Language Matters

Happy Eliza Doolittle Day!

This NPR article says it all for me.

Blog Anniversary #3: Let the Games Begin!

It's my three-year Blog Anniversary!

This year, I thought I'd take my inspiration from the wedding tradition of wearing

something old,

something new,

something borrowed, and

something blue,

but recreate it to reflect this blog - so we'll have

something literary,

something culinary,

something medical, and

something musical.

(I skipped "faith-related" because we had a pretty high dose of that during the recent High Holy Days.)

SOMETHING LITERARY

This is from a Facebook meme I found amusing. If you feel like it, share your version. Also works with movie titles and song titles.

"You Are What You Read": fill in answers to the following using book titles only (name the author in parentheses).

Describe yourself: A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)

How do you feel: A Separate Peace (John Knowles)

Describe where you currently live: A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Dancing in Petersburg (Mathilde Kshchessinska); or, The Most Beautiful Villages of France (Dominique Reperant)

Your favorite form of transportation: A Room with a View (E.M. Forster)

Your best friend is: Iron and Silk (Mark Salzman)

You and your friends are: The Complete Peanuts (Charles Shultz)

What's the weather like: Clear Light of Day (Anita Desai)

You fear: The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)

What is the best advice you have to give: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (Richard Carlson)

Thought for the day: French Women Don't Get Fat (Mireille Guiliano); and, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)

How I would like to die: The Sweet Life in Paris (David Lebovitz)

My soul's present condition: The Secret Scripture (Sebastian Barry)

SOMETHING CULINARY

Anesthesioboist's Almost-Flourless Chocolate Cake:

• Preheat oven to 375F.
• Line a 9-inch baking pan with buttered parchment paper.
• Melt together 6 oz semisweet chocolate, 4 oz bittersweet chocolate, and 1 c butter.
• Stir in 1 c sugar and let cool slightly.
• Beat in 5 eggs one at a time.
• Stir in 5 tsp flour.
• Optional: also stir in 1 1/4 tsp baking powder / 2 1/2 tsp vanilla / pinch of salt / liqueur of choice. I didn't use any of these the first time I made this and it turned out fine.
• Pour batter into prepared pan and bake 30-35 min or till set but with center still a little wiggly. Don't overbake!
• Turn over onto plate and dust with powdered sugar. Serve with chocolate sauce and/or cinnamon cream and/or fresh raspberries.

SOMETHING MEDICAL

Guess the diagnosis:

Boy with a Drawing

(though in fact the painting is more of an association rather than a portrait of someone with the diagnosis in question)

Lincoln

Mona Lisa (I don't buy it)

SOMETHING MUSICAL

First, I give you a little background oboe music by Stravinksy, written when he was 25 and, I guess, in a sweeter/more lyrical mood than his later work expresses.

I also give you this tongue-in-cheek quote from one of the best oboe-related articles I've read recently, entitled "The Supreme Court Could Use An Oboist." Written by ex-oboist Meghan Daum (though, as she points out, "once an oboist, always an oboist"), the article explains why Judge Diane P. Wood would have made a great nominee to the Supreme Court (hat tip to Elaine Fine for the link to the article in the L.A. TImes from which it came).

"...Speaking for myself and so many others in the oboe community, I don't think it's an overstatement to suggest that even if Wood had no judicial experience at all, even if she'd never even gone to law school - heck, even if she were a fifth-grader squawking out 'Ode to Joy' on a plastic Bundy - she'd still probably be more qualified for the Supreme Court bench than anyone else in the pool. Why? Because oboists may vary talent, discipline, ethnicity, gender and taste in unfashionable clothes, but we all have one thing in common: We're just about the most judgmental people on the face of the Earth. Ergo, one of us should sit on the highest court in the nation."

LOL.

Hope you've enjoyed this little "blog party" I put together for Blogiversary 3. Thanks for being here!

Blogiversary Weekend

My 3rd Blog Anniversary is this Sunday!

I haven't decided yet how I'm going to celebrate, but maybe I'll have an idea by then. :)

A Music Competition Unlike Any Other

One of my friends recently told me about the film Meetings with Remarkable Men, (supposedly) about the life of G.I. Gurdjieff (about whom I know absolutely nothing), and I was so blown away by the opening scene, in which men playing ancient wind instruments or doing some overtone singing (!) participate in a contest to make the giant rocks around a particular valley "ring." The contest itself is riveting, and the handing out of the award (seen in Part 2) is, in my opinion, worth the wait.

