Shameless Plug

So I know I don't do this too often, but I'm in a performance of Verdi's Requiem with the New York Philharmonic tonight, Saturday, and next Tuesday. It's been a wonderful rehearsal process, and we opened last night to a full house, and it sounded fabulous.

Now, I know most of you don't even live in New York, and even if you do, you don't have the kind of time and money to get a ticket to see this performance, but if you do and you do, get a ticket, because it's really good. If, however you would love to be there but you can't, the performances are being recorded and will be broadcast sometime in the very near future, presumably on WQXR. I did a Google search, and it seems that the broadcast itself is owned by WFMT and they're shopping it out to whichever radio station wants to play it. Call your classical radio station and request it! Dude, this is sincerely the best performance of Verdi's Requiem I have ever been a part of, and although hearing it on the radio won't be as cool as listening to it live, it's definitely a good second.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled program.

Ostara

Today was the first day of spring. Ostara, the ORIGINAL Easter, is here. I usually haven't made a big deal out of this, but I've always wanted to. Instead, I've gotten excited in my pagan way during the Christian Easter by coloring lots of Easter eggs and celebrating my inner child.

But this year, I was able to celebrate the first day of spring the way I've wanted to, with Ray (because he wanted to celebrate it too). He got me a huge bouquet of flowers and we went out to dinner. I think from now on, it's going to be our Valentine's Day. After all, flowers are much cheaper AFTER Valentine's Day, and they mean more when they're not obligatory for some made up Hallmark holiday.

Of course, the bouquet was so big I had to go buy a large vase just so I could stick the flowers in water. Apparently all the vases in the house are being used by leather roses. Go figure.

One, TWO, Three, FOUR

Monday night Ray and I went to see Billy Joel in concert. I should have gotten him tickets as a Christmas present when they went on sale back around December, but I didn't realize he wanted to go until all the cheap seats were sold out and the only ones left were $100 and up. And since the only time I'm going to spend $100/person on a concert is if a) it's for a really good charity, or b) a friend has made the big time, I figured he could live with the disappointment.

But when one of my roommates got his hands on $65 tickets, I jumped at the opportunity (especially since Ray actually WAS pretty disappointed I didn't get them for Christmas). So we went on Monday night and had a blast. Billy Joel did a lot of obscure stuff, which was nice to hear for a change. When he left the stage and the stadium went dark, everybody who had a phone pulled it out and turned the screen on so that there were tens of thousands of little white & blue dots all over the stadium, kind of like that cell phone commercial that's been on TV recently. I'm not surprised, but this is the first time I've actually seen cell phones being used as the new lighters. Pretty cool.

Ray was having a great time. But as he was moving to the music, I realized that he is afflicted with a terrible disease called WMRD (white man's rhythm deficiency). It is curable, but it takes years of intense physical and psychological therapy. Ray has never been treated, and although he hides it well, it's clear that he's in the late stages of the disease, which means that it will never truly go away, no matter how much therapy he undergoes.

The good news is that he is blissfully unaware of his problem. The bad news is that I, as a professional musician, was acutely aware. I'd be tapping my leg to the beat, and he would start tapping along with me, then get slightly off and slightly more off, and slightly more off until he was in a whole different tempo than Billy and me. Have you ever sat at a stop light with your turn signal on in front of someone else with their turn signal on, and noticed that the rate of your clicker was either very slightly slower or slightly faster than the guy in front of you? Every once in a while your beats will be in synch with each other for about three or four clicks, and then you get off again.

That's the way it was with Ray. I'd grab his leg and start tapping the beat on it, but he would look at me, puzzled, and move his leg even more forcefully to his own beat. I tried to show him about clapping on beats two and four, not one and three, but he had no idea what I was talking about. I mean, it's not like Billy Joel is funk; I mean, this is a white man singing white songs to other white folk. Most people with mild or moderate WMRD can grasp his rhythms. But not Ray. I fear there is no hope.

Some people call me Maurice

What a surreal day I had yesterday!

After coming home and falling into bed at 11:30 or so Saturday night (I was up in NY helping my brother with his Tisch audition material), I was awakened at 4 AM by Scratchy, who was meowing at the door wanting to be let out. Usually when he does this, I don't even remember his meows because I instinctively get up as soon as my subconscious registers it, but this time I kept dreaming about being in choir practice and having one person in the choir who just couldn't quite hit the note and was scooping up to it. After about three takes of the dream, I finally realized that this person sounded way too much like a cat meowing and, oh, yeah, I guess Scratchy wants to be let out.

A more portentous dream I could not have had.

