Elizabeth May statement on Canada’s climate commitments
From 31 March 2015
Mr. Speaker, today, March 31, is the deadline for those nations that are ready to do so to table climate commitments with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in advance of COP 21. Yesterday in question period the minister confirmed that Canada was not ready and would miss this deadline. The excuse that was offered was that we were a federation and we were checking with the provinces and territories.
Of the 33 nations that, as of today, have met this and have filed their intended nationally determined contributions with the UN, one of those, the European Union, had 28 separate nation states with which to consult, confer and develop a plan, and it met the deadline.
The minister said yesterday that we had until December. That is not correct. By October, the UN system will have calculated the cumulative total of all commitments to see if it is sufficient to avoid 2°C.
At this point, we are missing our obligations to the world, to Canadians, and to our children.
When we arrived at the KW Symphony’s gala fundraising dinner, we immediately noticed a glamorous-looking woman in a shimmery dress with a long train that we made a mental note not to step on. Next thing we knew, after getting a drink from the bar, she was introducing herself to us.
I’m Patricia Ward Kelly. Gene Kelly’s wife.
That would be Gene Kelly, actor, dancer, director, and star of Singin’ in the Rain, the greatest musical of all time. And no, Ms. Kelly is not 90 years old; she’s maybe 50?
“Big age difference when they met,” I told Jean, after we’d thanked her for talking to us and moved off into the next room. He was a bit stunned, not having read about Patricia Kelly in advance, as I had.
Everyone got dolled up for this “black tie optional” affair, which is always kind of fun. (Though I only have a picture of me, not a set of the well-dressed crowd.)
We weren’t able to convince any of our friends to join us at this affair, though, so we were seated with three other couples we didn’t know. (Should have been four, but one set was a no-show.) They proved to be good company. We had interesting conversations on topics such as travel, books, and Future Shop (which had suddenly closed that morning).
The event was held in the ballroom of the Crown Plaza Hotel (so, far from the pool smell…). Cocktails started at 4:30, dinner at 5:30, and they did an exemplary job of getting through speeches, an auction, and the three-course meal in time for us to get to Centre in the Square for the show.
As for the food, I think everyone was happy with the salad appetizer and the dessert, which was a choice of carrot or chocolate truffle cake.
Le salade
For the entree, I overheard some complaints of it being cold or the meat tough. Maybe just luck of the draw, then, but Jean and I found our meals quite fine.
For the auction, it was interesting that bidding was fiercest for the items that were essentially donations: for sending a school to a concert or for the symphony’s music therapy program. Instead of just taking the largest bids, Patricia Ward Kelly suggested accepting all the highest bids as multiple donations. Good idea!
She herself was quite a good speaker, talking of her meeting with Gene Kelly, when she didn’t know who the heck he was, and how they fell in love, and she’s become the keeper of his legacy. She’s never remarried. She was also very gracious about the community and the symphony organization.
The final part of the evening was at Centre in the Square (taxi ride to and from included), where Singin’ in the Rain was played with a voice-only soundtrack, and the KW Symphony played all the music live. Ms. Kelly spoke briefly here as well, and one of the items she told us was that all the original scores were thrown out by the studio, and had to be re-created later, by ear.
Evan Mitchell came back from Kingston to do the conducting of this show, and he did an amazing job of keeping the symphony in sync with film being shown. All really seamless, except for occasionally hearing the musicians turn the pages!
Jean concluded he hadn’t ever seen the entire movie before. For me, it was certainly the first time I’d seen it on the big screen. It’s so good! And for once, it totally made sense to applaud in the middle and at the end of a movie.
Good Mornin’ from Singin’ in the Rain.— the only song Debbie Reynolds actually sang in this movie. Otherwise, her voice was dubbed. Ironically. (This is I learned only last night…)
After the performance there was another reception downstairs, in the fancy member’s lounge. While it was nice to be in that room again (and get more desserts!), it wasn’t a terribly entertaining event, so we didn’t stay too long. We ended up cabbing back to the Crown Plaza with the Assistant Conductor of the KW Symphony.
