happy news!

Sep. 8th, 2015 08:38 pm
clauclauclaudia: (Sam and Frodo)
Last Thursday [livejournal.com profile] rmd and I had dinner with my parents and brother. It went well. We got home and closed the door, and she proposed. I said yes. :)

Memories

Jun. 18th, 2004 09:20 pm
clauclauclaudia: (huh?)
[this is prompted by spam mail I just got "from" Leola G-----; it prompted this memory about Lisa G-----, who I went to middle school with]

When I was in seventh grade--I was twelve that spring--I was in a community theater production of Oliver! In those days my hair was in a short round cap, shorter than a pageboy, believe it or not, and I was a skinny little kid. I was cast as an orphan and a pickpocket, and in theory I was understudying the Artful Dodger, but I was never really asked to learn the part--I think this was more an Honorable Mention ribbon than anything else.

That same year the high school was performing The Sound of Music, and so a casting call for the younger kids in the show went out to the other schools. Lisa G-----, who I knew from classes and from chorus, was cast as Brigitta, the middle girl. Everybody in chorus knew when this happened, just like we knew when a couple 8th-grade guys were cast to fill out the gangs in West Side Story the following year. ("JETS!") This was partially because the same teacher was our choral conductor and the high school musical director.

Anyway. Shortly after she was cast, I stayed after chorus for a few minutes, telling our conductor about Oliver!, and demonstrating bits of the song-and-dance I knew so far. He grinned with a gleam in his eye, and asked me why I hadn't auditioned for Sound of Music. (The answer was, I couldn't really do both shows at once.)

I mentioned this exchange to my friend Cathy, supposing, not unreasonably, that if I'd auditioned, I'd probably have been cast as Brigitta. (I suppose he could have been thinking of Marta, but she's much younger and I think a 4th grader was cast.)

Well, that day after school, Cathy and I were leaving school to walk home when Lisa strode up to me and said, "I heard you said you would have been cast as Brigitta instead of me if you'd tried out." And I looked at Cathy.

... you know, these days I'd either laugh it off or rip both of them new ones. But at the time, Lisa was towering several inches over me and Cathy was looking at me blankly, and I just didn't have the emotional resources to answer as the situation deserved. I felt embarrassed and mortified at the betrayal. I said quietly to Lisa, "No, I didn't say that,"* and walked home with Cathy alongside me. Cathy and I remained "friends" through high school--we lived on the same block, no more reason than that, really--but that was the last time I shared my thoughts and feelings with her.

* I had a strong feeling right then that both of them had acted entirely unreasonably and neither of them deserved my honesty. I wonder.
clauclauclaudia: (ecstasy)
None of this is news by now, but here's how it was for me. :)

We spent midnight to 5 am outside Cambridge City Hall waving and cheering for every last gay couple who came out the doors with a marriage license (266 couples). Cambridge was the only municipality in the state to start at midnight (rather than 8:30 or 9) so it got all the early festivities and notice. Apparently the Rev. "God hates fags" Phelps (or some of his followers) were there early on, but I didn't see them and they packed it in around 12:05. Thousands of celebrating people were there. While we were seated on the lawn waving flags and singing interminable choruses of "Chapel of Love" (and we're gonna get ma-a-arried!) one aging hippie with a white beard stopped to chat with [livejournal.com profile] rmd and me and said it felt like "a love-in without the acid". It was truly a wonderful concentration of positive energy--I was giddy most of the night, waving an American flag, blowing bubbles, and making truly dreadful jokes. One guy shouted in my ear, "I'm from Toronto, where we *have* gay marriage. But this! This is amazing!"

One of the very last couples were two older men who exited carrying a poster that said "49 years together" on the front, and on the back had a collage of pictures of them through the years. So sweet and wonderful. There were about 20 of us die-hards left cheering at that point, so we got to talk with them for a bit and see the collage up close. You can see them earlier in the evening, in video at http://www.boston.com/ ("History is made in Massachusetts")

It's real. Many of the couples are waiting the standard 3-day waiting period or more, but a few have already applied for and gotten waivers, and gotten married (the first by 9:15 am).
clauclauclaudia: (ecstasy)
Invent a memory of me and post it in the comments. It can be anything you want, so long as it's something that's never happened. Then, of course, post this to your journal and see what people would like to remember of you, only the universe failed to cooperate in making it happen so they had to make it up instead.

Snagged from half of my friends list, including [livejournal.com profile] yonmei, who thought it up.
clauclauclaudia: (ecstasy)
So, I went to the David Bowie concert Tuesday night, and it was good and all. Rebel Rebel and all that. Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. It was fun, don't get me wrong. And Gail Ann Dorsey has some pipes on her, though she looks nothing like Freddie Mercury (she sang his part in Under Pressure).

But there was nothing truly unexpected in Bowie's part of the evening. What was unexpected was the opener.

The Polyphonic Spree )

http://www.thepolyphonicspree.com/main.html

If you want to sample their music, I recommend the "Polyphonic Player" from their incredibly non-intuitive toolbar, not the David Bowie cover in the pop-up window. [Snagged from [livejournal.com profile] skreeky's journal, here's an article about them if you want to read some press without navigating their site.]

The theramin player was my favorite to watch. He had longish (think Davy Jones) hair that flopped into and out of his eyes, and when he was singing or playing the tambourine, he jumped up and down so that his feet were above his knees and you could see the denim pants under his robe. Then he'd play the theramin, with his right hand quivering in place while his left hand made grand spell-casting gestures and punctuated the pop symphony with science fiction tones. I want to have his job. I want to be a sorcerer in a good vibes symphonic music group. Yes I do.

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