11 Morena

This episode is a special one. Scot is going to dive into the story of Morena, the place The Perfect Show’s studio is named after, and recounts the story of one of the most amazing places he ever found in Japan. 

 

The story wanders to Indian restaurants, Hokkaido festival life, and Dr. Pepper. 

 

This one’s been on the slate since the idea of this podcast first happened, and I’m excited to finally share it with you now. 

 

Bossa Nova Chirstmas Songs:

 

Marcela Mangabeira - All I Want For Christmas is You

https://youtu.be/ne2r3378-ZU

 

Monique Kessous - Last Christmas

https://youtu.be/Tp_yks2Fl7E

 

Tahta Menezes - Happy Christmas (War is Over)

https://youtu.be/US-9cddsu2Y

 

Here are links to Kisha Solomon’s two-part essay “Black in Spain: Beauty Standards and Exoticisms”

Part 1: https://www.lasmorenasdeespana.com/blog/black-in-spain-an-exotic-beauty

Part 2: https://www.lasmorenasdeespana.com/blog/morena-negra-whats-in-a-name

NEW:
The Perfect Show has a new website! Now find us at www.perfectshowpodcast.com and put images to any audio you are wondering about.

 

Special thanks for the cover song: 

 

Romaana Shakir - romaanashakir: https://www.fiverr.com/romaanashakir

 

Instrumental by Chevy71Corvette on Youtube - https://youtu.be/8zyhnWDhcrM

 

And for the Japanese segment:

 

Japanese Voice Over - araccyn: https://www.fiverr.com/araccyan

 

English Translation - nwcoast90: https://www.fiverr.com/nwcoast90

 

Original Piano Composition - steveaik7: https://www.fiverr.com/steveaik7

Music from this episode by:

 

mikesville - https://www.fiverr.com/mikesville

 

nikas_music - https://www.fiverr.com/nikas_music

 

brrrrravo - https://www.fiverr.com/brrrrravo

 

dawnshire - https://www.fiverr.com/dawnshire

 

adam_mejghi - https://www.fiverr.com/adam_mejghi

 

Desparee - https://www.fiverr.com/desparee

 

Lofi_rob - https://www.fiverr.com/lofi_rob

 

Aandy Valentine - https://www.fiverr.com/aandyvalentine

 

From the Free Music Archive and used under a Creative Commons License:

Komiku - https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Komiku

 

AI-Generated Transcript:

 