Singin’ in the Rain plays again tonight (without all the gala accoutrements).
Last weekend we went out for our “late for me, slightly early for him” birthday dinner. After much hemming and hawing, we decided to on Bhima’s Warung, a restaurant we hadn’t been to in a few years.
It was much busier than we remembered! We asked the waitress if that was unusual, but she was said no, it was typical—even on weekdays. It’s not that big a place; the couple seated next to us joked about how we were basically dining together, our tables were so close.
Bhima’s offers the cuisine of Asia prepared using French culinary techniques. Definitely makes for an original menu.
This day they were also offering a surprise six-course menu based on the foods of Sumatra, for $47. Partly just out of laziness, Jean decided to go with that. I was not obliged to join in with him on it, though, so I puttered through the menu, which was made even more complex by the addition of three special appetizers and entrees that day.
Since we don’t get to Bhima’s that often, I wanted a sampling of items. The waitress described my ordered amount as somewhat “challenging” in terms of quantity. But she did point out that most of their dishes taste even better reheated the next day.
We didn’t take notes, so there’s no going through everything we eat (which is probably a relief to you). I will say that everything was very good, marking an improvement over previous visits, where the food could be uneven.
And we do have some photos.
Oysters times two
Oyster are ordered by the piece, so we went with two from the regular menu, in warm lemongrass, ginger, chili, and garlic sauces, and two that were specials of the day: an oyster shooter in vodka.
Squid with ‘rujak’ salad
I also tried the regular menu sotong goreng sama rujak, or tapioca and garlic fried squid in roasted chili, lime, and hoisin glaze with ‘rujak’ salad. Very nice; great texture on the squid.
Shrimp and ?
One of Jean’s courses featured shrimp and… Stuff we can’t remember.
Another Jean menu item: This one was monkfish and lobster ball
My main involved rabbit done three ways (a special), and it did indeed make a fine leftover. 🙂 Dessert for me was a tapioca and ice cream concoction, while Jean’s menu concluded with ice cream made of something we’d never heard of and now can’t remember—but tasted very good—along with some sort of pastry or apple or something. (Look, it was a lot of food!)
Mystery ice cream with mystery other things
It’s not a fine dining experience, but the dining was still quite fine. We should notify Where to Eat in Canada that Bhima’s is once more worthy of inclusion.
I once loved Glee. Season 1, I was completely enamored with the show. There was no denying its flaws—those two terrible pregnancy plots; the sudden and unexplained changes in characterization from episode to episode—but it more than made up for it in originality, heart, and wonderful music and dance numbers. At least for that year.
In Season 2, I still watched every episode, albeit with less enthusiasm. But somehow, the season finale episode just did me in. They’re at Nationals, in New York, the day before—and they still haven’t even written, let alone rehearsed, the original songs they’re going to perform?
Even for the bizarro world of Glee where a high school show choir can sing and dance every new song perfectly from the first take, it was too much. I couldn’t buy it anymore. I couldn’t watch it anymore. Just like that, Glee was off the PVR list and out of my life.
Til Cory Monteith. Now, Finn was never my favorite character, I was never that taken with Monteith as an actor (thought Mark Sailing, who played Puck, was hotter), but it was just so sad when he died. He was so young, and he seemed like such a sweet person, and the fact that he was actually dating Leah Michelle (“Rachel”) in real life… I had to tune in to see how Glee would handle it.
“The Quarterback”, Season 5, was ten-hanky episode for sure (music—it’s an emotional mindfield), but I thought it was a lovely handling of Finn’s death. It was set a few weeks later, cause of death never specified, and focused on how the character’s dealt with his loss. Which, being Glee, was mostly by singing.
And then I stopped watching Glee until—you’re probably thinking until the series finale, but no.
Earlier this month Netflix US made season 5 of Glee available. So I decided to watch the five episodes featuring Adam Lambert.
