Just for fun I took a fashion design and construction class.  We had a “Project Runway” style show at the end, that, while cheesy, was undeniably fun and adorable.   This is what I’ve been doing instead of writing in my blog.  The first dress is evening wear, and unfortunately, we didn’t get any shots with the bottom of the dress, which was the coolest part.  I’ll have to post that later.  It’s an iridescent plum raw silk affair with a spring green silk tucked hem at the bottom.   Accessories are a venetian glass and gold sculptural necklace and a vintage silver and amber cuff bracelet.

The second dress is a sheer knit top with a rayon blend woven bust line.  The top stitched embroidery is done in three different colors.  Modern, fun, and about a size too small for the model, because I had a little trouble with the measuring tape.

The cheapest way( for me) is to meet my uncle in the Park80 West office park and leave my car there while he drives the rest of the way in.  This costs me $2 in Garden State Parkway tolls.  It costs him whatever gas his car consumes, and the 8 dollar toll to cross the GW bridge.  It also gets me there in less time, and home before 11 PM.  Not to mention, it’s always a fun adventure riding with my Uncle John.  I get to hear all sorts of great stories about Emergency Department shenanigans, incompetent interns, and the latest government ridiculousness.  My uncle also drives like a character from The Fast and the Furious.   Yesterday, we discussed our practice methods for the Bach and how confident we felt we were about our progress.

I enjoy practicing the Bach, I’ve spent a fair amount of time with the learning mp3s and my score going over various drills to prepare for each weeks performance.  I ought to be great at it, I have very few other responsibilities.  I can’t help being a little arrogant though, my sight reading is good, my ear is better.  I only worked for a few hours this week on the pieces we were to be rehearsing on Thursday.  They were fairly easy, and I didn’t really review the previous movements.  I already knew them.  I took the extra hour saved by riding with my uncle and not on the train and looked over everything without spending a lot of mental energy on it.  I left for Park 80 west with plenty of time to get there.

When I take this route, the only thing I’m responsible for is getting myself to Park80 West around 6:00 PM.  I’ve done this successfully several times.  I know the route.  I felt I was reasonably certain about the overview of the area.  I stopped at the red light between Grove Street and Alexander, and realized that the road ahead of me was closed.  High winds that day had taken out a few trees and those had dragged down power lines.  Grove street was blocked right as it turns beneath the university and the cemetery.

This is bad news.  Both universities and large cemeteries have in common that they make a mess of the surrounding road structure.  The tall bluff that the university sits on doesn’t help matters either.  No, the only  way through the snarl of “aesthetically planned residential neighborhoods” tombstones, and campus buildings was blocked by large oaks, sparking wires, and aggravated police officers.  The short of it is, I was about to be very, very lost.

I spent the next 20 minutes cycling through various way-finding techniques, such as the reasonable detour (there wasn’t one) looking for signs (this is New Jersey, if you don’t already know where you’re going, leave!)  trying to ask someone (… yeah, right) and pulling over and banging my head on the steering wheel (not particularly effective, but satisfying)  I finally came across a partially-obscured GSP North emblem and followed it gratefully, made a few other circles trying to locate other GSP signs and got myself back on track. Of course, through this whole ordeal, I was kicking myself for having forgotten my cell phone on my desk.

I did eventually get there, my uncle wasn’t too annoyed, and we made it into the city only a few minutes late.  I proceeded to have a pretty terrible rehearsal.  We didn’t sit in sections that evening.  The director wanted us to really listen to each other.  I also picked up a bit of chest congestion in Boston, so I couldn’t hit any notes below a B.  After each note that my voice cracked on, I couldn’t find the one after it, or the one after that.  Without my fellow Altos to listen to, I was, for the second time that day, most definitely lost.  I tried other methods of pitch-finding.  Looking for a similar note on the parts I could hear (bass and tenor… I wasn’t always fast enough to transpose and reacquire my pitch) finding my perfect middle-c (not a particularly common note in the b-minor mass) and hiding behind my score and mouthing the words until we stopped and I could catch up again (not particularly effective or satisfying)

It occurred to me in the middle of rehearsal that I knew the B-minor Mass about as well as I knew my route to get there.  With no additional complications, I am reasonably competent.  As soon as something goes wrong, I am completely and utterly lost.

Practice is the only cure for this particular malady.  I will be working harder to correct both of these shortcomings this week.

Also, as I feared.. when practicing the Et Ressurexit in sectional rehearsal, we sung in counts.  Et Ressurexit is in 3/4.  Right in the middle of a rest on beat one, I happily sang out 1+ 2+ 3e+a 4!  The director stops and looks around quizzically “Who just said 4?”  I chose that moment to drop my pencil and spend some time looking for it under my chair.  This is a known problem with me and the Et Ressurexit.  I’ll be practicing not counting to 4 this week as well.  Lest I give you the wrong impression though,  of the errors made that evening, the most glaring and embarrassing were not, in fact, my fault.  I also like commas.  Good day.

