Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Danny Boy

I mentioned that I sang "Danny Boy" at the History Discussion Group the other week.  Since this is the season of St. Patrick's Day, I got to do it a few more times.

Last week I sang it to the memoir group and they were charmed.  The room where we meet has a curved ceiling which causes echoes.  That's an obstacle to hearing conversation, but it's well suited to singing.

Saturday I sang it at the Play Readthrough Meetup, which I hadn't been to for a while, at the Annette library.  We had fun reading through J.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which I saw on the stage back at age eight! (I was a bit late because the St. Clair streetcar wasn't operating, but that didn't matter.) I think I can speak with a brogue!

Sunday I sang it for the Reading Out Loud Meetup, where the topic was Irish writing.  I read the chapter in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels where he visiting the grand academy of Lagodo (he was making fun of the Royal Society, I now realize); the section of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes where he made good money selling a banned magazine page on birth control; the introductory verses of the first three cantos of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen; and W.B. Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter."

I've made a list of all the music the choir's done since I joined it a dozen years ago, and printing it out took a dozen pages!  (I'd saved all the scores they gave me.) I was going to give it to Paolo at Monday night's rehearsal, but it got delayed to tomorrow night!

Tonight I went to a Theology Meetup with a pastor talking about translating and codifying the Torah.  This stuff fascinates me!

Reading Doctor Zhivago, I've found myself slipping in and out of it. (I felt the same way reading a long essay by fellow Russian Joseph Brodsky.)

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