The first of these turned out to be the one right after “The Quarterback”, called “A Katy or a Gaga”. Auditioning for Kurt’s band (though mind boggles at the thought of Lambert actually auditioning for Colfer, but whatever!), Adam does this incredible cover of Lady Gaga’s “Marry the Night”. It so good it allowed me to forgive the rest of the episode, which wasn’t exactly bad so much as rote. So rote the characters themselves make snarky, ironic asides about the lack of originality. Sue somehow still hates the Glee club. Glee cast members might be new, but it’s still slut vs. virgin for the hunk’s attention. And so on.
Next up, however, was “Puppet Master”. And it has to be said that this episode has two terrific musical numbers: one a re-creation of Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” / “Rhythm Nation” videos, another a black’n’white rendering of “Cheek to Cheek” featuring Will and Sue, of all people.
But it’s as though, having put so much energy into these two scenes, they had nothing left for the rest of the episode, which was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. With Muppets everywhere. And characters who seem completely different in personality from what they were on the previous episode I’d watched. And finishing off with that ridiculous “What Do the Fox Say” song. Why? I don’t know!
(And one has to say that Angel has proven you can absolutely do an excellent episode of television based on Muppets! Having seen and loved “Smile Time”, I think, just made this awful Glee episode even more awful.)
Scene from “Smile Time”, Angel season 5
As the AV Club said (not nearly scathingly enough, in my opinion):
It’s like “Puppet Master” is so embarrassed of this plot that it just wants to get to the fun stuff.
That discord is what really feels lazy. There’s no meaning in the mix of songs in this episode or the way these plots have almost nothing to do with one another, even though three vaguely revolve around leadership.
To make it even worse, Adam Lambert’s part is teeny tiny in this episode. (But at least the badness doesn’t rub off on him so much.)
So what was most shocking about the next season 5 episode I viewed, “Frenemies”, was that it was actually a quite decent episode of Glee. Artie and Tina; Kurt and Elliott (that’s Adam’s character); and Rachel and Santana try to maintain their friendship despite their rivalry, with mixed results.
Two more eps to go. (Then Adam left the show to tour with Queen. Good move!)
Meantime, I did in fact watch the finale, after the fact, on City-TV’s website. (Which featured far fewer commercial interruptions than I was expecting.) And much like “The Quarterback”, and much for the same reasons, it worked for me. The first half harkened back to the first season in 2009, filling in the storylines not featured then of how Rachel, Artie, Tina, and Mercedes came to join the Glee club. The characters began discussing Finn only near the end of that half, and then—there he was on-screen, as they replayed the “Don’t Stop Believin’” scene from episode 1.
Don’t stop believin’
Cue the Kleenex, but very effective.
The second half occured now and in the future, and everybody is happy as their dreams come true, except there is this sadness over everything—because, Finn. Based on the AV Club comments, this was not very satisfying to those stalwarts who actually stuck with this program for six seasons.
But for fair-weather friends like me, it was just about perfect.
When someone you love dies, blogging about pop culture, news, travel, and food drops off the priority list.
Doesn’t mean that these trivialities drop our of your life, though. Just that your relationship to them changes, at least for a time.
Music
You know, if you break my heart I’ll go
But I’ll be back again
‘Cause I told you once before good-bye
And I came back again
Music is an emotional mindfield, isn’t it? I don’t think The Beatles “I’ll Be Back” would make anyone’s list of saddest songs ever, but on a day of bad news, I couldn’t handle it. I frantically searched through my playlists for safer havens. I finally settled on “High Energy”, a gathering of uptempo rock and dance numbers, generally with pleasingly dumb lyrics. I stayed locked on that for about a week and a half, ‘til it finally seemed just too incongruous. (Then I switched to Classical.)
I was interested to discover that I still got hungry, still wanted to cook, was still able to eat. Because certain forms of stress and worry make that difficult for me. But not this one, this situation with a known but sad outcome. While I didn’t eat more, or drink more—I didn’t find comfort in that—I still enjoyed the routine of preparing and eating meals.
I certainly became a distracted cook, though. Leaving the milk out on the counter, putting the vinegar in the wrong pantry, forgetting to start the timer. Like the energy of pushing the sadness away enough to follow a recipe was not leaving enough mental space to remember anything that wasn’t written down.
Things are now improving on that front.
