Fall cleaning

"Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you might have boarded it any day and gone home.  No, not 'home'--of course you couldn't call it home now; 'home' means that big red sandstone house of yours in the costlier part of the city. 'Home' means, in a way, this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me of the times that you had as a boy in Mariposa"--Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

We were cleaning house last week--why do it in the spring when you can do it in the autumn?  On Tuesday I got a new bed. (The first I heard of it was on waking up that morning!) My old bed got thrown out and I'm now sleeping on a futon bed from the attic.  John had to dismantle it to take it down here and put it back together.  I rather like futons!

On Thursday we aired out the house.  That meant opening the windows all afternoon in rather cool weather, and my room got so cold that I had to wear a sweater!  We also removed the wall-to-wall carpeting in the attic.

Thursday night my book club discussed Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.  It had a certain appeal for me because I come from a small town myself.  In December we'll be discussing a book of children's stories by Oscar Wilde, including "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant."

Friday night my historical movie watch party showed John Huston's 1966 epic The Bible... In the Beginning.  I had trouble staying awake!  They should have skipped the first half and gone straight into Abraham's story.

Finished How the Scots Invented the Modern World.  It was so fascinating that I've been doing something I never usually do and writing notes, listing all these important people and what they achieved in different categories...

This evening our MPP Jill Andrew was at her constituency office around the corner from my house handing out Hallowe'en candy!

Just now I have an unusually big headache!

Auditioning

"You have seen him, perhaps, playing poker in Peter Glover's room over the hardware store and trying to look as if he didn't hold three aces--in fact, giving absolutely no sign of it beyond the wild flush in his face and the fact that his hair stands on end"--Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

There's a new theatre group in my neighbourhood called the Hillcrest Village Community Players, who next year will be staging the musical Anne of Green Gables. (I saw the Charlottetown Festival seasonal production four times when I was young.) A week ago I auditioned for them, singing the Donkey Serenade and reciting "The Hill" from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, only I did it translated into Scottish dialect as "Th' Brae"!  I also did an audition for the dance chorus, and part of the routine we were learning was skipping.  That skipping took me right back to watching the show in Charlottetown...

I went through the Scots poem again and again, first getting all the lines learned and then working on the feeling.  I even recited in front of a mirror!  When I was practicing my singing, I also brought out the old songs I learned when I was taking lessons from Giuseppe Macina.  I still like Schubert's "Wohin?" (where to?) about following a little brook.  At the time I had to sing it in a lower key, but now I've raised my range to two octaves and can do the original!

I did my singing audition a cappella, and for my first try the director gave me a starting note a lot higher than the score to test the upper limit of my range! (Cute trick.) But second time she gave me the right note.  I think I did pretty well.  

The callback is on Thursday, so I had to reschedule my History Meetup a day earlier, on Wednesday.  I have hopes for the role of Matthew, but I'm up for anything! (I doubt they'll be casting me as Gilbert, of course...)

Tonight we started watching the series The Handmaid's Tale on Crave TV.  It's pretty disturbing, all right.  The musical score got a bit too off-putting for me.