Sunday, July 28, 2013

Three Days of Theater in the Berkshires!

What a three days of theater:  last night it was None But the Lonely Heart: The Strange Story of Tchaikovsky and Madame von Meck which we went to see for Jonny Epstein and Ariel Bock, but was really a lovely genre of mixed music, dance, singing and letters and other personal stuff from the main people it was about.  

It was written by Eve Wolf who has an organization called the Ensemble for the Romantic Century. She’s a pianist, and performed a lot of Tchaikovsky’s work, mostly with a cellist and violinist, sometimes with songs by Tchaikovsky, sung by an expressive young tenor, also with a couple of passages of ballet by a handsome male dancer in white and gold, maybe Swan Lake regalia?  Both the tenor and the dancer were also used as objects of Tchaikovsky’s yearning, and the text was the passionate strange letters  between him and Mme. von Meck’s.  

She supported him financially, and they agreed never to meet, but would sometimes spy on one another from a distance.  She bore eleven children, a story in itself, but not this one.  The strange climax is that she dropped him suddenly-- and this production gave intimations that she was being blackmailed: either break off with him or else his homosexuality would be revealed-- anyhow, it was just a super mix of music and text, with perhaps an emphasis on the music, lots of beautiful and fascinating people and costumes to look at.  Wolf has done other pieces like this:  has anyone else?  

Friday, July 26, 2013



We saw Shakespeare & Company’s Love’s Labour’s Lost last night, first of three!  Mucho dinero, much pleasure.  Anyhow, early play, contemp with Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer’s Night Dream, probably performed first in front of the Queen herself, with a lot of typical Elizabethan things that aren’t as hilarious nowadays, such as making fun of a Spanish character for his elaborate English and having the main men disguise themselves as “Muskovites” and speak with stupid Russian accents.  And there is a pageant/play-within-a-play-- how many times does Shakespeare do that?  And how must audiences  have loved those things.  All of this, of course, gives the Company lots of room for hijinks, but there’s not much they can do with latinate word play and elaborate figures of speech, extended metaphors, etc. And I still don’t get why they did it just post WWII, except for the neat women’s frocks and some good forties songs.
But-- in spite of all that, they once again did a terrific delightful play.  I continue to wonder how they do it-- and our audience last night included two bus loads of Upward Bound students from Boston who seemed occasionally bored but also often caught up in the fun, giggling over a character being called a “dick,” which may or may not have had quite the same connotation four hundred plus years ago as today.  And we all loved the runs through the audience and the appeals to audience members, and all the hamming it up.  But still Shakespeare & Company spoke the speeches, or at least most of them.
You can miss a lot of details in Shakespeare and still get the story.  And the story in Shakespeare can be pretty bad, and you still root for the good guys-- in this case, praise good Queen Bess!-- the women who give the men their comeuppance and promise to marry them in a year if they are good.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Heat Wave Broken?

    I just found (via Google) a Scientific American article on My Brain on Hot Weather that describes studies indicating that complex thinking is harder in hot weather, possibly because it takes more energy, specifically glucose, to cool us down than heat us up. 

On the other hand, the article states, if you read to the end, which I did for once, that this is mostly true on vacation/in a strange place/during unusual weather patterns. 

Good Old Adaptable Human beings think just fine when they grew up in the tropics.  For once a scientific article that makes perfectly good common sense.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Heat wave continues; I find I can write with a fan turned directly on me, and do other very focused tasks-- final papers for my summer class, for example.  I can take my walk.

What I've had trouble doing in the heat is anything of a scanning-planning nature, such as, making appointments, making plans.  And above all-- anything that requires make-up!!

Sunday, July 14, 2013

I've been doing summer work on my career, namely, giving away a free ebook and setting up a Facebook Page for my books.  I already am on regular Facebook, and find the cacophony gives me headaches. So last night, I was checking how things looked on the new page, and I saw my first indication of the outcome of the George Zimmerman trial, which gave me a real twist in the gut.

Meanwhile, in quick succession, messages from friends who are crying or already out demonstrating or-- lawyers! -- commenting that given established law, there was no way the jury could have decided otherwise. WTF, you know???