Movies and TV
While actually going out to a movie seemed like too much effort, watching stuff on TV was an appealing distraction. Since I don’t watch much medical stuff anyway, there wasn’t much I felt I had to avoid. Howard’s mother died on Big Bang Theory (as the actress had in real life), but it was handled with a light touch and didn’t set me off. In picking HBO movies, I decided to skip Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow for now, given its premise of the lead character dying over and over. I instead watched and quite appreciated the comedic In a World, one of the more overtly feminist movies I’ve seen in a long time. Recommended.
The human interest stories—little boys lost in the snow, Oliver Sack’s terminal cancer diagnosis—were best avoided for a while, but I still found the theatre of politics a surprisingly useful distraction. Especially in Twitter form (about the length of my attention span, at times). I couldn’t truly dig up my own personal outrage at some of what was going on, but I could still appreciate and retweet other people’s. #StopC51 and all that.
Books
So just a few days before all this my book club had selected Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal as our next book. It’s about getting older and end of life care, and how the medical profession has been dealing with it, and how it should.
Of course, there were days I wasn’t up to reading much of anything at all, but when I did feel up to it, I did read this, I seriously doubt I would have selected this particular book if left to my own druthers, but I feel it was in some ways helpful. It’s an excellent book, anyway, and much of it was more abstract and factual, which appealed to my logical side. Stories did become more personal and touching later in the book, but that was later in this whole saga for me too and—I don’t think it made anything worse. It certainly presented a number of scenarios I’m so glad my loved one never went through.
We originally thought of taking a day trip this long weekend—maybe do some snowshoeing—but the record cold temperatures dissuaded us from that plan. Instead we found entertainment closer to home.
Friday night we had dinner with friends at Aqua, the new seafood restaurant in the not-so-new Crowne Plaza Hotel. The service was a little iff-y—bit inattentive—but the food was pretty good. We all went with the Valentine’s special menu. The highlights were the beet soup with smoked trout, the ravioli and beef entree Jean had, and the two desserts: A chocolate mousse cake and a cookie with ice cream concoction. We all concluded we’d eat here again, amidst that special chlorinated pool ambiance. 🙂
Afterward we all attended a symphony concert. It started with a modern piece that our friend accurately described as interesting, but not that musical. Then we got Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concert no. 2 in C minor. For me, this would be the number 3 Rachmaninoff piano concerto I have heard live, and he is three for three in my books. I always enjoy them. The second movement of this one sounds so much “All By Myself” that Eric Carmen still pays royalties to Rachmininoff’s estate. (True fact!) The third movement was lively and sensual. The featured pianist was an attractive and obviously talented young woman named Natasha Paremski.
The second half of the concert featured Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, which was also good though, for me, not as good as the piano concerto.
Saturday was actual Valentine’s Day, and we don’t generally go to restaurants then. But it being a holiday, I decided to make a nicer dinner.
I tried a new (to me) Jamie Oliver recipe for slow-cooked duck pasta. We weren’t able to buy the duck until that morning, and it was frozen, so the main challenge was getting it defrosted in time for dinner that day. That required a whole lot of rinsing.
Otherwise, the recipe wasn’t tough: Just required time. The duck cooked at 350 for 2 hours, in its juices, and I had to turn it every half hour. Then in a fry pan I sauteed some pancetta, then I added various vegetables and some can tomatoes and red wine to make a pasta sauce. After the duck cooled, we removed the meat from it, and added that to the sauce. Then it was a matter of cooking rigatoni and mixing it all together, topped with Parmesan.
Quite delish. We served it with a Chateauneuf du pape.
For dessert I made a chocolate mousse cake. No flour, just cocoa, unsweetened, and bittersweet chocolate with eggs and Cool Whip, basically. It was another new recipe (to me), and it turned out well—not too sweet, good texture.
But we weren’t done eating yet. 🙂
Sunday we braved the cold and drove to Wilk’s Bar, which is at Langdon Hall, for lunch. It isn’t a cheap place (though cheaper than the Langdon Hal dining room), but they do a nice job.
We had the “From the Land” sharing platter to start, along with four oysters. The oysters were amazing. The land platter was fine, but not outstanding. The highlight of that was probably the almonds!
