Our Hallowe’en Special (I’m pretty obsessed with keeping the apostrophized old skool spelling of Hallowe’en alive, you may have noticed!) was indeed a treat, and the only tricks were performed by Flea… more on that later. The Blu-ray disc played beautifully. In fact it was almost like being at Angelica, except their subway rumblings were supplanted by our occasional flurry of 3rd Avenue traffic and, of course, they don’t have a dog that barks back at barking movie-dogs. Debra Granik might very well get an Oscar nomination for her wonderful film. Winter’s Bone is a perfectly paced thriller that grants us access to a world which would otherwise (thankfully) be inaccessible. It’s just slow enough to be creepy, but spiced up with excitement just when needed.

Speaking of spiced up… we had special drinks to honor the night. Although they might have been appreciated more on a cold winter’s evening (you just can’t trust the weather these days, can you?), the “Warm Winter’s Bone” (a hot, spice-mulled apple cider) and the “Warm Winter’s Boner” (the same ingredients stiffened up with a generous portion of Captain Morgan’s) went down a treat. We also made some yummy brownies (all organic!) and Zofi decorated a few of them. They looked somewhat worried, and with good reason… here are some that made it through until the end of the evening.  Will they last another night? Ich don’t think so.

So… about that trick; we’ve been teaching Flea to shake his paws separately, left and right. By way of demonstrating this, I asked Circe to write down a sequence of left and rights, and I then read them off in order to Flea, slowly and deliberately. He got the first eleven right and then lost it on the twelfth and final one.  Pretty damn good, I say. Of course he got a yummy treat for that! You can follow Flea on his blog at fleathedog.com if you’re interested.

More about this film on IMDb