zirconium

Different takes on the tarantella del Gargano:

With dancers:


With zest:


I dig this band:


On a sofa:


With castanets:


The late Owain Phyfe (our Renfaire and caroling gigs coincided for a few seasons):



Lyrics

Mark Miller's "Child of God," performed by my church choir (including me). Miller wrote the song during Methodist church battles over LGBT inclusion. The clip begins at 20:16.

Today's subject line is from Bachelor's "Stay in the Car," which has been earworming me since I heard it on WXNP earlier this week.

Dance recommendation: Anna Morrissey's All Together Alone, a modern take on "Ebben? ne andrò lontana," which I've adored since playing viola for it eons ago. Up until May 29. Warning for light-sensitives: there is some strobe action in it.

I keep meaning to mention the Stay at Home Choir's recording of Christopher Tin's "Sogno di Volare," which I sang on. (I chose to participate audio-only on this one.)



A Catholic composer who had also been involved with "Sogno" contacted me via Instagram about joining the virtual choir for one of his recordings, so that's in my practice folder now. I've sat out most of this year's SAHC projects, but they're doing another run at Ode to Joy, this time with a new German text by Michael Köhlmeier, and there's no registration fee for this one. It's unclear if there will be a recording involved, nor can I make the first alto sectional, but I do not care -- any time I can spend with that piece will help me refuel.

Today I squeezed in two dance sessions -- one for a reel that will be shown at a UK folk festival in June, and Karen Arceneaux's Beginner Horton class with Ailey Extension, where we're learning a combination to Billie Eilish's "Lovely" that Karen choreographed with Mental Health Awareness Month in mind. My back and shoulder are not 100%, and I stepped on a splinter last night (ow!), and there's like forty hours of work to fit into the next fourteen, so I'm pleased with myself for showing up (on camera, even!) and staying more focused than not.

It's not all wine and roses here, but my roses are doing very well this year, and my mom-in-law brought two bottles of prosecco to lunch on Sunday, along with this bouquet:



What I served (for four people total):

deviled eggs

bacon jam balls on red pepper strips

cashews

pickled garlic

tortellini with shrimp in a radish-lemon-anchovy sauce (adapted from an Anita Lo recipe)

green beans seasoned with butter and raspberry balsamic vinegar

zucchini soufflé

almond layer cake from Sweet 16th

The next afternoon, the other two members of the museum editorial team came over for our production meeting. I made another plate of deviled eggs, the junior editor brought Russian tea cookies, and we collectively put away more cake while having ourselves a merry time and discussing at length All the Things Due.

A week ago, something decided to eat every mallow seedling in my back yard. It left the adjacent zinnia seedlings alone, and I hadn't spent too much time thinning out the mallows, so I was amused as well as annoyed: I mean, clearly it was a really tasty snack for the critter? It had even consumed the scraps I had pulled from the ground earlier that Friday.

Being slightly ridiculous, I had put some of the bigger thinnings in water in hopes of transplanting them, and by yesterday some of them had developed long plump roots, so they went into some of the dirt patches out front. Fingers crossed . . .

One year in, I dance with imaginary partners and corners maybe once every 1.5 weeks. There are virtual contra and English country dances, concerts, classes, and presentations pretty much every day of the week, along with offerings from my early music and editing and public health circles. There isn't time for even a tenth of what I'd like to sample, never mind dive deeper into. (In other news, it's a day ending in "y" . . .)

Dancing alone also triggers unhappy memories of being a wallflower, and an envy of people whose partners enjoy waltzing and pousette-ing. It balances out: I literally doze off on motorcycles, which makes me less fun than our friends who are into them. I wouldn't want anyone else as my housemate, but my fantasy wishlist does include a dance spouse (along with a double manual harpsichord, a Citroen, an all-expenses-paid month in Barcelona, and the Bottega Veneta shearling coat I petted in San Francisco back in 2017).

On the flip side, drilling waltz steps was on my at-home list anyhow, practicing waltz holds tones the arms, and going through the figures revives happy memories as well, such as teaching "Volpony" during a Monday night class, being perfectly in sync with partners (and in demand) at past balls, and improvising a dance with another actor during last year's photo shoot for Grand Magnolia. ("Ah, Theater!" he declaimed afterward. "Where you gaze with all your heart into another person's soul -- and then move on . . .")