This movie was musically fascinating. It had me thinking playfully that maybe I had a past life in Central Asia somewhere. That would account for my attraction to Russia, old reed instruments, and the music and cuisine of the region, wouldn't it? :)

Happy Birthday...

Original cast of the ballet Sleeping Beauty at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, 1890, with Carlotta Brianza as Aurora, Marie Petipa (daughter of choreographer Marius Petipa) as the Lilac Fairy, Enrico Cecchetti as Carabosse, and Pavel Gerdt as the Prince.

Happy Birthday Tchaikovsky! (And Brahms, and Robert Browning - I don't mean to short-change them, but I'm in a Russian ballet state-of-mind at the moment).

Every year on May 7 I think of Tchaikovsky and what a huge part of my life his ballet music has been. Every time I see a gentle snow falling outside my window I hear his snow scene from Nutcracker in my mind, and not even Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain can conjure up dancing goblins for me as well as Tchaikovsky's Carabosse music from the Prologue of Sleeping Beauty. There are also those exquisitely beautiful adagios filled with pathos, or longing, or even in some cases an almost prayerful reverence - I'm thinking of any number of pas de deux from Swan Lake or Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty - that have the power to break hearts open and spill intense emotions a lot of people throughout the centuries have seemed to want to work hard to suppress. Tchaikovsky bares them all - he wears his heart on his sleeve and consequently has at times been criticized for being maudlin or even "vulgar." Perhaps this is why I have a soft spot for him: his music gives us permission to feel great joy and sorrow and love and awe in a world where there can often be distrust or disdain for such non-rational experiences.

Tchaikovsky met with a mysterious and tragic end after a deeply troubled life. I wish he could have known what joy he would bring to generations of people through his work and foreseen that over 100 years after his death there would still be people like me who would think of him with gratitude on his birthday.

When I was growing up I did a LOT of ballet - at least two hours a day. I wanted to be a ballerina and even took special classes in New York with a prominent teacher there. I read about ballet history, watched ballet videos daily and learned all the major parts, took master classes from Margot Fonteyn and Melissa Hayden, and had the chance to meet Rudolf Nureyev, Cynthia Gregory, and Robert Joffrey.

I gave up that dream when my skinny pre-adolescent figure ballooned in high school and I realized I couldn't sustain a 1000-calorie-a-day life forever, but dance has always been a huge part of who I am. Now I can enjoy it stress-free, and I've been getting back in touch with its history, especially after visiting the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. I didn't realize until this year that Mathilde Kschessinska had been Nicholas Romanov's mistress, or had tried to sabotage Olga Proebrajenska by releasing chickens onstage during one of her solos, or that Marius Petipa and Ekaterina Vazem had aired out their resentments so publicly, or that Anna Pavlova had reduced Tamara Karsavina to tears over a "wardrobe malfunction." Colorful stuff!

Ballet has evolved into something truly athletic - high legs, gravity-defying leaps, eye-widening spins by both men and women - but it wasn't always so. Dancers from the early 20th century may seem technically less capable to us now - a perception which, incidentally, isn't necessarily accurate - but they had an artistry and elegance that has become increasingly hard to find. Fonteyn, Kolpakova, and Alonso might look old-fashioned to viewers with today's sensibilities, but there was something special about dancers of their generation that I could watch over and over again. They and the later 20th-century greats - Plisetskaya, Gregory, Kain - bridged the gap between the late Romantic Period / turn of the century, dominated by Russian ballerinas like Pavlova and Karsavina, and the stars of the 1990's / early 21st century: Sylvie Guillem, Alessandra Ferri, Darcey Bussell, Polina Semionova, Alina Cojocaru, Vishneva and Lopatkina.

Technique can dazzle but without depth and soul it's a hollow Fabergé egg with no treasure inside. There comes a point when getting your foot up by your ear is no more than a cheap thrill - a trick that comes from being born with flexible hamstrings rather than from the kind of artistic maturity and musicality that makes a true Odette or Aurora or Giselle. I'll take Cynthia Gregory's Rose Adagio from Sleeping Beauty over ANY young Mariinsky dancer's today, much as I admire the latter.

Post-Cold War Generation

Photos from the train to St. Petersburg: my son and a sweet, bright young Russian boy bonding over hand-held electronic games...