Speaker 1: 0:25

Hi and welcome to the Perfect Show. I'm your host, scott Moppen. I'm what you might call a perfection prospector, sifting through life looking for little things or experiences that could be considered perfect. Join me each episode as I examine one topic that I'm presenting as a little negative perfection. Hey there, this one is a really special topic to me. You may hear me say at the end of most of these episodes that they're recorded at Morena Studios, which is just a name I've given to my little setup here. But for this one, I want to tell you how I picked that name and where it came from. Today, I'd like to tell you the story of Morena. I think it's pretty natural to get homesick when you're living in another country for an extended period of time. Moving within the same country to a place with a different enough feel or culture can do it too. The thing at the heart of that homesick feeling is separation from an environment that you know and immersion in an unfamiliar one. When I left Kansas for Japan, I was pretty ready to go. I was ready to see the world and live on the other side of it and discover who I was going to become. But even if someone is completely ready for that change. I don't think there's any way of avoiding missing what you leave behind. People for sure. That's the big one for most of us, or I should say people, pets, loved ones let's just extend it to loved ones but also haunts, familiar environments, favorite foods and drinks, or even just commonly available foods that you may take for granted until you look around and they're suddenly not available anymore. One that got me in Kyushu was we found a vending machine out in Fukuoka City, one lone vending machine that, along with the more standard choices you would find in Japanese vending machines like Coke or Pepsi, pokari, sweat and energy drinks, this one had Dr Pepper as an option. This one vending machine was the only place I had seen Dr Pepper in over a year. Now. Dr Pepper is not a beverage I drink. I've had maybe three in the last ten years, but seeing Dr Pepper in Japan just triggered something and my roommate and I got like six cans each. We took them back to our apartment to save her a little taste of home over the next few days or however long. I don't think I've ever enjoyed a Dr Pepper as much as those. So I'd have bouts of homesickness like that here and there, usually prompted by seeing something American in Japan or hearing about something happening back in America, where I wasn't. But mostly I was on board for Japan and everything that meant. So those times were few and far between the English-speaking foreigners in the Japanese places I lived tended to know each other. When I lived in a big city there was an informal social and support network of other foreigners. We would get together regularly and travel in many of the same circles. At these get-togethers we would trade tips or stories and reminisce about the things we missed from our various homes. Honestly, just having conversations at natural speed in English was a pretty significant comfort all on its own. It lets you sort of turn off the non-stop translation machine that's usually running while you live there. Also, as just a person who loves other countries and cultures, it was a real chance to overload on them. In my daily actions I would be immersed in a foreign culture, but it was always Japan. At these get-togethers I was mingling with and getting to know people from Canada, england, ireland, scotland, south Africa, australia, new Zealand, singapore, mexico, indonesia, malaysia. I met someone from the Isle of man once. I mean just so many places. Socializing in Hokkaido was very much the same but, like with everything in Hokkaido, it was really the scale that was different. The foreigners there, like everything on that island, were a little more spread out from each other than in Kyushu. For my first Hokkaido town, I would need to drive a half hour or so to reach the next nearest English speakers and another half hour to meet the next closest. Those of us in the Northern region became a close-knit group despite that distance. We had an emailless server that operated like a text thread would now, and we would meet up fairly frequently to hang out or do things. Usually that meant heading to a bigger city nearby, which, where we were, meant Nairo. Nairo is a medium-sized city for Hokkaido, small for the rest of Japan but positively metropolitan compared to Nakatombezu, the tiny village where I was living. Now let me take a left turn at this point in the show and a moment to explain my relationship with Indian food. It'll tie back in, trust me, but I never had Mexican food in Kansas. The first burrito I ever ate was in Japan, if that gives you a sense of how adventurous of an eater I was as a child and I had absolutely no awareness of Indian food. My first time having Indian was also in Japan where I discovered that I absolutely loved it, as did many others in my circle, and it became sort of a linchpin. My friends and I would plan around if we knew we were headed somewhere large enough to have an Indian restaurant. There were a bunch in Kyushu and they weren't terribly hard to find, but I was in a really urban setting there and remember everything in Hokkaido is more spread out, which is especially true for non-Japanese restaurants. The easiest place to find Indian food was Sapporo, hokkaido's capital city and the largest one on the island. Sapporo has a population of nearly 2 million people and that meant they had a number of curry places we would hit up trying anywhere we could find that served Indian or Nepalese curry and revisiting our favorites any time. We came back. A few hours north of Sapporo stands the city of Asahikawa. It is the second largest city in Hokkaido with a population of around 350,000. So the second largest city in Hokkaido only has 17% of the population of the largest city. Just to give you an idea again of the size, drop off of cities and how the scale of things is just different up there. Sliding down the list of Hokkaido cities, you reach Naioro at number 24, with a population of about 30,000. This was the big city for my northern friends and me, about a 45 minute to an hour drive away on Waini Mountain Roads from where I lived. Naioro had wider food selection than where most of my friends and I lived, and so I'd go to the Saijo there for grocery shopping, and we do celebration dinners at the restaurants there when there was an occasion, and it was also the nearest spot to quench any fast food cravings that cropped up via the Moss Burger Drive-Thru, which is still there across the street from the Yamada Denki electronic store where I bought so many things, and it looks like there's even a McDonald's in Naioro now too, which didn't used to be the case. So, uh, good job Naioro. I guess One thing Naioro lacked, though, was an Indian food spot. We would recheck from time to time Google Naioro and Indodiyo-Di from our K-Ti phones, ask Japanese friends who lived in Naioro and just check with each other regularly to keep ourselves up to date with the latest version of the FFDB, the foreign food database. My wife and I, back when we were just dating, bonded in part over our love of Indian food. We had it at our wedding, we went to India for our honeymoon. But before any of that we would roam around Hokkaido together looking for new Indian restaurants to try, especially if a work function or teacher meeting had us going to a new city that we hadn't searched before. When I was traveling down to one of these meetings, I got a text from my Australian friend, sam, who had left his town earlier. We all were usually given like time off and a little travel money for these things and then just expected to make our way to the hotel or wherever on our own and show up by whatever time. But Sam texted that he had heard of an Indian restaurant called Morena, not Naioro, but in Shimokawa, a nearby town with a population just under 4,000. I feel like Sam hadn't even been there himself yet. He was just updating the FFDB with a new entry. So Naioro was between the towns where my girlfriend Misha and I lived. If we were headed somewhere across Hokkaido, like to this teacher meeting and it made sense in any way we would often meet up there, leave one car at the Naioro train station and then drive together the rest of the way. This time we would do that same thing, but with an extra stop plotted at Morena. Shimokawa is about a 15 minute drive from Naioro, and Morena's address wasn't in the main part of Shimokawa either. It was set sort of off to the side, over by some farmland and a river. This was a restaurant at the edge of a small town, which was on the edge of a small mountain city, quietly hidden in the far north of Japan. Shimokawa, the town we were on the edge of, had an attraction that they were known for. Every winter, shimokawa's thing as a town was the Ice Candle Festival, and they would make ice lanterns by freezing water in a container made to produce these thick walled ice cylinders and then put them around candles. The ice cylinders blocked the wind from blowing out the candles, and the flames light up the ice like lanterns. Elaborate rows of these ice candles are placed in designs, in long walls and structures at night, and people come to visit and enjoy the beautiful combination of fire and ice. Town attractions are nothing unique to Shimokawa, though. In Japan, most every city in town has its own attractions that they base festivals or parade around at specific times of the year. The biggest festival in Hokkaido and one of the biggest in Japan is the Yukimatsuri, the Sapporo Snow Festival. This is where, every year, snow, which is in abundance in Hokkaido. One year my city got 40 meters of snowfall over the winter. That's a little over 131 feet of snow Every day. It would be common to have to remove like between 1 to 2 feet of snow from my car and driveway before I could go to work in the morning, pretty much every single day, which is how you eventually get to 131 feet. Sapporo also got a ton of snow, and then they would import extra snow from all the other towns, as those towns were plowing roads and clearing public spaces. So these giant truckloads of snow being taken to Sapporo to dispose of were then dumped in giant piles on empty lots and parks that aren't used during the winter. Then, for weeks, teams of sculptors from different places and organizations start carving these giant snow mountains into unbelievable designs Huge portraits or dramatic scenes, cartoon characters, movie stars, backgrounds everything built entirely out of snow and ice. It's like a huge parade where everyone spends an unbelievable amount of time making floats with incredible detail, but instead of the parade moving past you, they stay put and you go around the city visiting them instead. Prizes are awarded to the best sculptors in a bunch of categories, and the festival brings in an additional 2 million people to Sapporo over the week that it runs. Flights and hotels are crazy booked up several months or even a year in advance and I was only able to go every year because, a I lived on Hokkaido and could just drive there and, b because we had good friends in Sapporo who let us crash on their floor a few times. But back to Shimokawa the Ice Candle Festival gave their town personality and while the various festivals and town events all have their own individuality, they're also very Japanese. Baked into the celebration of the small area was also a celebration of Japan, which makes sense. We were in Japan, surrounded by Japan, living and breathing Japan, and the amount of Japan everywhere could sometimes get to you or me anyway A slow build that you sometimes don't even notice until there's some real pressure behind it. We would use non-Japanese restaurants as little pressure release valves and somewhat alleviate or beat back those homesick Though maybe a better term would be away full feelings for the time being, until the next, little venting was needed. Not that they all reminded me of home, because Mexican or Indian, nepalese or Indonesian restaurants certainly didn't remind me of the home I had left, but it was more about periods of relief from all the there that was there. So that was the state we were in when we went searching for this new Indian restaurant working just outside of Nairo that we had somehow missed over the past year of scouring that area pretty hard. I should also say I was in the state of young love. That's not something you can always replicate. I mean, one of the things that makes it so special is the unplanned nature and irrational priorities it puts in your life for a time. But looking back on this time, that was definitely a factor helping color everything I was experiencing, making the world feel more colorful, electric and alive. So then, after a bit of driving on the small highway, we came to a gravel road. There was a hand painted wooden sign that just said Cafe Morena and an arrow up the gravel drive. We turned in and pulled up. It was just before dark when we arrived. It