Muskox stew with mushroom risotto in the background
Both of the lunch entrees were very good, though. I had the wild mushroom risotto and Jean had muskox stew. The glasses of wine were quite nice, also.
But no time (or room, really) for dessert, as we had tea dance tickets for 2:00. After a detour to the wrong location, we got to that event around 2:15. It was a fun time, and a chance to work off some of the food—especially dancing to “Jump, Jive, and Wail”! Wow, that’s a fast song. (Which is why the wailing after the jiving, I guess.)
And then, we dashed to a 4:20 showing of The Theory of Everything at the Princess. Pretty interesting movie about the relationship between Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane. Definitely shows the challenges of her having to cope with his increasingly serious illness. Though of course, as we know, he continued to do amazing physics work through it all.
Then we were ready to go back home and relax. Family Day was pretty quiet, and that suited us just fine. Especially as we got some news Sunday night that definitely had us thinking about family.
***½ Selma (January 2105) David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, and Tom Wilkinson – Theatre
Selma covers a period of American history I wasn’t very familiar with previously. In 1965, African Americans had won the right to vote, but often weren’t able to exercise that right in southern states due to abusive registration processes that made it virtually impossible for them to get on the voter’s lists. After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King took this on as his next battle.
Though continuing to adhere to his belief in passive resistance, King knew that drama was needed to get attention to the cause. While continuing to be peaceful, the protestors had to also be confrontational. They had to go, in large numbers, where they weren’t wanted. This required enormous courage.
Though the threat of violence was always present, I thought director Ava DuVernay did a magnificent job of always presenting attacks as surprising and shocking when they did occur. This is not violence for or as entertainment. These aren’t “action sequences”, but moments of horror.
As today’s film goers are shocked by them, so were some TV news viewers at the time.
But the film also shows that King’s struggled with the sacrifices his followers had to make for the cause—not to mention the ever-present danger to his own family. He was a preacher, and most (all?) of the movement’s supporters were also very devout, some also clergy. So religion and faith play a prominent part in the movie—to an unusual degree for a mainstream film. It made clear, regardless of own belief, that everyone involved at that time really needed God’s support, that they needed that shared belief, to do this difficult and courageous work.
The portrayal of Lyndon Johnson in the film has been controversial. While he is not presented as a villain, he is depicted as a practical politician with much to do, who doesn’t feel he can prioritize voting rights as quickly as Martin Luther King would like. Whether that’s true to history or not, I don’t know. But it definitely makes for a nice dramatic arc when he changes his mind and brings forward the Voting Rights Act.
Afterward Jean and I discussed the question of where we might have stood had we been whites in the US South at that time rather than Canadians now. You’d like to think you’d be on the side of good, or at least not so actively evil. But who knows?
For “Edwin’s Orchestra Follies”, we were promised the wacky side of the KW Symphony, and they delivered on that!
The premise was that due to the symphony’s financial challenges, they had to try some new approaches. Like, striking a deal with new sponsor, Power Goop. Like offering a new Siri-like app, that seemed to be hearing-challenged. Like having a mascot: a big guy in a cat suit.
Cat mascot, conter tenor in the center, and conductor Edwin Outwater in his Power Goop outfit. Photo by Scott Belluz.
Some jokes worked better than others. They were throwing a lot of stuff at the wall, and only some of it stuck, if you will. By as my friend, who isn’t a typical Symphony attendee, remarked: “At least I’m not bored!”
Oh, and they did play music too. One surprisingly great piece was Leroy Anderson’s “Typewriter”, that did, in fact, feature a manual typewriter as one of the “instruments”. It was “played” by one of the members of the Youth Orchestra, who had to have been a novice on that device, given his age.
Several pieces were by P.D.Q. Bach, “the oddest of Bach’s 20-odd children.” Outwater commented that while father Bach’s pieces required great musicianship, “any idiot could play P.D.Q. Bach”, then invited an audience on stage to prove it. We got a young woman from Colorado (what?) who seemed slightly mortified by the whole thing, but nevertheless did a fine job of rising and hitting cymbals together when so directed by the conductor, earning an angry glare from the cat mascot, every time. This was during the Hindenburg Concerto, featuring balloon releases at various points during the piece.
