You should see this mint up close. I'm growing it in a pot because my neighbor uses Round-up and sprayed my last batch.A friend of mine used to go every year to Ashland, Oregon to attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. A couple of years ago he invited me to go with him. What a kick!
We saw four plays, I guess. One was a forgettable performance of August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom which we had seen maybe two weeks earlier at a local community college. The OSF version had live music, and the college was forced to use recordings, but I think the kids performed better.
Another play was Room Service, a farce which was made into a very funny play by the Marx Brothers. Unfortunately, the original play isn't really very funny. It's kind of like all the characters are Zeppo, or Gummo, and there isn't any Groucho, Harpo or Chico. We left at intermission.
The third play was worth making the trip all by itself, though it was totally forgettable as theater. Something about a Cuban emigré poet who had been suppressed and censored by the Castro regime and fled to the US. Now working in Texas as a lawn guy, he is free to write, but has poet's block. He's working for a woman who is unhappily divorced. A situation like that calls for a drink, so he made mojitos for them and explained to his employer how they are made.
I took notes madly.
Months later I watched an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy where the food guy made a mojito for Jai, the Puerto Rican. Jai knew what they were supposed to taste like and he couldn't even swallow it.
I saw it demonstrated, in the Northwestern United States, by actors. So I can make mojitos good enough for Ernest Hemingway.
Ingredients
A few mint leaves. The kind I have growing in my front yard.
1 tbsp sugar
Juice of 1/2 lime
1.5 oz white rum
ice
club soda
To make it
Tear up the mint leaves and drop into a tall glass. Add the sugar. Moosh the mint and the sugar around to releast the mint juices. (The technical term, the woman in the play said, is "muddling".) Add the juice of 1/2 lime and stir. Add ice cubes to the top. Pour the rum over the ice cubes and fill the rest of the way up with club soda. Drink, enjoy.
My dwarf lime tree. 
The fourth play we saw was Richard III and was that a knockout! I had seen the 1955 movie version with Laurence Olivier and he was grotesque enough, but unpersuasive as a villain. There was a 1995 version starting Ian McKellen, in modern dress, as a Nazi. Okay, he was really evil. But was it great lines and great acting, or did the uniform help persuade us? In the OSF version, Richard was crippled, on crutches, but extremely powerful, physically and politically, and oozing enough testosterone and ambition to overcome the resistance of any man who stood in his way; and women just wilted. The actor at OSF managed to create what Olivier and McKellen didn't: a combination of sympathy for and fear of a man who was laughed at because of his deformity, ignored by women, whose pain and resentment were distilled into an almost irresistabe force. Until it all came apart.
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
Richard III (1.1)
The rest of Ellen's web pages for Build 1 (this is lesson 4).
Lesson 1, "Dogs of My Life."
Lesson 2, "Set Up Your Router".
Lesson 3, "Font Properties".
Lesson 5, "Margins, Padding and Tables".
Lesson 6, "Put it all together".
Return to home.
If you have any questions about the recipe in this page, please email me.