Anyway, one of the dances on tonight's NCD program was "Volpony." I felt an urge to double-check the source while Cathy was teaching (having mentally misfiled it under Molière instead of Jonson) and found it opposite "Wa Is Me, What Mun I Do":



These are two of the achingly loveliest tunes in the ECD canon. Some I get tired of, and some I have never liked (I'm with the minority that cannot abide "Softly Good Tummas"), but my heart lifts when I see these on a program:

(this recording doesn't quite capture the yearning I hear in Purcell's music, but will at least give you a glimpse of real social dancing, with elegance and errors in abundance)

So, between allergies and scratches and figurative kicks in the teeth and waking up hung over (which seemed profoundly unfair because it was one flute of prosecco during a retirement-party Zoom and one flute of vermouth after dinner, but apparently that's one digestif too many for my metabolism these days) and nearly putting antibiotic ointment instead of toothpaste on my brush -- well. Hello, dregs of February.

But I slogged through this, that, and more, so some deliverables got delivered, some reportables got reported, the house is cleaner, and I pulled together a lemon-rosemary-olive-panko-parmesan-macaroni thing for dinner. It was mild enough today to walk to the Little Free Library in sandals. There have also been three rabbit holes: One was the lore surrounding St. Matthias, in the course of pulling together twelve lines for tomorrow's Tupelo poem; I was also intrigued by the why and wherefore of coppices, but that didn't make it into the draft. (Today's contribution was 14 lines of dog-gerel, so to speak . . .)

The second was triggered by Sam's Tumblr post on Sargent's depiction of Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson. What an intricate household that was. I did not know that Fanny and her daughter Isobel were both cougars (with the same writer-illustrator).

I have not watched this video of "Let Beauty Awake" in full yet, but even a few seconds . . .

The last is a current memory-melody worm: there's a Swedish cradle song in a 1957 textbook called Singing in Harmony that one of my elementary schools discarded when I was a kid. (The Commonwealth of Kentucky Public Instruction stamp inside the front cover has a line where one was supposed to indicate "White" or "Colored" . . .) The setting is similar to some Beethoven art-songs I'm fond of; the next-to-last measure particularly gets me, and I've played it several times today:



Last night I looked up the composer and lyricist. There doesn't seem to be much online about W. Th. Söderberg (though the song got around enough to merit sheet music for mandolin and guitar -- published in Seattle . . .), but the author of the English words, one "Auber Forestier," turns out to have been the formidable Aubertine Woodward Moore, whose many roles included serving as music director of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin. (For some other day: she apparently gave Whitman season tickets she couldn't use and may have been on a first-name basis with Alcotts and Emersons and fiddlin' Bulls . . .)

Subject line = quote from stellaandbow's Instagram.

At Manhattan's Central Synagogue, senior rabbi Angela Buchdahl (with backing clergy) performed Cohen's "Hallelujah" in tribute:


Cedille Records' statement includes a beautiful portrait by Constance Beaty. Earlier this month, I received a Soirée Cedille gift bag. It included recipe cards. (The bluefish spread is now on my To Make list.)

Oberlin's Baroque Performance Institute posted some lovely clips from the archives to SoundCloud last month. I especially enjoyed the "Chamber Bach" concert, which included Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's Concerto a duoi cembali concertanti, F10 (a double harpsichord showpiece), and the real find was what happened to be next in the queue - Trio Rosa Mundi's rendition of Anthoine Boesset's "Je voudrais bien ô Cloris," which in turn sent me down a rabbit-hole with future distractions such as the 1629 French Court Aires with Their Ditties Englished by one Edward Filmer, as well as Wikipedia's mention of an entire festschrift chapter devoted to the song's "notational and performance problems." Maybe. My nerdiness only goes so far, and I have a history of falling asleep while others happily truffle around for author-composer-choreographer intent for hours, but I'm enough in love with this piece that I tracked it down at the IMSLP (where Book 6 of Boesset's many court songs is archived under Bataille, who arranged the lute parts):



Anyhow . . . my workspace is lit in such a way that SoundCloud's "upgrade" menu label looks like "upgrace" during the afternoon, which is an almost-word I'd like to play with more some other time. It came to mind as I patted dirt around some of the tomato plants as night fell, having cleared enough room for two A. J. Reds, three Celebritys, and one Mary Huddleston. Some of the vines have tiny yellow flowers, and there are tiny white flowers on some of the pepper plants; the more mature ones seem bushier than their predecessors. There's one mallow (aka French hollyhock) that's putting out a blossom every few days, new buds on the Sky's the Limit rosebush, and the start of a really nice cluster of balloonflowers. The fireflies were out in force as I detangled vines, and there was a loud extended ruckus among the owls next door and some other critters a few minutes after midnight. I hope it didn't involve the bunny the BYM has been saying hi to almost every evening.

