Still recovering

This was a heavy cold!  I missed yesterday's show, to be on the safe side.  But I hope I can make it tomorrow. (Several other people have been absent.

Monday afternoon I made it to the memoir slam.  Instead of writing about "November," I took it on myself to write an independent piece under the subject "Bereavement." They thought it was quite good.  The other subject was "How smart am I?" and I think I managed to be pretty funny.

Monday evening I also made choir practice.  Our new piece was the famous Welsh folk song "The Ash Grove." When we sang "So Long, Farewell," I pointed out that when the women sing "I'd like to stay and taste my first champagne," they should be saying "Yes?" before we say "No!" (For some reason, the score had them saying "No?") I'd watched a clip of the number from the movie version to confirm this.

Tuesday I went to the chorus rehearsal for the gala concert.  We're singing the Champagne Song from Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus (in English, so it's pretty easy) and the Anvil Chorus from Verdi's Il Trovatore.

I finished my grapefruit, but thankfully Moira bought a new batch!

The Friday crossword puzzle from The New York Times was tougher than usual.  Or maybe I'm just less patient.

Under the weather

"What country would you like to fly to?" "Wyoming?"--Dog Day Afternoon

Monday was Family Day, so both the memoir slam and choir practice were cancelled.  I did go out to see Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon at the Event Screen with the Movie Meetup group. (I'd seen it three times before, but never on the big screen.) With Al Pacino at his best, it seems to get even better with time.  I shared my popcorn and half of it got spilled, but I was in such a good mood that I didn't care!

During hell week I was joking about how it would be nice to get sick for the next weeks, and on Tuesday I did get sick and had to miss the second-week opera performances.  Be careful what you wish for, even in jest.  That night I went to the gala rehearsal and found out it was just for soloists. (The chorus starts rehearsing next week.) But I got the chance to tell Beatrice in person that I'd have to miss some performances, and she was understanding.  This is why I don't have soloist ambitions:  too much riding on you.  I remember the year when Jay Lambie was lead tenor in all twelve of our shows--imagine if he'd got sick!

I took my last sleeping pill and Wednesday I was in bed till 16:00!  I bought some nice big grapefruit.  Father's diet forbids them, but for someone in my condition they're the perfect food.  The best way to eat them is by skinning the sections and just eating the pulp, which removes most of the bitter taste.

I've been watching some episodes of the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie on Youtube, a guilty pleasure from my childhood.  Sure, it's a chauvinist male fantasy, but Barbara Eden had a flair for sexy comedy.  I haven't been up to reading more of Our Mutual Friend, but I finished Shigeru Mizuki's manga about fighting in World War II.  Looking forward to the third volume, about his making ends meet with one arm in postwar Japan.

Hell week

Hell week is finally over.  Six performances in six days!  There's always one point where I start wondering, "Why can't I just get sick for the next three weeks?" (I imagine that's a common feeling.) Of course, for me the hardest part isn't performing onstage but waiting in the wings.

At the Don Giovanni dress rehearsal Tuesday, at the point where the devils come out onstage to drag DG down, nobody came out!  The people in front were indecisive, and the ones behind got stuck.  (Some of us were late coming up from downstairs--including me!-- because this year the stage manager didn't have an assistant to remind us.) But we got it right in the later shows.

In the first scene of Masked Ball, there's a moment when we hand our scrolls to Ricardo, but we kept doing it late!  I eventually realized that was because we were supposed to hand them over while he was still singing, so we had to overcome the chorister's instinct not to get into a soloist's space while he's performing his number.

I bought the second volume of Shigeru Mizuki's history of Japan at the time of World War II. (This volume is about the period from 1939 to 1944.) I was reading it downstairs on Saturday's Don Giovanni, and it was so fascinating that I was late coming up and missed the "Che Piacere" number!  Nobody died.  Mostly, I've been reading Our Mutual Friend backstage.

Moira and Puitak came to yesterday's Masked Ball show.  She says it's one of our best productions.  They were late opening the place, so some of us had to wait outside in unusually cold weather! (I was only a few minutes early.)

When the legend becomes fact...

