Sixteenth and Nineteenth Century Women and more...

Ashland Street
musician:
Hurdy-Gurdy Player

Yesterday was another all-day theater day.  We attended two productions:   Much Ado about Nothing in the afternoon and Fingersmith in the evening.   Both were superb.

Much Ado about Nothing was a wonderful comedy, done very well, with excellent renditions of Benedict and Beatrice, and good performances by the rest of the cast.   The report we heard was that the cast was a bit overwhelmed with how active the audience was and it threw them off a bit.   Since the audience is very close to the stage action (and some of the actors climb down into the audience), we could see how this could happen.  It was a hilarious performance.  The movement, acrobatics and site gags put it over-the-top.

The second play of the day was Fingersmith, based on a novel by Sarah Waters.  This world premiere is a wonderful Victorian piece, a pot boiler of a mystery, which should move across the country and be played in many different places.  Besides being emotionally disturbing in its treatment of women in the 19th century, it has a macabre Dickensian appeal that we won’t tell you about.  Just to say that if you get a chance to see this play, see it.

We attended a talk with the writer of the adaptation, Alexa Junge, and a dramaturge, Susan Lyons, about the production and how it was written for the stage from the 500 page novel Waters had completed about twenty years ago.  It brought out many things in the play, without divulging the plot.

We had dinner with friends of Jane and Peter who live in and around Ashland at Amuse, where we had eaten last year. The friends were truly a blend:  two South Africans whom they had known for years at Stanford, who had left  SA during the apartheid years, and a retired American emergency physician and his Australian wife, who now run their own vineyard to keep themselves in wine!  Both couples now live in Ashland.  

John and Ben both had the excellent three mushroom salad, which Ben followed with Alaskan halibut and John had sweetbreads with cherries.  We completed the meal with Amuse’s famous beignets, which must be ordered early in the meal.   We tasted three wines, a sauvignon blanc from Kriselle, a pinot noir from Irvine Winery, and a superb marsanne-roussanne-viognier mix from Cowhorn called Spiral 36.

We decided this morning not to stick around Ashland for the Fourth of July Parade and headed off to Applegate Valley to Cowhorn Vineyards to taste their wine—and visit the old Gold Rush town of Jacksonville, now a National Historic District.  

1850s Buildings Jacksonville

Jacksonville 19th century railroad
train, made in Pittsburgh!

The town is full of old 19th century buildings, some of which have been closed up and left in their original state to become 21st century museum pieces.  We took the town’s trolley tour to see this little place, with its 3000 inhabitants (it was bigger than that in the 19th century) and thoroughly enjoyed it. On it, we saw the old train that ran to Medford:  the 1891 engine was made in Pittsburgh.  There are still tracks in some of the streets where it ran. 

Cowhorn is a eco-winery and we tasted four of their wines: the Spiral 36 we had had last night, a marsanne-roussanne mix that was much dryer, a syrah, very full and very lovely, and a grenache, which we enjoyed immensely.  

Applegate Valley 

John is bringing back the printed information he could find about Rogue Valley and nearby wineries for our book collection.  The wines here are really good—as we said last year.

Dinner in nearby Talent was at the New Sammy’s Cowboy Bistro about three miles from Ashland.  It’s a sprawling part French-style and part Santa Fe-stucco style restaurant.

This is a place where the family had been the owner of a place Jane and Peter had visited in Mendocino a few years ago.  This version is owned by the family patriarch’s son, with dad in an assisting role as keeper of the wine cellar.  Regrettably the cellar had only one wine from the Rogue or nearby valleys…and we had had it both tasting at the winery and at dinner the previous evening!

The food and wine were good with a few mis-steps.   We ordered a lovely white wine, unknown to us, to go with dinner.  It was a savignan white from the Jura mountains in the east of France (although the dad described it as a Loire valley wine).   We had heard of yellow Jura wines, but not this white, which turned out to be quite full-bodied and good choice for most of the dishes we had.

Ben had a salmon dish, which was good and John enjoyed braised beef spare-ribs. The leek appetizer was good, but the leeks were not softened enough to slice easily.  Claire ordered a tortellini dish, which turned out to not be available about 10 minutes into the wait period for the food.  She enjoyed the risotto substitute, but this should not have happened.   We enjoyed both a floating island and an intricate ice cream dish for dessert and finished up the dinner as the last guests at 10PM.

We had a pleasant close to the evening sitting on the Winchester Inn’s grounds watching the Ashland 4 July fireworks through the trees.