Welcome to a World of Spiritual Harmony

A grim subject, a modern opera, a small stage at CCM - doesn’t sound like a pleasant evening. And yet it was mesmerizing music, libretto, singing, acting. Mary and I, with our usual excellent luck, found ourselves at the College Conservatory of Music a bit early - and were immediately invited in to hear a discussion about the opera by a British expert on Benjamin Britten, the composer. A great start, giving us the context for both Britten’s music and this piece.

It is one of those works whose ending I always want to re-write - like Romeo and Juliet. Lucretia, faithful, loyal and beautiful, is raped by a general, Tarquinius, whose family is ruling Rome. Her husband, Collatinus, is very supportive and loving. And yet she is the one who dies. Both the rape and her death scene are shocking. Nonetheless, her death causes the downfall of the tyrant and foreigner Tarquinius and his family and sets Rome on a different course.

The menace, the music, the unusual accountants-as-Greek-chorus singing, the performances and vocal abilities of the principal performers. What an evening of fabulous music. Thanks, CCM.

What a treat! This play, The Fall of Heaven, by Walter Mosley, based on his book Tempest Tales, features Tempest Landry, small time neer-do-well but not really a bad guy, who dares to say No when St. Peter wants to send him to the hot place. So Joshua Angel, heavenly ledger keeper, gets sent back to earth with him, to watch for the next mistake, so Heaven can justify its desire to be rid of Tempest.

Joshua falls in love and fathers 2 children, complicating matters. The Devil shows up, too, with a very scary doorway to hell in view. And the ending…. leaves us with lots to ponder.

The Playhouse in the Park made a great choice here. The staging was wonderful, the acting superb, the ups and downs of the stage areas - great theater and an excellent story.

Sorry - we saw the second last performance of this world premiere run. But I’m betting this gets performed on a lot of stages over the next few years - and might easily return here to its home base.

Good laughs, good theater, good fun.

You know I’m a major foodie - love to know all the restaurants, what’s going on, what’s the latest and greatest. So I try new restaurants, check out places I haven’t been for a while. I am seldom really disappointed - often enough, a chef will really knock themselves out when nothing on the menu is really vegetarian / vegan.

But last week I was disappointed twice.

Met a friend at Greenup Cafe in Covington for breakfast. It was a fabulous place when Jean-Robert de Cavel was chef. Then when he was first gone, it was a lot more regimented, not as inventive, but still very acceptable. Now - it’s being run by 2 guys who are trying hard, with a pretty limited menu, not many extras - and almost no one in the place! There was a guy drinking coffee when my friend arrived - the only other patron. As I got there he was leaving, so it was just my friend and I for well over half an hour. Then a woman came in, had a cup of coffee, and left. This in a place that used to have people waiting in line for breakfast on an ordinary weekday. The food was fairly good, and the guys were pleasant. But there’s no reason to go back.

Jerusalem Cafe, at the dead end of Clifton in McMillan, had been a favorite of mine for years. Then it switched owners / managers a bunch of times. A new group came in about a year ago, and I hadn’t been there since. So it was time to try it. Saturday night, dinner time - and again, there was one guy in the whole place when we arrived. He left soon after. My friend and I ordered a lot of favorites. Big mistake. The lentil soup was not even recognizable - bright green! And with no flavor. The spanokopita had flavor - tasted like chlorine. No phyllo, just some sort of super white covering. The fava beans were acceptable (as opposed to actually good), as was the hummus, the egg roll was not, even minimally. The grape leaves were acceptable. Most of the rest of it I already don’t remember, thank heaven.

I am the world’s all time great taker-home of food. About all I took home were the grape leaves for Brian, and the left over pita for the birds. And it was all more expensive, item for item, than it would have been any place else near the University. Been a long time since I had a really bad meal. Hope it’s a long time before it happens again.

Geminis are always doing two things at a time. And double Geminis like me are often doing four. Thus it is with the books I’m reading at the present moment.

I finished my last book, Life on the Color Line, by UC’s new president, and found it was still having a major effect on me - running around in my brain, so that I wasn’t ready just to pick up another big book. So I searched my stack for other possibilities. I found Feminist Fairy Tales, by Barbara G. Walker, who has written a lot of spiritual stuff, including the I Ching of the Goddess, and The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, both excellent and already on my shelves. These Fairy Tales are wonderful! What a treat! I could easily think they were hundreds of years old and steeped in other cultures, rather than being published in 1996 here in America. The Frog Princess is already a personal favorite. But I cannot read a whole book of fairy tales in one sitting - they must be savored.

So I needed something else to read. I had bought a book about one of my favorite Goddesses / heroines several years ago: Inanna, from the Myths of Ancient Sumer, by Kim Echlin. This is a ‘moving, sensitive and knowledgable translation’ of these myths (if myths they are : > ) from 4,000 years ago. Just reading the cover and intro, wandering through the striking illustrations, and reading a few pages (very sexy, these Sumerians) at random started a whole other set of ideas going in my brain .

