My friend Michelle is visiting from England for this month, so tonight Theresa and I went out to dinner with her. Michelle is now 3.5 months pregnant. While her husband has decided to call her baby bump “Cyril”, I’ve opted to call the bump “Pippa” - since I think the baby deserves an appropriate British girl name as well. We played around with some Italian names for the bump as well, to pay homage to its Italian heritage - “Carmine” was the clear winner in that discussion. Michelle’s sister Donna came up with that one.

For dinner, Theresa, Michelle and I went to a great Indian restaurant over in East Hanover (longer car ride allows extra time for chatting) called Saffron. Theresa and I both ordered a dish we’d never had before - something called Kashmiri Dum Aloo. The description read: “Golden fried potatoes scooped and filled with homemade cheese and dry fruit, simmered in rich tomato based Kashmiri sauce.” It was delicious; both savory and sweet, and a little spicy.

After dinner, we went back to Michelle’s family’s house to sit and chat with her parents and sisters. However, jet lag kicked in and she started nodding off so we called it a night. We have plans for tomorrow to go see some Theatre Under the Stars since one of her sisters is in the cast. Here are the details:

West Orange Theater Under The Stars presents “Fiddler on the Roof”
(Thurs thru Sat) July 27, 28, 29, August 3, 4 & 5 at 8 p.m.
at the Oskar Schindler Performing Arts Center
4 Boland Drive, West Orange, NJ 07052
Exit 8B from Interstate 280
FREE ADMISSION
Bring chairs and blankets for seating

This is one of those great free events that come along once in a while. I’m trying to convince my mother and cousin to join us. I don’t think I’ll have to push hard - it’s live musical theatre out in a park, for free, and you can bring soda or iced tea or fruit and sort of have a picnic on the grass while watching a play. Even if they’re talking too quickly to be understood, there’s singing and the songs are good. It should be fun.

Miss Eva needs to get some sleep. I had a really restless night last night and woke up with the sheets all twisted and thrown around. I was exhausted.

Oh. One other story. We were discussing the DaVinci Code craze and Michelle was telling us about how she visited a small village in France where, legend has it, Mary Magdalene settled in and had a child after Jesus was crucified. Somewhere along the way, Michelle and her husband visited some of the sites and were then taking a gondola of sorts across a river. They asked the gondolier what he thought about the whole idea of Jesus having had intimate relations with Mary Magdalene. In his very “salt of the earth” way, the gondolier replied, “I’m sure that a 30 year old man felt the need for some kissing and cuddling.” Then someone made a comment to the effect of, “what else would he do with his time?” And I replied, “Play video games. It’s the only way he could’ve stayed a virgin until 30.” Theresa threw in “Play Dungeons and Dragons” (since we’d been discussing a friend of hers who is married but still goes to his weekly “meetings” to play the game). We both started laughing at what we knew we were going to say next:

“Jesus was a DUNGEONMASTER!”

I think I might need to add that to my roster of t-shirt designs.