Oscar

Who's going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture? The only movies I saw last year that got any nominations at all were Star Trek and Julie and Julia. Didn't see a single one of the Best Picture nominees. Were any of them any good?

Opera benefit

Yay! Scored a ticket to tonight's sold-out anniversary performance of Opera Lafayette. Fabulous seat, too! I'm in the first parterre box nearest the stage on the right. If anyone else is going, message me and let's meet for cocktails at intermission.

Ballet report

This past week I've been down at the Kennedy Center being a supernumerary for American Ballet Theater's production of Romeo and Juliet. A couple of years ago, I did a Romeo and Juliet for the Kirov Ballet (Mariinsky Theater) from Russia, and, even though they both use the same music (Prokofiev score), the choreography of the two productions is vastly different. I was kind of excited to be cast this time with ABT, because it's the first time I've ever been cast by an American ballet company. The Russian companies are used to having tall dancers (I've met several taller than me!), but American dancers typically are rather short, so they never have costumes to fit me.

Here are a few pictures from the production.

More cast members.

Ballet

Dance audition tonight. Someone should talk some sense into me and make me stay home.....I'm too old and too fat to be doing this anymore! Probably won't get cast, though, cause this is an American company and I'm probably too tall for the costumes.

Haiti benefit

We're going to the National Symphony's Haiti Earthquake Relief Benefit Concert tonight, featuring Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.

Wedding singer

This is the dog that "accompanied" me from under the piano at the wedding I played Saturday.

Xmas in New York

Last weekend I went to New York for a Christmas shopping and musical weekend with Ian as well as to escape the "blizzard" that was forecast for Washington that Saturday (as it turned out, D.C. got about 20-24" of snow and, predictably, the whole city shut down, including all buses and above-ground Metro trains, and even on Monday, the federal government closed all offices because of snow). It was a fun weekend, even considering the 8-10" of snow that made its way to New York City on Saturday night (the original forecast had the snow curving out to sea and missing New York).

Snow or not, New York is always fun in December. Here are a few shots around town during the snow storm.



This is Macy's on Herald Square, with the Empire State Building in the background. We shopped in Macy's for a while, and it was a good thing, since the next day, they had an escalator fire and had to close down the building for a while (and I bet a lot of the clothes and things smelled smoky after that, too!).

It was snowing to hard to get a good picture of the tree, but this is Rockefeller Center. We didn't stay out too long. The horizontal snow was starting to hurt our faces due to the already-fast winds being accellerated in the wind tunnels of downtown skyscrapers.



Here are some chestnuts roasting on an open fire at one of the street vendor carts.