A week's worth

[mojosmom]

Last Saturday was the Woman Made Gallery's annual benefit and auction. It was fun, as usual. I bid on a couple of items, but the bidding quickly went past what I wanted to spend, so I came home empty-handed, but having had a good time.

Sunday was the first opera of Chicago Opera Theatre's season, La Clemenza di Tito, an opera with a plot that is convoluted even for opera (in which convoluted plots are the norm). It was conducted by Jane Glover, who is a Mozart maven. Everyone was good, but the women who sang Sesto (Renata Pokupic) and Vitellia (Amanda Majeski) were particularly fine. I liked the set, which was reminiscent of the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera, and the costumes (with the exception of the chorus, which was oddly dressed in half-masks and sort of dowdy 50s east European peasant-ish garb, for some reason I can't fathom).

As I was leaving, I ran into a woman I know who was in my college class. She also has the Sunday afternoon series, so we will try to get together for lunch/dinner/drinks/whatever before or after the next opera.

On Wednesday, my friends and I went to see Ghostwritten, a play by Naomi Iizuka, at the Goodman. The reviews were mediocre, but we liked it. It's a modern take on the Rumpelstiltskin story, which begins with a young American woman traveling in Vietnam (for reasons that become clear later on), where she meets a rather strange woman who, in exchange for the promise of her first-born, teaches her to cook amazing food. After that prologue, we learn that the American, who is now a renowned chef back in the States, adopted a Vietnamese girl under circumstances that are a bit hazy, and that girl is now pregnant. Enter the Woman from Vietnam (played by Lisa Tejero, who was amazing).

It's a very spooky play, but also funny in parts. I do think that there's a scene at the end which reads as though Iizuka felt she needed to tie up some ends (indeed, one bit that was bothering me suddenly got a nice neat bow on it that felt really added on). But overall, it's a play that I would definitely recommend.

Yesterday, I went to the last Newberry Consort concert of the season, "Arcadia Revisited: a Garden of Earthly Delights", seventeenth-century English music, with Ellen Hargis singing. (Here she is singing Love's Constancy, by Nicholas Lanier, with Paul O'Dette on lute, as he was last night).

The good news is that there will be a next season, though they have not finalized dates, etc., yet.

Non-cultural stuff:

Yesterday was beautiful, so I decided to walk to the dry cleaners. On the way, I noticed that signs had been posted for the annual yard sale that benefits the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer (which really should be the Avon Walk against Breast Cancer, no?). I got a couple of clothing items (belt and cotton blouse), two books¹ (Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian Cooking and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell), and two rather unusual items:

Al Pha Bet, an educiting game:


and a sparkler wand:


I was moved to diligence today, perhaps in part because the lovely weather induced me to want mildly to spring clean. So I can now inform you that under those piles of papers there was an actual desk!


¹ See, the reason I run out of bookshelf space is not necessarily the number of books, but the size of the books. These were both hardbacks, and you know how thick Clarke's book is! They're probably 4-5" between them. Two books.