"You know M.R.F. [my respected father], but not as well as I do.  If you knew him as well as I do, he would amuse you"--Our Mutual Friend

Sunday was the ROLT event "When the Legend Becomes Fact..." with folklore as the topic.  I read the Grimm Brothers stories "The Poor Boy in His Grave" and "The Goose Girl at the Well," and the penultimate chapter of T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone, where he pulls it out.  I was also going to read Hans Christian Andersen's "What the Old Man Does Is Always Right," but someone else volunteered to read it.  Jane read a First Nations story of the creation of the world, and someone else read the first paragraphs in the Ghormengast trilogy.

Thursday was my 53rd birthday.  We bought a strawberry shortcake and ordered Chinese food.  That night I saw a PBS documentary about the Amish.

At choir practice last night we did "So Long, Farewell" from The Sound of Music. (I remember seeing the number in the movie when I was little and feeling embarrassed for these kids having to sing in front of all those people.) Don, who drove me to the subway after practice, died of a heart attack last week!  Beatrice mentioned the death of someone called Don last week, yet I somehow didn't realize it was the same Don.  Now Giovanni will be giving me a lift.

Hell Week starts tonight at the opera.  Two dress rehearsals and four performances in six days!  I'll be bringing my black pants and sweater to wear under my cloak when we're devils dragging Don Giovanni to the bottomless pit.

New computer

My new computer arrived yesterday!  It's fairly similar to the old one, but a new gadget is always fun.  I've already started writing a translation of a Portuguese pamphlet in the "lives of saints" series, focusing on Catholics martyred in Japan four centuries ago.  Once again, I prefer my old-fashioned wired mouse.

Monday there was a lot of snow.  Both Selia and Ernie missed the memoir slam, so I took charge. (The subjects were your favourite swimming hole and a sense of home.) There were nine people there, a figure I reported to the librarian as Selia usually does.  That night choir practice was cancelled again because of the weather, but I hadn't checked my email and only figured it out when I arrived there.

Yesterday Malabar delivered the new costumes for the opera and I helped unpack them as usual.  My Don Giovanni costume includes a habitant-like cap!  We wore the costumes for dress rehearsals of A Masked Ball last night, and Don Giovanni tonight. (Don Giovanni is a long opera, yet it never seems long!)

On Youtube I've found playthroughs of the King's Quest games, including number seven which I mastered years ago (with help from online cheats).  I've also found Cinema Sins, which features videos listing off all the things wrong with movies like Titanic (e.g. 20 minutes of false suspense over whether Rose will live, when we know she'll live because she's telling the story!) or telling us "How to make a Brad Pitt movie"!

Classic Book Club

"But, according to the success with which you put this and that together, you get a woman and a fish apart, or a Mermaid in combination.  And Mr. Inspector could turn out nothing better than a Mermaid, which no judge and jury would believe in"--Our Mutual Friend

Yesterday afternoon the Classic Book Club Meetup met and discussed Moby-Dick.  Some twenty people had said they were coming, but I made the reservation for just eight, and that was the exact number that showed up!  I had to raise membership dues (for this and ROLT) from five to seven dollars because Meetup has raised their fees.  I suggested that after Our Mutual Friend we do The Yearling and (after Jane's input) Vanity Fair, and they seemed happy with that.

Afterward I went to see some silent comedy shorts at the Revue.  They had Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (the one with the huge waiter), an early Mabel Normand, one with Gloria Swanson and Wallace Beery, and one with Charley Chase.

Tonight I went to choir practice, but only when I got there did I realize that there was no rehearsal this week. (D'OH!) Oh well, I like the routine of leaving the house on Mondays.

I found the classic Laurel & Hardy short Dirty Work on Youtube!  That's the one where they're chimney sweeps in a mad scientist's house. (The butler looks at them and mutters, "Somewhere an electric chair is waiting!" Don't think he likes them.) I also found the episode of The Cisco Kid that was given the What's Up, Tiger Lily? treatment on an episode of SCTV, but not the introduction where Edith Prickley says: "You like reruns?  Good!"

Toting time

Today I brought in my computer for examination at the Apple store in Yorkdale Mall.  It fit into my art portfolio, lined with a quilt, but was quite a bale to tote.  (I kept putting it down for a rest.  At times like these, I don't feel so bad about being unemployed.) Maybe we should have put it in a suitcase with wheels.

