Orchestra Iowa intermission in my beloved Paramount Theatre!

We just heard Mozart’s sprightly, nimble (well, they’re all pretty nimble) Piano Concerto No. 21 (from house left row J on the aisle where I don’t think there’s any better vantage point in the city to watch the pianist’s nimble hands) and now we’re about to wallow in the glorious bombast of Beethoven’s mighty Symphony No. 5. And before the concert we both ATE KALE.

It doesn’t get any more Just Can’t Even than this!

Things to do when you’re alone in the gym on a surprisingly pumpy arm day

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

How to decorate like a lazy person

Instead of following your brilliantly tasteful vision of deep marine-blue walls with putty-gray trim, find a blue that works with the sissy-yellow painted and pink-undertone woodgrained trim you already have. Because who has time to paint all that damn trim?

Juliet balcony

Cedar Rapids Science Station building, née Cedar Rapids Central Fire Station
1918
Spanish Colonial Revival

Flashback Friday: Twinsies Edition

This painting hangs one room away from American Gothic in the Art Institute of Chicago. But with me standing next to it, it's hard to tell which painting is which. I can be quite a chameleon that way.

My sister literally asked me to take a selfie with my niece outside the auditorium after Newsies tonight

Out of the blue. With no warning. I wasn’t even aware that my phone had selfie capabilities so I obviously wasn’t familiar with the technology, but fortunately there were some “tech-savvy” (as the students say) students (as they call themselves) nearby who patiently taught me how to use the selfie functionality on my phone correctly, safely and responsibly. So here is my first-ever attempt, which I wouldn’t even have if it weren’t for the supportive wisdom of my sister:

But anyway. Newsies. Wow. Disney selected my high school’s theater department as one of five in the country for their first school licensing of the show, no doubt because of the groundbreaking work I did there when I had the lead in Oedipus Rex when I was a senior and we all know that emotionally and morally labyrinthine Greek tragedy + unworldly high-school actors = transcendent theater magic and I hate to brag but it’s staggeringly obvious that you can draw a straight line from the sticky stage blood matting my eyes shut on that stage in 1985 directly to tonight’s epic “Seize the Day” sung on that same stage by kids whose parents weren’t even old enough to drive in 1985. So you’re welcome, Disney.

But the torch has been passed. The kids in Newsies tonight grew up with my niece and nephew or are the children of my friends. Some I’ve known forever. Some I just recognize by sight after having watched them sing alongside my niece and nephew over years of school concerts and shows. And I feel so parental and proud of all of them ... and thrilled that they have this opportunity — this AMAZING opportunity — to be a part of this amazing show ... and so proud that my high school was selected for the national honor of field-testing this delightful, brilliant, challenging material. And I can safely say the kids and the staff and the teams of parent helpers and the entire department rose mightily to meet the challenge and blow away the expectations. They’re all the kings of CR.

Our kitty is a proper lady of refined taste and delicate constitution

But after years of finishing school and tramp shaming, she has shown an alarming intransigence toward improving her brazen behavior.

Day 8 of hunting the elusive Alluring Calfed Dudebro

My frequent visits to his occasional gym habitat have paid off in rich abundance; he made his third appearance in just over a week this morning. My attempts to engage him via traditional tribal Gym Dudebro greeting rituals — faux-offhand-doesn’t-mean-anything-I-just-happened-to-be-looking-in-your-direction sub-second eye contact and near imperceptible head twitches of human acknowledgement — have not been returned, so my camouflage game is either totally on fleek or my presence is non-alarming or we-all-know-it’s-not-true-but-I-still-have-to-say-it-in-my-report-in-the-name-of-accurate-anthropology not interesting enough to notice.

Sigh.

Aside from his aloof courting rituals, he exhibits a sophisticated system of characteristics and behaviors for attracting and selecting a suitable mate. His ‘90s-small-town-high-school-wrestler-crenellated-bowl-cut bangs keep potential suitors cautiously at bay, while his habit of wiping his brow with the hem of his shirt reveals a corrugated curtain of abs that are as impossible to tear yourself away from as a Siren’s fabled song.

At this writing, he has retreated into the fogs of the storied Brigadoon from whence he came, but not without a final, beguiling presentation of his eponymous alluring calves to the sparse early-morning population of his occasional gym habitat.

I shall keep vigilant watch — always in super-cute shoes, just in case — for his next appearance.

Bedtime snacks!

