Well now I know where I got my fascination for walking around the city taking pictures of architectural geometries and dramatic perspectives and stark contrasts between shadow and light:

I just saw West Side Story on the big screen for the first time, and it is BRILLIANT cinema--and a lush visual poem of color and movement and shape and pattern that I never fully appreciated from my endless viewings on a TV screen. I grew up devouring the movie soundtrack and I’ve known every word and note and phrase and nuance of Leonard Bernstein’s score and Stephen Sondheim’s libretto for as long as I can remember. I’d assumed I’d spend my first big-screen viewing obsessing over Jerome Robbins’ choreography and staging, but instead I kept examining every camera angle and forced perspective and texture and shadowing and gang-specific palette of Robert Wise’s cinematography. And now I have the final piece of the puzzle for my full love of and artistic respect for this movie.

OK, well not the FINAL final piece of the puzzle; the final final piece may or may not (which totally means does) revolve (literally!) around the ... um ... globe-like butts of the dancers, which also can be fully appreciated only on the big screen.

Anyway, here are some non-butt-related examples of the photos I've taken as I've wandered around Cedar Rapids not realizing I was pretending to be Robert Wise:

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

All the world is only you and me!

Born to higher things

Barbara Cook, the breathtakingly full-range operatic Broadway singer best known for her 1957 career-launching role of Marian the librarian in The Music Man, has died at 89. I had the thrill of seeing her only once, in the 2010 Broadway revue Sondheim on Sondheim where she was clearly still at the top of her game in a haunting pairing of "Losing my Mind" and "Not a Day Goes By" duet with Vanessa Williams. She first landed on my radar on the original 1956 Broadway cast recording of Candide, where she masterfully conquered Leonard Bernstein's vocally gymnastic and deliciously contrapuntal "Glitter and Be Gay." In this tour-de-force comic aria, Ms. Cook, as the presumed-dead Cunégonde who finds herself imprisoned in a Parisian palace and makes peace with her lot in life by not-at-all-reluctantly bedecking herself in jewels, introduced what has now become a coloratura holy grail of vocal dexterity that blends throaty pathos, wicked arpeggios and what she famously catalogued as "four E-flats over high C, six D-flats, 16 B-flats and 21 high C’s." It's always sad when a brilliant artist dies, but Barbara Cook left us a stunning legacy of music that's both technically perfect and gorgeously emotional. 

Please give yourself a moment to enjoy her definitive "Glitter and Be Gay" in her memory.