Saturday fun

On Saturday John and I caught up for what was at one point planned to be our last get-together before I leave on Friday.

We began by attending Josh's senior piano recital. Josh is one of the many students who, despite being at MIT primarily to study engineering, also takes his music seriously. It was nice to share the performance that represented the culmination of his music studies here.

The performance was enjoyable, though I felt that he was probably a little nervous and fell slightly short of what he would have been hoping for.

After an afternoon chatting, we went to the Shakespeare Ensemble's scenes night. The scenes night began in the building 14 courtyard, an interesting location but one that worked for their traditional "set light" approach to the scenes night. The first scene was an extremely dramatic and enjoyable depiction of Gwendoline and Cecily meeting, from The Importance of Being Earnest. This was followed by the first of two scenes from Macbeth (it's ok: I'm an opera singer, not an actor). During this scene it began to rain, so we moved up into 4-370 to continue.

The middle scene was a performance (I believe complete) of A Madness Most Discreet, a gay robot romance inspired by (based on would give the wrong idea) Romeo and Juliet. I thought it was very effectively done: the robots were well characterised, and the way one of them 'discovered' love seemed very authentic, even though there really isn't anything to be authentic too. After the second Macbeth scene, the program finished with a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. I'm not familiar with the play, but I didn't need to be to recognise Grace Kane '11's brilliant acting as Blanche.

A wonderful way to spend my last Saturday in the US (for the moment).