The tenor takes a nap

Last Sunday the tenor stomped around swooshing his cape.  Why Aida and Amneris thought Radames was worth getting all hot and bothered about escaped me.

Took this photo of a snoozing caped moth at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens yesterday.  I couldn't tell if it was a Liberace moth with Elvis hair or an Elvis moth with a Liberace cape.

No guides online for pronouncing Tolype velleda, but it must sound like a good name for either an opera character or an undecided Ohio chihuahua.

Tolype velleda (Stoll, 1791)

Who was Stoll?  What was he doing in 1791?  Did he fall asleep during the opera?

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Purple berries and canaries

Thought I'd lost Nedda! When did the print on cd spine labels get so tiny? If you can't spy your "Pagliacci" recording with your little eye are you getting old?

What goes first?  The first thing to go is the memory?  The hearing?  The eyesight?  No. The first thing must have been participation in pop culture. I dropped out sometime before Michael Jackson lost his glove and Madonna got her training bra.  I was too busy raising sons to tune the radio dial.

Told friends I saw David Crosby and Stephen Stills at an Independence Day event.  Their response was, "Oh, yeah, wasn't Crosby the sperm donor for Melissa Etheridge's children?"  Well, yes, if Jerry Garcia was primarily a necktie designer.

So, this is what happens. You age. You like opera and oldies, and think drinking coffee from a "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" coffee cup might make you smart enough to solve Will Shortz's crossword puzzle. You remember Watergate like it was yesterday, but can't remember when you changed the filter for your Brita pitcher. The only thing that keeps you climbing back up the trail is dread of imposing on your kids making them haul you on a makeshift stretcher back to the car.

Say, can I have some of your purple berries?


Yes.  I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now, haven't got sick once.


Probably keeps us both alive.

 © 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

4 1/4 hours @ 44th opera

Dallas Opera's Tristan und Isolde just reaches in and sucks your whole consciousness up into the hovering UFO to perform brain swaps and other alien experiments.  And you don't even care because you are so totally into the  moment, the music, and the projections.  That's right!  You feel honored that you can sit in the uncomfortable chair with no room for your knees for four and a quarter hours of breath-taking music and incredible projected sets by Elaine McCarthy while almost nothing happens. Five stars in the Fabulousity column of your opera Life List.

This morning, though the English horn solo from Act III is still haunting you, symptoms indicate you have severe post-Wagner Winspear Syndrome.  You feel like you were folded and packed in a very small box and then shipped by slow boat to Cornwall.  Your thighs and upper arms hurt the most. You think Alberto Giacometti thoughts.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Black and white and red all over

Not able to post much because I cannot put down Erin Morgenstern's novel, The Night Circus. The book reminds me of trying to catch the spot images after a Kodak flash photo when I was a little kid. Birthday parties were so simple then. Kids chase optical spots from flash photography. Kids create static electricity rubbing balloons on their hair. Kids play "Drop the Handkerchief" and "Musical Chairs".


This photo is of the likely last canna bloom of the fall. My many cannas were slashed, bent, and broken in the weekend midnight hailstorm, so I was pleased to find a bloom emerging fresh from the wreckage.

The storm was a stunning display of black and white, just right for a reader deep in the novel.  Sunday afternoon Act III of the Dallas Opera's "Lucia di Lammermoor" had a strobe lightning storm that tried but couldn't match nature.  Lucia won with her mad scene duet with the flute, though. See part of it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfgOPNXWU2I




© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Flat on our backs singing

"Bring your umbrella", my opera buddy commanded.  The weather was supposed to get wild mid-afternoon.  No way could I take that big maroon and white Plano Panther cross country mom umbrella to the Winspear Opera House.  Dug around in the hall closet just in case wishing could make a smaller umbrella appear.  Lo and behold, there was a mid-size umbrella in a black sleeve.  Tickets, binocs, snacks, umbrella, and I was off to experience Verdi's Rigoletto for the first time.

What an experience it was!  James Valenti was quite as fine as the lusting Duke as he was in '09's La Boheme, but we would prefer he not wax his chest hair.  Paolo Gavanelli was powerful as the hunchback jester.  Laura Claycomb brought tears to our eyes as Rigoletto's innocent daughter Gilda.  She stunned the entire audience with her performance of "Caro nome" sung while flat on her back.  It's about 4:56 into this video. 

This feat surpasses the performance by the early literacy presenter at Saturday's training session.  She was able to sing "Little Seed" to the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot" and then to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song back-to-back:

Here's a little seed in the dark, dark ground.

Out comes the warm sun, yellow and round.

Down comes the rain, wet and slow.

Up comes the little seed,

Grow, grow, grow!