wasn't late, but being that far north, in the winter the sun sets pretty early. The gravel road gave way to a small shoveled parking area in front of a modest white two story house with a green door and a garage next to it. We got out of the car and were genuinely unsure where to go. There were no lights on in the garage. There looked to be some on in the house, but the door was closed and the only sign had been back at that road. So as we opened the door to tentatively enter the house, I remember feeling like maybe we were just walking into some random Japanese person's home. And if that were the case, well, the amount of surprise I would feel would pale in comparison to how much surprise I would cause by being a large blonde American just standing there inside. But my fears proved to be unnecessary, as the door led to a short hallway and then opened up into a larger, warmly lit room with tables and chairs. We had found Morena. Now I really want to take this entrance slowly, because a lot happened all at once. As soon as we opened the door, my senses were bombarded with change. So let's go through them one by one. First, let's talk sound. When we entered, we were hit with the warm sounds of Bossa Nova Christmas music. This was an album of Christmas songs in English sung by non-native English speakers over smooth Bossa Nova beats, giving us an immediate sense of things that were both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. At full capacity, the space would probably seat 18-20 people, and that would indeed feel very full. It looked to me like a place that had fallen directly out of a Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movie. Actually, that was the case for the outside too, with a thick blanket of quiet snow covering the ground and the house and smoke slowly meandering up from the chimney Touch. The other warmth that immediately hit us was the literal warmth of the inside itself. When opening the door, our bare faces were immersed in a wall of heat from a wood-burning stove. Hokkaido homes and apartments are usually heated with tonyu or kerosene delivered in these large, elevated tanks outside your house by a tanker truck once a year or more, depending on how fast you went through it. Kerosene heaters give off great heat, but there's something different about the heat from a wood-burning stove. It has a different feel, a different quality. It gives a sense that you are actually in a warm space instead of how somewhere heated by kerosene can feel to me like a cold space that's just been painted warm for the time being. Coming inside from outside in Hokkaido makes that temperature change even more pronounced. You're naturally bundled up for outside and encountering this new warmth, you'll find that removing layers quickly moves up your list of priorities, so that covers sound, sight and touch. There wouldn't be anything to taste until later, but what we smelled may have been the biggest shock of all. While we were processing the unfamiliar music, with the familiar feeling of needing to get our coats and hats off quickly, the most familiar of unfamiliar smells hit us Freshly Baking Pumpkin Pie. For non-piers, I apologize, but I'm going to go off here for a minute. Walking in on the smell of freshly baking pie is a needle scratch record. Stop the phone. Sort of moment. Even in America, apple, cherry, rhubarb, whatever, it's a gauntlet being thrown, one that says, yeah, everything you smell right now is about to happen. You'll be tasting these smells soon. To me, pumpkin pie smell says all that and in addition it just gives an overall sense that it's food time, because pumpkin pie only comes out around big eating holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas. It says a feast is about to be had and is letting you know to get ready. This mythical dish, pumpkin pie, had a starring role in my presentations for classes explaining to Japanese kids about American holidays and cultural traditions. It's one of the things I had really grown to miss, without even knowing I was missing it my one trip back to the US at that point had been in the summer, when there's no pumpkin pie around. So I'm clocking probably three years since the last time that smell hit my nostrils at this point. So we stepped in and I was just absolutely bewildered by what I was smelling. My brain was trying to balance an equation with the factors American pumpkin pie, indian restaurant and Japanese house, but just coming up with question marks. I mean, pumpkin pie can be a pretty powerful smell on its own when you're already expecting it. But it's hard to describe how absolutely off guard it caught me when an amazing pumpkin pie smell just hit my nostrils out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere Japan. There's no real way to adequately describe it. So I was processing all this as we made our way into the cozy space, put our coats onto the backs of two chairs and sat down at the nearest table, unsure what we were in store for. The only person there was a Japanese woman in the kitchen, presumably the one responsible for the delicious pie smells. She came out a minute later and brought over some water and a boat import that had a bunch of papers tacked to it in different places. The woman introduced herself as Fumiko and she set the board on a third chair at the table and then went back to the kitchen. The slips of paper on the bulletin board listed the items you could order at that time and this was how Marina did their menu. There was no standard printed menu. I would learn that it changed regularly as different ingredients became available or got used up and as they tried out new dishes or retired old ones. The menu had pretty short titles of the dishes without descriptions some items we recognized, like curry and rice, and some that we didn't like gado gado salad. We started discussing what combination of dishes we would share, and that's when a second figure, who we had missed earlier, appeared. He waltzed in, eyed the chair next to us, came over and sat down without saying a word. Then he looked at us with eyes that said so what exactly do you think you're doing in my restaurant? And we looked back at him thinking Well, this is an extremely forward cat. We picked a few dishes and then called out to Fumiko who came to take our order. While we were ordering, fumiko surprised us by having really good English. We ordered a bunch. We just really wanted to try everything we could. So Fumiko whisked back into the kitchen to get things started and me and I chatted in the atmosphere. The restaurant was so small we could just speak a little louder and talk with Fumiko while she was in the kitchen. So we did, because we had so many questions. Turns out she learned English while traveling the world with her husband, which is how they both learned Indian cooking too. When the food came, we were treated to yet more delights, with all the smells around us. The food was exquisitely good. The hot chai tea was amazing. As for the curry, it wasn't purely Indian in the way it looked and tasted and it certainly wasn't Japanese. It was, like most things I would find at Marina, unique to the place itself. It was a wonderfully flavorful curry with beautiful yellow saffron rice and a recipe only to be found here. While we were sitting there, an older man with a neatly trimmed mustache and floppy hat walked in from outside. He changed from snow boots to house shoes, like Mr Rogers, came into the main space and was greeted warmly by Fumiko. This was Fumiko's husband. Hide Hidehiko and Fumiko Kuriyua were the owners, the chefs, the everything behind Marina. We stayed for hours. They spoke excellent English as well, so we would chat some in English, some in Japanese and a mishmash. If there was something one of us couldn't find the right word for, it felt like home, in part because it was Fumiko and Hide's home. Their living quarters were on the second floor and they had made the first floor into the restaurant. There was a small shelf too, with rows of photo albums, a few books and some more books at the top on display. We thumbed through the photo albums as we sat and talked and drank chai tea. They showed us photos from their trips backpacking across Afghanistan and Europe, an album of pictures from traveling around Okinawa in a camper truck named Wonderbird that they had built themselves. What I saw was evidence of what looked like not just one life the two of them had lived, or even two, but several. Hideh pulled out a guitar at one point and treated us to some styles of music he had picked up as well on his travels. He had learned this beautiful Spanish style of guitar playing. At a later visit I was able to record a little bit. So here's a taste of Hide playing a little guitar for us in a video I cherish very much. That's my friend Kevin who is with us, and that's Hide. Fumiko and Hide were unlike any Japanese people we had ever met. They seemed to belong to the whole world and could never be limited to somewhere so small as just Shimokawa, hokkaido or even Japan. The orange striped cat was later introduced to us as Achan, short for Anesto, which was short for Anesto Hemingway, or the Japanese pronunciation for Ernest Hemingway. He was an incredibly chill cat and loved sitting with guests and having his chin scratched. Hide and Fumiko were just cool. They looked cool, they dressed cool, they talked cool, they named their pets cool names, they made cool food and had cool lives. We found out that in the summer they would also do beekeeping with a few hives nearby, grow their own vegetables and spices in the yard beside the house, which was covered in a thick blanket of snow on this first visit. But they'd trade those with other local growers, sell a few and mostly use them in their dishes, which were constantly changing. That's why the menu was scraps of paper pinned to a bulletin board. A printed menu would have been outdated almost as soon as seeing dried. At some point we asked about the pumpkin pie and Fumiko seemed surprised, since I don't think it was on the menu yet, but then again it didn't really need to be. That smell was like a neon sign all by itself. We had some pie with homemade whipped cream and it was just absolutely perfect. When it came time to pay, fumiko rang us up for some stuff, said other stuff that we had eaten was her trying out recipes like? She said that she was still experimenting with the pumpkin pie to get it right before selling it. So that was just free. Total made us wonder if we had maybe misheard the number. It was just a small number for what we felt like the value of what we had just received was and Japan doesn't have a tipping culture, so we couldn't just give extra money either. But we had been maybe some of, if not the only, customers that night and we couldn't imagine how this functioned for them to turn a good profit on what had just been a jaw dropping meal. They had these little jars of sauce for sale, so we bought some of those like different jams and jellies and sweet peanut sauce that had been on the gano gano salad. I think she may have had some bread for sale. That part is fuzzy in my memory. After the night we had the restaurant. Everything related to it had a blanket seal of approval, so there was no pondering if we were getting too much. We just loaded up on pretty much anything that was available. Also, that book display on top of the bookshelf. Those were books of off the beaten path farmhouse restaurants in Hokkaido called Sudou na Cafe o Tazunete, or let's Visit a Slow Cafe, and they were books compiled of just the restaurant feature, parts from issues of a magazine called Northern Style Sudou. The magazine would come out and have all sorts of articles and features, including features for these small restaurants, and then the farm restaurant articles got collected by themselves and published in these books afterward. There were three volumes of the book, with Morena being featured as one of the restaurants in volume one. We bought a copy of each. We basically wanted to take anything of this experience we could back with us and hold on to it if at all possible. It was the vending machine with Dr Pepper all over again. In fact, I actually still have those three books. I kept them all this time and so, with the help of some people from Fiverr, I'll play the Japanese entry for Morena in that book and I'll read excerpts of the English translation as well. The epitome of Morena is the relaxing food and atmosphere and the story of the journey that is told by the restaurant owners the Kudiyuwa, hidehiko. Kudiyuwa was originally a businessman in Tokyo and moved here to Shimokawa at the age of 47, and it has been a decade since he opened Morena. He has been inspiring to a life of travel since he was 30 years old and started to visit countries around the world, mr. Kudiyuwa travels because he wants to draw. He travels because he wants to feel the thrill. His travel style is wandering around places and if he finds something interesting, he stays for about a month at a time. He even ended up staying in India for about a year.

