Happy Holidays

We spent the holidays visiting with family and friends, lighting the Menorah each night and, as expected, opening gifts with Manda & Rena. On Christmas day we followed our family tradition of going to the movies and dining on Chinese food with our friends Bobby and Joanna. Christmas day is a big opening day for movies and we usually try to fit in a double feature. This year we managed to see MILK, the story of Harvey Milk, the first publicly-gay elected official. Now I realize this may not be a movie everyone is comfortable with, but it is definitely worth the ticket. Sean Penn deserves an Oscar nomination for his performance. He is a true actor and has the talent (too often missing among his peers) of totally becoming a character, so that it is not Sean Penn “playing” Harvey Milk, he “is” Harvey Milk.

We also saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, which was entertaining, although I could have done without the last 20-30 minutes. I didn’t really need to see Benjamin becoming a child/infant to make the story work for me. Brad Pitt is very good, and as always, great to look at, and Cate Blachett is exquisite. Her beauty and poise always remind me of Katherine Hepburn.

We had reservations at Little Szechuan in Doraville for one of their private rooms as we had eight adults and two children. The food is good, but the service is notoriously slow, and on Christmas, with half the Atlanta Jewish community eating dinner there, well it was excruiatingly slow. Since we were in a private room, you couldn’t just catch the waitress’s eye and we had to get up a couple of times to seek out someone to bring us more water, beers, etc. It took us over two hours—for Chinese food! At least we had good company, and Jasper (3) and Lyna (5) were serious troopers; no meltdowns or tantrums. All in all, a fun day.