Day 112: Shakespeare on the Common

The best part of today was all of it.

Day two of biking to work meant that I needed to bike all the way from Fresh Pond to Newbury St. in the evening for Calliope.  I thankfully left in plenty of time, not realizing that bike paths in Boston are actually full of pedestrians (well, mostly runners).  Who knew Boston was so athletic?

It was a fantastic day for the ride.  Biking on the Boston side of the river across from Cambridge turned out to be stunning, even if the path was pedestrian-ridden.  Thank you Dr. Paul Dudley White.

One of the coolest parts of the ride was biking past the hatch shell (see above), which was apparently hosting some crazy cardio exercise which only women were attending.

I had a few moments just before chorus to myself, so I plopped down under a tree (viewed the correct way as shown in the photo) and just breathed for a few minutes.

Rehearsal was a bit rough this evening, but afterward, we had the reprieve of some William S. in the park -- Coriolanus.  Only got there in time to see the last two acts (out of five) -- "I will be loved when I am lacked."

Beautiful day.

Day 111: Views in downtown Boston

It's rare enough that I go out in Boston -- other than the occasional excursion to the 'Snake after Calliope -- so it was somewhat bizarre to realize that a friend's birthday dinner tonight was to be held at the same bar/restaurant where I had crashed a wedding after-party a few months prior: Woodward, in the Ames Hotel.  The food was surprisingly good and the company was of course lovely, so it was a pleasant night spent out-of-doors at dinner. The views from the terrace of the restaurant were also a treat -- I hadn't realized this the first time I was there.  I'll try to go back for a picture before I'm out.  Walking back to the car after dinner through the State St./Government Center area was pretty great, too.  Not sure I'd done much of that at night-time before.

We popped in for a nightcap at the Field on the way home, a place that is fast becoming another one of my favorites now that it has an outdoor patio.  It will be nice to live in a place where being outside is an option twelve months out of the year.... Maybe from now on (i.e. for the last 34 posts) I should end with an optimistic statement about southern California.

Day 110: BSO behind the scenes

Never thought I'd be the type of person to wake up at 8am on a Sunday bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but it's happened.  Sundays in Georgetown for rehearsal are fab-o, and we stepped it up a notch today.

Rehearsal itself was a bit sluggish today compared to last week.  Our first attempt at running through Act 2 off-book was not as glitch-free as our first attempt at Act 1 -- and most of us had to resort to using scripts.  But it was great to get everyone there for Act 2, as we had spent less time on it thus far.

The second part of the day involved a foray to Crane Beach in nearby Ipswich -- my take was that it was nice, but next time I'd just drive a bit farther and go back to Ogunquit/York beach (this was pretty close to Georgetown, in its favor) -- free to park there and fewer folks around. Again, nearly none of us had brought bathing suits, but BNap saved the day by having a car full of dirty laundry -- one piece of which was the t-shirt I'm sporting above, touting the same radio frequency as D's (different cities, though; funny).

Part three of today was great.  I was stoked to find out earlier in the week that Mercury Orchestra, a local/community-based group that is quite a bit larger than Calliope, was looking for choristers to accompany the orchestra for Daphnis et Chloe, Ravel's longest piece of music and only ballet (it's short for a ballet, only about an hour).  The choral accompaniment is stunning -- and apparently REALLY HARD!

The first cool thing about the whole ordeal is that my name was on a list with a security guard at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, allowing me to enter its under-belly and poke amongst the scattered music stands that are always floating around where there are orchestras.  Got a big twinge of .... -- well, something more pleasant than food poisoning -- being in that atmosphere again, the basement of a symphony hall.  Felt like a big production and reminded me of singing with the Kokomo Symphony Orchestra as a kid in the KCC -- we would always accompany their biennial rendition of the Nutcracker.

The second cool thing about this schtick is that the conductor is fantastic.  Whole different style from what I've become used to -- and it's always nice to start with chorus only before trying to put the whole thing together.

And the coolest thing is that the music and the singers are beautiful -- and we get to perform this beauty in Sanders Hall.  This blog -- and this summer -- have turned into a sort of feschrift for the arts, and I like it.

Day 109: And to think that I saw it on Newbury St.

Happiness is walking out your front door into your favorite coffee shop on a Saturday morning at 8:30, finding that a close friend has also arrived (freshly back from Germany, no less!), and having an unplanned 45-minute long conversation.

It is not minding the fact that you're working on a Saturday and having no plans at all after, but making it up as you go along. Today was a breath of fresh air.  Eek, I'm sounding rather trite today, eh?

This evening, after a brief stint at a barbecue this afternoon, I met up with the brothers E. to run lines on Newbury St.  [The phrase "run lines" has become a part of my daily vocabulary, but I still think it sounds like I'm into hard drugs every time I say it.]  Sitting on Newbury St. and people watching somehow feels quite like Harvard Square.  Maybe it's all the brick?  Anyhow, the Saturday evening patrons of Newbury St. Starbucks were treated to a double-feature (that is, simultaneously doubled, not in sequence) of some buskers and a trio of aspiring thespians doing our rendition of Rumors -- the whole of Act 1, I believe -- on the patio outside.  We later finished Act 2 in Beautiful Medford, making it an early night before our now-weekly Sunday morning gig practicing on the stage in Georgetown.