Three children are cute, but only for awhile . I took a few adorable pictures of the kids with my new 50mm prime. I absolutely love it. I would have tried for a few more while the light was good, but they weren’t in the mood for sitting still. I’ll post a few when I get them edited.

My uncle is certified with the state police andthe NRA to teach firearm techniques and safety. I got the basic course in handgun safety and handling. I’ll post more avoid it when I have a keyboard.

Speaking of, time to get the car packed.

Some of them really are though:

Neil Gaiman reads The Graveyard Book on a multi-day tour.  I’ve been loving this.  He’s a great reader and since it’s his book, you really get the sense of how he imagined the dialogue and pacing when he was writing it.  I would reccommend setting aside a few hours to watch these (or background them if you can’t spare the time)   http://www.mousecircus.com/videotour.aspx

Also, in that same vein, I’ve been eagerly awaiting Coraline and this latest trailer makes me want February 6th to come even faster:  http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/01/heres-button-trailer.html

This image of Tamar Levine and Rob Sheridan’s creation is creepy and cool: http://www.rob-sheridan.com/sketchblog/  I hear they’re doing more.

I’m sure there have been other things.  I can’t remember them right now.

I’ll start in Ames.  The traditional Ames, Iowa pizza is Great Plains Sauce and Dough Company.  (at least since DaVinci’s closed) A pizza from Great Plains is a thing to behold.  It is less a pizza and more of a manner of conveying cheese to your mouth.  I am not sure I’ve ever really tasted the aforementioned sauce.  Toppings are generally an afterthought and probably overkill.  A lunch special at Great Plains includes 1 drink 1 or 2 pieces of pizza and dessert.  The dessert and the pizza are combined.  You simply order the honey-wheat crust, nibble off all the sauce and cheese bits and you are left with a bread stick sized piece of sweet bread.  The accepted practice for consumption of the crusts is to save them all until the end and drizzle honey.  Built-in dessert.

Great as this is, I’ll move further east to Chicago.  The pizza experience of Chicago is best exemplified by a pie from Gino’s East.  It is much like the Great Plains experience in that on piece of pizza could constitute an entire meal.  It differs in that you could probably fit all of the food groups inside a Gino’s Pizza and possibly never even notice due to the richness of crust and sauce.  This is a momentous combination.  They take their sauce seriously and the pizza is always deep pan.  Wen you order sausage (and for your health I’d recommend never ordering sausage) you get a pizza sized sausage patty hidden underneath the top layer of sauce and cheese.  The Chicago boys (Nate, Brad, and Bob) tell me that horrible things happen to you from eating more than one piece of Gino’s sausage pizza.  They elaborated…. I am not going to.

Move a little further south and you get St. Louis style Pizza.  In my opinion this isn’t really worth eating after the first two.  If you like provolone cheese melted over a cracker and smeared with very sweet tomato sauce, though, you might disagree with me.  For my recommendation, skip Imo’s and all it’s ilk and go find a Chicago Pizzeria Uno.

Today I had New York style pizza.  New York also takes its pizza seriously, but since New Yorker’s rarely have time to sit down and hack through their pizza with a knife and fork (as is required for pretty much all of the above) they take it seriously in a whole different way.  With very few exceptions, your typical neighborhood pizza joint in New York or New Jersey turns out about the same product:  a very large, very flat pizza lightly covered in a sauce that tastes pretty much like mashed tomatoes and salt, and more heavily covered in delicious, surprising orange cheese that has a grease factor all its own.  The crust is a small marvel of engineering, as it has a tensile strength that leads me to believe it was used to reinforce the Brooklyn Bridge.  Toppings had better have a high coefficient of friction all their own.  This usually means they are also flat and thin and stuck deep into the sauce. These slices are giant and require a fold in the middle to even hope to fit the first bite in your mouth.  Luckily, the miracle crust (invariably verging on burnt) is up to the task and even business men in suits and fashionistas in Prada can be seen standing on the street by their pizza counter of choice and quite daintily consuming what looks like a very tasty manhole cover.

New York Pizza reminds me most of my favorite pizza in the world.  Every piece of Pizza I ate in Rome.  Roman pizza is not fussy.  It is served mostly during lunch from street-side shops with little or no seating.  Pizzas are baked in large rectangles and sold by weight.  You simply walk up to the counter point to the one (or ones) you want and make motions with your hands to indicate how big a piece you would like.  This is not just because I don’t speak Italian very well.  This is standard practice.  The person behind the counter would then pick up a large pair of what can best be described as “Pizza Shears” and cut you off a rectangle to your size specifications.  Your choice(s) would be weighed and handed to you on a plate, napkin, or in a box( if you ordered enough) .  There is no food you can’t put on a Roman pizza, it would seem.  I enjoyed such favorites as mozzarella and red sauce (real mozzarella, very little grease involved), potatoes and rosemary, shrimp and chicory, brie and pear, and what I can only assume (and hope) was squid.

