Salon.

J and I are having our first salon tonight. This is something we've wanted to do for years. When we first talked about it, it was going to be called Eating and Writing or something like that, a gathering with a literary focus. And food, of course, because food goes with everything. We've made it a little more broad, with songwriters and filmmakers invited too, and we don't have a clever name for it yet. We're just calling it the salon.

I'm going to play a recording of one of the songs from Lizzie Borden from the concert reading we did last spring, the finale of the show. It's called "Where Are You, Lizzie?" It's an old song -- I wrote it in 1989 for the first incarnation of this musical -- and there are several new songs in this new version but I don't like the recordings of them as much as this one. I'm also going to sing a song I wrote in 2005 called "Fine." It's not new either, but it's my most recent song other than the new Lizzie Borden songs and I want to sing something live tonight.

I made a slightly spicy and very orange squash soup with coconut milk, using acorn and butternut squash from our farm. We also got lots of kale from the farm last week, so I made potato, kale, and roasted red pepper soup based on a recipe from the chef at the restaurant where I cooked in Utah. And I made baba ganoush for an appetizer. The only bad thing I have to say about our CSA farm is that they plant way too much eggplant. We get barrels full of them in every delivery for months. I have a freezer full of roasted eggplant. But we love baba ganoush, so I guess it could be worse.

Maybe there really is hope.

Born on the cusp, I don't identify with the Baby Boomers or Generation X. I often see the baby boom generation defined as those born between 1945 and 1965, and I was born in 1961, but I was too young for Vietnam, too young for the 60s. My babysitters were hippies, not me. I think of Generation X as the Janeane Garafolo generation, I guess because she was in Reality Bites which was such a zeitgeist movie, and I always thought, still think, a lot of those actors and other artists are very cool -- Garafolo and Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater, and even the so-called brat pack Breakfast Club crowd. But in the end, they're my little sister's generation, not mine.

I even see a distinction between me and my friends who were born only 2 or 3 years later, because they grew up with Sesame Street and Schoolhouse Rock, which I just missed. I had Captain Kangaroo. Another major dividing line is HIV. I was 22 when the virus was discovered, so I sowed my wild oats (and those were some wild oats) at the extreme tail end of the age of sexual freedom. People just a couple years younger than me began their sexual lives in a very different world, and people a few years older than likely were done with their experimental years. For those of us born in the very early 60s, the iron fist of safe sex came down smack in the middle of our party.

So I'm declaring myself an honorary Millenial. (Can one declare oneself an honorary member of something? I guess not. I'll ask my classmates today.)

Obama is Beautiful World.