Speaker 5: 30:10

this way, the soup curry is a superb piece of Morena's menu.

Speaker 1: 30:37

I was thinking about how delicious the meal was, but also it feels healthy and apparently it really is healthy. The vegetables and herbs are pesticide free and supplied by a private farm as much as possible. Sometimes they don't even notice customers because they are out in the vegetable field. In addition to that, Mr Kudiyuwa is also a musician. When you visit Morena and if you're lucky enough, you might get a chance to hear him play the Flamenco guitar, which he learned to play in Spain. The relaxing atmosphere of the cafe can only be provided by those who've traveled the world and experienced the culture firsthand. The pictures in the book feature their bowls and dishes with a beautiful blue design around the edges. You can see the same dishes on the Wikipedia page for the town of Shimakawa, where a picture of Morena's food is one of the few images featured for the notable assets of the town. The same dishes are in the cell phone pictures we took of the food and in the pictures on Morena's website, pictures that I can almost smell when I see them. I know that food so well. The truth is, it was sort of hard to separate some of the aspects of the first time we ate there, because for the next three and a half years it became and remained our favorite restaurant. I mean, I could even say our favorite place period. We went there whenever we could. We stayed for hours. I even took naps on the floor of the long table room a couple of times. When we first met it already felt like we had been friends for a long time, but Fumiko and Hide were more than just friends. They were like a really amazing uncle and aunt. Midway through my time in Hokkaido I moved to another city and Morena stopped being as convenient to get to, but we still went back frequently. No longer the waypoint on a journey between our two cities, morena was now the primary destination, a lot of times all on its own. And those farm restaurant books. We spent all three and a half years going to each and every entry in that book we could make our way to, especially if there was a work trip or we were going to a teacher conference somewhere on the island or just traveling to see the sights of Hokkaido. We'd cross-reference these restaurant guides to see if there were any that were going to be nearby. They were so important they even got to stay in the car with the SuperMaple, the paper map book that we had for Hokkaido. Oh, that's right. I lived in Japan during a very pivotal time of technology change. Japan was where I got my first cell phone in my 20s, but I was there when the change from flip phone to smartphone happened. It was also a time when the standard for maps went from a folded up paper map or one in a book to then a jump where it was sort of functional on the flip phone. And I had a pretty ridiculous flip phone. It was doing video calls back when I lived in Kyushu and had like a little joystick that let me control cursors so I could browse real websites and not just mobile ones, even though I had to do it on the small two and a half inch screen. But I was impressed. When I moved on to my second car in Japan, my best map option instantly became the SuperMaple CD-ROM that went into the disc player of that car and showed up on a little screen that came out and flipped up in front of the radio area. It did what Google Maps does now on Navigate with a little car icon that represented my car on the map moving along in real time. The screen was probably the size of a small tablet, but this was 2007, so I felt like I was driving fully into the future. Some cars and trucks at that point were popping up with screens in the backs of chairs or like in the radio spot where I had mine, sometimes flipping down from the roof like sun visors, and even some embedded in steering wheels, like right in the middle, which was a thing I saw shockingly often. These screens were supposed to have limiters that kept them from showing video while the car was in drive, but I don't think that was much of a hurdle for anyone, myself included. I regularly saw businessmen in luxury cars that had been modded watching their shows in the steering wheel or front console. Truckers too, I saw, had often figured out ways around the moving video restrictions. On my end, my car screen would read off a disc that would shut down when it was in motion for anything other than the map. But it also had a set of the red, yellow and white RCA jacks on the back and when I plugged those in to the core that connected then to my video iPod, I could just play whatever. I loaded onto it whole TV shows, movies, music videos, whatever and that worked whether the car was parked or in motion. But the screen came in the most handy when I used this car, which was a pretty comfortable sized station wagon, as my overnight lodging, by folding down the back seats, putting a futon and some blankets back there and then, if it gets cold during the night, just wake up and turn the heater on and run that for a few minutes, not instead of a hotel room, mind you Having a real bathroom and toilet gives those a clear edge but sleeping comfortably in my hard shell of a car that even had its own heating and cooling system, if I needed it was a pretty great tent. Alternative Pretty greater is being comfy in your car futon and watching a dope movie like Step Up To the Streets on that small screen in the front dashboard, which is something that I did and something that they did. I watched that movie in my car and they stepped up to the streets and then, by the time I left Japan, everyone was using Google Maps on their phones. My stay in Japan basically covered the complete period when the world made the switch from paper maps to digital ones. So, anyway, we would use those books to plot out different restaurants to see on our various journeys, and when we ate at one, we would try to get the chef or owner usually the same person, but we'd try to get them to sign their entry in our book, which would always amuse them to no end. And we were able to gather a lot of signatures over our trips across Hokkaido, but none of them could compare to Marina. It just had the instant warmth and feel of home, that same returning to a place you belong, feeling that people get when they go home for Thanksgiving, or at least in the movies where people go home for Thanksgiving. So I got like a small jewel to that. Every time I went to Marina we took friends a bunch of times it was like a litmus test for our friendship. If you went with us and you were just like meh about Marina, then we were just like meh about you. On one of those trips we took our Canadian friends Kevin and Kathy and even recorded a little bit of video on Marina. This is the night where that video of Hide playing guitar earlier came from. But I also have this wonderful video of Hide explaining the origins of the name Marina. My video is old, a little crackly, so I'll recap what he says. But here's Hide.

