I have influence!
You may remember that I wrote a while back that I had attended a poetry workshop at my local library. While there, I recommended to the group Stephen Fry's book, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. Yesterday when I was there returning books, she came over and said, "I ordered that book you recommended!" Maybe I should make a list . . .
I went to see a play last Wednesday that was utterly and unremittingly dark and depressing. The Long Red Road is about an alcoholic who nine years earlier caused a car accident that kills one of his daughters and costs his wife her legs. He flees to an Indian reservation in South Dakota where, at the time of the play, he has hooked up with Annie, a young woman who teaches there. After he nearly gets himself killed in a bar, Annie calls his brother (who has been living with the wife and surviving daughter) for help. Now, I don't necessarily mind dark plays. But this one really piled it on. At one point, I'm thinking, "all that's left is for brother to molest daughter", so, of course, he did.
Better and definitely more light-hearted was Friday night's opera, L'Elisir d'amore. That was fun. Frank Lopardo was Nemorino, and for a guy who's been around for decades, he was very believable as the young swain. Actually, all the singers were good actors as well as in good voice.
Last night I went to a concert at the Newberry. The Center for Renaissance Studies had a symposium on "Disease and Disability in the Middle Ages and Renaissance", so the Newberry Consort did a program on "Disease and Disability in Music", including such works as Anthony Holborne's "Sicke, sicke, and very sicke", John Dowland's "In Darkness let me dwell", and what was probably an audience favorite, Marin Marais' "The bladder stone operation" (really!). There was a wine-and-cheese reception afterward, which I hadn't realized, and everyone had a good deal of fun.
Today, I went over to campus for a showing of Roman Holiday. In conjunction with the Smart Museum's exhibit, Sites to Behold: Travels in Eighteenth-Century Rome, there's a film series, The Grand Tour and the Myth of Italy in Anglo-Saxon Films. This was the first one I've been able to get to, and was glad I could, because, shockingly, I'd never seen it before.
I got my hair cut the other evening, and stopped by Powell's, coming out with a couple of books, a biography of Peggy Guggenheim and a book on Japanese books and scrolls, surprisingly inexpensive for an Oak Knoll publication (they are so expensive to start with that I can't usually afford them used!).
Saturday, I was really naughty! I was downtown for a board meeting and decided to go shoe shopping. I've been wanting a pair of gray boots, and found a luscious pair in gray ultrasuede. Very versatile as they can be scrunched down, or worn with the cuff up so they are just above the knee, or with the cuff folded down so they are knee-high. Très cool. But then I found a couple more pair, a reasonably sedate pair of gray leather shoes and a rather funky tri-color pair of '20s-ish heels.
The board meeting itself was good. We're in the black, having made actual profits at seminars and the annual dinner, and membership is way up. We're planning a party, an "Irish wake for Clarence Darrow", which should be tremendous fun. We'd just co-sponsored a two-day forensics seminar, which I attended, and which was really an excellent program. So we are quite happy, and voted a raise for our executive director (not that she's making much - it's a very part-time gig - but she deserves every penny).
I went to see a play last Wednesday that was utterly and unremittingly dark and depressing. The Long Red Road is about an alcoholic who nine years earlier caused a car accident that kills one of his daughters and costs his wife her legs. He flees to an Indian reservation in South Dakota where, at the time of the play, he has hooked up with Annie, a young woman who teaches there. After he nearly gets himself killed in a bar, Annie calls his brother (who has been living with the wife and surviving daughter) for help. Now, I don't necessarily mind dark plays. But this one really piled it on. At one point, I'm thinking, "all that's left is for brother to molest daughter", so, of course, he did.
Better and definitely more light-hearted was Friday night's opera, L'Elisir d'amore. That was fun. Frank Lopardo was Nemorino, and for a guy who's been around for decades, he was very believable as the young swain. Actually, all the singers were good actors as well as in good voice.
Last night I went to a concert at the Newberry. The Center for Renaissance Studies had a symposium on "Disease and Disability in the Middle Ages and Renaissance", so the Newberry Consort did a program on "Disease and Disability in Music", including such works as Anthony Holborne's "Sicke, sicke, and very sicke", John Dowland's "In Darkness let me dwell", and what was probably an audience favorite, Marin Marais' "The bladder stone operation" (really!). There was a wine-and-cheese reception afterward, which I hadn't realized, and everyone had a good deal of fun.
Today, I went over to campus for a showing of Roman Holiday. In conjunction with the Smart Museum's exhibit, Sites to Behold: Travels in Eighteenth-Century Rome, there's a film series, The Grand Tour and the Myth of Italy in Anglo-Saxon Films. This was the first one I've been able to get to, and was glad I could, because, shockingly, I'd never seen it before.
I got my hair cut the other evening, and stopped by Powell's, coming out with a couple of books, a biography of Peggy Guggenheim and a book on Japanese books and scrolls, surprisingly inexpensive for an Oak Knoll publication (they are so expensive to start with that I can't usually afford them used!).
Saturday, I was really naughty! I was downtown for a board meeting and decided to go shoe shopping. I've been wanting a pair of gray boots, and found a luscious pair in gray ultrasuede. Very versatile as they can be scrunched down, or worn with the cuff up so they are just above the knee, or with the cuff folded down so they are knee-high. Très cool. But then I found a couple more pair, a reasonably sedate pair of gray leather shoes and a rather funky tri-color pair of '20s-ish heels.
The board meeting itself was good. We're in the black, having made actual profits at seminars and the annual dinner, and membership is way up. We're planning a party, an "Irish wake for Clarence Darrow", which should be tremendous fun. We'd just co-sponsored a two-day forensics seminar, which I attended, and which was really an excellent program. So we are quite happy, and voted a raise for our executive director (not that she's making much - it's a very part-time gig - but she deserves every penny).