Ciabatta Pizza with Apples and Mrs Harris Goes to Paris

Ma

What a lovely surprise this is. I read that story in a Reader’s Digest condensed edition when I was very young. I think I was eight, and I absolutely loved the book, so it will be a real treat to see the movie. I also bought the book this year on Kindle, and am looking forward to reading it in the future. I thought I saw a movie of it years ago, but I’m not positive. The pizza looks great, so this will be a fun Friday.
This being Friday and it being October, I am working up to the scary haunted houses we lived in. Today’s story won’t scare anyone, but it is a strange one. This involves a hotel in downtown Madison, not far from the campus. A Best Western maybe? I don’T really remember after so many years. My Dad had been there on business and he recommended the hotel as being very comfortable. My best friend was studying library science at UW Madison. It was a crazy place back in the day. It was not unusual to see people walking around in the dead of winter wearing only sheets, and that was tame for the times!
We checked into the hotel around noon and were only staying overnight. My friend came over and we went out to lunch. When we got back, we faintly heard a party. A record was playing, there was saxophone music, and the smell of cigarette smoke was mild, but noticeable. My husband told us to look at the bathroom door. It was swinging all the way open and then closed. It never stopped. It kept doing it, at irregular intervals. It clicked when it closed or opened. We couldn’t figure out how it was doing it, but we weren’t alarmed. It was just weird.
My friend and I were going to get some Cokes and ice from the machines in the lobby. We ran into the desk clerk who was going off duty. My friend mentioned the bathroom door, and he said, “Oh yeah that’s the haunted room.” We rolled our eyes and forgot about it. The sounds of the party grew louder as the day wore on. We opened the door to our room because we were going to ask the partiers to keep it down. As soon as the door opened, the noise stopped immediately. When the door closed, the sounds of the party started again. As the afternoon and early evening progressed, we could hear several people talking, and ice cubes clinking in glasses, and the splash of liquid hitting the ice cubes. The voices got louder and we could hear people talking more clearly. This was accompanied by a saxophone playing a beautiful, mournful tune. My husband was a jazz fan, but he didn’t recognize it. We kept opening the door and the noise would stop until we closed the door. It still didn’t bother us although it was rough sleeping with all the noise. There was a record player that would play the same song endlessly, and then when it ended, we could hear the needle scratching and then it restarted. The sounds of cigarette lighters opening and closing was fascinating. Our parents had those kind og lighters, but we had cheap disposable Bic lighters. Sometime after midnight they started talking about us! A woman’s voice said, “Oh they’re okay. They’re from Iowa and they’re just here overnight.” That did it for me. We packed our suitcases in a hurry and checked out. When we got home, I realized we had left our favorite shirts hanging in the closet at the motel. We just didn’t think it was worth the trouble to get them. We always wondered if a few hours from the roaring twenties were forever trapped in time, doomed to endlessly replay the final hours of some young lives, or if someone was playing an elaborate hoax or doing an experiment. None of the questions were ever answered. I still don’t know what it was. I always imagined about ten or twelve twenty somethings dressed in the height of fashion from the Roaring Twenties having a party. The sax player wore a hat, and they all smoked and drank way too much. That was the way I imagined it, although they could have been from any decade. We didn’t recognize any of the music from their radio, so that didn’t help in placing them, but it felt like the twenties. I wondered from time to time if the hotel was built on the site of an old farmhouse, or had they been in a bad car accident nearby? It would have been difficult to find that out at the time, although not impossible. We were never sure what it was. Was it real, a hoax, or were we unwitting participants in an odd experiment? I dont suppose we will e ver know. I’m not sure I want to. If it was real, then I hope Felix the sax player, and his friends are at peace. 👻👀👻