It turned out that the problem is with the hardware, and involves some parts that they no longer make!  I can still look for a repairman--I'd like to save my translation files--but it's over six years old and we'll have to get a new one pretty soon.  When I got home I felt like going back to bed!

Wednesday night we started blocking Don Giovanni at the opera.  The chorus has a small singing role but we have a lot of non-singing stuff to do.

Thursday night I saw Peter Jackson's third Hobbit movie, the one about the battle of the five armies except I'm not sure which armies they were exactly.  It was about what I expected:  lots of battles and special effects and new age stuff.

I've found a documentary series on Youtube that I've been hoping to find for a while:  the 1964 CBS production World War One, narrated by Robert Ryan. (I saw the greater part of the show on a PBS station some thirty years ago.) It's a pretty masterful treatment, with lots of old films and photos.

On Netflix I started looking at the fourth season of Good Times, after father John Amos left because Jimmie Walker's J.J. had come to dominate the show. (Mother Esther Rolle missed the fifth season for similar reasons.) Pretty cheesy, really.

Computer trouble

My computer's been on the blink since the weekend. (It's some sort of kernel panic trouble so it won't start up.) I got an appointment with a specialist at Yorkdale Mall on Saturday afternoon.  I've had to use the downstairs computer which Father and Moira normally use.

Saturday I finished Dicken's Hard Times.  Since then I've started reading the foreigners issue of Lapham's Quarterly.  It looks like a good one! Now it's time to start Our Mutual Friend.

Saturday I saw a documentary at the Bloor about the last days of South Vietnam in 1975 and the last-minute operation to evacuate refugees. (A few nights later I was dreaming about President Ford.) The American ambassador was in denial until very late in the day.

Sunday afternoon was the first event of John Snow's book club.  We talked about Dickens' Hard Times.  There were a lot of no-shows, but he still got six people.  The next event is Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, but I'll have to miss it because it's on the same day as the March ROLT Meetup.  John's also started a second book club that's going to read Dombey and Son, but I can only read one long Dickens book at a time and Our Mutual Friend has priority. (Too bad:  I do want to read Dombey and Son someday!)

Monday night at choir practice we started Giulio Caccini's "Ave Maria." (The only lines are "Ave Maria" and "Amen"!) Last night I had to leave opera rehearsal early because I wasn't feeling well.  But I'm feeling well enough to attend tonight.

A filling

"He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been--in that nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they had not been whistled away--by the fervour of this reproach"--Hard Times

Monday night choir practice resumed.  We're doing a new number from Fiddler on the Roof  combining "Sunrise, Sunset" and "Sabbath Prayer."  Tuesday night opera rehearsal also resumed.  We managed to block out all the chorus scenes from Masked Ball.

Wednesday night I saw Charlie Chaplin's City Lights yet again, at the Event Screen with a Movie Meetup group.  Among his other talents, Chaplin was a brilliant music composer!

Today I went to the dentist and got a new filling in my lower left molars.  The main inconvenience was waiting for the freezing to wear off. (The other day someone in one of my Facebook groups asked us to name three things that are better than they used to be, and I wrote, "Dentistry, toilets and the internet.")

Recently I've been watching the new miniseries about Marco Polo on Netflix.  It's competent hokum, action-packed if rather improbable.  Some parts are sleazy, hard to follow and even too dark to see. (The 1982 miniseries was so cheesy that they lifted the whole Tibetan sequence from Tintin, including the bald monk levitating!) For all its lavishness, there's something oddly depressing about it:  I felt the same way about what I saw of The Tudors.

The Great White North

Yesterday afternoon was going to be the new year's first acting class, but it got cancelled.  Instead I saw the documentary In Search of Mozart at the Bloor.  Lots of Mozart music and discussion of his musical development.  Shame that it had only one showing and Moira missed it because she hadn't yet returned from Kingston.

