Don't all happy hypodermic needles wear lab coats?

But we mostly chatted, caught up on our reading, ate delicious food, and quaffed adult beverages. Not always in that order. It was a relaxing time with great company in a beautiful setting.

My temporary office. View was great; internet, not so much.

And in between all this, I had the DTs (digital tremens) since my phone didn’t work and the wireless available at a nearby restaurant was spotty at best. 

One day, the cousins and I went to the beach—just a short four wheeler drive from the house. There wasn’t a soul there and we got a bucket of beers, and sat in a mostly deserted café at the edge of the sand.  The water was warm and refreshing but before long, it felt as if I had barbed wire wrapped along my leg. Then one of the cousins said, “Did you just feel something?” Yes, we’d all felt it. Lo and behold we’d all been stung by jellyfish. It hurt but wasn’t disabling, like a mild case of shingles. We discussed peeing on our stings and decided against it. I was glad I’d packed ibuprofen.

My final night there, we had a bonfire on the beach. Even in Mexico, in the age old battle between beach bonfires built below the high tide line and the rising tide, the rising tide wins. 

L to R: Kristin, Rick, Paul, and Bill Bryant

The night after our bonfire, it was time to go back to Puerto Vallarta to start my trip home. The cousins and I said our goodbyes, and we posed a family photo to mark the event.

R. and P. put me on a bus and told me that when the bus arrived at an actual terminal and the driver got out, I’d be in Puerto Vallarta.  The bus was modern, clean, and speedy. In fact, the roomy seat reclined so much that it was like taking a 90 minute test drive of a La-Z-Boy Recliner Rocker.  The trip felt much safer and surely was more comfortable than the legendary Chinese buses that used to tote folks around the Mid-Atlantic states. Generations from now, my collateral descendants will not be wondering which ancestor was in a bus plunge in Mexico.

I’d looked into booking a room for my final night in Mexico in a quaint and charming hotel in the olde quarter of Puerto Vallarta. However, after reading Trip Advisor at length, I decided that I couldn’t tell the difference between one commenter’s colorful publican and another’s bitchy old queen. So, I decided to play it safe and stay at the large outpost of the U.S. of A. In other words, the CasaMagna Marriott Resort.

Nothing says quality like a double portrait of J. Willard Marriott and his son Bill that's in every Marriott lobby. I have lots of Marriott points and was able to cash some of them in for a room with an ocean view.

The building is an enormous John Portman-esque thing that would look a thousand times better if they’d just freshen up the exterior paint color. The color wasn’t baby shit brown but it made me think of baby shit brown. And that’s just as bad.

The hotel really was top notch even though check-in took 16 minutes once I got to the head of the line and my “Sucks To Be You” coupon for a discount on a massage wasn’t worth a whole lot since there weren’t any appointments available. But the thought was nice.

The swim-up bar is on the backside of Gilligan's Island.

A stroll around the grounds showed that there weren’t legions of buff, attractive, and amusing gay men who’d had excellent SAT scores lounging and loitering by the large pool with swim-up bar, or even on the adjoining not fantastic even-by-New Jersey-standards strip of beach. Puerto Vallarta may be Mexico’s answer to Provincetown, Key West, and Rehoboth Beach rolled into one, however, at CasaMagna, the Book of Mormon in the nightstand is the one revealed by the Angel Moroni to Joseph Smith so that he could found the church responsible for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Osmonds, and the dearth of Starbucks in Utah.

These guys do not exist in real life. At least in my real life, including my Mexican vacation.

Were the Book of Mormon in the nightstand at CasaMagna a DVD of the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical with book, lyrics, and music by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone, well, there would be a whole ‘nother crowd making burnt offerings of themselves down by the pool.

Once I'd settled in, I showered, shaved, and Aqua Velva-d and upped the snazzy quotient with some fresh madras for a cab to the Olde City, Puerto Vallarta's gayborhood. Perhaps it was a communication problem caused by his lack of English and my lack of Spanish, or he didn’t like Aqua Velva and madras, but the cabby was, well, creepy. It was the only time in Mexico I encountered someone who was creepy.

The cab dropped me off at the Cathedral and I gave it a quick Reformed Protestant jiffy tour, taking in of all the bells and smells that I could stand in five minutes.

I walked around the Olde Puerto Vallarta which is like Wildwood, NJ except in Mexico, and it has fewer people who look as if they’re related by blood, marriage, or time spent in the buffet line to Governor Chris Christie. While people were out having fun, if there was Bacchanalian revelry going on, I certainly missed it. (It wouldn't be the first time.)

I had a fantastic meal in an upscale Thai restaurant, of all places. It even had Wi-Fi.

When I’d had given up on the idea of debauchery and had enough of the colonial charms of Olde Puerto Vallarta, I decided to take the bus back to the resort rather than to take another creepy cab ride. I called up the directions on my phone and found what looked to be a bus stop. Trip Advisor told me to wait for the blue and white bus that was going to the Marina, so I waited and waited and waited some more while lots of other buses came and went. After what seemed like an eternity but was probably really six minutes, my bus came by.

As soon as I boarded, I decided that the bus had been a washing machine in a former life. And not a Maytag either, but an East German 2-cycle washing machine that ran on whatever toxic waste there’s a surplus of in Dresden. After the bearings were shot, it was repurposed in Romania into a bus. I have no doubt that it shuttled Olympic athletes of indeterminate gender identity to and from their dorm to the Peoples Gymnasium #7 where they practiced the 250 meter rhythmic dodge biathlon, a sport that combines the floor exercise from rhythmic gymnastics (as in the wacky event where women cavort with the ribbon tied to a stick that calls to mind fly casting) with target shooting and dodge ball. It was considered perfect training for Communist bloc agents who were sent to the United States under deep cover as female gym teachers. But I digress.  

I’m not sure if the bus had an actual suspension, but as we sped down the cobblestone streets, it felt, well, as if we we’re on the love child of the square-wheeled train from the Island of the Misfit Toys and an industrial strength Magic Fingers. I sat there, glad that my nephew was a dentist. If my fillings vibrated out, I’d at least get the family discount on some new ones. On the other hand, the fare was less than 10 pesos, and no one on the bus was remotely creepy. What wasn't to like?

The next day, after a breakfast almost as good as that of The Buffet at Wynn Las Vegas, and enjoying an hour or two of the best weather of my trip, I flew back to the U.S.

When I was waiting in O’Hare Airport for my flight to State College my phone came back to life, easing my DTs (digital tremens). I could now get back to the important stuff in my life, like following Lee Radziwill on Twitter.  I’d had a great time in Mexico, reconnecting with relatives, seeing a new part of the world, and being thankful that I‘d waited as long as I did to get stung by a jellyfish.