I cannot sing lying on my back, not even to the tune of "I'm a little teapot".  Not in the thunderstorm waves of lightning and rain beginning about 1:30 this morning.  [And not in a boat or with a goat.]  Sure, I'm stiff and creaky, but mostly I was being still, soaking up the sounds, and being grateful for the rainfall.  So glad I didn't have to open Dad's freebie Munsingwear umbrella in the elite opera crowd. 

Had my bone density scan after work.  It was nice to be still, just lying there letting the machine collect evidence to present to my doctor.  Her lectures about blood pressure, weight, and osteoporosis are still a few weeks off.

Dad is flat in bed when I get to his room, but he wants to get up.  The hospice nurse left me a message that Dad was up and self-propelled in his wheelchair much of today.  Seems he was a bit sad, "not feeling like" himself.  At two he was ready to get in bed, but after a nap he's ready for action.  This is such a treat!

The aide who changed Dad from clothes to hospital gown for his nap does not want to get him back up.  Dad is adamant, so I change him back into clothes myself.  We insist on the help of the aide to put Dad in his wheelchair, and then we
go outside!

For ten minutes Dad is energized in the fenced courtyard, watching traffic on Park Boulevard, bombing around in the wheelchair smashing into the sidewalk edging,  and looking at the rose bushes.  The wind gives him an open milkweed pod look.  Suddenly Dad is too chilly.  We head back inside for his supper.  I mark the calendar for Dad's first time outdoors in Texas.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Undissolvable, with lava lamps and Jujyfruits for all

Prologue 1598.  Boris Godunov has retreated to the Novodievichy Monastery near Moscow.  ... Shchelkalov announces that Boris still refuses the throne and sorrows over Russia's insoluble misery.*

Russian misery won't dissolve.  It can't be diluted.  It won't mix with water.  No wonder it seems gritty. It must be related to the liquids with "Thick-It" for stroke and Parkinsons patients.

Insoluble--Is thitta word?  Is thit the right word?

Meeting despicable former KGB agents in Henning Mankell's The White Lioness, I am in a gritty, clouded Russian mood.  The Dallas Opera's production of "Boris Godunov" is fantastic.  FANTASTIC!  Still, that word "insoluble" is burbling in the back of my head.

It's a wonder I passed eleventh grade chemistry class.  It was right after lunch, a time when my brain is least likely to form a solution. 

• Is Boris refusing (throne + sorrows)?
• Is Boris sorrowing? 
• Does Boris have clogged plumbing?
• Does Boris need a blender?
• What would be the crown for Your Insolubleness?
• Wouldn't Insolubly be a great name for a racehorse?
• Did I mention "Boris Godunov" will move into my Top Ten Dallas Opera productions?

insoluble [ɪnˈsɒljʊbəl]  adj

1. (Chemistry) incapable of being dissolved; incapable of forming a solution, esp in water ... Not capable of being fully dissolved. Fats and oils are insoluble in water.


2. incapable of being solved ...  Therefore, I am happily proved wrong.  The Playbill word choice was appropriate.

insolubility , insolubleness n

insolubly adv

[This photo subject is not a lava lamp. It is the lamp my sister and I had in our bedroom growing up in the Sixties.]



* From the Playbill for the Dallas Opera's production of "Boris Godunov", courtesy of Opera News.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Spring Break guest

"Honey, I'm home!" 

Don't usually get to holler into the empty nest, but the preschool class rabbit is chilling with me this week.  Norton has his preferred corner of the living room with sunshiny windows on two sides of his cage.  He's been coming to this resort for school breaks for years now, but this is the first time since I moved the Eames furniture down from the house in Lincoln. 

I'm sure Norton will learn to appreciate this design aesthetic, but his initial impression regards the lack of shadowy places for curling up to snooze. Sometime during Spring Break I'll show him the TED Talks video about Charles and Ray Eames. Then we will build with my Eames House of Cards picture deck.

In rabbit years Norton is the same age as my father, and has many of the same problems. He has watery, mattering eyes. There are incontinence issues. Norton's appetite is better, I regret to report.

Norton is either ten years old and weighs nine pounds, or weighs ten pounds at nine years of age. And after one slow gallumph around the living room he is sound asleep next to the Eames rocking chair. Alas, that is similar to my exercise regimen.

Tonight I gave Norton a full report on the visit to Parkland Hospital to tell Felecia good-bye. I pray this fantastic drama teacher's stage exit will be any hour now. My dear friend is ravaged and reduced to an ineffective gasp of her fabulous self, and every minute is precious torture.

I told Norton how Felecia once sewed Robert Plant into his tight pants. And how she was always the first person to notice the monarch butterfly migration high in the Dallas sky. Glaring blue. Orange wings. How Felecia poured her compassion into tiny glasses of German wine to toast the New Year 2005 when Fritzi was dying.

