We return to Aspen and retrieved the tickets for the Aspen Music Festival. I rent a bicycle and tear around the town, hitting every bottle shop in sight. Adhesive with sunscreen (not enough) and perspiration (too much for 8000ft), I crack an Odell 90 Shilling and declare a new rule for the Family Vacation Drinking Game: every time you're running late for an event and have to run out the door, finish your drink
The show is kids performing, a final rehearsal. Electric, but the crowd is sparse—the kind of classical music snob who knows to leave awkward silence between movements, silently applauding only themselves, in recognition of their sublime pretension, saving the audible golf clap for the end of the act. One girl has a face that lights up as she plays, expressive beyond words. She seems genuinely ecstatic, but it's hard to tell. An eye-line between the conductor and the drummer in the back crackles, cuing off a crescendo, and it's clear that the kids are on fire, wasted though it may be on the bored retirees doing crosswords in the newspaper.
Dinner is good, including a lightly smoked Colorado buffalo carapaccio that came on a bed of lettuce and looked like a pile of raw meat, which, I remind myself, it is. Returning 'home' after a provisional detour to the supermarket, I crack an Aspen brewing 10th Mountain Oatmeal Stout. It's everything that is good about stout and oatmeal. Balanced, not overbearing, filling, slightly sweet. It constitutes part, if not all, of a complete (if not balanced) breakfast, so I finish it off in the morning with smoked salmon and vintage Gouda.
"Let the bacon flow like a crispy river."
No comments:
Post a Comment