I Love the ’70s is on right now, which makes me VERY HAPPY. I LOVE VH1 shows like that! They rock and they are unfortunately NOT AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE. Sigh.
Candide has been a strangely recurring theme over the past couple of days. It really is the most infuriating opera, because who the fuck sets a philosophical novel to music? And by Voltaire, at that? But the music is awesome and there were some very cool people involved with the writing of that thing. Richard Wilbur, the principal librettist, was the winner of Pulitzer prizes and also taught at my alma mater for a long time. We were subjected to singing lots of his beautiful poetry set to bad music in choir. Anyway, back to Candide. So after I’d been talking to one of my bosses yesterday about the pros and cons of Voltaire and the various cool parts of the opera, the same boss told me today that I’d missed my opportunity to sing Glitter and Be Gay on the phone to a patron. I don’t think anyone should ever be subjected to that: I’m not a soprano and I am certainly not a coloratura. But the aria has its own Wikipedia entry!.
In any case, one of the most fabulous arias in Candide is the Old Lady’s tango. The music is simply wonderful. I was jealous of the woman who got to sing the part in U of I’s production a couple of years ago. The aria is backed up by male chorus and these guys were dressed in barrels and the choreography was so fun.
Today a patron came in and I discovered her name was Gretchen, and told her I liked that name owing to Faustian fame. She was impressed that I knew the literary connection, and she said she’d lived in Germany for about six years, and that someone had bought her tights with the Gretchenfrage printed all over them. The Frage (questions, auf Deutsch) are the questions Gretchen asks Faust pointedly about his religious beliefs. Since I haven’t illustrated in a bit, I did a Gretchen search and came up with something along the lines of “Gretchen am Spinnrade!”:
I checked Wikipedia to see if Gretchenfrage had its own entry, but only in German.
THEN I decided to see if the Tristan chord had finally achieved its own Wikipedia entry, and it has!. But those fair readers who find such entries boring might perhaps be interested to know that in the opera Tristan und Isolde, the Tristan chord doesn’t resolve until the very last sequence, when they are both dead. This had never happened in opera before. Basically, the operas were strung together by arias, which were basically like five-minute songs, resolving to the tonic each time. The music, incidentally, was also so erotic for the audiences of the 1860s in Europe that supposedly the women in the audience were overwhelmed and fainted. This is something my prof said in college: I need to substantiate it.
I. absolutely. adore. Tristan und Isolde. It is sublime.
So tonight I went to my new mailbox place only to discover that the fucking USPS still hasn’t delivered my mail from about fourteen days ago. But my mother sent me a very heavy package. I’m guessing it was about 30 pounds. I had to carry the damn thing all the way home, because hello! I don’t have a car! A terribly nice man came up behind me and offered to help. Turns out he was coming from my gym so we talked about that for awhile. When I got home I discovered why the box was so heavy. My mother put all these coffeetable books in there, as well as a *cast-iron Santa Claus mold.* I need an iron mold like I need a hole in the head, but oh well.
Then I checked my email, and I’m on Match again (winter boredom finally kicked in). I had a situation earlier this week where a guy emailed me and I didn’t respond and he got mad and said he deserved some kind of response. In the past, I have found that if I open the door at all by just trying to be nice and saying “thanks but no thanks,” I wind up getting stalked. But I responded to the guy and simply said I have absolutely zero interest in meeting anyone who describes himself as politically conservative. There should be a hint in the beginning of my profile, where the first few words I even write say “I am looking for a man who is politically liberal.” Duh.
Anyway, another guy emailed me yesterday. He didn’t have a photo and I say in my profile that profiles with no photos get no answers from me. When he contacted me, he said he would send a picture if I responded. I looked at his profile and saw that he also identified himself as politically conservative. I responded and thanked him for his effort but that I have no interest in meeting any conservatives because politics are really important to me. And I wished him luck with his search. I didn’t put any qualifiers whatsoever on why I don’t like conservatism, etc. It was pretty simple and I was trying to be polite.
In response, I received the most unbelivable diatribe. He went on about how shocked he was that a Smith grad was so unintelligent and that I don’t know anything and that I attacked him and insulted him, etc., etc., etc. As soon as I got it, I called my dad and read it to him. My dad, of course, was shocked at what an unbelievable asshole this guy was. When I wasn’t assuming anything about him except that he was conservative (which he specifically stated in his profile), he assumed a great deal about me, that I was “well-schooled but not well-educated,” and that I have a “shallowness of intellect and emotional intelligence” because I was “labelling him” for his “interests.” Ummm…..
But given the current state of politics in this country, if you actually call yourself “conservative” it says a great deal about you. Don’t worry: I didn’t satisfy this guy with an esoteric conversation about Greek political philosophy, etc. (which he seemed to want to engage me in even though he ended by telling me I was certainly not intelligent). Ten years ago, I would have been turned off by any guy who called himself conservative but now I don’t even want to meet people who classify themselves that way. Sigh.
YAY! “Time for Burt Reynolds’s mustache” was just on! I didn’t know if that was something that was only in one episode of I Love the ’70s, but apparently they have made room for it in more than one! Now they’re talking about the “Theme from Ice Castles.”
