Our trip to Providence, with our good friends Frank and Sue, consisted of tickets to Beautiful the Carole King Musical at Providence Performing Arts Center, a quick visit with our son VJ at his new condo in the city, and dinner at the Waterman Grille.  We started off with a light lunch at our friends’ lovely new kitchen…Frank made a delicious beef stew for us, with traditional Italian bread to soak up the flavorful broth…

 

BEEF STEW RECIPE

INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 lb cubed beef stew meat
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 onions, diced
3 1/2 cups beef broth

1/2 teaspoons salt                                                                                                                              1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon dried parsley                                                                                                                 1 tablespoon dried thyme
1 dried bay leaf
1/2 cup chopped celery, with a few minced leaves
2 medium potatoes, diced
2 carrots, diced                                                                                                                                      2 tomatoes diced

DIRECTIONS

Heat oil over medium heat in a large pot.
Place meat in the oil and stir until slightly browned, Add onion,
stir until well browned. Add broth, then last 9 ingredients
Cover and cook over low heat for 1 1/2 hours (stirring every 15 minutes). Cook until meat and all vegetables are tender. Serve with crusty bread

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This is the Providence Performing Arts Center, as you can see from the photos on the left, the theatre is stunning, with the gold leaf ornate moldings…opened as Loew’s Movie Palace in 1928…restoration was completed to restore the Theatre to its original splendor in 2006.  Beautiful the Carole King Musical was amazing, The right photo is the actress portraying Little Eva and chorus singing “The Loco-Motion” written by Carole King and husband Gerry Goffin in 1962…Little Eva was their babysitter until they wrote this song for her!!! This number brought audience right back to the 60’s and they loved it!!! The musical was wonderful…It started with Carole at age 16 on the verge of selling her first song to Don Kirshner at 50s and 60s label Aldon Music, in no time she is pregnant to budding lyricist, playwright Gerry Goffin, they are quickly married, Carole gives birth to her first child and they begin to write hit records for top recording artists…the musical goes through her career with songs from her, Goffin and their good friends who were also in the industry writing hit songs, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann…also portraid in the show were Neil Sedaka, The Shirelles and The Righteous Brothers!!!  The show ends with Carole’s debut in 1971, at Carnegie Hall singing “Beautiful!”  I highly recommend seeing this musical, if you are a fan of Carole King…if not, you will be by the end…

After the show, we stopped off to see our son VJ, at his new condo in Providence…he doesn’t want me to show his condo until he is done renovating, so that will be a post of its own, when he is ready…but he did put on a nice spread for us, before we went for our dinner reservations…a platter of roasted peppers, artichoke hearts, olives prosciutto and soppressata, cheese and crackers with a glass of wine😋

 

Right down the street from VJ’s condo is Waterman Grille, tucked in the corner of Waterman Street and on the Seekonk River…I had Waterman Salad with Jeffery’s greens, shaved vegetables, sunflower seeds, lemon-thyme vinaigrette with an add-on of seared scallops…Victor had roasted cod with yellow-eyed beans, savoy cabbage, mushrooms, red pepper vinaigrette…and that’s Frank always talking with his hands, like a good Italian boy🇮🇹  I highly recommend this restaurant for a delicious meal, with warm, inviting, modern atmosphere in a lovely setting!!

 

    <🎶🙏🏽🍵🙌🎵>

A Note about a Synchronicity

I think that in life we all have a choice to take different paths, I also think that if you pay attention, the universe will let you know if you are on the right path by little signs, one of them being synchronicities…So as we were having lunch with our friends, since we were going to see Carole King’s musical, I told them about how we have been listening to the children’s song “Chicken Soup with Rice” by Carole King in our kindergarten class…I was not even aware that she sang this song or that it came from a movie called “Really Rosie” until a couple of weeks ago, when Jen, our teacher, introduced it to me…my friends I was relaying the story to had no idea what I was talking about…”Chicken Soup with Rice???”…what is that??…I tried to sing it for them but I can’t carry a tune to save my life…so I just let it pass. Well, as we were driving to Providence, Victor sitting in the front with Frank, were listening to Sport’s Talk Radio and Sue and I sitting in the back seat chatting…All of a sudden we heard Carole King singing “Chicken Soup with Rice” on the radio…on Sports Radio???!!!! I could not believe my ears and neither could they…it’s not the type of song you would ever hear on the radio, unless you were listening to a children’s station, which we were clearly not!!! The reason the station was playing it was, that a basketball player had thrown a cup of chicken soup at another player and the sportscasters were making fun of them…so there was a reason for it, but “really???” What are the chances that it would all line up at that particular time??? Synchronicities, on the right path with good friends🍵

P.S.  If you have young children or grandchildren they will enjoy this half-hour video of “Really Rosie” performed by Carole King, made in the 1970’s, our kindergarten class is enthralled with it!!!  click here to watch video