Who else would savor a drive-through lunch at Burger King with the same connoisseur's relish as a Dallas Opera performance of "Tosca"? What a gift to have shared nine operas with Felecia, and also wandered away from the guided tour to find Nedda's pink trailer from "Pagliacci" in the DO's prop storage? 

Please let the former drive time DJ at KGUS in Hot Springs, Arkansas, have "twenty thousand watts of sparkling clear power" sending her off.  Soon.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Trout lilies herald spring

  These flowers on the Sycamore Trail at the Heard Nature Sanctuary were lovely, but they were just the opening act for the trout lilies on the Hoot Owl Trail. 

  This delicate but strong plant poking up to bloom at the earliest hint of spring is absolutely Juliet.

  The spotted leaves poking up through the layer of organic debris is as refreshing a sight as spotted trout in a cold mountain stream.  Grab the sunlight.  Shimmer and reflect.

   The unfolding petals are the slashings on Romeo's sleeves.
 


© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Flying nuns and Cio-Cio San

 
Discovered this amazing berry bush while walking the Caddo Trail at Oak Point Park Sunday.  Did you ever see such wimples on berries?  Every berry could be a flying nun...a teeny tiny Sally Field.

 
Yes, Virginia, there was a t.v. show starring Sally Field as a nun who could fly, and it ran for eighty episodes.  Yes, we still had a black and white t.v. back then, and no, my parents didn't let us watch such drivel.  My eighty-seven year old father still wants to smack Sally upside the head every time a Boniva commercial comes on t.v.

Other views of the berries seemed like settings for "Madama Butterfly" (Dallas Opera 2005 more than 2010).  Such a subject deserves a giant scroll and lovely strokes painted with a bamboo brush.

 
Or pop the original 1940 "Fantasia" in the old VHS player and fast forward to the "Waltz of the Flowers". Try to stay awake on the sofa under the heavy knit afghan.  Try.  Try.  Fight those visions of twirling flowers, Chinese mushrooms, and frost-skating fairies dancing in your head.



© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Fantasy Opera

I probably should have watched the Cowboys-Vikings game, but the Fox channel had annoying wavy lines through it. I couldn't identify Tony Romo in a police line-up, but Brett Favre always looks good in those Wranglers. How would Brett look in pink stockings and a toreador costume?





Instead of reality football, I was playing fantasy opera. It's a good imaginary desert island diversion, and the price is right. Yesterday friends treated me to viewing the Metropolitan Opera live broadcast of "Carmen" in High Definition at a movie theater. Today I'm assembling my own production.

In the role of the gypsy, Carmen, I can choose from Elina Garanca (Met in HD), Julia Migenes-Johnson (1984 DVD filmed in Andalusia), Jessye Norman singing sweetly on my Decca CD, or the entirely unconvincing Ekaterina Semenchuk in her 2004 Dallas Opera debut. Elina and Julia will have to fight it out in the cigarette factory. Julia is earthier--more real. Elina is just the tiniest iota too perfect, and I rarely forgot she was acting.

Roberto Alagna clearly leads the pack for the role of the naive, and then obsessed Don Jose. His chemistry with Elina Garanca in the Met broadcast was spellbinding. Runner-up is Neil Shicoff on the Decca CD. Placido Domingo has never convinced me that he wouldn't rather run home to his mama on the DVD. Mark Thomsen made no memorable impact in the Dallas Opera.

Houston native Latonia Moore gave credibility to Micaela in the Dallas production and won the hearts of the audience. Faith Esham looks and sounds wonderful on the DVD, Mirella Freni sounds excellent on the CD. Barbara Frittoli at the Met looked old enough to be Don Jose's mother.

Teddy Tatu Rhodes subbed the bullfighter role, Escamilla, in Saturday's Met broadcast, learning he would sing just a few hours before the performance. He sang the role in 2004 in Dallas, a year after he gave my heart a flutter in La Boheme. I seem unable to choose Simon Estes from the Decca CD sight unseen. I lean toward Ruggero Raimondi's arrogant rock star portrayal in the DVD over Teddy's more human if still egotistical interpretation.

I don't know if Brett Favre can sing, but Keith Miller can. I had no idea Keith Miller played football for the Colorado U Buffaloes before becoming a knockout as Zuniga on the Met stage. He has no competition. This is a fantasy opera, after all.

DVD wins with atmosphere, filmed with real dust and rocks. The Metropolitan Opera set rotates and transforms from act to act creating a unified form that is dramatic and effective in each arrangement. One of the greatest joys of the HD broadcast was watching the set changes from fantastic camera angles.

