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March 3, 2000
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grand schemes and grand opera I worked. The day's business was to try to look ahead and comment on the selection of paths for projects. What will happen in our business in one year, five years, ten years? How can we react now? What do all these acronyms mean? When we get up in the morning, there is a routine of sorts. It varies but it goes something like (1) make Chalow get up as she is preventing someone getting out of bed; (2) someone lets her out and observes her duties; (3) the bed is 'made' by smoothing the sheets, pulling up the comforter/spread and arranging the six down pillows unadorned (no time-consuming shams or ruffles in this family); (4) showers and such for the non-dog household members, bumping around the relatively small bathroom. Forrest usually makes me some coffee and brings it to the bathroom. At some point in this routine, Forrest and I often weigh ourselves. One gingerly punches a button with the right big toe. Scale: Please enter your memory number. One pushes the same toe against one of five other buttons, positions both feet on the large scale and waits for the balances to quit bouncing. As soon as one hears the scale begin to speak again, one steps off, perhaps hearing the end of the scale's verdict on the way to the shower or coffee. Scale: Your weight is ... 172 pounds. You have lost...2 pounds. (If you weigh the same as last time, it just says 'Goodbye.' It can also say 'Have a Nice Day.' But I got tired of telling it: "I'd have a nicer day if I didn't weigh...whatever.")And so it goes. This morning (and you wondered where this was going!) the scale said the same weight each time it was used. (Chalow doesn't weigh but, if she did, it would say around 25 pounds, I think. Oh, OK, maybe 30. She doesn't watch her weight as we all know.) Me: Are we married or what? We weigh the same thing. You know they always say you start to look like each other...but weighing the same? That's bizarre.
The opera Aida has come to the Austin Lyric Opera. We went to the dinner beforehand. We never do this because it's ridiculous to expect to be dressed in black tie so early (6 PM) on a Friday. But our buddies Pete and Harry chaired the thing and they have been very kind to us so we capitulated. I wore black pants, silk and cotton sweater, black socks and dress shoes to work. I just put a fancy jacket over that (made by the British girls in Houston), put on my diamond necklace and gold watch and voilà. It's easy for Forrest to slip out of his upstairs lair and dress a little early. The dinner was OK. Nothing spectacular. Lots of thanking of donors and sponsors. My company is the season sponsor and there were three couples from the company. Of course, the operations people scoop up the free tickets to dinners and the opera. Forrest and I pay for our own. These people don't, I suspect, give a cent of their own money either. Sweet deal. But I'm glad that the company is giving something back to the community. The opera was quite nice. It starts a little slow in my opinion but has a nice crescendo of rape, pillage, dance fighting and chorus singing in the second act. There were no elephants in the procession. No live animals, actually. The set (made for several opera companies around the country) had this gigantic chained eagle which rotated on a set of steps and was even used itself as steps as the feathers formed something like steps. (The whole set looked pretty dangerous to me, but elaborate dances and movement went mostly without a hitch.) This was my first Aida and I did like it. I got a little sleepy during the slow lyrical parts but it really soared for me in other spots. I guess I should say something about the tuba (Sousaphone actually) player. Brian Frisbee is the artist. He didn't do the trumpet player. That was Barry George. Brian has now made a band with the guy displayed today, the trombone player on the home page and a clarinet player. (We used an old metal clarinet.) He's working on the French Horn player. We bought the French Horn and Sousaphone on ebay. We bought the clarinet in a junk shop and the trombone from a secondhand music store. The artists then crafted found objects to build the 'players.' Collecting is a disease. I made my friend Anne an 'instant' collection of metal cowboy hat ashtrays for her cowboy room. I made the rule that they had to be metal because you have to have rules. I told my friend SuRu today that I was tempted to collect Eiffel Tower stuff. She has a French Cafe theme in her office at work including an Eiffel Tower lamp. She sent me some trivia today about the year 1900 and it said the Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world in 1900. That's true and remained true until 1930. Still I better not start an Eiffel Tower collection. Hmmm...but I already have that souvenir knife and a little metal building. Stop me! We thought about going to Four Seasons bar after the opera. It was just too late, though.
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"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience." George Bernard Shaw |
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the band plays on |