This afternoon was the latest ROLT event.  A dozen people had said they were coming; a made a reservation for six; three showed up.  One of them was the author M.H. Callway, who read an exciting passage from her new novel Windigo Fire; the other was a Parisienne who's only been in Canada a few months.  I read Pauline Johnson's poem "The Song My Paddle Sings"; the passage in Jack London's The Call of the Wild where the dog Buck tows a thousand pounds of flour a hundred yards to win a bet for his master; the passage in L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle where Barney saves Valancy from an oncoming train; and the passage in Mazo de la Roche's Young Renny where Renny visits a farm and a woman reads tea leaves and tells his fortune.  Next month's topic will be folklore.

I've finished watching that Hollywood series on YouTube, except they don't have the second-last episode about Clara Bow and John Gilbert. (It had some BBC content that got it blocked.)

This last week I got careless about taking my Cipralex in the morning, and had some intense dreams.  One was this Harry Potter-Lord of the Rings type of adventure story where a race had to leave the surface of the earth when their enemies took over, and took a descending path lower and lower into the bowels of the earth, meeting many different species, until they came a bottom level with really primitive creatures, then started their return to the surface, planning to defeat their enemies when they arrived back.

Book hunt

Wednesday I was making the library rounds looking for books for Sunday's ROLT.  We had Jack London's The Call of the Wild at home, but it was a shorter version that didn't have the part I wanted. And we seemed to have two copies of L.M. Montgomery's The Blue Castle, but it turned out that both were sold.

I found Pauline Johnson's Flint and Feather at Deer Park, Mazo de la Roche's Young Renny at Forest Hill, and The Blue Castle at Lillian Smith.  But The Call of the Wild was harder:  I finally found it yesterday at Spadina Road when I figured out that it was in the juvenile fiction section instead of regular fiction!

Wednesday night I went to the Bickford Centre to help them set up the opera set.  But they had enough people already and I ended up standing around a lot, and left early.  On the way home the spine cover came off our copy of Hard Times, and Father put it back on the next day.  I thought we could just tape it on, but he glued it so I had to stop reading it for a while as the glue dried.

Last night I had a bout of insomnia and didn't get to sleep till past 4:00! (At such times I end up thinking about everything that makes me angry.) I didn't wake up till around 2:00 in the afternoon.  But on one of my Facebook groups a fellow Aspie said that he had a fit and ended up wandering around in the cold, which puts my problems in perspective.

That translated manga is terrific!  It combines a history of Japan in the 1920s and '30s with the author's personal story. (He was born in the early '20s.)

FINDING VIVIAN MAIER

The real cold weather returned yesterday.  Unfortunately, the previous day had been milder but it got cold really quick.  The big temperature swing, as I expected, gave me a big headache.  I was tempted to skip the memoir slam, which I almost never do, but managed to make it. (I was surprised that attendance wasn't significantly lower than usual!)

Last night I saw the documentary Finding Vivian Maier with a Movie Meetup group. (I might have skipped it if I hadn't RSVPed.) It's a fascinating story of a brilliant street photographer who worked as a nanny and whose work was only discovered after her death, by sheer accident.

Last night I dreamed about a non-existent movie with Lana Turner, whom I've never dreamed of before.  I also dreamed of visiting Las Vegas and not liking it.

Today I went out to the Victory Cafe to make a reservation for Sunday's ROLT Meetup, but it turned out that now they only take reservations online!  If I'd known that I could have been spared a freezing trip, yet it's always good to get out of the house.  I did visit the Beguiling nearby and bought a translated manga about Japan in the decade before it got into World War II.  Looks hard to put down. (Of course, with the manga format you always have to remember to look at panels and voice balloons from right to left, the opposite direction from the West.)

I've finished translating the story of the life of St. Philip of Neri, and started translating the Carl Sandburg poem "Yarns of the People."

INTO THE WOODS

"I've made my decision, which is not to decide"--Into the Woods

I finished Moby-Dick on New Year's Night.  The same night I was reading a Salon article about American decline which reminded me of Starbuck's famous line "Ahab beware of Ahab." Uncle Sam beware of Uncle Sam.

Now I've started reading Dickens' Hard Times for John Snow's book club. (Jane couldn't get into it.) It occurred to me that the "hard times" the title refers to are modern times.