A whey protein shake for fast workout recovery and strong muscles. And the entire Nabisco test kitchen for stubborn weight gain and gout.

When your date has to cancel on you because he has the flu ...

You logically deploy your emergency I-suddenly-don’t-have-a-date contingency plan: Get a flu shot.

 

Also: get a bright red post-flu-shot souvenir band-aid > take a flexy shoulder selfie to post on Facebook

Also: post a flexy shoulder selfie on Facebook > score yourself a quality boyfriend

Also: stagger through the aisles of Walgreens in crippling, bewildering, post-flu-shot pain with no boyfriend on any radar anywhere anyway > wander innocently past the cookies

Also: discover you have enough Walgreens rewards points for three virtually free packages of Oreos > it’s none of your damn business what I’m having for my dateless dinner tonight

Why do Mexican restaurants always hide the enchiladas under salad?

ArtThrob: The Burghers of Calais

(Original French title: Les Bourgeois de Calais)

1889

Auguste Rodin

Impressionism (1872-1892)

The relatively short-lived period of Impressionism in art was as defined by what it wasn't -- clear lines, plausible composition, realistic depictions of figures and the space they occupied -- as by what it was: impressions of visual perception told through explorations of changing light and color and even through the rough-hewn textures created in paint using varying brush strokes. A radical departure from the longstanding -- though always evolving -- rigors of academic Realism, the fresh ideas of Impressionism on canvas quickly inspired similar reinterpretations of artistic norms in music, literature and sculpture.

Enter François-Auguste-René Rodin.

Classically trained and well-established in creating representational art, Rodin saw Impressionism's dreamy figure studies and craggy, dimensional textures as a vocabulary he could use to render bold ideas, subjective emotions, and plays of shape and light in sculpture. His raw, turbulent works brought new, profound depth to the revolutionary cacophonies that had so far been constricted to the flat canvases of Impressionistic paintings, and his most riveting use of this complex, muscular multi-dimensional language is in his mighty Burghers of Calais. The sculpture depicts six men walking to their martyrdom to liberate the French town of Calais during the Hundred Years' War. The men are overcome with terror and anguish and resignation and peace all at once, and Rodin sculpted the figures with such a masterful mix of romantic realism and primitive rawness that you can see and understand their every emotion from your every angle. The piece is enormous in size and exaggerated in scale and arguably unfinished in its rendering, all of which invite you to approach it with your own perspectives, examine it with your own curiosities and appreciate it with your own conclusions.

French law decrees that no more than twelve original casts may be made of any work by Rodin, which means The Burghers of Calais tells its weighty story in museums and university campuses all over Europe and the United States, including a single figure from the piece who stands resolutely at the entrance to the University of Iowa's Boyd Law Building.

I make a point to see my reproduction of the work every summer on my annual pilgrimage to visit friends in Washington, D.C. It stands with other Rodin masterpieces in a relatively austere corner of the sunken sculpture garden behind the Smithsonian's relentlessly round Hirshhorn Museum. I usually stop there on my way to the airport at the end of each visit. I walk around the sculpture a few times to take note of specific details Rodin included -- like articulated toes to help propel the walking figures through space -- and specific details he didn't include -- like eyeballs to help the figures see where they're going. Then I sit in my same spot on a little concrete ledge to take in the piece in its weighty enormousness, to contemplate the explosive change Rodin and the Impressionists brought to the way we see and understand and interpret art, and to take comfort in the fact that my Burghers will most likely stand caught in their time and this place, waiting for me year after year every time I come to visit them for as long as I live.

This morning I voted to go to the gym instead of voting to go vote

I also voted to do a pretty intense leg workout at the gym, so I’m pretty sure there won’t be any kind of runoff in the next few days. But after work I finally voted to go vote, though in all the civic excitement I forgot to vote to finally get my flu shot afterward. And now that I’m home and my shoes are off, I’m voting to stay put. Which, my fellow citizens, is my Constitutionally exercised right to democracy inaction.

Day 7 of 7

Seven days of black and white photos about me. No people. No explanations.

This popped up in my Facebook memories today

... and seven years later I’m still both thrilled and proud of it.

Shout out

to all the people who don’t know what the opposite of in is

Keep this handy for next week

Day 6 of 7

Seven days of black and white photos about me. No people. No explanations.

When you oversleep

... and you’re so late to the gym that you have to cancel your trainer at the last minute, your obvious first order of priority is to repost a proud Facebook memory from the middle of the Disney half marathon you ran a year ago.