My Day Out

Yesterday was a good and bad day. I got some bad news yesterday, a neighbor of ours, Deb Chamberlin was on vacation with her family in Yellowstone when she stepped over a retaining wall to take a picture and she fell and died. It hasn't really hit me yet that she is gone, I mean it is such a freak thing to happen. I don't know when it will sink in since I won't be home for the funeral. It's really hitting my mom hard. They were pretty good friends and on school board together.

The rest of my day was actually really nice. The person I'm renting from needed the apartment for a few hours to show it to her boyfriend's parents, so I went to Central Park. I read for a while like last week and then went to a different area of the park and saw King Lear performed by the Boomerang Theatre Company. It was really well done, especially for being outside with no real set except for the hill they were on. It was nice to sit outside surrounded by green.

After dinner I went to a concert that was part of the Celebrate Brooklyn series that goes on in the summer. The opening act was a group called Chirgilchin. They are a throat singing group from Western Mongolia. Throat singing is really cool, I don't know exactly how it works, but they can sing overtones. It's really cool, you'd have to hear it to really know what it is.

The main act was Laurie Anderson (that's who is in the picture above). She's an artist that has been around for a while. I actually studied her in a music history course at school because she was/is very innovative. The concert was really cool. Think Maureen's performance piece from Rent only better because the pieces had more melody and harmony. She tended to start out with a little talking/poetry over some music and then it would morph into a song. There were two musicians playing with her, one on bass and the other on keyboards. It was a little strange, but very good.

So that was the latest I've been out completely on my own (my roommate was with college friends for the weekend) and as dorky as it is I feel proud of myself. I went to a concert a good hour subway ride away by myself and got home a little before midnight in one piece. It was really fun.