What’s On the AOL Tuner: Andreas Vollenweider: Cosmopoly

That’s nice, hadn’t heard any of old Andreas’ music in a long time. I used to listen to one of his first albums a lot years ago in Seattle.

They were talking on ::NPR this morning about it being the 40th anniversary of the Surgeon General’s report that advised us all that smoking is bad for us. I wonder if incense counts as second-hand smoke? It sure set off the sniffling and coughing, and it makes my throat tight – not a good thing if you’re trying to sing.

I sit next to our lone bass, who normally carries peppermints around in his engineer boots. He didn’t seem to have them with him today – if he had, there would have been sneezing too (in this house, Altoids are also known as Sneeze Mints).

Anyway, church was good. We had about 40 souls. There were a number of kids, but they were under the control of the Sunday School women, not their parents, so they were good. I blew off choir practice this week and church last week, and had to sort of hack my way through today’s “party piece” after hearing it played through once. Not one of our better performances, but we got through it. Fortunately, as an alto, I don’t have to really sing out loud – that’s supposed to be the sopranos. They didn’t sing out loud, so we sounded pretty bad. Oh, well.

Shameless Promotion Dept.

I’m going to try adding a sort of bookshelf along one side here – the “life list of books wot I read” idea – with links their location on Amazon. Since I often have the AOL Radio tuner playing something while blogging away madly, I’ll probably add links to CDs that I like from there as well.

You Can’t Get A Man With A Gun

We have season tickets to the Marriot Lincolnshire musical theater, and Friday’s show was “Annie Get Your Gun.” Dinner was at Wildfire before the show. Usually on “show Fridays” it’s a stressful day because Fridays are typically busy, it’s hard to get out on time, and it’s always a mad dash to get from work to whatever restaurant in Lincolnshire where we’re meeting the rest of our friends. The best route varies according to traffic, and we’ve found ourselves running late and calling in our appetizer and dinner orders to our friends before.

However, no worries this time, we were the early birds for a change. I had the seared tuna steak with wasabi cream (yummy!!! yummy!!!) that was almost as good as Alton Brown’s version. David had a fish special – grouper with a cashew crust. So did Steve and his “date,” Ken. No, it’s not what you think. Steve’s original date had flaked out. Steve has season tickets also, and often finds himself scrambling for something with a pulse to bring along so his second ticket doesn’t go to waste. Ken was much better company than this theoretical female date was, anyway. We laughed our way through dinner, dawdled over dessert, and predictably found ourselves scrambling to get to the theater before the show started. Our waitress thought we were pretty funny, apparently.

I don’t know, we were just all “on.” It was one of those ephemeral “you had to be there” good-times experiences that can’t really be captured.

And Ken was just a stitch about being Steve’s backup date. Morose, “you never call me unless you’re stuck,” shrugged sadly, the whole bit. He’s a funny guy.

Anyway, the show was great, as usual. It’s funny, both productions of “Annie Get Your Gun” that I’ve seen had stuff go wrong with the production, and funny ad-libs to cover it (or were just funny and stopped the show).

In the case of Friday’s show, in the scene where Annie pulls off the one shooting stunt blindfolded in order to impress Frank Butler, the finale had a lot of shiny colored tinsel drop from overhead (the theater is “in the round” so there’s no backstage, but they often do things from above). Some of the tinsel got hung up in the lighting and hung up there, wafting about slightly in the air currents around the lights.

During the intermission, “Buffalo Bill” came out to give the usual “buy a subscription” speech more or less in character, and a bit of tinsel that had gotten caught in the lighting drifted down in front of him. He made some off-the cuff remark about subscriptions coming in already, the audience laughed and he moved on.

Then in a later scene in the second half, Annie, Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill are sitting around playing poker on the “cattle boat” as they return to New York. A messenger from a rival show hustles up to the boat from an offstage “launch” and gives them some news. In the middle of the speech, some more tinsel drifted slowly down. Laughter, pause, he looked up into the rafters, and commented “What are they feeding the cattle up there?”

Hysterical, show-stopping laughter. The actors attempt but fail to stay in character, also laughing. Short pause.

The guy playing Sitting Bull gets up slowly, and stoicly gives the “messenger” one of the fake dollars from his stake in the poker game, in a mock-condescending, way-to-bring-the-house-down-kid-we’re-in-a-show-here way. Then he sat down and looked at him like “Well, what was that you were saying?”

High pitched, pee-in-your pants laughter. The Marriott has a pretty elderly subscriber base, so I feel sorry for the theater cleaners…

Somehow, the “messenger” found voice to deliver the next line and they started again. The second half had a lot more “bounce” than the first – they got a lot of energy out of that little incident, I think.

I have to say that the Sitting Bull actor was funny in his whole performance. He was great – I was watching him pretty carefully, because the last time I saw the show was a high school production in my senior year.

The guy playing Sitting Bull then will probably never show up at a class reunion, because in his big scene (after a too-quick costume change) he stood center stage and delivered his heap-big stage-Indian speech with his fly wide open.

I mean, WIDE open. I was two-thirds of the way back in the audience, and I could see he was a briefs, not boxers kind of guy.

Nothing like that happened in Friday night’s show, but the mishap made it not one of your smooth, run of the mill performances.