The first half ended with Haydn’s Farewell Symphony. Outwater pointed out before starting that everyone had partaken of Power Goop before the concert. Throughout the piece—it’s written this way—various members of the orchestra leave, until no one is left playing. Only the way it was acted out, they were each leaving due to some sort of intestinal distress!
You had to be there, but it actually was pretty funny.
And the second half began with a response in the form of P.D.Q Bach’s Howdy Symphony. It starts with a “conductor solo”—that’s right, just Edwin Outwater flailing away in the face of no music, no musicians. “Ssh,” he said, as the audience took a few minutes to settle down. “This is my solo. You don’t get a conductor solo very often!”
And then all the musicians gradually ambled back in, one by one, and started playing.
Edwin’s supposed even greater intake of Power Goop felled him on the third piece in, and he collapsed on the couch (which was on the stage for the cat mascot, of course). “Get that girl!” he managed to wheeze, and our Colorado visitor got a turn at the baton, for “Flight of the Bumblebee”.
Probably the funniest piece was the final one, P.D.Q Bach’s “Ipheigenia in Brooklyn”, featuring the pictured countertenor. It’s a mockery of the aria form, with the singer having to take rather absurd leaps in vocal range, while singing even more absurd lyrics about “dead fishes… Dead, but still smelling of fish” and “running, running, running, noses”. The singer played it all very straight, which was perfect. The piece was nuts and I was in stitches.
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And for some completely different, last night we went to see Travis Wall’s “Shaping Sound” dance troupe. He is a dancer and choreographer on So You Think You Can Dance, and the troupe featured a number of other dancers from that show and Dancing with the Stars.
I won’t get into big description. It was some amazing, upbeat group numbers set off by angsty and sometimes sexy contemporary pieces. I quite enjoyed it. Their take on “Bohemian Rhapsody” especially stood out.
Our annual “weekend in Toronto in winter because Jean has a conference” wasn’t terribly eventful—we drove back before da big storm really hit—but it did provide some photographic opportunities.
We visited the very crowded, kind of expensive, but still pretty neat Ripley’s Aquarium.
The big draw seemed to be sharks swimming overhead.But there were other interesting critters, tooHello moray
We had some trouble getting dinner reservations Saturday due to (I assume) Winterlicious being on. But we managed to get in at Frank, at the AGO. Jean had their Winterlicious items while I ordered from the main menu.
This was the mussel appetizer.
I had a roasted squash salad. For mains, we each had a tuna entree, but prepared different ways—both good.
This was the Winterlicious entree.
For wine, we had a bottle of a Spanish white, an albarino, that was on special. Quite nice, and appeared to be low in alcohol.
For dessert, Jean’s had rum raisin crème brulée. Yum.
I had the Tres Leches Cake—not too shaby, either.
For January, the weather wasn’t too bad. It was partly sunny on Saturday, and not that cold, especially when not in the wind. So we did do some walking around, and Jean took some photos.
Toronto City HallSkating rink at Nathan Phillips SquareView from our hotel
Sunday we had some delicious dim sum (no photos), then visited the Douglas Coupland exhibit at the ROM. It was more to my taste than Jean’s. Therefore, you must now prepare for a precipitous decline in photo quality, because the following ones are mine.
If you look at the next image through the camera of your cell phone, they’ll look quite different than they do with the naked eye. It’s really weird. (And if you actually take the cell phone picture, you lose the effect.)
I don’t know what you do if you’re looking at this post on your cell phone.
The exhibit was very pop art-like. One set of paintings was of QR codes that bring up phrases like “Sworn to fun, loyal to none” and “I wait and I wait and I wait for God to appear”, that you can then text to your friends to confuse them. Another was a large installation of found objects, arranged to represent the four quadrants of the brain, and the cerebellum.
The following photos might help you judge how interested you might find all this. How many of these coloured squares do you want to read?
I am really, really surprised how much I am enjoying this concert.