The morning started out as a usual Sunday morning: the alarm went off, I hit snooze a couple times, and then finally rolled myself out of bed and into the shower so I could to church. I was still a little groggy from lack of sleep, so instead of wearing black tights that would have matched the black blouse I was wearing with my burgundy skirt, I pulled on a pair of dark brown tights. It wasn't until I was walking from my car to church that I looked down at my shoes and realized my mistake. Too late now, I figured. Of course, there was also a big run in one of the legs that clued me into the fact that I didn't have the mental capacity today to dress myself properly.

Church itself was pretty normal. We have a new assistant rector with abysmal writing skills, and I've recently taken to counting the number of times he repeats a word or a phrase within the sermon...today the word "life" came in first with a whopping 35 repetitions, with the word "priority" a far second with only 21. I think it wouldn't be so noticeable if he didn't use the exact same words in a different order to fill three sentences in succession. He's fond of phrases like, "We all prioritize things that matter in our life; in other words, things that matter in life get prioritized." Uh, did anyone point out to you that you're not using other words at all, but the SAME EXACT WORDS? I might forgive him his redundancy if he created a chiasmus with them (like The Sphinx in Mystery Men: "Learn to hide your strikes from your opponent and you'll more easily strike his hide"), but he's not nearly that clever.

After church, we had to sing in an evensong at another church in Asbury Park. It was several church choirs combined to sing at this one church -- they're hoping to make it an annual event, which by itself it not a bad idea, but they'd better put someone else in charge next time. The whole affair, from the rehearsals up to the concert itself, was infuriatingly disorganized. Asbury Park is on the Jersey Shore (some people recognize it as Bruce Springsteen's home town), but it's a good hour's drive away from our church in Moorestown. By the time we were done with the second service at church, I barely had enough time to scarf down a sandwich before all the section leaders piled into one car and headed out to the shore.

Asbury Park should be renamed as Ass-bury Park. That town is a real dump. The church is smack dab in the middle of a pretty bad neighborhood, and we all agreed if we never had to return it would be too soon. When we got there, the airhead in charge was unable to answer a lot of questions and had clearly not communicated what needed to be done in the rehearsal with the other church choir directors or with the clergy from her own church.

We were also dealing with the added bonus of children's choirs. Our children's choir managed to behave themselves, thanks to one of the moms who sat opposite them in the choir stalls and glared at them the whole time. But the other kids didn't have that type of oversight. One kid sat in the back and didn't even pretend to sing; another one didn't have any music because some of the other kids had stolen it. There were no parents anywhere; I assume they must have thought with 40+ adults around, there was plenty of supervision. Boy, were they wrong.

The concert itself went surprisingly well, with the exception of the tone-deaf priest who really wanted to cantor. He had been practicing all month, you see, and was really nervous about it. Too bad his chant didn't have any resemblance to the notes on the page at all, and our harmonized responses would have crashed and burned if it weren't for the quick-thinking organist, who played our chord before each response.

When the concert was over, I couldn't get out of there quicker. On my way home, I called Ray, who asked if I could stop and get some pizza for dinner. Pizza sounded good. And beer. Lots of beer. But when I got to the pizza place, they had an order ready for me under the name "Maurice." You have to be seriously not listening to an order if you hear "Maurice" from "Maren." Ray even spelled it for the dude. So I guess now you can call me the space cowboy or the gangster of love if you want...

What a perfect end to my wacky, crazy day.

Outer Space

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer. My dad got me a telescope for my ninth birthday, and I looked through it every night at the moon. I had a big map of the moon and tried to memorize where all the various seas were. I was constantly amazed at the fact that I would have to continually adjust the telescope to follow the moon through the night sky.

I also subscribed to the 3-2-1 Contact magazine and had a huge NASA poster above my bed. My dad took me to the planetarium frequently, and I dreamt of going to space camp and working on the next space shuttle launch. I was obsessed with all the different constellations, and even without the aid of my telescope I would try to find as many recognizable stars in the night sky as I could.

Then, of course, I realized how much math went into astronomy, and the dream faded away (those of you who have ever seen me try to do math in my head know what I'm talking about).

But I've never stopped following the stories about the different space shuttles and keeping up on what NASA is up to these days. So when I read about the fact that the Cassini probe detected geysers of potential liquid water on one of Saturn's moons, I felt a stab of regret that I couldn't
become that astronomer. Maybe I would have been in the office that received those first pictures. Maybe I would have been in the meeting where they realized this may be a key to finding out about possible extraterrestrial life. Wouldn't that have been cool?