last night

I went to Traviata, and then tried to get into Cowboy Monkey. I was very impressed by Desiree, as everyone said I would be. Furthermore, I'm used to hearing that huge aria at the end of the first act sung by Joan Sutherland, who, on sound and sheer volume, is very hard to beat. But I was pretty damn pleased and blown away last night. The tenor actually has a great deal of promise and might have a good career ahead of him in several years.

I still think that the stories of most Italian operas are gratuitous bullshit, and I figured out last night that I really have zero interest in victims and victimizing, which pretty much is the case with the female leads in most tragic Italian operas. I bought a book several years ago that I need to read. It's the English translation of a French book called Opera, or the Undoing of Women.

Then, as I said, I went to Cowboy Monkey to see Heidi and Mike play and there was this huge line outside that wasn't moving, owing to the place being at capacity. I was ready to wallop a woman from my program, who always means well but somehow without failure always manages to offend me when I'm around her. And it's not easy to offend me, so she's particularly talented. She acted quite shocked that I wasn't going to hang around longer and try to get in, because she said we were supposed to be supporting our fellow classmates in their cultural and performance endeavors. OK. Needless to say, I am the very last person in the world to whom she sould be saying that. I clock in, on my official class schedule, eight solid hours a week of singing rehearsals. That's not including all the other stuff I do. Does she come to my concerts and gigs? No. Do I announce them? Yes. Does ANYONE from my program come to my gigs? Two of them do on occasion. That's it. Furthermore, M and H haven't been to any of my gigs over the past year and I make an effort to go to theirs. So I was pretty angry. I have a concert tonight in the Great Hall in Krannert. Is she coming to that? I'm sure there's no fucking way she or anyone else is from my program. So I don't want to hear ever again about how unsupportive I am.

So I went to the Blind Pig and my friend met me. We laughed our asses off and then her very nice boyfriend came and picked our drunk asses up at 2 AM. And now I have to go to work and somehow after that miraculously pull off a very difficult bit from a Renaissance work without a major hitch this evening at the concert. Yeeks!