We spent the day at the beach today. "The Beach," whatever beach it may be, will always be one of my favorite places in the world. It never fails to send me into a variety of moods. For a few minutes, it will make me feel like a little girl, and I'll splash through the waves and run across the sand to find a quiet spot to read or write (I had an obsession with quiet spots and hidey-holes when I was younger... I still do). Then watching the sea from afar will put me in a meditative, somber mood, which is good for journaling and writing poetry.
And then when I'm standing on the shoreline, watching a wave approaching, my mind begins to take a more morbid path. "It's coming to take me," I always think, as the wave gets closer.
It doesn't help at all that in one of my favorite murder mysteries, Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers, a body is discovered at the seaside. (I highly recommend the book, by the way. And the miniseries with Harriet Walter and Edward Petherbridge.) Something about the cry of a sea gull will always be linked in my mind with death.
#4: Playing music from Pride & Prejudice. I get so lost in that music. I start to play, and if everything is quiet and no one disturbs me, I go into a little world of my own. The notes and melodies take on separate personalities, and sort of... talk to each other in my head. Does that sound crazy? Don't answer that.
#3: Watching series two of The Roman Mysteries tv show. It may even warrant a whole blog post of its own.
#2: Catching up with my first ever best friend. I hadn't talked to her in years, because she moved to South Carolina and didn't get any of my emails and lost my phone number (because I also moved). She moved back to CA, and I found her on Facebook last week. It has been so wonderful to talk to her again!
#1: An impromptu concert at an out-of-tune piano. After a music rehearsal for Twelfth Night (at the house of Mrs. V - I've talked about the V's on here before), I sat down at the piano and started playing All I Ask of You, from The Phantom of the Opera. Decently. Little V the Elder came up and began to sing along. This girl is 10 years old and has a VERY strong soprano. She's learning an aria from The Magic Flute in her voice lessons. I absolutely love her, by the way. :D So she was singing, and I kept playing... badly. I get really nervous when people stand over my shoulder while I'm playing. And then this guy, who is, as of that night, our guitarist for Twelfth Night, came up behind me and started singing with Little V. Even worse for my performance at a piano than a sister or friend standing over me, is a perfect stranger. But I decided I didn't care how badly I was playing - as they say, the show must go on. :) Pretty soon even I was singing to my horrible accompaniment, and I was trying not to giggle. There we were: a ten-year-old opera star-to-be, a home-schooled theatre junkie, and a high school guy in a metal band, singing Andrew Lloyd Weber, just... because. Because spontaneity is so lovely.
There was also some rather awful parts of this week, but I won't go into those here. It feels like winter today. I'm even drinking hot cocoa and wearing a sweater... in June...in California!
Yes, we saw it! No, we didn't forget our tickets at home, or lose ourselves in the terrifying city of Hollywood, or arrive too late to see the whole show. Our experience went something like this...
We drove the long drive to the San Fernando Valley to have lunch with my grandparents to celebrate my sister's eighth grade graduation. ("Yeah... isn't it lame?" quoth my sister, regarding her "graduation") Then we drove to my father's parents' house to leave him, Noah, and the baby. We visited for a while. I made sure everyone was clear on the "Watch Zoe like a hawk" thing. ;) Not that I don't trust them or anything.
From their house, my mom and sisters and I practically flew to Hollywood - there was NO traffic! And Hollywood is a huge, scary, dirty city, but it's got a lot of character.
So... we were standing around waiting for the doors of the theater to open, and people were lining up, milling about, checking to see if they had their tickets, et cetera, and my mother (who had made us dress up a little bit) said, "Well, I'm sorry. I guess people don't dress up to go to the theater anymore." Desirae groaned. She hates wearing skirts. But then inside, mum said, "See? Now that we're inside aren't you glad you dressed up?" Because it was really really gorgeous in there. And then, when you get into the actual theater, well... wow. I mean, it looks like part of a set. "It's so art deco," my mother remarked several times.
As always, it seemed like we were waiting in our seats forever. I began to pity my sister because she was sitting right next to my other sister and her best friend - they're 11 and 12. And you know... at that age, girls are sort of giggly.
