Several Meetups

"Actually, 'forsook' is acceptable usage too." "Forsook you and the horse you rode in on!"--August:  Osage County

Sunday afternoon was Reading Out Loud.  The subject this month was science fiction.  My earlier efforts got weak attendance, but this time there were seven people.  One attendee had some copies of a zine he'd published, and the other had a manuscript of a fantasy novel she'd been working on!  I read the penultimate chapter of Tom Swift and His Giant Robot, along with the closing passages of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and H.G. Wells' The Time Machine.

Tuesday I had another singing lesson with Andriy.  Not only is he really cheap, he'll continue for an hour and a half, until I get tired!  I've figured out that Route 1 on York Region Transit will take me along High Tech Road (they actually have a street with that name!) to Silver Linden Drive, not far from Andriy's house.  His focus is on technique, and I think I'm learning a lot.

Wednesday afternoon I went to the Play Reading Meetup at Annette library.  We read through August:  Osage County, which was really fun.  Now I'll have to see the movie!

Wednesday night I went to the Political Discussion Meetup at the Fox & Firkin near Eglinton station.  Much talk about the Trump campaign.  I still wish they'd find a somewhat quieter place.

Last night I went to Rose's Non-Fiction Meetup for the first time in a while.  Our book was History's People, the same book my history group will be discussing in a couple of weeks!  Afterward we hung out at Jack Astor's, where I had a cream soda float.

I've finally finished the winter issue of Lapham's Quarterly (on spying), and started the spring issue on disasters.

I think I need to get my eyes tested again.  The place where I went before is gone, so I'll have to find a new optometrist.

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and INHERIT THE WIND

"The only man who can strut while sitting down"--Inherit the Wind

Sunday afternoon I saw the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera at the Revue.  It was their first movie without Zeppo, having moved from Paramount to MGM.  It was their biggest financial success, but it isn't my favourite of theirs. (That's Horse Feathers!) Parts of it are very funny, but there's a really lame romantic plot between Alan Jones (in the Zeppo role) and Kitty Carlisle.  There's also a bad-guy opera star who slaps Harpo around, as annoyingly obvious as Billy Zane in Titanic. (Part of the movie is set on an ocean liner.)

Thursday night the History Discussion Group watched the video of Stanley Kramer's movie of Inherit the Wind, a fictional play based on the Scopes Monkey Trial.  It's a pretty good adaptation, with veterans Spencer Tracey and Frederic March in fine form as veteran lawyers.

Today I went to a history walk in High Park.  It was hosted by Trevor, who has a video company in the Junction that emphasizes the Steam Punk fashion.  I met Martha, whom I haven't seen since we were in Nancy's acting class.  That reminded me of how we did the exercise in that class of creating a character from scratch, and I came up with a socialist revolutionary from 1914. (Trevor's character was from 1880 or so.)

Singing lessons

I've started taking singing lessons from Andriy Kartuzov, whom I know from the choir.  He charges even less than my first teacher Giuseppe Macina did!  We had our first lesson today, and he takes a more technical approach than Giuseppe did.  I've taken to moving my arms around like an Egyptian dancer while singing to keep them relaxed.

Getting to Andriy's place in Richmond Hill was an adventure in itself!  The first lesson was supposed to be on Tuesday, but I went to Caymus Street instead of Callowhill Street!  Today I carried a printout of his location from Google Maps, as I should have done previously. (There's a lot of my mother in me--she could be goofy about finding places too.) His neighbourhood has some exotic street names like Far Niente and Monet and Iron Horse...

I finished Margaret MacMillan's History's People the other day.  I didn't care for the part about politicians, but liked the part about diarists.  Now I'm reading Hemingway's In Our Time for my book club, and the spying issue of Lapham's Quarterly.

Tonight I saw a documentary about the making of Marilyn Monroe's The Misfits on Youtube.  A sad, poignant story.

We finished the second season of Fargo.  It was even more brilliant and original than the first season!

FARGO

"You're a Gerhardt!" "That's like Jupiter saying to Pluto, 'You're a planet!"--Fargo

I wasn't quite finished with NYC when I got home.  On Tuesday night we watched the documentary Six by Sondheim, about Stephen Sondheim's career as a Broadway composer, focusing on half a dozen of his songs.  Then I went to the Bloor and saw another documentary, Norman Lear:  Just Another Version of You, about the '70s sitcom creator who created the anti-Moral Majority movement People for the American Way.  The Bloor showed the giant ant movie Them! on Thursday and I would have seen it, but I thought it was at 9:00 when it was actually at 7:00.

