Live, Love, and Prosper
Zelda Mae Brewsala was born just ahead of Memorial Day in Seattle. She was 20 inches long, 8 pounds and 2 ounces, and arrived after 41 weeks and a day — not a moment too soon! Everyone’s at home and in good health now, enjoying some sunny and unusually warm June weather. Welcome to the world, baby girl!
Many factors came together to make 2016 the happy first year of the Brewsalas, but one significant influence should not be overlooked: namely that of the psychedelic British Invasion band the Zombies.
Probably everyone in the western world has heard “Time of the Season”, the song that at least lately puts the Zombies on the map. And aside a smattering of hit singles in the mid-sixties before that, one could be forgiven for assuming they were a one-hit-wonder. But due as much to my insatiable quest for new-to-me recordings as a truly serendipitous if otherwise unworkable housing configuration in 2012, that year I discovered the profoundly underappreciated 1968 opus of the Zombies: Odessey and Oracle.
A highlight of late-sixties baroque pop, Odessey and Oracle is as much a marvel today as it was when it was new nearly fifty years ago. Having just happened upon a gem of this stature in December 2012, I wasn’t done bragging about the find in March 2013 when Yana and I met. We both fell in love with the album and were overjoyed to see the Zombies perform at Bumbershoot that summer!
On the walk back to our Airbnb in Prague, Yana found a promotional tie on a riverside bollard. She of course immediately put it on Mark, who proceeded to also wear it the next day on our plane journey back to Reykjavik.
Lesson painfully learned: figure out which public transportation gets you where you need to go on time, then take the one before that one! Getting from our Airbnb to Hauptbahnhof for our train to Prague was a stressful endeavor — we got on the train by the skin of our teeth, printing the ticket on the platform at 9:01am for a 9:03am departure with Mark straddling train and platform in desperation (much to the chagrin of the German conductor who thankfully helped us out of sheer pity for our sweaty and stressed selves).
Once aboard, we encountered a new type of seating configuration: a 6-person cubicle with 3 seats on each wall facing each other. Rather than be crammed in this small space with the extraordinary amount of luggage carried on by our cubicle companions, we opted for the dining car, where we spent the entirety of the 5-hour ride playing Hanabi and enjoying our first sips of Czech beer, Staropramen Dark.
