12 August 2001

Well, we said goodbye to the kid last night. Jeri returns to Boston tomorrow morning, after about 2 months here. My mother had a going away party for her.

When she's in Boston, we have telephone and e-mail and it just seems that I know more about her day to day activities. So in that sense, it will almost be good to have her "back home" again.

It was a quiet afternoon, with several of her friends coming to tell her goodbye. We got there early so I could show my mother the slide show I'd done of our family reunion, and Jeri showed off what she's learned these past two months on the oboe she rented.

She plays several instruments and has decided to take oboe lessons in the fall, so she has been familiarizing herself with the instrument in her spare time and we were impressed at how much she has learned on her own, though since her main instrument is the clarinet, I suppose it's not too great a leap from one reed instrument to the other. (She describes playing the oboe as "like playing the clarinet upside down, through a straw.")

The party was scheduled to be larger than it actually turned out to be--partly because some friends were unable to come, and partly because I stupidly gave someone else the wrong day. (I'm wondering if she'll show up at my mother's this afternoon.) I feel very, very bad about that!

But we had a very nice afternoon. Many too many hors d’oeuvres so that by the time dinner came around we were already stuffed. But everyone had the chance to relax and enjoy themselves.

Ned's two best friends, Phil and Greg were there. I love these guys. They have been friends since high school and remain very close. They've all been through so much together. What's fun about watching them together is that they're all in their 30s now (yesterday was Greg's 35th birthday) and they are still doing a lot of the same things they did back in high school.

Phil - Greg - Ned

The group has been "making movies" ever since they discovered our 8 mm movie camera. They moved into video as soon as we had a video camera, and got professional when they were all working for the local cable station. Ned and Greg once made what was, for a time, a local cult classic film called "Ned and Greg Investigators." It had a cast of hundreds and was filmed all over Davis. They even had the use of a local club for a nightclub scene. Phil was the "bad guy" in it and the movie starts with him throwing Walt off the tallest building in town. Finding the murderer of "Ned's Dad" was the task for Ned & Greg and the movie had everything, including a car chase (at about 10 mph) and several fight scenes.

It was the first 30 minute film made specifically for Davis cable and they ran that damn thing endlessly. Every time you turned around, "Ned and Greg Investigators" was on TV—mostly because they didn't have any other original material.

The movie haunted them because it was played literally for years and would pop up when they least expected it--and when they had long moved on to other, more serious things.

Over the years they've made hundreds of movies--though never quite on the scale of "Ned and Greg Investigators." I was very amused recently to hear Greg say that he and Ned are thinking of going into the business of videotaping weddings and other social events (Greg's wife is a party planner). It's just so funny to think of those guys actually making money off of something they've been doing for fun for all of their lives.

We had a buffet dinner, that we all had to force ourselves to eat because we were so full of food already, and then after most folks left, the core group--the immediate family--stayed around to watch the videotape of Jeri conducting the 40 piece orchestra playing her award-winning composition, the concert we attended when we traveled to Boston earlier this year.