And THEN...
The first notes of the musical.
And the dragon above the stage started moving. Those first notes of Wicked always excite me, every time I put the soundtrack on.
But as much as I'd like to go through the whole show scene by scene, song by song, I can't. So I'll just sum it up: It was excellent. Very well done, well performed, and I really enjoyed seeing it with my mom. Now for the finer details, with some nitpicking:
Costumes: My absotively-posolutely FAVORITE part of the show! ... possibly. ;) The Ozzian's costumes were sort of like... Les Miserables meets colorful-fantasy-world (sort of), perfect for this darker depiction of Oz. Glinda's dresses were rather astonishing: glittering all over, full skirts. Even when she was a schoolgirl at Shiz, her dresses were lovely. Elphaba's "Wicked Witch" dress was so subtly magnificent.
Singing and Acting: Erin Mackey, who played Glinda, was my favorite, acting-wise. She had a good voice as well. Although Kristin Chenoweth, Broadway's original Glinda, has a much better and more experienced voice, her performance seems kind of flat after Erin Mackey's totally insane, immature energy. See the video below. Teal Wicks, Elphaba, was pretty great - I loved how you could see all her energy, even when she was just walking across the stage. At first it was a more suppressed energy, but it became more and more apparent throughout the play. Everyone did really well, actually, and I don't really have any complaints... (Sorry, Aly. ;) ) The Dresser from Beauty and the Beast played Madame Morrible. Haha! The show was REALLY fun, no matter how... skewed, the story is. They threw in some nods at lines from the movie ("What's in the punch?" "Lemons and melons and pears" "Oh my!" (Nessarose and Boq) and an ironic "There's no place like home" from Elphaba). A fan of the book will start rambling at intermission about all the changes, and have a nitpickers' field day when the show is over (I shared quite a few of my complaints with my family, I didn't pick the story completely apart) but a fan of the movie will come out tickled pink. And I consider myself a fan both of the book(s) and the movie (well... I was a fan of it when I was four years old...)
This is Erin Mackey performing Popular.
I'm not even going to try to find a video of Defying Gravity for you. YouTube videos simply do not do it justice. Neither does the song on the soundtrack, come to think of it.
It's added a whole new chunk of quotes to my and my sister's supply, and we didn't get home until 2 that night (which is pretty funny, since the show ended at 9 something... Honestly, how did that happen? I guess we watched the Olympics at my grandparents' house for longer than I thought...)
This afternoon I had a little adventure in the kitchen. I was home alone with my sister, and my sister was at the computer. If I had older, wiser, or nosier family members at home with me, it would not have happened. But I get brilliant ideas when I'm alone that turn out to be not so brilliant.
I was going to have some chocolate chip ice cream. I scooped some into a bowl, got out the hot fudge, and suddenly had one of those "brilliant" ideas. I decided that I would melt some caramel in the microwave and put it on my ice cream. I unwrapped four caramels and into the microwave they went. For only 20-30 seconds. I took them out. They did not look at all delicious... Part of the caramels had indeed melted and turned black and bubbly. I touched the black-and-bubbly part. OUCH. The phrase "blonde moment" comes to mind. You would think that I would be smart enough to do the math. My finger didn't hurt for very long, fortunately.
I melted the caramel some more and took them out of the microwave in a hurry when I started to hear a hissing noise in there. I stirred the caramel around, thinking, "This might work..." But in stirring the caramel around, I stirred in the black parts too. I ditched the whole idea. I put my bowl of ice cream into the freezer - I didn't need melted ice cream on top of everything else! I spooned some of the caramel into the trashcan, wrinkling my nose at the little black bits mixed into it. I then turned to the sink to puzzle over how best to clean the quickly-hardening caramel out of the little bowl. I REALLY didn't want anyone to know about my kitchen problems and stupidity. The spoon I had stirred the caramel with was pretty easy. But that bowl. *shudders* I soaked it in hot water, and scraped and scraped and soaked and... augh. I was so glad that I had cut my fingernails a few nights before, because I would certainly have broken several in the scraping process.
