bleary eyed sunday ramblings

Sunday, January 27, 2008

I actually have the day off today. This is pretty remarkable. Well, it's not completely "off," as I do have to teach piano, but I don't have rehearsal or work. Between last week and the end of next week (that's confusing but I don't know how to write it differently) today is my only day off from rehearsals......

So far, the show I'm in is fun, but we haven't started staging yet. That all starts tomorrow, and apparently the staging is going to be manic and hyper with a ton of dancing. We'll see how I feel about it being fun after that. At yesterday's music rehearsal, Justin, one of the guys, had just finished his aria, and while the director played the little postlude, he looked up and said "This is where your solo dance will be." Justin's face went white. Literally, all the color drained in about a second. The response was great: "Don't worry, the last time we did this show, Mercury was a gymnast, but we won't make you go that far." Justin's face got even more white.....

Anyway, I'm encouraging you to read 2 articles this weekend. This one is from Alternet, and talks about assimilation versus separatism in queer communities, and how that relates to the struggles of the suffragettes and post-slavery/civil rights issues. The other is the short story in this week's New Yorker. It's called the Reptile Garden, by Louise Erdrich. I think you can listen to it at www.newyorker.com, or in the print version.

In general, the fiction in the New Yorker hasn't been grabbing me lately. I don't know why, but I've been more into the regular articles. This is quite a shift, since when I started reading the New Yorker (at my grandma's house when I was a kid), I only read the fiction. And the cartoons. So, yeah, it's the first time in a while that I've been really into one of the short stories.

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I watched the US Figure Skating championships last night. Youth is definitely the name of the game at the moment, but when 2 out of 3 of the medalists in the women's competition are so young that they can't even compete in Worlds, I think things have gone too far. I really wonder what the point is of competing in Senior when you know that even if you win, it's the end of the road. If you're too young to compete internationally, why not stay in Junior, where you can actually go to Junior Worlds? It just seems dumb. Yes, Senior is where all the attention is, you'll get better known, all that, but for Nationals to be the end of the road would be a total let-down, I would think.

Poor Kimmie Meissner fell 3 times, all of them rather bad wipe-outs. She was the defending champion, and while only 18, has a maturity and a grace that were totally lacking from the ickle 14 year old "prodigies." She's obviously an amazing athlete, but it much more normally proportioned, and doesn't look all bony and stuff. Plus she's smart as hell, and can actually give a good interview, unlike the little ones. She looked so upset, but was trying to be stoic as she watched her horrible marks come up. It was really awful to watch, and the fucking TV cameras were right up in her face. I hope that she gets put on the team for Worlds (they have to create a team, since they can't just send the medalists, like they're supposed to), because she certainly deserves it (she won in '06).