“Arcadia”

A die-hard fan of Tom S.’s “The Real Thing”, I was excited to see “Arcadia”, another Tom S. classic, starring his son Ed. In the minutes leading up to the show, we was surrounded by excited chatter – the theatre sounded more like a pub than preview week for a West End production. Although the show contained the same play on words and language that I love in Tom S.’s work, it was all brain and no heart. The love stories play a distant second fiddle to the academic banter between the academics and the post-doc mathematics student. Ed S., the playwrite’s son, plays the part of a self-involved, absent-minded graduate student well and is sure to leave his own imprint on the contemporary theatre scene.

The British Police Symphony Orchestra

A friend, the first celloist in the British Police Symphony Orchestra, invited us to attend the orchestra’s 20th-anniversary concert at Cadogan Hall.  Half of the performers are active police officers and the other half are friends and family of cops. The performance of Elgar’s “Cockaigne Overture” offered a solid openining and Mahler’s “Symphony No. 1 in D Major” a tiresome end. The piece I was eagerly looking forward to hearing performed live is Mozart’s “Oboe Concerto”; the composer’s pieces for wind instruments are not nearly as often performed as his piano or violin compositions. I enjoyed how playfully the massive Scotland Yard cop sang into his oboe; from his breathe out and his oboe, he pushed out sprightly music appropo of a lovely spring evening.

“Much Ado About Nothing”

Tonight we attended WS’s “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. While the show itself was unremarkable, the outdoor stage made seeing the performance worthwhile. If I were to execute a feminist interpretation of WS’s “Much Ado About Nothing” a la Betty F., I would describe the comedy’s love interest, Hero, as a prime example of a woman defined by her “feminine mystique.” In the first half of the play, Hero fails to utter a word until well into Act II when she agrees to trick her chatty cousin Beatrice into falling in love with her equally effusive verbal sparring partner Benedick. Hero is the beautiful daughter of wealthy Leonato whose pride for his daughter smothers any atom of personality orbiting in her brain. WS’s comedy serves as a morality tale, a warning to all women “born to speak all mirth and no matter”: women such as Beatrice are destined to serve as the life of the party, but when push comes to shove me, gallant soldiers such as Claudio reserve their eyes for delicate dimwits. Irony of ironies is how the poet and playwrite WS interrogates the moral of his own story not through plot twists and turns, but by enabling Beatrice and Benedick to wield the English language on such a level that the men’s swords appear dull rather than deadly and maidens’ eyes less bright and rather lazy compared to the sharpness of the anti-heroical couple’s bittersweet love sparring.

Giverny

The next day we visited Giverny, where Impressionist painter Claude M. lived and painted his most well-known works. We explored his garden where we saw the original water lilies and the foot bridges that serve as the subjects in many of his paintings.

VK’s Surprise B-Day in Paris

AD took VK to Paris where we met up with them to celebrate her b-day. We kicked off the day with breakfast at Laduree, the first of the two visits we’d make there that day. From Arc de Triomphe, we walked down the Avenue de Champs Elysees through Jardin des Tuileries to the Louvre. We walked across the Seine to the Latin Quarter and then made our way to the Tour Eiffel where we enjoyed the year’s first rays of summer sun.

Garrison K. at Cadogan Hall

Garrison K. is the first celebrity I’ve ever met. I was thirteen years old. After quickly introducing myself, I told him, “I like to write too.” Facing one another in NYC’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, about as far from the mid-western communities GK writes about in his widely-successful “A Prairie Home Companion,” he must have been struck by the reach and appeal of his stories to an audience that has never known the boredom of driving through fields of corn or for whom a church dance was the highlight of the social calendar. Last night, clad in a formal tux with a red bowtie and red sneakers to match, we listened to GK sing in his modest baritone voice a programme of “American song” or, perhaps more accurately described as, “American limericks”. Expecting an exclusively American audience, I was struck by how many locals were in attendance laughing along to GK’s original songs which describe church culture in the mid-west, provide marital advice, and praise the spirits (not the religious variety). The City of London Sinfonia accompanied GK, playing many of Mendelssohn’s best-known works as the background music for GK’s story storytelling through song.

“The Kite Runner”

I re-read KH’s “The Kite Runner” for our May book club meeting. My focus on the plot shifted from the novel’s anti-hero Amir (with friends like that, who needs enemies?!) to Assef, the novel’s villain. I was struck by his psychological profile, a textbook “sociopath”. We first meet Assef as a childhood bully who has inherited blazing blue eyes from his German mother. His parents fear their own son, a sadist with a keen interest in history’s tyrants and most ruthless dictators. Still, the heavy foreshadowing does not prepare the reader for one of the novel’s biggest surprises, when Assef re-emerges later in the novel as a leader in the Taliban, disguising his non-Afghan heritage by wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. Irony abounds in the scene where Amir begs Assef for Sohrab; Assef describes his active role in ridding Afghanistan of Hazaras as he desperately tries to disguise his own racial impurity.

“The Art of Possibility”

Tonight I met Benjamin Z., my first TEDster, at a bank’s women’s networking event at the Barbican. BZ draws on his experience as a conductor and music teacher to talk about leadership, whether in a boardroom or with one’s family. In his book “The Art of Possibility”, he asks people to lead one another from the “downward spiral” mentality characteristic of media towards “radiating possibility”. Aptly, the talk is preceded with Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”; BZ is just that: a joyous, energetic and fantastic figure. He literally seems to jump off the stage and into one’s lap. In his talk, he references Arianna H.’s theme from last year’s conference: surmounting the fear of failure. During the talk, I was struck by a universal theme that bubbles beneath the surface of many of the best inspirational talks I’ve been audience to, an idea of Nelson M. appropriated and made famous:

“You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

BZ concluded his talk with the notion that “the secret of life is that it is all invented”, an idea closely associated with Buddhism’s tenet that one must strive to create distance from the material world in order to maintain a healthy relationship with power structures invented by man in which we participate and are complicit in maintaining.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion.html

Bosnia & Herzegovina Luncheon

Part of the JLC’s fundraising goal is to fund a seedling-sales business in Bosnia. Late last week we met with the country directors of Bosnia & Herzegovina and Kosovo. WfWI hires local women to work “on the ground” and negotiate the country’s bureaucracy and political system in order to aid women survivors of war. The two country directors gave us insight into the impact war has had on women in Bosnia and Kosovo, particularly since these women are often left uneducated, unskilled and widowed.

WfWI Gala

Last week, WfWI held their annual gala at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The theme was a Middle Eastern one; hoummus and olives were served, and a belly dancer/singer and her band entertained the 450+ guests who were there to support the organisation and its cause: providing financial and emotional support to women survivors of war. A number of us were lucky to have met ZS, who founded the organisation fifteen years ago after visiting Bosnia and learning about the women’s plight during the civil war.