Stuck Inside

It's an unexpected day off but it's been raining all morning, that slow, sad drizzle that takes all the life out of morning energy and promise. The edge of the horizon is ringed with black so I see no end in site. Alas no bike ride, no stroll to the laundromat, no neighborhood saunter with camera in hand...

Instead I'm going back through my many obsessive projects and taking stock. I started Daniel Mark Epstein's biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" this morning. Being in Upstate New York, it seemed the perfect time and place to dive back into my consistently thwarted ESt.VM project. I was reading Nancy Milford's beautifully penned biography last year and so it seems we've come full circle.

My mother has also made progress on some research about my grandfather, another outside source of interest for my own writing and creative work, so I may dive into that a bit as well.
Even as I child I was never capable of getting bored.

I think I may make myself a juicy caprese salad and read a bit more....

Unexpected Respite

A nice surprise to the end of my work day as Lillian gave all six hours of tomorrow's rehearsal to Maestro Wachner for music work. This means a day off for me tomorrow. Don't get me wrong, I plan to spend several hours working on my woefully scribbled up score and I'm hoping to finish my critical chorus document before our final room run on Saturday afternoon, but I won't have to get out of my pajamas until I'm good and ready and I may even have a chance to take a long bike ride, which I've wanted to do since I saw my roommate's Schwinn, filled with potential energy in our garage.

The other thing the unexpected news allowed me to do was spend this evening relaxing and spending some time NOT thinking about Gluck/Berlioz, Agrippina or any other upcoming projects. I sat on my Federalist front porch and read my book as a huge storm came up and thundered, poured and hailed all around me. There was very little wind, so I didn't get wet as I sat in the middle of the din of rain drops and grumbling from the sky. The photo is from the midst of the hail storm from my vantage point all curled up in the rocking chair. I played with macro and my telephoto lens to capture plants as they dealt with the deluge. It was a great afternoon.

We did some great detail work in rehearsals today. We're ready for this room run and for our final (and complete) move to the Alice Bush Theater. Our little shadow sat on the bleachers behind us for five straight hours, entranced. We even got her up working in the morning. As we worked through an aria that really needed the chorus to play off of, we asked her to get on stage and stand in for some chorus members. She was delighted and sat in her designated spot with prim posture and a wide-eyed grin. She's become our little mascot.

My roommate is at the theater tonight. All of the stage managers attend each other's first piano stagings to lend support to the one on the hot seat. That first night in the theater is stressful solely because of the locale change. Tonight the Offenbach team is in there and I am in my sweats in my giant living room playing on line and relishing in the fact that I have no set agenda for nearly 36 hours.