...and, of course, chess. I would never have dreamed such a moment possible when I was their age: Russia v. the U.S. engaged in a peaceful game. No language needed.

Ok, people: these single-digit-age kids can do it. Now can we all just get along?

(This, by the way, was probably one of my favorite moments of the entire trip.)

Door Number Three

Our community has been hit by a sudden, painful tragedy: a freak accident that claimed a child's life. On what should have been an ordinary day - kids playing outside after school, others walking home from after-school activities, parents preparing the evening meal - one family in our neighborhood suffered an unbearable loss. We're all shaken and deeply saddened.

At work I face stress and anxiety-provoking situations all the time, yet people tell me I meet them with calm and grace under pressure. My home life is a different story altogether. As a mom I have a tendency to harbor deep anxieties over my children's well-being that I keep in check only with a lot of mental self-persuasion.

Right before we left for this trip to Russia I confided in a friend, "I worry that something bad will happen to one of us, and it'll be all my fault for dragging the family to Russia in the first place. I'll blame myself forever knowing they could all have been safe and intact but for my wanting to go." Just two weeks earlier two metro stations in Moscow had been attacked by suicide bombers.

"First of all," she answered, "nothing bad is going to happen to any of you. And secondly, what are you going to do, spend the rest of your life locked up in your house? Go live your life!"

So off we went. We rode the metro in Moscow - the relatives with whom we were staying, in fact, live right at one of the ones that was bombed. We rode a high-speed train to St. Petersburg - one of these had suffered a so-called "mechanical failure" (read: terrorist bomb) last fall. We flew in airspace that had been shut down for a week because of a volcano's threatening spew.

My friend was right: we can't let our lives be ruled by dread. But that's something I have to keep reminding myself. It only takes a moment to ruin a life, a number of lives; the current tragedy in our community is an agonizing reminder of that. What parents wouldn't give everything they had to rewind to the moments before such a loss, and somehow change things so that they could have that precious, unique, irreplaceable child back?

Years ago, when my first child was just an infant, I made a "dread list" as a way of exorcizing some of my demons, and I must admit it did help. Writing down my worries didn't dispel them entirely but it helped me let go of dwelling on them and constantly revisiting them. I won't say the words "carbon monoxide" don't cross my mind every time I wave goodbye as one of my kids goes for a sleep-over, or "roller coaster disaster" when we're at the county fair, but I don't mention my dark thoughts to them or prevent them from enjoying these normal treats of American childhood.

Change, too, makes me anxious, especially change of my own making. I worry that the decisions I make will be harmful in some way to my kids - as if I had control over everything that might happen to them - and if I allow myself to, I can fret about such decisions almost pathologically. The thoughts go something like this: Door #1 means we stay as is, Door #2 means we choose something else because of me. If we go through Door #2 and something bad happens to one of us, I will forever blame myself for not choosing Door #1 instead. If I pick Door #1 and meet with adversity, I'll wish we had chosen Door #2. What if I pick the wrong door?

This, of course, is a senseless, useless mental game, one that I banish from my thoughts when I have to make life decisions that affect my family, because if I didn't, it would drive me absolutely bananas. But the very fact that I have to banish it at all means that the tendency to entertain it is there, lurking like an imp holding out a temptation. People who tend to be plagued with "what-ifs" understand me, I think. And they would understand that the "what-ifs" I have to work so hard to suppress are nothing compared to the "if-only's" I am trying so hard to avoid.

If only I hadn't been there, gone there, stood there, done that. If only she had waited a second longer. If only he had taken the other road instead of this one. If only we had been able to do things differently. If only.

It's only human to want to avoid loss. It's small consolation that our capacity for experiencing loss is a corollary to our ability to hold things dear. Because we are human, we can recognize beauty, value things or people, experience wonder and joy in our relationships; but also because we are human, irrevocable separation from those we love hurts like hell. It is hell.

But I tell myself: we can't live in fear of what lies behind Door #1 or #2 or #3, or along this road or that road. We can't control everything that gets flung across our paths or berate ourselves for not being able to avoid the unexpected, the cruel adversities and unspeakable sorrows. We can only do what we can do: create life stories that bear witness to the best in us. We can't do more.

But my heart aches anyway. For my son's schoolmate and his family and friends. For the families I've met over the years at work who have wept the tears this family is weeping. For the loss of children, the sorrows and suffering of children, of families. If only.