It seems this strange lunch ritual involving giant omni-food-cutting scissors is enjoyed across all classes in Roman society.  One of my favorite everyday sights was spotting a nun in full habit carrying a stack of pizza boxes.  I even witnessed one of the shadowy Caribinieri jump out of his sleek black car and grab a box.  Official business, very top secret, very delicious.

I am naturally a Type C driver.

I hate driving, I’m afraid of being squished into a little Honda pancake by one of the many Hummers on the road out here.  I am extra careful, I don’t want anyone to be mad at me, and I wish that everyone, both Type A and Type B drivers, would simply follow the basic principles of cooperation and make for a safer happier commute.

That theory works really well in Iowa.  Drive like that here, and you’ll never, ever, get anywhere.  Robert suggests that my problem is my overall lack of aggression and my concern for other’s well-being.  I should develop an intense hatred for the other cars on the road because they are actively trying to prevent me from getting to my destination.  He can suggest this because he knows I’ll never quite make it that far, but the exercise might help me survive the road conditions out here.

My old driving methodology causes nothing but trouble on these roads.  People expect me to cut them off, and plan for it, and I make even more of a hazard when I don’t.  After nearly being sideswiped then rear-ended yesterday after a moment’s hesitation at a “Yield” sign, I decided to get angry.  Contrary to driver’s education class curriculum, defensive driving is going to get me killed.

I’m not completely passive, I do have some capability in the field of aggression, and my new Honda has a 6 cylinder engine in a comparatively lightweight body.  I’m pulling more acceleration power than most of the cars on the road.  This car likes to run.  I can feel it, just have to let it out a bit.

Today I drove between Upper Montclair and East Orange, a road full of twists, turns, lane switches, disappearing lanes, and unruly traffic coming off the Garden State Parkway.  It is a small urban planning disaster and the speed limit is 45 miles an hour.   This gives me a speed of traffic of roughly 50-55.  Once I turned on my more assertive driving style, this once terrifying maze became almost fun.  My reaction time is fast enough still, my car is agile enough, and I am good enough at reading people to know what the other drivers around me are thinking.  (That part is not really true… it’s easy to know.  They’re thinking “Me first, get out of my way!!!”  Unless they’re in a giant boat of a car and then they’re thinking “What???? Where am I???”)

Extrapolate all that data on to my projected flight path, and holy hell!  I think I’ve learned how to drive.  I’m not reckless, don’t get me wrong.  With just a little more anger, I am capable of being attentive to a lot more of the road and find the paths through the crossing, turning, speeding, braking, and otherwise occupied cars.  I don’t have a choice.  If I can’t thread through, I’ll either sit there forever or get smashed from behind… Or both.

This place is crazy.  The road signs are wrong, the drivers are hateful, the buses are bigger than you and are great big bullies, and the roads are unpredictable and in poor repair.  And I’m actually having fun with it.

On Thursday I went into the city to audition for and rehearse with the New York Oratorio Society.  I was on the subway, halfway uptown before it occurred to me that I’d never actually been into New York by myself before.  I wasn’t bothered by this, I was just amazed it took me until I was almost to my destination to realize I’d never done this particular thing before.  I found the Turtle Bay Music School easily and even was able to recognize a few of the group members from China and Prague.  The first half of the rehearsal was a little nerve-wracking because I’ve never even heard the Mass in B Minor all the way through, and I’d never seen the score before I picked it up on my way in.  I settled for sitting and following the music and jumping in when I saw a familiar pattern.

The first piece was a a Kyrie fugue, very baroque with all it’s ascending and descending 4ths, but for some reason my poor music starved brain was only able to pick out a few notes and progressions.  When we started working on the Kyrie (2) Fugue, though, my musical hind-brain kicked in.  I was able to sight read almost all of the movement.  It was remarkably easy, like I’d been singing it for weeks.  I don’t really remember in the foreground much of the musical theory used to allow me to do things like this, but apparently it is still back there somewhere.  The chords, ornamentation, the timing… everything felt like it could really only be structured in this way, and I knew the patterns and they all made perfect sense.

I’ve had this particular phenomenon occur with other baroque pieces, and Stabat Mater came easily too.  I’m excited to know that piece of my hard-won knowledge is intact.  It definitely helped me through the audition.  I wasn’t particularly brilliant at the sight reading for the audition, but I made my mistakes with confidence and a remarkably clear and well-developed voice.  When he pointed out the mistakes, I was easily able to correct them.   I confessed I hadn’t sight read anything in a long time, and the conductor replied that I must have been good at it once, and was certainly welcome to sing with them.  I was pretty giddy.

