Friday, January 21, 2011

I Have Been Given the Weekend Off ...

... by my husband who decided, in His Infinite Wisdom, that he, too, has too much Work To Do.  (I mean , really now, what do college-educated people in their 50's with bad backs have to do but work?)  I am in the midst of picking up the pieces of a life interrupted (joyously) by a daughter's wedding, approximately 15 inches of snow over several days, and best of all, the offer (accepted) of writing another libretto after having not done so for, say, 15 years.

I'm working with a composer, Whitney George, and we are together writing an opera based on Guy de Maupassant's "The Diamond Necklace".  How times have changed!  Whitney and I have never met, and may not meet until the first performance.  Yet we have this mutual support society thing going on which is a joy.  We're doing this all through e-mail and (gulp) our face-to-face meetings might even be Skyped.  She was referred to me by my Very Good Friend, Fred Ho.  (He and I did some damage to the artistic firmament when we Wrote "Warrior Sisters" together, my last opera collaboration before this one.)  Anyway, doing the libretto is my idea of fun.  

Also, I was on my way to NY last Sunday and just by accident my friend, Taylor Ho Bynum, who I met through Fred was on the same train, and we had one of those rollicking co-artists conversational riots until he had to 'scuse hisself to work on the sheet music for the 10-piece Positive Catastrophe Band performing that night at Jazz Alley.  (Oh, God, New York will never be what it once was where jazz clubs were the center of the universe.  A part of me longs to have lived there in the 1950's, despite the fact that I would have probably drunk myself to death).  And, as I told The Husband, I realized that there was an "Ann T. Greene"  who got left behind when I left New York.  It's only when I work with or run into fellow "creatives" that she emerges.  I miss her and need her here.


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