— Jean, at intermission
Tuesday night we went to see KW Glee perform with the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony at Centre in the Square. KW Glee is a show choir that was, in fact, inspired by the TV show Glee. So they sing pop music, and they don’t just stand there while they’re doing that—all their numbers are choreographed.
The inspiration
What’s different from the TV show? Well, this show choir is much bigger; they have many featured vocalists, not just one girl (Rachel) and one boy (Finn) who do most of the lead singing; and especially; no auto-tune!
The actuality
And what voices, my friend. My goodness, such talent in this community. I’m wondering which of these young people will break out as a huge star some day. Seems likely at least one of them will.
The set list consisted mostly of what kids are listening to these days, which meant that—honestly—I did not know many of the songs. In some cases I hadn’t even heard of the artist. (VV Brown?)
No matter, They had us at the opening number, a mashup of “Some Nights” by Fun and “End of Time” by Beyoncé, performed by choir only, then carried us through as the Symphony joined in on “Counting Stars” by One Republic mashed with “Wake Me Up” by Avicii.
And then we got Junior Glee, all on their own. Oh, my goodness. These are the 9 to 12 year olds, and they are mostly girls (Senior Glee is somewhat more gender balanced), but their first number featured three young boys singing Bruno Mars’ “Treasure”. They were both adorable and deeply impressive at conveying this love song.
In the introduction by artistic director Amanda Kind, we were told that the youth auditioned based on vocal talent only. All the dancing, they’d have to learn in their 12-week rehearsal period.
But some of them obviously have some additional dance training. “Say Something” (by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera) was performed as a vocal duet, with two of the choir members dancing. It was lovely—reminded me of the performance of this song on “So You Think You Can Dance” (and nearly brought me to tears).
Kelly Clarkson’s “A Moment Like This” (a rather sappy song, that) was another that featured two other talented dancers.
Adding to the excitement were a great number of costume changes. I don’t know how many, but we didn’t have time to get sick of any particular outfit, let me tell you. (It must have been chaos backstage.) For example, for all-ladies singing of Britney Spears’ “Toxic”, the singers were all in sexy black and red. For Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”, the outfits were more eccentric. For Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” mashed with Rhianna’s “Disturbia”, more scary.
For the James Bond Medley, the guys were all dapper in suits, of course. For “Shake It Out” by Florence and the Machine, the lead singer was in a lovely red dress, while the rest of the choir wore black, representing the demons being “shaken off”, per the song lyrics. You get the idea,
And the Symphony? Well, honestly, they were very much in the background—especially in first half. Staging-wise, they literally were seated way back, to allow for so many singers and dancers to do their thing in the front part of stage. But, they did get to shine more in the second half, which featured more quiet numbers. They actually started playing the second half—the James Bond theme—before any singers were on stage.
And there’s no doubt that throughout, these talented musicians provided solid backing. There’s nothing like live music. And everything was a world premiere, friends. There has never before been a full concert of show choir + symphony. All the scores—all of them—were written especially for this concert by conductor Trevor Wagler.
Another highlight to mention was the performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. Obviously, this one has been done by lots of singers. KW Glee had four young men from Senior Glee perform it. Simply the fact of it being sung by four people instead of the usual soloist made you forget about comparing it with past covers, as each did a nice job on his own and their voices mingled beautifully when they sang together. The orchestration was also fantastic. Though the audience probably could have been popping up all night, this is one place where a standing ovation occurred mid-concert.
I once loved Glee. Season 1, I was completely enamored with the show. There was no denying its flaws—those two terrible pregnancy plots; the sudden and unexplained changes in characterization from episode to episode—but it more than made up for it in originality, heart, and wonderful music and dance numbers. At least for that year.
So just a few days before all this my book club had selected Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal as our next book. It’s about getting older and end of life care, and how the medical profession has been dealing with it, and how it should.
Selma covers a period of American history I wasn’t very familiar with previously. In 1965, African Americans had won the right to vote, but often weren’t able to exercise that right in southern states due to abusive registration processes that made it virtually impossible for them to get on the voter’s lists. After winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King took this on as his next battle.
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