I’m singing Alto I with the Oratorio Society of New York on April 20th!  If anyone wants to come out, let me know, I’ll get tickets.

My first modern dance class this morning was not so uplifting.  I knew it was going to be pretty bad.  My last dance experience was tearing my hamstring and damaging an ankle ligament trying out for The Nutcracker.  My pointe shoe caught on a flaw on an improperly applied vinyl stage floor landing me in the unenviable position of losing my footing halfway through a grand battment rolling my ankle on the standing leg and landing rather heavily forward on my outstretched leg.

My leg didn’t work properly for months, and by the time it was healed enough to consider rehabing it and getting back into dance, I was too depressed about the idea of working back through it… I certainly wasn’t a natural at dance, and my chances of doing anything with it, ever were almost zero, and I had found plenty to keep busy with.

It should have come as no surprise when I started gaining weight and losing muscle tone and flexibility.  Even after my leg had mostly healed, I still couldn’t touch my toes.  I was afraid, I think.  I didn’t want to hurt myself again, I was pissed off at myself for allowing it to happen in the first place, and I was lazy.  It was going to be exponentially harder to get back to the level I was, and it just got harder the longer I waited.

This year I decided I’d had enough with my lame excuses and I was going to dance again, just for fun and exercise.  I enrolled in an adult beginning modern class.  And it was all I could do to keep from crying through it this morning.  My knowledge of music might have stayed with me, even in phantom form, but my ability to dance is definitely gone.  Everything hurt, I was embarrassed to be in the “2nd Group” something I’m not too familiar with, and even more upset to find that not only is my strength and flexibility gone, my ingrained movement pattern went with it.  I’m starting at square one… back where I was as a child, just now with the greater cognitive capacity to watch my own ungainly movements and without the hope that having plenty of time to improve brings.

I’m not going to quit… like I said, I’ve had enough of my excuses, but it’s going to be a struggle physically and mentally.  It’s going to hurt… a lot… the injury is still deep in the muscle, I could feel it today.  This means months of very careful rehab in addition to being really slow in the class.   Still, if at the end of this year I can put my head on my knees again and look at myself in the mirror without wanting to go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, it will have been a year well spent.

I have wanted to post about my fabulous time in NYC as a tourist and as a New Years Eve party girl.  I think I’ll make that it’s own post… tomorow.

I’m pretty excited about tomorrow too.  I have my first practice with the New York Oratorio Society.  That’s right, I will be singing Bach’s Mass in B Minor in Carnegie Hall in March.  I never really figured that was something I’d ever do.  I’ve only been peripherally interested in music since I left its practice after high school.  Still, I did sing a solo with the Muscatine Civic Chorale (grin)

I’ve been doing a lot of manual labor lately.  I have a studio space in the basement of the house, but it was filled almost floor to ceiling with stuff.  I would have just dug it out and moved the stuff to another part of the basement, but that would have been impossible, as the rest of the basement is full of stuff to.  It’s not useful stuff.  It is the accumulation of 60 years and three households and a mentality that believes that nothing should ever be disposed of because it may be useful some day.

To that end, I have discovered 3 toasters, 4 chandeliers, boxes of sheets, more polyester pantsuits than I care to think about, medical texts, Kurt Vonnegut’s entire collected works, boxes of kitchenware, enough paint cans to constitute our own small environmental disaster, an unknown brown liquid in a jar, and several creepy dolls with no heads.  This is just to name a few of the wonders I’ve unearthed down there.

I’m of the opinion that if you haven’t seen it in a decade or more, chances are you’ll never need to see it again.  I’ve made progress.  I can see enough of my studio to know that there’s water damage and the concrete will have to be resealed before I can move in *sigh*

I also did battle with an immature female wolf spider today.  I feel kind of bad, because I am not really happy about causing any creature harm.. but it snuck up on me, and I happened to be holding an ice pick (I don’t know why there was an ice pick in that box of books)… It was actually kinda badass.  Also, even in their immature state, female wolf spiders are HUGE.  It was more a knee-jerk gut reaction than a premeditated execution.

That aside,

I’ve also started taking classes to fill up some time.  I’m in a mixed media sculpture class that is already pretty cool.  I’m having fun twisting wire into shapes ( and imagining Paul Shao threatening to beat me with a stick as punishment to various crimes against art and design.. that was an interesting class)  I’m also signed up for fashion sewing (why the hell not) and Modern Dance.  I’m also looking into capoeira.

Another vast portion of my time has been job hunting.  I’ve applied to at least 15 places now.  Have heard back from one.  It’s a bad time, it really is.  I’m not hurting too badly yet, but I could be in very short order if I don’t find some manner of paying work soon.  Luckily, I have a few commissions to work on (even if I don’t have a space to do it quite yet) and a show coming up.

Now it’s time for bed, id I can find where I’ve misplaced it.