Day 129: Small-town bar take-over

I feel that my life recently has been thoroughly re-defined by this play.  I still do all of the other things I normally would do -- go to work, go to chorus practice, hang out with friends, eat meals, etc. -- but all of that has to be fit in around Rumors, and after this week, we're done.  [Not to mention the fact that after this week I will be driving around the country like a maniac / preparing to move across the country for a couple of weeks, but I can't even begin to process that yet.]  I also feel that this blog has perhaps suffered, as a large portion of my time is no longer being spent in Cambridge, but rather in Georgetown, and therefore I have fewer new, exciting details about Cambridge to divulge.  But we'll just assume that discussing our post-play take-over of a small-town bar is just as interesting.

First -- a note on night two of the play.  I hate to say that it suffered a bit from the "sophomore slump" -- but Act 1 did, at least.  Act 2 was worlds better tonight, however, once we had our energies going.  It's funny -- the crowd was over twice the size of the group last night, yet we couldn't get anything from them for a while.  Or maybe I'm just perceiving things in a skewed fashion because I was so exceedingly baffled at getting ANY kind of decent response yesterday.  A strange world.

After our stellar second act [from which S.B. took the above shot!], however, nearly the entire (perhaps it was the entire) cast and crew headed to a place nearby (the only place still open, at 10pm on a Friday night!) in Georgetown for a drink.  We ended up staying for quite a while, such that we lost some soldiers by the time it was time to meet some Calliope folks at the Charles Playhouse for karaoke to celebrate the birthday of one of our regulars.  Pudney and a friend of hers made it out, however, which was fantastic!

Day 115: Opera at the Parish

Today was quite the atypical day, making me feel like I was living in parallel universes at the start because I tried to work from MIT instead of heading out to BBN (I was tired, didn't feel like biking that far nor fighting the traffic in a car, and thought it might be fun to work around other people).  Was sort of bittersweet... story of my summer.  So very melodramatic these days!

The rest of the day was really fun, a happy contrast to the gloomy weather brought upon us by some mid-summer rain (apparently the center of the country is in a drought, but I can assure you that Boston is not).  Perhaps the most atypical bit was attending an operatic production. D. has had a boarder staying with him for a couple of weeks for an opera workshop (also atypical, I'd imagine -- someone affiliated with Calliope emailed out searching for such spots for boarders some time ago - but I digress).  The workshop (unsurprisingly) culminated in a performance put on by its participants, and we decided to go watch it.  For me, it involved a trek by T to the United Parish in Brookline, a place I strangely had been once before for a board meeting of the Boston Choral Consortium on behalf of Calliope.  Kind of cool way to feel a part of one's community, joining a community chorus.

Anyhow, the operatic vignettes we saw were really nice - D's boarder being the best, of course.  He did a bit from The Elixir of Love (I'm not so up on my opera so it didn't surprise me I hadn't heard of over half of operas on the list).  Post-opera, we headed to Zenna's (no, not my roommate but a delicious Thai place in Brookline) and then to post-dinner karaoke at good ol' Charles Playhouse with Calliope.  Good people, good times.

Day 74: Non-Rand Anthem

Tonight I had plans to hang out with a friend (K.) who worked at MIT while I was a student there.  One thing I love about hanging out with K. is that her version of Boston is so different from mine (which is super Cambridge-centric... fairly obviously).  She lives in Brookline but often hangs out near Newbury Street/Copley, near the seaport, at Drink, etc.  Adult places.  Tonight she asked if I might be up for meeting in Faneuil Hall, and I ended up joining her and a friend of hers at a place called Anthem.  I had to think about the word for a second when I heard it -- for some reason I find it to be a really striking word that is not used often.  Of course it calls to mind Ayn Rand [aside: I've somehow managed to get through the tomes that are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead -- one of my favorite books of all time, but don't worry, it's for literary reasons -- but have never managed to read the much more reasonably-sized Anthem], but for me, it also brings to mind some sort of image.  Maybe it's from the cover, but I imagine a person, usually a very young person with a true heart, standing, looking up, shining with justice, and standing FOR SOMETHING.  Ok, sorry for the weird diversion.

