Summer Party, BBQ and Sunny and Warm

The Annual Voice Summer Party brought more people than ever to The Great Plotnik World Headquarters and Barbecue Kitchen. Most of the guests are people Plot and Duck have known since they moved north, since Plot entered the Snowy Valley Voice Literary Contest and began to be hooked up with the paper. Amazingly, nobody in the picture has a Plotnik name. Publisher Sally Smith (curly red hair) is the center of this community since she generally pays everyone for their stories and editing and paste-up and all the little things a small business has to do to stay alive, and even she doesn't have a Plotnik name. Yet.



These four bags of garbage and maybe four more are all that's left of food and drink for at least forty people of all ages. Florence and Leo came this year -- Florence had written a Voice Column since the paper was founded in the '70s, about her memories of living in the neighborhood as a young woman with small kids, but lately her eyesight and memory have deteriorated a bit so Sal runs one of her old columns in each issue. Her husband Leo is a well known photographer and artist and they brought artist friends with them.

Other people brought their kids, to be measured and marked on the back of the pantry door, and this year Heidi's boy Evan, now 14, brought his guitar and played for everybody. Plotnik got into the act too, playing and singing a few of his songs -- it's always so easy to play for people who already love you before you even take your guitar out if its case.



Kathleen, who is Sal's niece and new art student at SF Art Institute (and isn't even a Vegan yet!), here plays the piano in the new music room. Oh, wait! That's not a piano, it's a pool table!



This godawful looking thing is the health drink that The Great WantzaNewName swears by. Wantza didn't actually show up yesterday, but Plot has wanted to advertise the delicious-lookingness of this tasty beverage.



What DID taste great was Plot's newly devised barbecue sauce for five pounds of pork bbq: he found himself out of Maurice Bessinger's Piggy Park so was forced to improvise by mixing half Burrell's Rib Cage BBQ sauce (from Santa Ana, SoCal, that Shemeckl brought him a few Christmases ago) and half Moore's Olde-Time BBQ Marinade (from New Bern, NC, that Colonel Joe sent also a few Christmases ago) plus a little Aleppo pepper (purchased in bulk at a felafel stand in Stiletto City). Sweet, plus vinegar, plus hot: man! The best bbq ever. Have to do it again really soon.

And it's September! Summer's here! This week: Sunny and warm, sunny and warm, sunny and warm, sunny and warm and sunny and warm.