Today's subject line comes from this weekend's Live from Here broadcast, in a reading by Lulu Miller, I think around 1 hour and 40 minutes in.

Today's photo is of a jar full of stars -- a birthday gift recently delivered to me:


I do not like having to multitask as often as I do, but being able to fry bacon and mushrooms while attending my church's congregational meeting is a plus, especially as it trundles through its second hour. The meeting started with an exceptionally good tutorial, and I've been jotting down Zoom navigation tips from other members (new to me: to change your name within the Participants list while in a meeting, put the cursor over your name and click "More ->").

The frying is for a quiche I'm pulling together, since there were carrot and kohlrabi tops from last week's market bag. In looking up how to prepare kohlrabi, I ended up giggling at this bit from Martha Rose Shulman [NYT]:

Every time I work with kohlrabi I wonder why I don’t buy it more often.

If you receive it in your CSA basket and you’ve never worked with it before, you may find the thick-skinned vegetable puzzling, maybe even daunting. As the nutritionist Jonny Bowden describes it in his book The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, kohlrabi “looks like a cross between an octopus and a space capsule.” That’s true, especially if the greens are still attached. If they’re not, it just looks like a space capsule.

As I told a friend last night, I'd like fewer bugs (both literal and figurative) and more sleep. I'm saying "no" and "later" to various projects to make the more sleep possible, but the docket still overfloweth. The congregation meeting hit the two-hour mark right before the chalice extinguishing. Up next, in my Franklin-Covey-ish blocks:

[A]

finish assembling the quiche (with a substitute for the heavy cream we don't have on hand)

prep for Monday presentation to interns

mark edits to wills/directives

attend an online birthday celebration

write Postcards to Voters

participate in a CalTwerk or Limon workout

do enough Duolingo to stay in Diamond League

log into an SFEMS workshop (aka getting my butt kicked in both theory and sight-singing to get better at both)

laundry

[B]

pick up batteries, mayonnaise, and other sundries

whale through more work

collect library holds

financial housekeeping

yardwork

some personal correspondence

[C] (aka not tonight but this week)

finish three library books, with a Vary the Line post related to the one on translation

yet more paper slinging and filing

research for a nonprofit task force

dance homework

start learning The Armed Man for Stay At Home Choir. First UU's choir sang it 11 years ago for Music Sunday, but I remember very little about it and may well have jumped in on soprano or tenor instead of alto.

continue working on the pieces already assigned to me

more cards and notes, including to some addresses on the Americans of Conscience list

figure out what to plant in the straw bale

:



[D] (aka things I might not have time for but may do anyway if I get too crispy around the edges)

watch Stratford's Love's Labor Lost

improve the peanut-butter-whisky + coffee slushies I started mixing last week. I totally admit that I bought the bottle because of the label. (Netting an appalled look from the BYM was merely a bonus.)

Signal boosts:
The Okra Project
Wiggle Room (disclosure: a friend is on their team)
The SIJS (Special Immigrant Juvenile Status) Project (disclosure: a friend runs this)

Onward, y'all. Stay safe (within what's feasible, especially considering the demands made by both the rest of society and our individual souls) and keep in touch.

...a friend or associate of a former classmate tweeted a video of harpsichordist Scott Ross, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia 30 years ago.

There is a recording on YouTube of Ross playing the Gigue from Rameau's "First Book of Keyboard Pieces," which happens to be what I played most often on the harpsichords around Connecticut College back in July.

This morning I sang a solo about God having countless names and faces, and slid a stone into our water communion bowl in memory of Thomas Peck.

Since last night, I've been living with the urge to howl holy hell at North Carolina.

What has helped: cranking up the volume on my car stereo and singing along as it plays "Stand" over and over. (That chorus!)

The Nashville Public Library is ordering copies of Good Trouble for its collection.

Team Tug of Warhol (War-HAUL!) was not victorious, but we were valiant, and apparently provided a good deal of entertainment for our colleagues back at the ranch via Facebook Live (as well as those who joined us at the park, where it was 91 freaking F at noon).

It's been an intense day. I dreamt at length about my late honorary mama and her family last night. I was up at 6:30 a.m. for an early meeting. A training session for our upcoming Native Women Artists exhibition included a viewing of The Indian Problem, which -- god _____, Tennessee. Gdi, North Carolina. I followed church class with ten minutes on the erg at the Y. I'm looking at the Road Scholar catalogue that just arrived -- Honorary Mama had suggested doing one of their trips together, and while that never happened, there's at least one that another honorary relative might be up for.

But first, bath and bed. And reinforcing that figurative breastplate.