Back to Anthem the bar.  This all goes to say that while I like the word, it also seems kind of a weird name for a bar, and it kind of bugged me, because although the bar was fine (and it's fun to be in that area once in a while), I didn't feel it lived up to its fairly patriotic name.  Unlike People's Republik, which most certainly does.

After Anthem, I parted ways to join my choir folk at a last-minute charity karaoke event.  The money raised was to go toward fighting cancer.  Really cool idea... did not win the raffle, but did enjoy a beer or two and belt out that awesome song by Megara from the movie Hercules.

Day 60: Commencement

Lesson learned today: sleeping through alarms and phone calls due to karaoke-induced exhaustion and therefore arriving three hours late to your MIT graduation does not mean you cannot walk. It did, for me, mean that people were worried, but also that I got to stand in the shade with friends for 60 minutes rather than sit in the beating hot sun with people I barely knew for three hours and then slip into the line to walk across the stage to receive my diploma.


It was a beautiful day until about 3pm, well after graduation was finished.  Commencement at MIT is held in Killian Court, the lawn in front of the dome on Memorial Drive, on the Charles River.  Absolute perfection for a graduation ceremony in which everyone, undergrads included, gets to walk, so there is a lot of watching and waiting.

After graduation, I did a brief stroll around campus with the friends who came (E., T., and two of my roomies), which was lovely and resulted in many pictures.  Then to BCS, for a brief reception, and back home for some rest. Z. cooked one of my favorites, mac and cheese, for dinner, which was great, and then we all met up with some folks from my choir for the monthly karaoke sesh at Charles Playhouse.  Great end to a somewhat stressful day.

Cheers to MIT for being organized enough to remember to call the name of the girl who overslept by about three hours.

Day 32: Oh, the people you'll meet!

One of the things I love most about living in this area is that it's big enough to feel somewhat anonymous when you want to, yet very much small enough that you run into people on the street that you know (for instance, in both heading out towards and back from the airport, I ran into the *same person* -- and yesterday alone, I ran into both my ex-boyfriend, walking toward the coffee shop located in the same building as my apartment, and my roommate, in Harvard Square).  It's also small enough that if you frequent a location for a short while, you'll run into the same people over and over and often become friendly.


Tonight, I first made a cake for a friend's birthday party located at her house in Somerville, and later in the evening took the T into Boston to go to karaoke with a bunch of friends from my choir, two members who were celebrating birthdays tonight as well.  Charles Playhouse was the locay, and of course there were regulars there whom I'd met at least on two separate occasions before.  I also got offered a job working there, for whatever reason (my hypothesis: it's because I helped bail out a girl who got roped into singing along to "Girls just wanna have fun" with some random drunk chick -- sweet, but drunk). At any rate, if you live here in Cambridge, you get to feel like you really, really *live* here.  And it's wonderful.

Day 11: Charles Playhouse

This was one of those fabled fortnights in which karaoke happened multiple times each week. Last night's LBK at Asgard was, as always, epic in its own right, but there is something special about going out to karaoke with members of your choir (more on that another time; perhaps tomorrow).

I hung out with several of them at Charles Playhouse located in the theatre district. As a matter of fact, it is also located in the same building which has hosted both the Blue-Man Group (Boston-based, baby!) and the slapstick comedy Shear Madness (murder mystery style) for years (the former I've never seen; the latter, my mom and I attended the summer before I moved out here, and it was ridiculous, in a good way).

In fact, I arrived second to the karaoke venue, preceded by a non-Callioper (who is however a karaoke fiend and aficionado), and we were eventually also joined by a second non-Callioper, a friend of mine who is auditioning for the group this weekend (!). We did a duet (new to me) at the end of the night -- "Picture" by Sheryl Crow and Kid Rock (probably the only Kid Rock song that I can tolerate, and I actually like it very much... "I just called to say I miss you -- come back hooooome.").

Usually at Charles Playhouse, the singers are really great -- apart from the group I was with and a few other outliers, the level of the performance was, ahh, well, slightly sub-par. Ok, actually it was just awful. But still fun! The end of the night was also an experience, as the theatre district is also where all of Boston's serious "clubs" (and hence, skirts shorter than my underwear) are located. All-in-all, a great Charles Playhouse experience.