This evening I went to see a movie with the Movie Meetup group. (I was glad to meet Jane, who's suggested Vanity Fair for my Classic Book Club.) We saw Rob Marshall's movie of Into the Woods, Stephen Sondheim's curious musical fairy-tale pastiche with an oddly apocalyptic final act.  It was moderately entertaining, though none of the cast really stood out as singers.  The pacing was brisk enough:  I had to go to the washroom a couple of times, and I'm not sure how much I missed.  Reading Hard Times on the way home, I started to imagine how to adapt it into a musical!

I've finally quit the Facebook games Tribez and Megapolis.  And I'm also finished my latest bouts with Candy Crush Saga and Pet Rescue Saga.  Now I've started two new games:  Tribez & Castlez and Transport Empire.  How long before I lose interest in them?

MR. TURNER

"When I peruse the mirror, I see a gargoyle"--Mr. Turner

I found the Kevin Brownlow documentary Hollywood on Youtube, about silent movies in America.  I'm now watching it for the third time.

Yesterday I had lunch with the Aspergers Meetup. (Evie organized it.) We went to the Old Spaghetti Factory, where I had spaghetti with the spicy meat sauce.  They have nice hot bread rolls.

Then I went to the Lightbox to see Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner.  I was supposed to see it with a Movie Meetup group, but couldn't find them.  It turned out that they were meeting in the Member's Lounge, and I'm not even a member!

The movie was vivid but a bit too long.  Timothy Spall's Turner was something of a beast. (He seemed to have Asperger's Syndrome.) They were talking about Turner in the National Gallery documentary I saw the other day.  Of course, he anticipated the French impressionists.

Dinner was Kentucky Fried Chicken.  They're trying to encourage feedback through a sweepstakes whose grand prize is a year of Free KFC!  Years ago Moira knew somebody who lived on KFC for a whole year.

NATIONAL GALLERY

Wednesday was unusually mild.  I walked to Sobey's to get another vanilla-flavored Slice Cream (wince!).  The last one I put into the freezer with the wrong side up, and the freezer wasn't cold enough so it melted somewhat into a mess.

Donald couldn't make it for Christmas dinner yesterday. (Big workload at The Globe and Mail!) But we'll save the plum pudding for when he comes.  The turkey was a bit undercooked--Father thinks they didn't drain the blood sufficiently--so we put some of it into the microwave.

Today I saw Frederick Wiseman's three-hour documentary National Gallery at its first screening at the Bloor. (I told them,  "If you screen any Wiseman films, I'm already there!") Despite having visited that London museum a lot, I was still amazed.  

I'm especially impressed by the restorers. (In one scene you can see a partly restored painting, and the before-after difference is visible.) Their job is a holy mission, the present preserving the past for the future in a never-ending Manichean struggle with time.  Even bad restorers deserve credit for trying!

I've finally quit the Facebook games Megapolis and Tribez.  They just weren't worth the time to me any more.

Lunch with Bev

Today I had lunch with Bev from my Aspergers Meetup group at the Thai restaurant Spring Rolls near Eglinton station. (I had the spicy chicken fried rice.  Later dinner was fried rice with shrimp, but I didn't mind the repetition.) We had a good time:  Bev said "We've found our..." but couldn't finish the sentence, so I suggested "...our groove," which she thought the right word.  She suggested we see that documentary about the guy who introduced yoga in America when it returns to the Bloor.

Sunday I finished Captains and the Kings.  I said to Father, "It's time for Perry King to be assassinated," a couple of seconds before he was. (I should be writing these things!) Now I'm watching another miniseries for what must be the fifth time:  Rich Man, Poor Man is my Christmas treat.  Because it's Christmas time, I've also started playing Candy Crush Saga and Pet Rescue Saga again.  I enjoy them enough that I'd be risking addiction if I played them at any other time!

I've entered the home stretch of Moby-Dick.  I just noticed that the plot doesn't really kick in until about four-fifths of the way through, when Ahab confronts Starbuck over whether to stop to fix the leaking barrels.  It's several books in one:  a few chapters even read as dialogue in a play!  I can well believe that the book's few contemporary readers couldn't make head or tail of it.

CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS

"Before you take off all my clothes, I have one thing to ask." "Yes?" "Take off yours"--sizzling romantic dialogue in Captains and the Kings

Monday night I went to a Mathematics Meetup at the Rubikloud Industries office near King station.  We talked about group theory, which I recall studying at college thirty years ago.  I won't be able to attend often, since it's on the same night as choir practice, but it's an interesting group.