FINALLY I got all the caramel out, and either into the trash can or down the drain or vanished somehow or other. I ate my ice-cream without further decoration than hot fudge and enjoyed it very much. And I told my mother later that day. She thought it was pretty funny, but I don't think she would have thought it so funny if I had left it for her to clean.
So. That was my minor kitchen catastrophe for the day. At least, it seemed like a catastrophe at the time. It also seemed very interesting, but now it just seems stupid and dull. The moral of the story is: Never leave me alone in the kitchen for too long.
Once upon a time there was a girl named Delaney. She bought so many books that eventually she was buried alive in them. The End.
Luckily, that's not a true story (yet)! But it was beginning to look like it might be! Behold:
Yes, folks, that's about how many books I usually have stacked up beside my bed. And this is what I had in a bin under my bed:
We had talked about my desperate need for a bookshelf, but furniture is expensive. And I can't have any old bookshelf, you know. So last night I decided to do something about it.
In the closet in the room I share with my sister, there are two dress-up bins, (With clothing and costumes from when my mother was young), a bin full of shoes (most of which we have outgrown) and a bookshelf, which was more of a magazine/notebook/scrapbook/old book/paper shelf. It was very ugly. Last night we cleaned that out, moved the bins into the part of the closet where the bookshelf was, and moved the bookshelf so that we could actually get to it. We threw a lot of stuff away, and now all my old notebooks are hidden safely under my bed in a storage bin. Then ... we made this junk shelf into a real bookshelf, as my sister says!
(Just a note: I don't learn Latin from Latin For Dummies. I use Henle Latin.)
Aaahhh. Now, here's the pile by my bed; only books I'm reading, and books from the library.
I think I now know why there is that practice called "Spring Cleaning." There must be something about spring that shows up the dirtiness of your house. And spring is a time of newness.
(My apologies for the bad quality of the pictures. I had to edit them to make them brighter and not so ... yellow. *wrinkles her nose*)
Yesterday we were driving home from a long day in the town we do all our shopping (and most of our socializing) in. My thoughts were doing their usual thing, wandering around in a mysterious pattern, and I was paying little attention to the outside world, when I saw a man standing on the side of the road, holding a sign. People standing on the side of the road with all their worldly belongings and a sign tend to fascinate us, do they not? We have a fixation with misfortune. You agree?
My mom started to pull over, and I could see what the sign said.
“Enuff for a Happy Meal, please?”
My mom handed the man the coins she could find from her purse and said, “Here you go, sir.” Bless her. Kind of reminds me of Les Miserables, when the Bishop calls Valjean, ‘Monsier’: “Monsieur to a convict is a glass of water to a man dying of thirst at sea.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about that sign. How much does a Happy Meal from McDonalds cost? Six dollars? Less? I’ve never even thought about it before.
I made my first real "enemy" today. He's a radio talk show host and he doesn't know that I exist, nor that he is my enemy. Today he was talking with people for at least 45 minutes on how he can't believe Catholics can believe what they believe and still hold their heads up.
Pfffft.
What I was thinking, as I turned my rock-hard music up very high (Superchic[k] isn't exactly rock hard, but if you turn it up loud enough it's very satisfying when you're angry) and read The Queen of Attolia and STILL heard that man talking and talking and talking and swearing and talking, was "I'm going to pray for you, pal, and there's nothing you can do about it! Ha! Ha!"
I never heard what his name was, so I decided to name him Rob Tirsch after the "evil prince" in The Shadow of the Bear (I must have been feeling particularly disgusted with Rob at the time. I can't remember what I was thinking, though); he would be my enemy, and I was going to pray for him. But then I realized that I would be praying for him...for revenge. Which kills the entire point. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around that...
Anyhow. A lady with a beautiful little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes almost left her daughter's shoes behind in the parking lot of Baja Fresh. I tapped frantically on her window and held up the shoes. When she opened the door, took the shoes, and thanked me, it occurred to me that I had perhaps tapped too frantically, and I said, "Sorry." I don't know what I'm thinking sometimes.