Speaker 4: 38:19

So now my restaurant. I cook Indian curry. It's very delicious, thank you. Before I go to India, I'm very square man, I'd say- square but after India I changed.

Speaker 1: 38:50

I know that's a little hard to hear. So before India, hide says he was a square like how you would say in the 60s. But after India he changed.

Speaker 4: 38:59

The name Marina, marina, yes, what does it mean? Marina is Spanish language, the women in the Spanish mix women. They say Marina.

Speaker 1: 39:20

He says that in Spain, marina is a name for women with brown hair or brown skin. I looked up the details because, as I've said before, spanish is not one of my languages, but I found a really excellent two part essay called Black in Spain Beauty Standards and Exoticisms, by Kisha Solomon, an American writer living there, where she discusses the term Marina, how it's applied in Spain and the nuances about which words people use in Spanish to refer to black and brown people and the connotations of each. I'll put links to it in the show notes and the web page. But Marina is the term she prefers to use in mixed company, which P Day and I would certainly qualify as what the Marina means is sometimes earth, earth, earth is Earth is.

Speaker 4: 40:07

Yes, yes, marina's skin color is like earth. Yes, brown, brown, yes, yes, and the Marina sound is very beautiful. I love the sound. It sounds very nice.

Speaker 1: 40:27

So Hide likes the sound of the name Marina and Fumiko. Let us know it being easy to say was important too. Very easy to say yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 40:39

First time he thought that the Russian name was Sotiro. Sotiro, sotiro, it's also Spanish Sotiro. Yeah, and we call the telephone company of it. It's the name Sotiro. It's a woman, not understand, sotiro.