Therefore, I decided to read the book, Tempest Tales, by Walter Mosley, which he has turned into his first play - Fall from Heaven - which I’m going to see tomorrow at the Playhouse. But a big part of me didn’t want to read it before seeing the play - I did take just a taste of a few pages - wonderful writing. I’ve read his mysteries, which are also great.

Then last night, I was ready for something big again. I had bought Teddy Kennedy’s book True Compass, for just such an emergency, but had loaned it to son Brian. Upon inquiry, I found that he was also reading other stuff, and was not focused on Teddy’s Compass. So now I’m happily immersed in Hyannis Port, taking frequent sails into Nantucket Sound. He is a born Irish storyteller.

So I am the world’s happiest camper, prepared for any book emergency which might arise!

Our new University of Cincinnati President, Gregory Howard Williams, wrote this book, published in 1995, and subtitled the true story of a white boy who discovered he was black. It is an excellent book. Ten year old Greg Williams had already had a hectic and often poverty stricken life by the time his mother left him, his younger brother, and his Italian American father, taking the 2 youngest siblings with her.

After his alcoholic father destroyed the rest of the family’s assets, he took Greg and Mike with him to Muncie, Indiana, his home town. On the bus ride there, the father Tony (as he was known as an Italian American in Virginia) reverted back to being Buster Williams, a black ne’er do well who had almost made it in life. Though Greg and Mike were white to all appearances, Muncie of the 1950’s knew instantly who they were, and treated them accordingly.

This is a shattering and heart-breaking book. The crudities and cruelties of his alcoholic black grandmother were more than matched by his white grandmother and that entire family, who simply did not acknowledge his existence - though the entire town, black and white, knew who was who. In giving a fairly observational and non-emotional description of the nightmare life the boys led, it is amazing how much of the time they simply did not have enough food. Thrift store clothes, fighting their way through playgrounds, often rejected by black and white kids at schools, life was hard. But his dad and grandmother would not / could not even give up a bottle of wine to keep them fed. Finally, Miss Dora - a church going woman who knew of their circumstances, took them in, and kept them fed, though she didn’t have resources to do much more than that.

How black and very underprivileged Greg William became both a lawyer and a Ph. D., and now president of a major American university is an unbelievable story. If you want to know how race is truly still lived in much of America - read this book.

The Shakespeare’s Studio Series each winter is outside the norm and often dark. Definitely the case this year, with Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, and Hughie by Eugene O’Neill featured. Both include Joneal Joplin, who is very gifted. Excellent productions, settings, good plays, giving me more experience with Beckett and O’Neill.

And both speaking to a time and place in American / Western thinking and culture that are fast disappearing. Thank Heaven. Most of us now know the language of addiction well enough to recognize the sex and gambling addictions of Erie Smith, very well played and quite the egomaniac - he is really the only person he finds interesting in his entire world. Everyone else is an object, a mark - especially women. We know him a lot better after the play - but really - who wants to? He is way less interesting than he would have been back in the mid-1950’s, when all of us who are ‘other’ would have felt we had no chance to make an impact on the world unless we knew how white men made things happen.

Krapp and his tapes are also going the way of the dodo - though it was fun to see an 8-track being looped around expertly. Vaguely, but not facing it directly, Krapp knows that when he did not commit to the relationship he talked about 30 years before in a tape he plays over and over, he gave up a meaningful life for what he perceived as freedom. It is a tragedy, with laughs and bananas.

We can be grateful that the world has turned, and be glad that most (white) guys are now more open to life and to being human. And especially that all of us who are other - most of the world - can find our own paths in this changing world.

Damn good theater, for sure. Well done, Cincy Shakes.

We are known as a city of wimps about snow. I still love the Jim Borgman cartoon with a guy huddled in a blanket beside his furnace, surrounded by milk, bread and boxes of other supplies. That’s just about what we do, isn’t it?

I just stay home, nice and cozy. Makes sense to me, rather than being out un-rushing around from one traffic snarl to the next. I have shoveled parallel tire tracks down the driveway, so I could get out if I wanted to. And likely even get back in eventually. But why would I, until everything is much better?

I have lots of projects from my left brain and right brain to work on, there’s plenty of food, and I can always go out and shovel something or feed the birds if I require fresh air. The snow was so heavy the last couple of days that the cookie sheets and pie plates I sat on the snow to put bird feed on are just plain buried. And I have no idea where. So today, I raided the recycling bin, got out an empty organic lettuce container and a plastic tray from a burrito, and filled them with feed. And I put another deer block out, which the deer share with everyone.

Life is good. And I’m sure soon I’ll be back out in the world. Meantime, warm and cozy works for me.

