![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/beitmalkhut.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/IMG_1477.jpg?ssl=1\" "\\"Erin")
<\/a>I flew from Tokyo to Beijing on Tuesday and had a more-interesting-than-one-wants taxi ride from the airport to Red Gate Gallery and Bei Gao Studios<\/a> near the 4th ring. My friends Rayna<\/a> and Nick are doing their artist-in-residency program<\/a>, and I was spending a couple of down-days with them, hanging out in Beijing.<\/p>\nDid I mention that I’d never met Rayna and Nick before?<\/p>\n
Did I mention that Rayna is Mira’s daughter?<\/p>\n
Well, yikes!<\/p>\n
Fortunately, we all got along great, and it was a really fun couple of days.\u00a0I arrived around 11pm, and we were all hungry, so Rayna and Nick took me to a little family-run restaurant around the corner from their studios. It was so low-key and casual (Nick actually had to go fetch our beers out of their storage area) I had to ask: were they sure it was really a restaurant and not just a family who was too polite to tell them to stop sitting on their patio, who figured they might as well sell their leftovers to the clueless round-eyes?<\/p>\n
My question drew a long pause and a pair of sheepish grins. Then one of them remembered having seen a menu a while back.<\/p>\n
If it wasn’t a restaurant, it sure should been\u2014the food was great!\u00a0We gobbled down three dishes and shared a few beers, and then we went back to their studio and hung out talking into the wee hours about art, making art, and all the usual conundrums about being artists.<\/p>\n
I think it was 3:30 in the morning when we realized that bedtime had come and gone, and the next thing I realized was that I still needed to make a Kaddish. I was way too tired to attempt reading the text, and I was way too shy to attempt singing it in front of N and R, so I played it on the Virtual Piano app of my iPhone instead. It has a tiny little one-octave keyboard, so I had to keep switching out the octave, which made the melody sound so strange, I had a rather severe memory slip. Stumped, I detoured to the final phrase.<\/p>\n
Oy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think it was 3:30 in the morning when we realized that bedtime had come and gone, and I still needed to make a Kaddish. Oy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[216,253],"tags":[643,296,370,646,645,644],"class_list":["post-3518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kaddish-in-two-part-harmony","category-podcasts","tag-bei-gao-studios","tag-china","tag-exhaustion","tag-nick-curley","tag-rayna-savrosa","tag-red-gate-gallery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3518"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3526,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions\/3526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}