Tasty Treats

Jürgen and I had an amazing time at our menu tasting about two weeks ago. After a long day at work we went to Blue Plate's office and we treated to what we felt was equivalent to a multi-course tasting menu. For us burgeoning "foodies" it was an ideal way to spend the evening. They greeted up with Champagne (you can tell from the photo Jürgen is pleased about this) after which we were led into a room all set up with lovely linens and a personalized menu just for us. A friendly waiter served us while Kelly (our go to gal at Blue Plate) described each item. We tried about eight different Hors d' oeuvres, followed by a full carving station menu, an Asian station, a French station and finally about ten different desserts! Needless to say we left in a semi-comatose state. Now we want you guys to be surprised on the day of so we will not give away what we chose, but rest assured, you will be very well fed!

After the tasting: smiling and satiated.

A Day At the Downs

For our last day in Louisville I felt it necessary to take Jürgen to an historic Louisville landmark: Churchill Downs. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Downs, it is a world famous horse track which hosts the most prestigious horse race, the Kentucky Derby . Our good friend Bruce gave us tickets to the Turf Club so we could watch the races in style. We had a great day eating good food and putting our money towards some promising thoroughbreds. We partook in what we called a "show parlay." How does this work? As a group we each put $2 in for a given horse to "show" (that means to come in third in betting lingo), if we were to win that race we would take whatever our winning were to put towards the next race. Out of eight races that we bet on, we "won" seven of them. It was a very exciting day and a great way for Jürgen to get a slice of Kentucky history. Here are a few photos which were snapped while we stood out by the paddocks and perused the horses before their race.



See those twin spires in the background? Yeah, they are pretty famous.

More Photos!

I could only upload 5 at a time and because my dad is a master photographer I felt I should post some more!


Group Shot! We had a great crowd.
Group shot from other end of the dining room
The "young folk" Blair the boy, Bo, Jürg, Blair the girl, Mollie and Scott!
Mom and some of her best friends-Glen, Denise, and cousin Meme
Last group shot of the eve (Mom, Bo, Blair x2, Jürg, Uncle Jamie, Mr and Mrs Butler and Charlie Bond!

Party Time!!!

Jürgen and I traveled to Louisville, KY the weekend of June 27th to attend a fantastic soiree thrown in our honor by my lovely parents. Thank you mom and dad for putting together such a lovely party. Below are some photos. Thank you all for coming out, it was an unforgettable event!



Out in front of LCC before the party (the rain stayed away-whoo hoo!)
We are on a sign...how...um...exciting?!?!?
Mom, Dad and myself before the guest arrived
Prepping Jürg on how to behave for a group of 60 eager guest

The first guests! Aunt Nancy, Uncle Whitney and Uncle Dick---the interrogation begins!

Jürgen in the news....

Jürgen has been performing in Collaboraction's annual new play festival Sketchbook:08 for three weeks now and the response has been fantastic! TimeOut Chicago called him "excellent" Hedy Weiss with the Chicago Sun-Times called him "sensational." It's also a very exciting time for Ira (the playwright) because the piece, titled Dated: A Cautionary Tale for Facebook Users, has been picked up by a festival in DC which will perform later this summer. On top of being a critical and audience favorite in the festival the piece has also been asked to perform at the Chicago New Media Summit and at the Union League Club dinner. Here is a photo from the New Media Summit. The show closes this weekend but it has been a wonderful experience for all involved (even for Blair as her photos we included in the projection portion of the piece).

In other news we are excited summer has finally arrived. Blair traveled to NYC to meet up with her family to see her brother Neill in wacky version of Alice in Wonderland. She also had the chance to see her old friend (and maid of honor) Brittany!

Here is a picture of the Robertson clan (minus mom who was taking the photo) having High Tea in honor of Neill's show!


We will be traveling to Louisville the weekend of June 28th and to Maryland in July for a week to celebrate Jürgen's 26th birthday!

Wedding planning is going well. We have secured several old time trolley cars to transport guests from the Church to the reception site. We think this will be a fun way to travel. The menu tasting will happen in a few weeks, and seeing as how one of our favorite pastimes is to EAT we are very excited about this. Blair continues to look for things to "check-off" but apparently you can only do so much in advance. Some things will simply have to wait until closer to the time. She will do her best to contain herself!

