story time

so i know nobody needs me to tell them how wonderful it was seeing stevie wonder live in tobago, but except for american airlines being the shittiest airborne transport ever, we had a great trip in every way. i'll never fly american airlines again after our australia trip this christmas- i just glad we only using them to get to l.a. and switch to qantas. my mom's been a flight attendant my whole life so i know a few things about the business, and american airlines is the worst. they should be boycotted and deserve no reprieve.
but everything else was so good that i won't go into details about the sloppy appearance, shitty service and stank attitude of that airline. except to mention that when one cow in a uniform tells me to do something and another heifer in the same hideous uniform sees fit to shout at me in front of a packed aircraft about it, then follow up by berating my husband for nothing, they should be more concerned about the fact that i forgot to remove my pocket knife from my box before flying and the inconvenience and profiling under the guise of airport security didn't catch it, in spite of putting me through an extra search. needless to say, the travel experience took me right back to hating america and everything it stands for, and if grims didn't look so sad when i said it, i really wouldn't have bothered to come back. fuck it. i don't wanna be here in the first fucking place.

anyway, on to better and funner things.
maracas (pictures in previous post) on wednesday was beautiful- even the post-rain sandflies that took advantage of my newly waxed legs and left bites that still itched a week later didn't spoil that- and there was almost nobody there, which i love (of course, having been to rehoboth, i know that we are blessed to never have truly crowded beaches in trinbago because with my general hatred of people, i'd never go).
so from the time grims touches down in trini, my people start giving him food. people who know me from birth don't give me presents, just him. we landed and mom figured we should have doubles for lunch @ the airport, so he was in his glee. then on the way home, we stopped by the da costas, and aunty pat gave him julie mangoes just picked from granny's tree. later we passed by the clements, and he got more mangoes, oranges, and a zaboca. we went by aunty noble so i could find out about lilliput's anniversary show (going back home end of september for it- more later) and she told him come to our production meeting the next day and she'd feed him. so now when i go home, i don't have to go get the things i miss eating. they come to grims- except for food from the breakfast shed, which he still hasn't had because we said we'd pass there on the way home from the port when we got back from tobago, and grabbed the papers that morning before leaving 'bago to find the headline breakfast shed torn down today. they had to decide to start building the new shed right now...
anyway, we took the lynx over to tobago, which was a first for all of us (my last boat trip was on the very slow panorama) and i like this new fast ride. and it's comfy and shit too. the bar service was poor, but i met mom's friend "flookypoonks" and that name made up for everything.
friday night's show was a little choppy, but in spite of the flow being off, machel montano and xtatic were hot as always, rudder's performance was still the closest i ever come to a religious experience, and i survived shaggy's complete lack of stage prescence (i know it hard for anybody to look good onstage after machel, but is not like shaggy didn't know what he was following- he coulda try to keep up). and a youth man from south named darryl sheppard was a pleasant surprise. he mash up the dance on the pan, and his original compositions were the best stuff he played. listen out for him.
grims wore his (tottenham hot)spurs shirt and took a picture in front of the tobago gourmet jazz festival banner for their 'spurs shirts around the world' site, and got hailed out by some other 'spurs fan in the crowd. and we were photographed for triniscene, which cracked me up because until now i was the only person i knew who hadn't been on there, and now i'm there with grims from vermont (or will be, when they post their jazz festival pics). i guess his honourary trini-ness is now officially documented.
we stayed in a nice little place in bacolet, just up the hill from the beach, so we slept to the sound and smell of the sea and woke with the birds, and in keeping with the previous "too much information" on my brazilian wax (yes, that was a warning that you may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph) i can say there's nothing like getting a freshly waxed poonani licked to the sound of the waves without having to get sand in your snatch.
bacolet beach is nice, reminds me of hundred steps in trini, but having to walk back up the hundred-plus steps is worse when you also have to walk back up the steep hill to the house we stayed in. the walk up was so wicked, the second time we went, mom said fuck it and drove the whole less-than-eighth-a-mile down the hill to avoid it.
saturday we skipped jazz so grims could do the glass-bottomed-boat tour of buccoo reef and the coral gardens and go snorkeling, and then chill in the nylon pool. some man named tarzan (yes, i asked, but he was vague about it) booked us for a decent price and grims loved it. i think he woulda spent the whole day snorkeling through coral gardens if he could. his glee was beat only by alex (age 6-7) who not only thought every wabine he saw through the bottom of the little boat was a shark, but also came on board @ 2pm with a dead fish in his aunt lydia's backpack, because when the men were pulling seine that morning he apparently threw his maybe 50lbs of body weight in on their end of the nets, and thus felt that the fish he was given was his special prize. by that afternoon when we met alex on the glass-bottomed-boat, lemme tell you that "special" was not enough word for the smell of that fish.
oh- side note for those of you who know tobago but haven't been recently: the food on store bay is no longer about miss jean- apparently things have gone downhill since she died- and tarzan (who i trust implicitly) swears by miss esme.
we also went up signal hill so me+grims could finally see the land we'll be building on (not that my father knew where it was- we had to wait for the clements to reach 'bago and take us to see our land) so now i'm all excited because it's 10 minutes from everywhere we wanna be, and the view is gorgeous.
and sunday's show- there's nothing that needs saying about how good it is to hear stevie wonder live. my only complaint is that the band, who sounded great up until he took stage, just couldn't keep up with him on pieces like master blaster. they did fine on the slow tunes, but when stevie got going, i kept thinking he needed amp fiddler backing him instead.
ken philmore and robbie greenidge, mavis john, sparrow, and the signal hill almuni choir were all as good as, and even better than i knew they would be, and the flow of the show was much smoother. the low point of the night was, strangely, india.arie, who was very unexpectedly disappointing. some even said boring. but my problem with her was that although she looked and sounded great, the attitude that came through her performance ruined it. she was obviously overly micromanaging the band (who had no problem rocking the hell out of her shit), had a silly flute folly (and then didn't even play it well or long enough to be worthwhile, after the fuss), and affected way too much posturing with her guitar. the whole time she was on i recognised that she sounded good, but she wasn't engaging and i couldn't enjoy her. and her bra strap visibly cutting across her otherwise naked back in her otherwise beautiful halter top pissed me off too, on a much smaller scale. lame. her new song (supposedly hitting radio in a few weeks) which she chose to premiere in 'bago is called i am not my hair and i like it, in spite of not enjoying her set.

in other news, yesterday, after being back less than 12hours, we had a fire on our roof. no damage, and the fire trucks came round the corner right quick, reassuringly.
we set it up to have the roof redone yesterday, and while they were torching it, apparently their propane tank caught fire and lit up our roof. i was upstairs doing something, and came down to find grims shouting about helping him with the hose, and found myself running out in the backyard in my panty to not help much because he and the roof dudes handled it mercifully fast. i did know where our fire extinguisher was though, and after they used it i finally know what the hell that gross yellow powder covering the inside of the stove our house came with (now thankfully replaced with the sexy, new, stainless steel, five-burner convection oven) was. all this time i'd been scared, thinking it was rat poison, but i guess it was just proof that the stove (or possibly the cook, but more likely the stove) was a menace and had had to be extinguished.
alright, my fingers hurt and i'm still catching up and preparing to be miranda in shakespeare's the tempest, so i should go work through that too-long script.
fiction sooncome.
walk good.

ps: all jazz festival mentions have links in a previous post.