a little night music

[calimac]

1. To Berkeley's Cal Shakes to see Mrs. Warren's Profession, Shaw's play about a determinedly self-directed young woman who rejects the sentimentality and hypocrisy of the world. She won't marry, either the older man who offers security nor the young man who offers romance, nor will she any longer take her mother's tainted money. Instead, being talented at the kind of work that forty years later would be done by a desk calculator, she's setting herself up in business at it.

The disadvantages of seeing plays in an open-air, unenclosed theatre are becoming apparent. The actress in the above-mentioned principal role has a light voice and basically had to scream her way through the part in order to be heard. Two or three pages of the text would be torn out at a time by airplanes passing overhead.

2. To something called the Summer Stanford Orchestra, no less talented than the regular school-year orchestra, for a concert including Rodrigo's Fantasia para un gentilhombre (Charles Ferguson, guitar soloist), which I'd never heard in concert before, and Beethoven's Eroica, played with more passion and character than non-professional orchestras usually bring to the Eroica, and I'm slightly amazed at the size of the dataset I've accumulated with which to make such generalizations.

3. Defying the rule that says, "Oh, all the work can be done by e-mail," the committee for next year's Potlatch had a very productive in-person meeting. PR1 will be out soon and it will have some stuff in it, I think I can say without jumping any starting guns.

4. Beginning to get feeling and movement back in my left hand after rather stupidly stabbing myself in the palm with a kitchen knife a few days ago. Try not to have to go to the emergency room; it's expensive.

Comments

[lynn-maudlin.livejournal.com]

first, you stabbed yourself in the palm with a kitchen knife?!! you silly man, eeeek! Heal quickly, please.

And while yes, much work can be done well by email, it always works so much better if the folks have at least *some* IRL meetings; you need to know that someone really has your back (or that they're just talking out of their hat) - and that's much harder to know "by email"...

Big dataset indeed!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's mostly that you get more discussion and interaction, and a clearer sense of the collective feeling, when complex multi-valued decisions have to be made.

[lynn-maudlin.livejournal.com]

well, that's certainly a big chunk of it-- it's always easier to identify when someone isn't saying what they think when it's happening in front of you, in person, in real time, rather than shrouded in email messages...!