Thursday night I went out with my BFF Lori to Town Hall to see the Duke Ellington Orchestra and Patti Austin perform the music of Ella Fitzgerald. I've been delving into the Lady Ella catalog lately, so it was a timely performance. I only know Patti Austin from a couple songs - "Christmas Time is Here" from the Charlie Brown Anniversary album, and "Through the Test of Time" that was on a demo CD from long ago. But I was really impressed with her voice after 60 years in show business.
It's important to me to keep up the opportunities to hear live music after last year's musical Renaissance, so Lori and I also made plans to see Tori Amos at the Beacon in August.
Friday night I met up with Lourdes at TSMC (her first visit to my place) and we walked up a few blocks for the Poly Women's Group at Natalia's place. It was a surprisingly small group, but that might have been better for Lourdes because I imagine it must be a bit intimidating for a newbie to walk into a large raucous group of women, as we can be at times.
I went directly from the meeting down to MMMM, where again it was a very small group and surprisingly, composed of only people I already know - my friend Lori (the professional dominatrix who appeared on Josh's show at the PIT), Sardonica and Kiwi, that's it. Despite there being just the four of us, we had a good craic going, talking about Lori's work, getting older, sharing photos, romantic types, bed theft and many other topics. Lori and I exchanged phone info as we were leaving, since she might show up at Poly Cocktails on Monday.
Saturday was another double-event day as Liz had an extra ticket to see an afternoon play called "Love and Information" at the Minetta Lane Theater in the West Village, a few blocks from Kacey and Becker's apartment. It was a very interesting play, especially from a technical standpoint. It was basically 57 short vignettes that were almost completely unrelated to each other, shown in rapid succession using a dizzying array of lighting, sound and staging techniques.
One of my favorites was a man and a woman sitting at a playground swing. The woman is trying to convince the man that they are married, but he doesn't believe her. She's distraught and says if they made love that would prove it because only they know each other's preferences in bed. He is taken aback and refuses, and it ends. There were many such scenes and partial scenes where I wanted to see the whole play that the scene suggested. So overall it was fascinating, but I found it a little unsatisfying.
We left directly after curtain - Liz went to a meeting for a new production and I went home to meet up with Kristina (again, her first visit to TSMC). We entered the Mathilda ticket lottery (since I've now seen The Book of Mormon, I can move on to something else), but we didn't win. Plan B was to see the new Wes Anderson movie, Grand Budapest Hotel, with Kacey and Becker, but the show they had their tickets for was already sold out.
We had dinner at E&E Steakhouse and we took our time about it. We sat down at about 6:15 and got up at close to 9 pm, and managed to talk through so much life history and all kinds of things we didn't know about each other. It was kind of like the High Line with Kacey all over again, except we actually planned this one (although it wouldn't have happened this way if the movie hadn't been sold out). We came back to TSMC after dinner and watched my favorite Miyazaki movie, Howl's Moving Castle, which she hadn't seen yet. We're going to try and see his latest and last film, The Wind Rises, on Tuesday.
Tomorrow, I have a work call at 10 am but happily nothing planned after that. I should hopefully get some rest before what could be a busy day at work on Monday, and then Poly Cocktails that evening.