Good friend Ed Kluska, the best astrologer around here, does an annual astrology workshop, where he presents charts and forecasts for the year. My intuition is working as he’s talking, and sometimes I get a little different take on an issue, or have tangential information.

The key learning from this year’s workshop, in brief: 2010 will be nearly as bad as 2009. Ed says we have to really toe the line, sacrifice, eliminate waste, and be more cautious - really over a 14 year period. I’m feeling like it’s not quite that bad, though it’s close. We’re an inch up from the bottom, rather than a quarter of an inch, as we were from July on last year. And - good news - 2011 will be much better, and will give us a breather as we go through all this change.

We will never go back to the old days - neither politics, business, government or banking will ever be the same. We are entering the new normal - everything will be transformed. The way to go through this is to get into our heart’s balance. This is not the same as seeing Armageddon coming, by the way. Most of us will be happier with not so much stuff, with not being greedy and wasteful, with focusing on staying healthy. None of this in the sense of what we’re giving up, but in the sense of what we’re getting as we simplify. We are gaining more freedom to be ourselves, to be more entrepreneurial, and there will be unexpected blessings the more we approach life that way - particularly mid-year.

Capitalism is in transition, as is everything else. Our generosity with regard to Haiti is really making us feel better. We will do more sharing, more selfless service, more energy healing (hurray!) One question was about investing. Ed pointed out that cash is a good thing to keep around (even though some stores hardly know what to do with it any more). And what I get about investing is that we can no longer invest in the old world - guns, land mines, tobacco. We will invest in the new world - green technologies, alternative medicines, recycled and sustainable products.

Now and mid-August we’re in what Ed calls the Debt Collector. So play it cool. In September, the New Thrust will be in play, so go for it with those new collaborative ideas. And toward the end of the year, the alignments will be again in the Big Goody - that’s the time to expect what you really want to be arriving.

I love the news stories lately about how good it is for your brain to do mind work / play like puzzles and games. I have always loved puzzles. I don’t do the crossword puzzles in the Enquirer nowadays - too easy to be fun. They have 2 every day, but both are pretty simple. I do the Sunday Enquirer puzzle, though.

I used to buy the NYTimes on Sunday just to have their wonderful puzzle. But I hate having that big paper stack up, mostly unread, with those trees having died for nothing. Though of course I recycle every scrap of paper I get my hands on. I guess I should look around on line in their magazine and see if it’s downloadable or doable online.

I really enjoy the Enquirer’s Jumble and Cryptoquip. Fun to get to that moment when you know what it says. And with the Jumble, you have to solve the list of words, and then figure out the joke. The words are done in 10 seconds, but not always the joke.

The real biggie for me is jigsaw puzzles. Can’t be too tediously easy, or too tediously hard. Like the all red round puzzle a few years ago. What was the point of that? Another criterion - they must be beautiful. Luckily, my wonderful friends have figured all this out, and find me fabulous puzzles.

A good friend gave me a wonderful Kuan Yin puzzle that I started as soon as Christmas was all put away. I only do Christmas puzzles during Christmas. (I never said I wasn’t eccentric!) Kuan Yin was the Chinese Great Goddess, and like all of them was demoted into various smaller jobs. She’s now known as the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion. Gorgeous colors, pieces nearly all alike, a lot to pay attention to. Aaahhhh.

She’s finished, and I couldn’t bear to take her apart - so I’m working on the Tibetan Wheel of Life, a thousand piecer, and tres intricate, beside her on the table. I found this one myself. It’s not as hard as it looks, though I may not admit that. Next up is another present - a huge puzzle of the astrology wheel. That should keep my busy mind occupied until the snow is finally gone.

P. S. When do I have time to do puzzles? When I get wound up and want to smooth down. When I’m on a long phone call. When I’m waiting on a client. When the toast is toasting…. I just do a few pieces here and there and then wander off to the next thing. When Grandson Kyle is in from DC, we will often settle in for an afternoon and puzzle the day away, while catching up with each other. Otherwise, it’s just what happens when I wander past the puzzle.

Light-hearted, fun and pretty good New Age mystery - that would sum up Dial Om for Murder by Diana Killian pretty well. It’s not really “The best a cozy can be”, as ReviewingTheEvidence.com says. But it’s way better than the average.

Maybe part of my problem is the fairly lame attempt at including at the end of the book a not-so-great description of the yoga pose Sun Salutation, and a recipe for salmon - so they can say on the cover ‘includes yoga facts and organic recipes’.

The mystery itself is fun, lots of unusual characters, who have managed to get all tangled up with each other. Then again, being murdered by a koala ice sculpture is pretty unique, too. The lives of the real detective, and the yoga teacher detective are pretty tangled up as well.

So it’s a fun book. Just the lame stuff at the end threw me off.