Speaker 1: 41:06

Sotiro, sotiro oh, that sounds very bad. Here Fumiko is saying something. I had forgotten that Marina was originally going to be called Sotiro, but they got a phone call from someone so confused by that name in Japanese that they changed it to Marina. And she dug that because it was easy for everyone to understand. And that's the video I have of them Short but full of color and flavor, a lot like our time at Marina. We came back to America together, misha and I, back to the San Francisco Bay area where she's from and where we got married. I wrote to Fumiko and Hide a few times, but they weren't really set up for digital life. That made sense to me. There's was one of the few Japanese spaces where I didn't really see technology dominating anywhere. But I also let go of the rope some on my end. I got busy moving to a new place, learning how to be in America again, getting married, learning how to do that and then having a kid, etc. I reached out to the one email address I had gotten before we left, with occasional letters attaching current pictures of Misha and I with our new daughter, that sort of thing. But I didn't hear back and eventually the email started bouncing back as undeliverable. The restaurant website was a static page with contact info including the email address I had, and it had been the same simple webpage since we started going there in 2005,. So that wasn't much help for my quest either. Eventually, though, I tried a different method. Through my English teacher and Japan connections and Hokkaido ties, I was able to locate and message the current ALT, which stands for Assistant Language Teacher in Shimokawa. That's the foreigner who was there doing what I was doing in my town back then, and that teacher, a Canadian named Sean Slater, messaged me back the good news. Sean knew Moreno very well, frequented the place New Kudisan which I guess is what everyone else called Hide, shortening his last name, and then sent me pictures of Achan the Cat. Now for the bad news. I had gotten in touch with Sean just after he finished his contract of three years and moved to another part of Japan. While I could find out that Moreno was still open, I couldn't really get a message to Hide through Sean, because he is gone and the new ALT, who I didn't know, wouldn't be moved over and settled in for a little while yet. Then I let there be more gaps, more living life here, more not doing the steps to track down the person there. But when I started doing this podcast last year, I decided pretty early on that Moreno was going to be the subject of an episode. Once I had an idea for how to tackle it and I suddenly had a renewed reason to reconnect. I did the same thing as before, putting out a call to be connected with the current ALT in Shimokawa, and then I got a message from that ALT, annie Williams. Annie let me know she'd been to Moreno, meaning it was still very much open. Achan was there plotting around, as was Hide. I explained who I was and asked if she could pass along my info in person. She agreed and also tipped me off about the existence of a book that Hide had just published about his life and travels, showing me the cover. Annie got back to me a bit later to let me know she had gone to Moreno and delivered my contact info and that Hide still remembered us well and said hello. I guess maybe here is the point where I acknowledge that I've just been saying Hide for a little while and not Hide and Fumiko, because during this process I found out that Fumiko had passed away some years back and so Hide runs Moreno by himself. Now Hide's book actually turned out to be two books, one for each of the drop everything and travel the world with basically nothing trips that he took in his youth. We bought the books, had them shipped over from Japan, and when they got here, mishina and I went through them. They were fascinating for different reasons. Both were mostly memoirs which Hide had written in Japanese, and neither of us are at the level where we can sit down, crack a book like this and just read it with any real speed. But the pictures were where we focused the majority of our attention. In the book about his first trip, the White Book, a few photos are of young Hide by himself in London where he worked for a stent and studied English, which we had seen in those albums years ago, but others are him in different countries with a woman that we've never seen. Turns out this woman was his first wife, teruko, and so we instantly knew why, if we hadn't seen the photos or mementos from these trips before Turkey, syria, iran, afghanistan, living in villages in Nepal and India. Hide's first trip went until he hit a bad bout of hepatitis in Bombay, waiting to take his ship to Africa, ending his world journey and sending him back to Japan. The Blue Book was interesting for the opposite reason. This one is about his second time taking a trip, this time with his wife again, but now his second wife, fumiko. His volume was interesting exactly because it was full of these pictures we knew so well already. From leaving Japan again in 1989 to travel the world and then returning in 1995 to open a restaurant, hide and Fumiko were gone that time for six years, the same length of time that Mishinai were gone from America too. The Blue Book has most of the pictures I remembered well from those nights in Morena, the tales of the two of them traveling the world and experiencing all that life had to offer. I love that I have these books now. And then the strangest thing happened. The timing on this is just really crazy to me, but while I was working on this episode, two months ago in March of this year, after years of being the same, morena's website got completely redone, now beautifully designed and organized, with several pages and sections covering the restaurant and its food, as well as Hide, his life and philosophies, the animals and Hide's art and writing. It's really gorgeous. You can find it at wwwcafemorenainfo. That's C-A-F-E-M-O-R-E-N-AI-N-F-O, and even if you don't speak Japanese. There's a great drone shot of the house and the photos of the food and restaurant all speak for themselves. The pictures of Hide, his travels and artwork are fantastic and I legitimately poured over every page on the site for hours. That's where you can read all in Japanese, mind you about how Hide Fumiko and their friend Mr Matsumoto started Morena in an old farmhouse back in 1995, refurbishing it, repairing it and building it by hand, funding the construction of Morena by selling boxed lunches that they would make along the way. They were keen to buck the trend that you needed a large sum of money up front to open a restaurant and that friendship and experiences are more important than money. Anyway, you can see many of the photos from the books here, also a great shot of Achan yawning and just wonderful pictures all over the restaurant, the food and the place. It was when I was reading over this website that I discovered the journal record that filled in the missing pieces about what happened from when we had left Japan until now. We left Hokkaido in 2009, and that's when I lost touch. But in early 2010, hide had a stroke at age 66. He was hospitalized nearby and journaled every few days as he was rehabbing and working to reverse the effects of the stroke. He put these journals up on the new Morena site as part of his writings. They tell the story of a man who had been so defined by his fierce independence, now dealing with this new reverse situation of being completely dependent on others for so many things. He shares anecdotes of friends who visited the other patients there in the stroke world. Hide was considered young for this in Japan. So many of the other patients he writes about are quirky older people, but he shares about Fumiko and how hard it must be on her, but also sweet glimpses of her kind encouragement to him. After five months in the hospital, hide came home to Morena and continued his recovery bit by bit. He writes about it being important to relearn what he can do, but also to do the things he can despite his condition. This included installing railings in places to make moving around the yard and house easier and discovering he could use his hand-tilling tool like a cane to let him continue to work in their kitchen garden. Speaking of the garden, that was always one of the most amazing parts of Morena to me. We didn't get to appreciate it on our first visit because it was winter, so you were spared the long description treatment earlier. But Morena had a pretty special garden. Hide explained his philosophy to me once he had tilled a field and tried conventional gardening before, but he didn't like the process and he had then shifted to just going out to his fertile ground, finding spots to plant the amount of whatever vegetable he needed and trying not to disturb any of the plants that he didn't have to in the process. Instead, he would just plant this new fruit or vegetable in and among whatever was already there. That way it would have to grow and flourish along with the other things that were already there, disturbing only what it needed to as it grew. Sure, hide said it wouldn't produce the biggest or most vegetables this way, but the ones that came through would be in harmony with everything else and would have been made strong by the process. The easy analogy there for how people could live, how Hide and Fumiko chose to live, was not lost on me. There were different patches of plants all around just outside of Morena's glass doors and when cooking, fumiko or Hide might walk out and grab a sprig of this or a pinch of that, maybe cut a squash off the vine to come back in and put in a curry. I was a picky eater well into my 20s, but at Morena, anything they cooked I would eat. I probably tried more new vegetables in that house than in the house I had grown up in, and they were all cooked to perfection. Hide's journal tells of him starting to work in the restaurant again, bit by bit, and you can read his clear joy in being out of the hospital and back in his home again, that restaurant filled with the memories of their travels. The journal also shares some sad details of Fumiko passing away from cancer the following year, in 2011, and a local memorial concert that had been planned for her not happening because of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami disaster that happened shortly after in March of 2011. I learned of Fumiko's passing in 2018, still several years after it happened, but I hadn't really gotten a solid picture of the timeline of things until I read Hide's journals for this story. The Morena I had left had changed a lot shortly after and the Morena I had imagined going back to all this time was really just that a place that only still existed in my imagination After Fumiko passed. Hide writes really openly about slipping into a dark place, about isolating, diving into alcohol which he steered clear of since the stroke, and grief. He writes about feeling so alone and then not knowing what to do. And then he writes about emerging a little at a time to see what he could still manage around Morena, about working in the garden slowly, but working still, and cooking dishes and sharing his food with others as much as he could. He writes about how he's making sure to sing and play the guitar every day and do a lot of painting and writing. It was during this time that he started working on the two books he released last year, and he's working on a third volume of his memoirs now. Hide draws the parallel between his challenge now and that of the plants in his no-till garden to find a way to flourish and produce beautiful fruits despite the challenges that surround them, and grow in harmony with life. It reminds me of the saying no one can step into the same river twice, because the next time both the river will be different and so will the person. Sure, I can't go back to that Morena that I miss, because that Morena's not there anymore, but also that me isn't here anymore either. The river has changed and so have I. What's that thing. They say you can't go back again. That's a good way to put it. You can't go back again, not to the same place, same you, but sometimes you can go back again, knowingly different than before, and catch the past up to where things are now. So then there's one final leg of this journey to tell you about, literally. While I was putting the pieces of this episode together, I reached out once more, this time to Hide, his longtime friend Saiko Tominaga, who does have a presence on social media, and I was able to message a bit with him about what I'm doing. He writes, dear Mr Mopin, this afternoon I could hand in the printed message of yours to Kudisan. He was so delighted. Below is his message and I translate it. So this is Hide's message through this friend Hi Scott, the world is really small now, isn't it? Thank you so much for reading my book. Of course, for your radio program, I am happy that you will mention Morena and me. I believe those who love traveling can enjoy my story of journey in such COVID time. Take care and see you again someday, hide, at Morena. Then Hide's friend sent me his phone number and told me he was happily waiting for my call, and so Okay. So I think all the audio is set up right. Shall we call Hide? I'm really nervous about this.