Day 108: The yoga scene

Back in the day when I was a graduate student at MIT and therefore had access to all sorts of delightful perks, I would often go to the weekly group classes at the gym across the street from my building (in the Stata center, which you can see in the background image for this blog).  This mostly involved power yoga, pilates, and something called "PiYo" (an attempt at a pilates/yoga fusion).  Vinyasa yoga was incorporated in most of these (even in the pilates to some extent), but somehow most of the courses managed to avoid the true "hold-this-pose-until-your-muscles-are-burning" part of vinyasa that gives it its punch. [Also probably the case that you don't get the most advanced / difficult classes in the world at the Stata Center.]


When my friend Az asked if I wanted to go with him to a vinyasa class, I was excited -- in fact another friend had just thrown a free class pass my way a few days before.  So A. and I went to O2 yoga in Somerville this afternoon after work, and I must say the 75-minute class really took it out of me.  My body used to feel like a nice happy sack of goo after pilates at MIT, but after this class left me feeling more like a sad sack.  Well, not too sad -- muscles felt used, but in the right way (not the over-stretching way, which is why I used to stick to pilates over yoga), body felt completely mellow, and my brain really felt quieted.  I will have to re-visit.

Even with the very zen feeling, I managed to make the most of the rest of the evening and got to see a bunch of great folks at two of my favorite just-north-of-Central-Square establishments -- the Cellar and Cantab.  [One of my friends brought a girl who looked absolutely terrorized at the prospect of entering the Cantab as we approached the bouncer who was checking IDs and seeing the folks who were entering; we had to pay her cover and coax her in gently.  We all had a great time dancing, though!]

Day 107: Out-of-towners

Today was just another summer 2012 Cambridge Thursday, complete with work (new computer today!), some downtime at home, rehearsal in Georgetown for Rumors, and live-band karaoke after.

Several the usuals were away this week (out of town), so I had no high hopes for turn-out -- but though the crowd was small it was certainly punchy!

Since our own locals were being out-of-towners elsewhere, it only seemed reasonable to interact with some non-local out-of-towners in Cambridge.  P. had already begun to do this by the time E. and I arrived from rehearsal, with someone in town from North Carolina on business.  He was a great karaoke fiend and sang us his son's rendition of the song "I'm sexy and I know it" (hockey-themed: "I'm Gretsky and I know it"); though I was a bit worried when at the end of the night he told us, "I drive better when I've been drinking than when I'm sober.  My wife's always telling me, oh you gotta drive -- better start drinking!" -- just before driving to his hotel five miles away.

Before the end of the night, we decided we'd probably be best off ordering some pizza at Cinderella's, and were somehow approached by the table next to us, a group of brothers visiting, originally from Chicago, spanning nearly a couple of decades in age.  When I mentioned I was from nearby Indiana, the youngest expostulated that he went to school in Indiana, at the best school of the state -- Notre Dame.

I laughed and countered that no -- that school was located in Bloomington, to which he responded with an inflammatory remark by inserting a particularly flexible adverb in between "best" and "school" to describe IU.  After that I was not so interested in conversation, particularly after one of them made some about assuming one of our crew had "just met me tonight."  Perhaps an upshot of the evening was just that I felt lucky to live in a place where the out-of-towners don't make me wish I lived elsewhere?  The Cantabrigians I know are pretty great.

Day 106: The Last Hurrah

 
Some time ago, possibly the day of the most epic photo scavenger hunt known to man (or at least to this hu-man), I ran across a bar called The Last Hurrah.  Even then it spoke to me of the parting of the ways of the four tenants of Jack In The Box (as our place is called), and when I mentioned it to V., she was enthusiastic about it being a part of her last night out in Cambridge. Er, Boston.

So tonight, we went.  I arrived there on the on-time/early side, and E. was already there and well into drink 1.  I joined him at the bar and quickly we were joined by others, and ceded our spots to move to a larger table.  We migrated once more to move to a spot which happened to be directly in front of the television that was broadcasting the Olympics. Luckily the patrons who seemed interested in watching both a) were very nice and b) departed shortly after.

The portion of the night held at the Last Hurrah was (fortunately) fairly short-lived and involved a lot of talk about water conservation.  We relocated to one of my favorite Cantabrigian bars, River Gods, not too far into the night.  On the way we passed a lovely sign entreating us to shred any suspicious evidence [so weird; see above photograph], and once there we were greeted by many summertime lovelies in the form of butterflies hanging from the ceiling and such (River Gods always has bizarre creatures hanging around to celebrate whatever season it may be).

The point: Good-byes are terrible, but a part of life.  I don't know why you say good-bye, I say hello...