The small hut near his home at Troldhaugen (not far from Bergen, in Norway) where Edvard Grieg did most of his composing. \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0(Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bach, Sibelius, and Grieg are major favorites of mine. \u00a0(For whatever it\u2019s worth, I\u2019ve been to the home of each one of them. \u00a0Or, more precisely, in Sibelius\u2019s case, to a statue representing him and it.) \u00a0Oddly, though, while I love Grieg\u2019s Peer Gynt<\/em>, that affection doesn\u2019t extend to Henrik Ibsen\u2019s play by the same name. \u00a0Of course, I\u2019ve only actually seen it performed just once \u2014 many years ago \u2014 and perhaps I should give it a second chance. \u00a0But, on the occasion when I did see it, I didn\u2019t merely not like it. \u00a0I hated<\/em> it.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
An evening such as this deserves to be accompanied by fine food. \u00a0By haute cuisine<\/em>. \u00a0And, tonight, it was<\/em>.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
A standby of ours, when we\u2019re short of time, hungry, and on the road away from home, is the Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Taco. \u00a0And that\u2019s what we went for tonight. \u00a0Moreover, we washed our tacos down with an excellent Diet Pepsi, on the rocks. \u00a0Much better, in my humble opinion, than Diet Coke or Coke Zero. \u00a0I\u2019m not much for soft drinks, actually. \u00a0When I had hepatitis in Egypt, the doctor recommended regular mass consumption of soft drinks in order to keep my blood sugar up. \u00a0I\u2019m not sure whether there\u2019s really much medical value in such a treatment, but it so turned me off from soft drinks that it\u2019s only in recent years that the sheer thought of them hasn\u2019t disgusted me. \u00a0And, even now, I don\u2019t like them that much on the rare occasions that I drink them. \u00a0But a\u00a0Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Taco needs to be paired with a beverage of the appropriate quality.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I share such things, in part, because my occasional posts about the restaurants, plays, and concerts that I visit absolutely infuriate a small coterie of my critics, and because I feel a need to do something to enrich their otherwise manifestly drab existences.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m also leading up to a story that concerns, precisely, Taco Bell.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Many years ago, I served as a counselor to the bishop who presided over the ward made up of the folks living in BYU\u2019s Foreign Language Student Residence \u2014 an apartment complex in which students of Spanish, Japanese, Russian, German, Arabic, etc., headed up by native speakers of those languages, spoke only their target language while at home. \u00a0(Alas, we\u2019ll be attending his wife\u2019s funeral on Saturday morning.) \u00a0Our ward clerk was a native of Mexico City who was a passionate and quite discerning partisan of good Mexican cuisine.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
One year, we were chatting after he had returned to BYU from the Christmas break. \u00a0Eventually, it came out that he was somewhat irritated that a new Taco Bell restaurant had just opened up not far from his family\u2019s house in Mexico City \u2014 and that, for at least the time that he had been back home, the line of Taco Bell customers extended from the restaurant\u2019s doors back around the block. \u00a0Incredulous and even a bit indignant, he asked some of the people standing in the line what on earth they were doing. \u00a0\u201cWe want to try this American food!\u201d one of them explained.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 We\u2019re just back from a Friday evening concert of the Utah Symphony at Symphony Hall in Salt Lake City. \u00a0It was a great program. \u00a0In the first half, the orchestra played the\u00a0Brandenburg Concertos 3 and 4, by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), with\u00a0M\u00e9moriale, by\u00a0Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), sandwiched in between. \u00a0The second half of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Utah](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2016\/05\/800px-Utah_symphony_at_Abravanel_Hall.jpg\")
<\/a>