Speaker 2: 55:10

I think that's understandable and okay.

Speaker 1: 55:14

Can you introduce yourself?

Speaker 2: 55:16

Right now.

Speaker 1: 55:17

Sure.

Speaker 2: 55:17

Sure what, like I'm Misha, what do you?

Speaker 1: 55:22

want me to say Not usually like a question mark, maybe I should. Yeah, you do that. I'm here with Misha, my wife, who features prominently in the stories about Morena in this episode, and we're about to call Hide Hidehiko Kudiyua and reconnect after not having talked to him in, I guess, since we left Japan in 2009. Alright, so any more dialer? Alright, here we go. A machine answered and then, after a quick recorded message in Japanese, what the end it says.

Speaker 2: 56:22

You're connecting you, so please wait.

Speaker 6: 56:27

Hello.

Speaker 1: 56:30

Can you hear me?

Speaker 6: 56:32

Yes.

Speaker 1: 56:33

I can Hello. This is Scott.

Speaker 6: 56:38

Can you hear me?

Speaker 1: 56:39

Yes, Scott.

Speaker 6: 56:41

Hello, how are you?

Speaker 1: 56:43

I'm fine, oh Kurii-san.

Speaker 6: 56:48

I'm able to speak Japanese.

Speaker 1: 56:51

So we connected. It worked. We broke out some rusty Japanese and then we had a chat in English some and Japanese some, and both at times, just like before, if you don't know mo-shi-mo-shi or mo-sh-mo-sh or any number of ways people say, it is the way you say hello when answering a phone in Japan, but it's only used on the phone. You'd never say hello to someone in person with mo-shi-mo-shi or put mo-sh-mo-shi in a text just when talking on the phone. So we started to catch up some talk about work and where we lived. Where did you live? In California, california.

Speaker 6: 57:29

Oh, that's great. So I think you are in London, but now you are in California.

Speaker 1: 57:44

Yeah, I'm back in California actually, because Misha was from California, so Misha and I came back together. Actually, I have Misha on the phone too with us Mo-shi-mo-shi ohi-sashi-buri desu.

Speaker 6: 58:00

Konnichiwa, konnichiwa, genki, desu Genki desu Nice to talk to you. Ah sashi-buri da ne hon-tori ne Soushisne.

Speaker 1: 58:12

We have your books. We have your books here in California. They are so beautiful. Hon-tori ne Book yes, the Heisei and Showa.

Speaker 6: 58:27

Ah, my book. Yes, I have your books. Did you read my book?

Speaker 1: 58:35

I can't read Japanese very well, like very quickly, but I looked at all the pictures and there are so many great memories. It's so amazing. I do have a bookshelf of Japanese books, some Haruki Murakami novels now Hide's two books, the three restaurant books from before, and I've tried to sit down and read some novels with a dictionary before, but I was just having to look up far too many words to get any satisfying momentum going on the reading front, so I never got more than a few pages in before moving on to something else. Congratulations on being an author. Yeah, congratulations, it's beautiful work.

Speaker 6: 59:21

Thank you, I was writing the third book.

Speaker 1: 59:27

I read that on the website.

Speaker 6: 59:30

Now I am writing the third book Very nice. The third book is Around Japan. Around Japan, I bought a very small car. Only 360cc About 40 years ago. Yes, I was young at that time.

Speaker 1: 59:55

Oh, this would have been when you were even younger. Okay, very cool.

Speaker 6: 1:00:04

The third book is about Japan. It's about 1970.

Speaker 1: 1:00:13

Oh it's the same Hide's third book will be released in Japan soon, and if he didn't catch it in our back and forth, this one will be about his time before either world trip about 40 years ago, traveling all over in a small car. All the books have been 1900 yen, or a little under $20, which is pretty stunningly low to me considering how beautifully made they are. Ah, Achan. Are you still there? Are you still there?

Speaker 6: 1:00:41

I'm still fine.

Speaker 1: 1:00:44

Wow.

Speaker 6: 1:00:45

I don't know if you know about Scott, but I bought a dog called Mario.

Speaker 1: 1:00:52

Mario doesn't know about it. He told us that Achan the cat is still alive and well around Berena, along with the dog named Mario. Oh Sugoi is just a Japanese exclamation like wow, we're amazing. You'll hear more of it in these clips.

Speaker 6: 1:01:09

Did you see my home page? Morena home page.

Speaker 1: 1:01:14

Oh, yes, I read the whole thing. Yeah, it's beautiful Sugoi.

Speaker 6: 1:01:18

Sugokoro yes. Amazing home page. So it's not I produce, it is my friend's produce home page.

Speaker 1: 1:01:31

Yes, he helped me. He did a great job. It's very good your home page. I heard about your stroke from the writings on the website and so reading about your recovery and reading about a Ah, I had the sickness over head.

Speaker 2: 1:02:03

Yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:02:05

But now I come back again.

Speaker 1: 1:02:08

Amazing yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:02:10

So now I Morena is fine. We're so glad to hear that.

Speaker 1: 1:02:16

Yeah, I'm so happy about that. So now I'm making a podcast here in America. So I'm making, I'm making an episode. I want to make an episode about Morena, about how, how. I love, how I loved Morena Junen.

Speaker 6: 1:02:32

Junen, it's my story.

Speaker 1: 1:02:35

Yeah, yeah. And about Misha and me finding you and finding you and Fumiko and Morena and just how much we loved it Wonderful memories and ties at Morena with you. Yeah, so I'm excited to talk to you and I haven't talked to you for so long. It's amazing to be able to reconnect, yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:03:06

I'm very glad to listen to your voice. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1: 1:03:17

I asked about reading on his website that he still plays the guitar every day.

Speaker 6: 1:03:20

Yes, I, I, I play my guitar every day. Wow this morning I played guitar, also Nice.

Speaker 1: 1:03:36

Yeah, I remember.

