E G O S P E W

My next appearance on stage will be as a soldier and wedding guest (i.e. chorus member) in this production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte.  Get giddy.

Cosi Fan Tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Friday & Saturday July 30 & 31, 2010

Smith Opera House

Geneva, NY

Our local wild bunnies are resting up as they prepare for tomorrow’s heroic duties.  Note that while Santa is only one single dude who has to cover all the world delivering presents in a few-hour sweep, Peter Rabbit and all his assistants are each about 1/300th the physical stature of the Bearded One.  And I’m not convinced of their logistical prowess in executing the Mailman Algorithm (to maximize efficiency delivering to X destinations arranged in Y configuration).  But they couldn’t be cuter.

Rest well, my furry friends; tomorrow’s the big day.

My next concert, in the Hobart & William Smith Colleges Community Chorus,  Tuesday, April 13th, 8:00 pm, St. John’s Chapel, 630 S. Main Street, Geneva, NY 14456.

Massa Unpeeled

I managed to peel the Eric Massa bumper sticker off our car today.

How did we get so fooled? He seemed pretty smart back during the campaign, at the living room chat and the log cabin barbecue fundraiser. He reminded me a little of Senator Jim Webb, with that ex-career military kicked-around-the-world and wrote-a-book-or-two kind of wisdom. We helped get him elected in a solid Republican upstate New York district that hadn’t voted a Democrat into office for decades. (Though we couldn’t quite tip the county to Obama, embarrassingly.)

Massa’s arguments against our Afghanistan involvement were pretty brave; I love seeing an ex-military officer go ballistically anti-war.  He had long been vocal over the abominable folly of the war in Iraq.  But then he disappointed us with his stand against the health care legislation because “it didn’t go far enough.” . . .A classic case of allowing the Perfect be the enemy of the Good. Or of the Better-than-Nothing. A chance to advance civilization comes around only once every fifteen or twenty years; don’t let it slip through your fingers because it ain’t perfect.

And now this bizarre resignation: for medical, or political, or personal reasons? I hope the doctor’s reports turn out to be good news for him. But as for all his bad news, the blame lies with Eric Massa. These wounds are self-inflicted. True, he accepted limited responsibility in the coded admissions about not “living up to his own standards.” Which only makes his subsequent ranting at environmental or political pressures seem more like attempts at deflection or dissemblance. Sadly, in this strange behavior and abandonment of his post, he has disappointed many, many people who had given him their support and trust. What emerges with each rambling interview is an intuited truth, disconnected from his admissions and protestations; a truth purposely unspoken. This exercise in deception is the saddest act to witness: an aware, worldly man so unable to come face-to-face with his own self-knowledge.

I didn’t know what to do with the bumper sticker. . .it was laden with so much history and personal investment, I couldn’t just throw it away.

Since 2000, my father, Lindsay, has engaged in a charming tradition usually sometime around Easter, driving cross-country from Arizona to St. James’ Episcopal Church in Montross, Virginia. There, he offers his services as a guest conductor of the Festival Choir while accepting the generous hospitality of the local residents, his old friends and new.

The St. James Festival Chorus

This year, on Sunday April 18, 2010, he will continue that tradition, once again conducting the St. James Festival Choir in a (post-) Easter celebration.  The major work will be The Seven Last Words of Christ, which he composed in 1992 while in Coral Gables, Florida. (That was the period of his first “retirement”, lasting 15 years and including the following positions: music director and organist at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Coral Gables; guest conductor of the Coral Gables, Florida, Civic Opera and Symphony Society; resident campus carillonneur at the University of Miami; later administrator of the Anne Pohl Lafford Language Laboratory, named in honor of his wife for her contributions to the lab over her eight-year tenure as its director until her death in 1988.) In 1994 he retired again and moved to Tempe, Arizona, his current home, where he devotes most of his energy to music composition and zooming to performances.

The usual cohort of pals will parachute in to Montross, including my soprano-sister Julia Welbon from Philly (inevitably tapped for solo work), tenor-brother Peter from Phoenix,  former students of my father’s (basses and college roommates) D.Dyson Gay from Rochester and hopefully Carl Hye-Knudsen.  Carl and wife Melba, who now live in Bradenton, Florida, were responsible for starting the whole tradition when they lived near Montross in the Northern Neck. I, too, will be joining the St. James Festival Choir as a guest (with a few bars of solo, at the insistence of the composer/conductor, ahem) and, as always, we so much look forward to being with our friends in Virginia.