A post that should be panicking

[desperance]

What am I doing? I'm supposed to be cooking dinner in two days' time, for people whose good opinion I care about; and I have not shopped, I have not prepared, I have not even given it any thought! I don't know what I'm cooking! Aaargh!

Instead, I keep working, and thinking about work: about how to finish this proposal, and then about the short story I want to write straight afterwards, this weekend; and about the book just finished, that I need to be revising, and the other short story, and...

Also, I keep going to the opera. Last night Rigoletto, in a production that clearly echoed if it didn't mirror Jonathan Miller's famous Mafia interpretation; but you see this done and then you wonder why on earth no one did it before, because it suits the material so very well. And we were disappointed because Rigoletto himself was to be sung by an understudy, and we agreed we'd never seen a stellar performance from an understudy, there's none of that coming-back-a-star thing in real life; and then in the first interval we agreed that he was good, and in the second interval that if they hadn't told us we wouldn't have known, and at the end I do believe we cheered. Fab night. And tonight it's Peter Grimes (which I just typed as Peer Grimes, and now my mind is full of Ibsen/Britten crossover, which is no comfortable place to be, so I might just have to go and listen to Grieg instead), and tomorrow it's La Voix Humaine. Which I have never seen.

Dinner for eight? Oh, phooey. Dinner'll happen...

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

That's not soapbox, it's really interesting. And, I think, as it ought to be. I don't know if practices do differ this side; very possibly not, it may just be perception that has always left me feeling disappointed by understudies hitherto. 'Specially when the missing actor or more commonly singer is the one who's made a name in that role, that production - to some extent the one I've gone to see.

But as I say, he was fab last night, and I'm only sorry I can't remember his name. Bad me.