Speaker 6: 1:03:39

When I was young, or two hours. I play guitar continuously and sing a song with guitar, so this is my hobby.

Speaker 2: 1:03:54

Yeah, very cool.

Speaker 1: 1:03:56

I remember your songs and guitar.

Speaker 6: 1:03:59

When I was young, that's when I was in London and that's when my job is street musician. You know, I guess, yes, I got money. Yeah. Or to London on the street. Very cool, it is my memory. Very cool. I continue, yes, because I love music.

Speaker 2: 1:04:27

Yeah.

Speaker 6: 1:04:28

Yes, yesterday I have a Spanish lesson. I'm a Spanish small school. Oh. At the Morena. Yes, oh nice.

Speaker 2: 1:04:43

What is? What is Spanish? Small school. Like for Spanish language.

Speaker 6: 1:04:48

Yes, my friend is Pablo. Pablo is from Chile. Uh huh, it is a nice chance, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:04:59

Hide told us his friend Pablo is cycling around the world and is in Japan until August and currently near Shimokawa. So they get together some mornings to do a Spanish school together and Pablo helps Hide in a bunch of ways. It sounds like. It also sounds like even when Hide doesn't have a way to go out and see the world, the world finds a way to come in and see Hide. Great, it's so, it's so good talking to you. It sounds the same. You sound the same as uh, as as 12 years ago. It's so strange to me, ah, I'm tongue. The same, the same, the same.

Speaker 6: 1:05:35

Ah, is that so the same? The same, the same.

Speaker 1: 1:05:36

The same, the same, my, my voice is the same.

Speaker 6: 1:05:41

The same, exactly the same.

Speaker 1: 1:05:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I imagine you the same.

Speaker 6: 1:05:47

Ah, your voice is the same, okay, well, so I am very glad to listen to your voice, and you are my wife's voice also. I was waiting for your home, thank you, so I can very glad listen to your voice. Yes, I'm happy. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much for talking with us. Yeah. It was very good to hear your voice too.

Speaker 2: 1:06:17

All right.

Speaker 6: 1:06:18

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:06:20

Bye, bye, hideo, okay, all right.

Speaker 2: 1:06:26

Nice.

Speaker 1: 1:06:27

That was really cool to talk to him. I have a big smile on my face, yeah. It was so good to talk with Hideo again. That was surreal for me. I hadn't heard from him in so long, and what's wild to me is that he still sounds the exact same Still as genki, or lively as ever, and making and sharing his art with the world every day. So his music, his singing, his painting, his writing, his food, really his whole life. What I didn't expect is that this story became about the feeling of being homesick, but being homesick for somewhere else and someone else really for a moment in the past, a place that ultimately doesn't exist the same way as it did when I left. But that's the feeling I got when I came back to America after living abroad for a chunk of time too, like, oh, this is what I was wanting and it has those same elements that I had been missing, but at the same time it is somehow different than I expected, different than I remembered. You have to recalibrate a bit, because subconsciously you're expecting it to be more like hitting a pause button, and now you're just unpause and go back to that time, and you're in everyone else's life too. But of course the pause button doesn't exist. Everyone continues making their paths while apart, and the question when you return isn't how to go back in time and unweave what you've been making, but rather how to weave the whole cloth of who you are now back into the tapestry of the world you've returned to. Feeling homesick in Japan was part of what made my bond with Morena fast and strong. And then, being home again, I found myself with homesickness for Morena, maybe more so than for anywhere else in Japan. And can I say homesickness when it was never my home in the first place, Although I ate there and drank there. I met with friends and listened to them play music for me. I even slept there a few times. So maybe home isn't such a bad way to think about Morena after all. I've been thinking a lot about Hidey these past few weeks. He's 78 now and still running the restaurant along with Aach on the Cat, mario the Dog and a community of friends and fans who all love and support him, and with a beautiful new website. It looks as though he has no plans of stopping anytime soon, I think. Reading the account of Hidey's stroke and recovery and then about Fumiko's passing even though it was a long time ago it really got to me. I also hadn't known the part about her memorial concert getting cancelled. If there was anyone who wouldn't have wanted to take any spotlight from the victims of a disaster, it would have been Fumiko, of course. I think a light like hers deserves to be celebrated, even if I'm 11 years late. There's this Ben Folds 5 song called Magic. It's a beautiful, meandering song about the passing of someone close and I've always loved it. It's also the song that popped into my head when I heard about Fumiko's passing and the concert. That wasn't so. I had a cover of that song made and I'd like to take a bit of space here to have a little, I guess, memorial concert for Fumiko, however small it may be. Here now is Romana Shakir singing Ben Folds 5's beautiful song Magic, in honor of my late friend Fumiko.

Speaker 2: 1:10:14

There are similar photos of her pulling this in history, but she wrote one with these.

Speaker 7: 1:10:57

You're the magic that holds the sky up from the ground. You're the breath that blows these cool winds round Training places with an angel now. Saw you last night, danced by the light of the moon. Stars in your eyes, free from the life that you knew. Saw you last night. Stars in the sky smiled in my room.

Speaker 1: 1:12:19

And with that Morena, and by that I mean the man, the restaurant, the memories, the magic all of it becomes the next entry into the Perfectorium, the Index of Perfect Things. You can also find the credits and links for the music in the show notes or on this episode's webpage. That's where you can also find pictures of that night in Moreno, where my video clips came from, and the videos themselves. If you'd like to put faces to the voices and here's something new To see that webpage you're going to need to go to a new location because the Perfect Show site has moved. It is now located at PerfectShowPodcastcom. That's right, we grew up in Ghanacom, like the big kids, so now you can find a direct link to the Perfectorium by going to PerfectShowPodcastcom. You can still contact the show through PerfectShowShow at gmailcom. Connect on Twitter, youtube or Instagram to the name PerfectShowShow. That's all the same. And in case you missed the last mini episode, there's a call-in number now, so call 616-737-3329. That's 616-PerfectZ. Or check out the last episode to hear what that's all about. It's like four minutes, it's quick. This episode was recorded and mixed at Moreno Studios in Oakland, california. Subscribe to get every episode and if you're enjoying these and want to drop the Perfect Show, a perfect rating review, please do. It's the easiest way to support the show and remember. Actually, you know what. Just remember to be kind. Explore the world when you can eat good food and tell the people you love that you love them whenever you get the chance. Anyway, until next time. I'm Scott Moppin, and thanks for listening to the Perfect Show.

Speaker 7: 1:14:40

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Speaker 2: 1:15:03

I'll see you in the next one. Bye, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.