Wednesday night the History Discussion Group met at Scallywag's for a Roaring Twenties event discussing Bill Bryson's One Summer:  America 1927. (Jane didn't care for the book so I lent her the 1929 book What a Year! which she liked better.) For the occasion I wore my fedora with my green cardigan and a tie.  There were just three of us but we had a good time.  Margo from Belarus (not to be confused with Margo from Poland), who'd suggested the idea, couldn't be there because she's visiting the Maritimes.  She passed through my hometown of Sackville, N.B.!

We've started watching the second season of the TV version of Fargo, which Moira borrowed from the library.  This is a prequel to the first season, set back in 1979, back when the policewoman's father who runs the diner was a cop himself.  This is how movies should be adapted for TV:   loosely similar, with somewhat parallel settings and characters, but with the same sensibility. 

We're getting into corn season and I had some corn on the cob for dinner! (It's good to have an oblong butter dish so you can roll the cobs in the butter.)

I've been watching some interesting videos on Youtube talking about languages.  Today I actually took a stab at learning Korea's Hangul alphabet!  I also saw the hilarious Gavin McInnes video "Don't Move to New York City."  I just took a free personality test at visualdna.com which concluded I'm a "stargazer" type.

Weekend in New York

When I get stressed, my mouth goes dry.  I noticed that on a weekend tour of New York I took with a group of 50 people whom I hooked up with through the People Over 50 Meetup.  It was all a bit overwhelming.  I made the mistake of entering the Times Square area, where there's now street repairs going on, forcing people into an even tighter squeeze than usual.  I ended up not going to any shows but returning to the hotel early.

We left Friday morning and were on the bus almost around the clock.  There were about six women for every man.  The most scenic part of the drive was in New York State southeast of Syracuse, in James Fenimore Cooper country.  We stayed at the Empire Meadowlands hotel in Secaucus, New Jersey.  I was in a room with Peter, who'd coincidentally been sitting next to me on the bus.  I heard that the rooms on the eastern side had a view of Manhattan, but we were on the west.  He and I and a woman whose name I've forgotten (I warned her I was terrible at remembering names!) had dinner at a Japanese buffet in Secaucus.  On both Saturday and Sunday I took a New Jersey transit bus back to the hotel, which was an adventure in itself. (Route 129 can drop you off just around the corner from the hotel!) At the hotel breakfast I ate yogurt for the first time in years.  It isn't that I didn't like yogurt but that I'd just lost interest in it.

Saturday we took on a tour guide and drove around Manhattan.  He was talking about a public dance Friday nights at the Lincoln Centre Plaza (A Midsummer Night's Swing) and said, "Young men and women come together to spawn." Classic New Yorkese!  We got behind schedule because of heavy traffic and only got a short time at the 9/11 Memorial Park, but no complaints from me about that.  We ate at an upmarket food court in Rockefeller Center, where I had a lobster roll that was a lot pricier than back home.  In the afternoon we did a walking tour of Central Park, where we saw a crowd of people staring at their iPads, playing Pokemon Go!  I had dinner at Carnegie Deli:  a corned beef and egg sandwich so huge that I ended up skipping dinner on Sunday.  American food can make me feel unclean.

On Sunday morning it was raining sore. (Thank goodness I took my raincoat!) In the morning we visited Ellis Island but didn't get to stay there long.  I could have stayed with the main group, had lunch at Chelsea Market and walked through the High Line Park, but like a couple of others I let the bus take me on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  My lunch was a hot dog--a New York dog, with sauerkraut as well as relish--which I ate outside the Shakespeare in the Park theatre, where they were performing Troilus and Cressida with snatches of heavy metal music.  My favourite part of the Met is the American Wing, but I went through some other areas and saw stuff like a 17th-century French painting where a young woman asks an old gypsy for her fortune as her entourage picks her pockets!  And there was this bust of the young Roman emperor Caracalla, with an unimperial perplexed expression like Hamlet.

One of the group went home by train, so on the way back the bus had one empty seat, and guess who got extra space to stretch? (I was born lucky!) I was talking to a very friendly Italian-Canadian called Pena, who'll now hook up with me on Facebook.  As I took the TTC home I saw Toronto in a new way, since my extra alertness wasn't relaxed.

I'm not really one for group tours.  Next time I'll go to NYC alone, stay for a week and try to do things a bit more slowly.  It's the seventh time I've visited that city, but I always feel like I've only scratched the surface.  Great cities are fine for visiting, especially London, which I lived in for eight months so I got below the surface a bit.  But it's better to live in a near-great city like Toronto!