We hope everyone is having a wonderful summer so far! Keep in touch!
Blürg

The Robertson ladies love to blog

Blair traveled to Louisville, KY this past week to spend some time with her family and to meet her baby cousin Anna.  In town from North Carolina, Anna found some time in her busy schedule to visit with her eager cousin and Great Uncle and Aunt.  Blair felt as though she knew Anna because of the fabulous blog Anna keeps, chronicling her day to day life as a newborn.  You too can see what Anna is up to at www.robertsonbaby.blogspot.com.

She is an absolute delight and meeting her was the highlight of the visit.  Anna's Dad, Rev. Ben G Robertson IV will be con-celebrating the wedding service in January.  Having been a reader in Ben and Ellen's (yes there are two Ellen Robertson's one tall and one short....try to figure out which is which) wedding in 2002, I am so thrilled to have Ben be a part of my wedding and to have Anna in attendance.  She will have just celebrated her 1st birthday....we will have to think of a special treat to give her when she gets here!

You are no longer listed as in a relationship

I've been meaning to post this blog for about a week, and with Blair nagging me every other minute I figured I'd better get on it. A little back story:

My best friend, and groomsman, Ira has a play in this year's Sketchbook Festival. Collaboraction, a Chicago theatre company, hosts a festival of new works every summer. I participated last year and will again this year...in Ira's play no less. (It's at the Steppenwolf garage theatre if you're interested...and you should be) The play - "Dated: a cautionary tale for facebook users" - deals with a young man who finds out that his relationship with his girlfriend is over via facebook (a social networking site these crazy youngsters use today to keep tabs on one another). It's a good mix of humor, tragedy and...erm...poignancy....? Sure, that'll do.

I play the young man and Ira, always considerate of the tech crew's time and energy (tech took over 3 hours yesterday for a 9 minute play) has written in a ridiculous number of projected slides, video clips and images from facebook, myspace and livejournal to help tell the story. We knew that we would need to use my facebook page with my picture for many of the images, but we needed to find a willing female to play my girlfriend. Blair readily volunteered to let us use her page as well. This presented an interesting dilemma: we'd have to cancel our relationship to get the frame shots we needed to help tell the story.

We were both really excited, both sharing a very dark sense of humor from time to time, and thought it'd be a lark to spend a half hour or so letting all of facebook think our relationship had ended. Even typing that right now sounds about 80% less cool that it once did, but we thought it'd be a laugh, as facebook tells all of your friends publicly when your relationship status changes (highly considerate of it with such delicate information).

So Ira comes over to Blair's place on a Wednesday evening during our Top Chef time (we're big geeks) to get still captures of our respective facebook and myspace pages before, during, and after we digitally cancel our relationship. What followed was a very unnerving forty-odd minutes. We thought the process would be quite simple, but it wasn't.

First of all, the character's name is Guy...not Jürgen, so we'd have to change my name first. This proved difficult as facebook is a little more toffee-nosed than myspace and won't let you post nicknames. "Guy" was a no-go, so we tried "Guy Smith" and were told there would be a waiting period while facebook verified this. Just to give you an idea of how long that verification process can take: this took place almost two weeks ago, and only a few days ago did my name magically change to Guy Smith for a few hours on facebook. Frustrated by that, Ira decided he'd just photoshop over my name.

Next: the cancelling of the relationship. Again, Guy is not engaged to his girlfriend, so when Blair ended our relationship instead of the desired "Guy is no longer listed as in a relationship," we got "Jürgen is no longer listed as engaged." So we had to restart our relationship as just "relationship," and then cancel it again. Splitting focus between all these problems and Top Chef was proving a mild annoyance but it was milder still when compared with the sense of disquiet growing inside of me.

The laugh I thought I'd have at our relationship being cancelled on facebook wasn't coming. What was coming was the unease I felt at all of facebook being able to access information about my relationship status. Though there were plenty of people I cared about who would get the joke and I wouldn't mind explaining the situation to, there are plenty more people I'd really rather not know about this. My profile isn't set to private so I can be searched by anyone in the area and from random theatre acquaintances to crazy exes I really didn't want the possibility of a rumor mill starting. I started getting very anxious for the whole thing to be over, and breathed a great sigh of relief when we finally recommitted ourselves...digitally.

So that's that...take from it what you will. We laugh about it now, but more about the surprise of feeling exposed. It was a wild thing to experience and hopefully it'll inform the play more when it opens....this weekend. Come and see it.

Below are the links for Sketchbook and the Steppenwolf box office respectively.

http://collaboraction.typepad.com/sketchbook/2007/01/post.html
http://www.steppenwolf.org/boxoffice/productions/index.aspx?id=453