Yes, we love comp tickets. That's how I saw Arabian Nights at Lookingglass last night.

I'm fairly picky about what I want to see, which is why I loved season tickets at Lincoln Center when you could pretty much pick out your 5 favorite concerts of the year.

I looked into splurging and getting something here, but was underwhelmed by most of the programs offered.

The one thing I really wanted to see was the SF Symphony's semi-staged Iolanthe, but it's the weekend of the F2F.

No worries, Strega. I usually do a better job of containing my bad moods.

I love the ballet and think you should go, Jesse. So there.

In fact, I've been thinking lately about how my parents always took us to see summer college theater. It was really my informal schooling in Shakespeare and Gilbert and Sullivan and musicals, and I'd love to do the same for my kids. I need to find out about cheap, summer stock productions around LA, or summer concert series, or dance, or whatever. Culcher.

My weekend, BTW, if my back holds up: Franny has a Hispanic heritage performance today. Tomorrow is dance class, a 6 yo birthday party, and I have an evening event (margaritas and arts & crafts with the school's studio teacher). Sunday = housework that didn't get done the other two days. See, look at that! No time for my back to be out!

Weekend plans

DH and I are running awya and won't be back 'til monday!!!!

Of course , there will be free wireless. And ocean. and possibly a bat walk.

So I need to get my act together so we can get out of here when he gets home.

Hilariously, the guy called an uninvited me! Apparently he had offered the spare ticket to more than one person.

Y'all need to cozy up to someone who works at the Symphony. In Milwaukee I can pretty much go whenever I want, and occasionally that extends to Chicago. I think my dad goes a couple of times a month at least. Employee comp tickets FTW.

Yeah, this guy used to work for the Philharmonic, and it was fantastic. The best part was actually the free concerts in the park -- we got to go up front in the uncrowded VIP area.

I saw a Chuck E Cheese ad just after we all talked about it, after having not really seen one for eons. To name an evil is to create it, I think. Also,

Clovis says you just shot up the list for this month's "Good Minion!" competition.

Hee.

I haven't seen live ballet in years and really need to. I mean, I went to the little local dance recital here in town and it was cute and all, but there was very little of it that I would actually call ballet.

Which reminds me, one of the things I've been thinking about wrt:SYTYCD, I think one of the reasons the hair-flinging fall on the floor version of "contemporary" as a dance style bothers me is because of ballet. I feel like it's being used by dancers who studied ballet but never made it en pointe, like me, and all the flinging about is to cover up the lack of technical ability. (Insert disclaimer here: I know this is not true of the whole genre, and I've seen some excellent, technically sophisticated yet expressive contemporary dance. I'm making sweeping generalizations and I know it.)

I had to wikipedia it because I'm not clear on the history and evolution of the dance styles since I quit as a teenager decades ago. But for me, modern dance was a direct pushback at ballet; a rebellion. It took and acknowledged the forms of ballet and deliberately messed with them, angles instead of curves, flat instead of pointed. Wikipedia talks about the use of gravity, instead of ballet's defiance of it, and I agree with this in the ways it created interesting shapes and worked with the space instead of ignoring it.

But contemporary seems to not be of that struggle; its version of acknowledging gravity is the dramatic fall to the ground. I don't mind groundwork itself, I just feel like contemporary seems to think that the act of going to the ground brings the pathos and some sort of edginess.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that contemporary as a style portrayed by SYTYCD contestants seems to me to be too much of what I could do myself, leaping about the streets in collegiate self-absorption, and too little of structure and bursting out of that structure in expression.

Hmm.

That was more thinky then I meant to be.

Anyway, this weekend's plans for me include work, work, housework and deciding if I want to hang out while the SO plays two shows or skip them.

Oh, weekend plans also include working out how to get photos off my camera because...

There is a nest of baby bunnies in my flowerbed!!?!

We'd seen the digging, and yesterday I spotted a brownish hind end digging in further. I thought it was a toad and made all these excited plans to buy a little toad house for the flowerbed.

But no, today I looked again and it's four tiny baby bunnies, smaller than the palm of my hand! I now realize it's been the mom that Seabiscuit's been chasing off when we take him out for his routines. So I guess it'll all be on leash from now on until summer. Between that and the bird's nest on our deck, we're a veritable nursery.

So cute.

Rick Moody has a similar argument regarding writing, i.e., there's a difference between knowing the rules and breaking them, and not knowing the rules. [Insert "kids today" rant here.]

Yeah, I think that's the crux of it.

Breaking the rules is an earned struggle. Being ignorant of the rules is an unearned liberty.

But having made the argument, I can now see another side of it, and that is that today's dancers are looking at the whole of previous dance, which includes classical and modern and everything else, and working from within that framework. Merely taking elements from those things and using them is not the problem; it's like sampling in music. I'll need to think that through.

However, I reserve my right to have crotchety old views when necessary. Hee.

It's sooo slow here. I feel like maybe today isn't a work day, and nobody told me.