Thursday night I went to see a documentary at the Bloor about people staying in Antarctica through the winter (our summer), with the Movie Meetup group.  I was careless enough to get popcorn, and got sick. (When I upgraded my Bloor membership to the silver level, they threw in about nine free popcorns.)

Thursday after seeing Dr. Hassan I went to North York Centre library and borrowed the DVD of Captains and the Kings, a 1976 miniseries that was part of NBC's Best Sellers, a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to repeat the success of Rich Man, Poor Man.  As a young Irish immigrant becoming a big robber baron in the Civil War era, Richard Jordan is a remarkably colourless lead, though Charles Durning has some life. (Durning could have used a better agent:  he was always making movies like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas!)

I Wanna Bedtime Story

Yesterday I went to the Met telecast of Wagner's Meistersinger.  I was running late and skipped breakfast.  But I got a headache and had to leave early. (In hindsight, I should have come late and only seen the second half.) The opera doesn't have much action; it's more of a debate about art set to music.

This afternoon was ROLT, focusing on children's writing as usual in December.  (The event was titled I Wanna Bedtime Story.) Twenty people said they were coming, I made a reservation for eight, and five people showed up.  I read a chapter from Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer in which a romantic meeting with Becky Thatcher turns to heartbreak; a poem from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory about how books are better than TV; a passage from near the end of the second Harry Potter book where Harry says that he and Voldemort have a lot in common, and Dumbledore replies that we're defined not by our talents but by our choices; and a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy (about her future husband) where the parents leave their kids alone for a week and things get out of hand.

I've started watching on Youtube a PBS documentary about Napoleon from the series Empires.  Fascinating stuff!  He hated France in his childhood, but ended up being more French than the French! (Like some Canadians become more American than the Americans.)

Vivid dreams

These days my dreams sometimes feel pretty real.  The odd thing is that they can feel so real that the inconsistencies that are a normal part of the dream world suddenly seem incomprehensible to me.  The other week in one dream I was so puzzled that I asked a stranger in the dream for help, saying, "I know longer know what's real!"

I often dream about walking up West Avenue to my Sackville home, but by the time I get there I sometimes remember that other people own the house now and I don't belong there!  In a recent dream I told someone, "I have a Ph.D., but we decided I should do Grade Five again"!

Just last night I had a dream where I was visiting the Victoria & Albert Museum of applied art in London with my friends Puitak and Gordon.  I also dreamed of Star Wars rebels being offered a political deal except they realized it was all a trick on Darth Vader's part. (Something to do with today's actual politics?)

Yesterday I went to Scotiabank and discussed segregated funds with Natalie. (There was some confusion about whether I'd been booked for an appointment with someone who wasn't there!) They don't do that on the branch level so I may go through I-trading or something like that.

Last night I went to Rose's Christmas get-together with the Non-Fiction Meetup people at Jack Astor's near the Reference Library where we usually meet.  I had a good time, telling an Iranian-Canadian called Nassy about what I'd been reading in the Classic Book Club and having an ice cream float (vanilla with cream soda) for the first time in years!

Christmas concert

Monday night was the choir's Christmas concert.  The audience was pretty big.  Then tonight we did a shorter concert at Blythwood Baptist church after joining them for Christmas dinner.  I was a few minutes from the church when I realized I'd forgotten to wear my black suit.  But Brian was also dressed casually and that made me feel better.

Sunday I visited Giuseppe again. (Part of the Bloor-Danforth line was being worked on so I took the College St. bus instead.) I showed him my art--he used to paint--and he said I have talent.

The other week I got a silver membership at the Bloor Cinema, so admission is now just $6 for me!  This afternoon I saw the documentary Hermitage Revealed, about the famous St. Petersburg art museum.  Wow!  I'll have to add that place to my bucket list.  When they made Kandinsky, they broke the mold.  And in a few weeks they'll have a documentary about London's National Gallery!

After the church concert I tried to get to the Bloor to see a documentary about the guy who introduced yoga to the west. (I don't usually see two movies on the same day, but this was its last screening for the time being.) But the subway was running slow on both lines and I clearly would have been late, so I just went home.