My first exciting onstage tour of a Dallas Opera set was 2004's "Carmen". I will create the costumes for Frasquita and Mercedes, Carmen's gypsy friends, in my fantasy production.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Beaded bag, Bohemia, and bedazzled

My sister brought me this beautiful shawl from her trip to Prague and Vienna. We found the beaded bag in a trunk of things from our great aunts. The two items go together perfectly. I can't wait to doll up for a Dallas Opera performance at the new Winspear Opera House with them.


We love our new and very red opera house. Opera-goers were dressed for the Sunday performance of Verdi's "Otello" in their scarlet and crimson finery. I hadn't seen so much red since my last Cornhusker football game in the Seventies.

Rodolfo, the ringed dove

Today my fence visitor is a far more handsome and sharp specimen than the usual mourning doves. In fact, this ringed dove reminds me of the excellent tenor in the current Dallas Opera production of "La Boheme". No lumpy, nerdy poet this time! James Valenti brought power, height, good looks, and a convincing portrayal to a role that often goes to a doughier guy.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Harem eunuchs

"Trust you won't have to be a harem eunuch," I wrote my friend. He got a teensy part in a spring Dallas Opera production of Rossini's "The Italian Girl in Algiers".

Such a funny word, eunuch. Back in high school, during the last Ice Age, the males in my social group formed an intramural flag football team called "The Eunuchs". Why exactly they chose this team name isn't important, just as most of what happens in high school isn't important.

We had yearbooks in those paleolithic days, but no Facebook. It was just as well.

Well = eu. That's what we learned about Greek and Latin root words: Eugene, Eunice, euphoria, eulogy, eucalyptus...

Eunuch has a different etymology. Eune = bed. This from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

eunuch
1387, from Gk. eunoukhos "castrated man," originally "guard of the bedchamber or harem," from euno-, comb. form of eune "bed" + -okhos, from stem of ekhein "to have, hold." The Gk. and L. forms of the word were used to transl. Heb. saris, which sometimes meant merely "palace official," in Septuagint and Vulgate, probably without an intended comment on the qualities of bureaucrats.

Good grief. Let us not comment on the qualities of bureaucrats in or out of bed!

Instead I comment on my abbreviated adventure in Facebook. The Dallas Morning News ran a large double op ed about Facebook today. As a DMN Voice I've had a couple questions from the editorial board about online social networks.

For research only, I created a Facebook account today. My sons have bravely allowed me to blog as long as I didn't have a presence on Facebook, so this was dangerous territory. As quick as possible I logged out, but not before one of the Lincoln East High Eunuchs showed up on the list of people I might know. If I've been happily unconnected with high school eunuchs for over thirty-five years, why would I want the wonders of the Internet to reconnect us now?

Do you Facebook? Sitting around the dining table at New Years I quibbled with sons and girlfriends about whether "Facebook" could be a verb.

Do you Auroch? We are considering Ice Age animals in the preschool class. We are discovering saber tooth tigers and woolly mammoths. Aurochs were the giant wild bison depicted in the cave paintings at Lascaux. Maybe the cave paintings were a social networking site for the Ice Age.





© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Pushing the vatrine

The Dallas Opera's current production of Donizetti's "Roberto Devereux" makes use of large, lighted glass display cases on wheels to showcase the psychological suffering of Queen Elizabeth I due to beheadings before and during her reign. At least that is the best pop-psych explanation I've come up with to explain the circle-the-wagons feature. (I flunked Tudor self-help.)

In Act I three glass display cases pop out on stage ending a fairly clever quicky recap of the Elizabethan era. William Shakespeare climbs out of a wicker chest to direct Elizabeth in a scene from "Midsummer Night's Dream" on the stage of the Globe Theatre. A lovely map unfurls for a backdrop. A cardboard cutout Spanish Armada is blasted by a cardboard English Navy.

Alas, the glass cases must signal that it is time to get capital S serious or italicized m mystified. Are they museum displays? Store windows from Neiman Marcus? Lenin's tomb? One case contains a hefty Henry VIII; another must hold Elizabeth's mother, Ann Boleyn. The center case holds a young redheaded princess doing the mime-in-a-box act while looking distraught. Yes, we get it. "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" : Henry IV, Part 2; act 3, scene 1.1.31. Shadowy figures propel the lighted cases around the stage and off.

At the end of the opera, the three boxes go rolling around the stage again. One seems to contain a clearly deceased Roberto Devereux. One must hold Mary Stuart. Who is in the third?

One of my friends is a shadowy figure. He's hardworking. He claims the glass box he pushes is called a "vatrine".

My American Heritage Dictionary has no entry for "vatrine". "Vitrine" doesn't appear, either. I have better luck online with Merriam Webster:

vi·trine \və-ˈtrēn\ noun French, from vitre pane of glass, from Old French, from Latin vitrum:
1880 : a glass showcase or cabinet especially for displaying fine wares or specimens

So, depending how it's embellished, a vitrine could hold collections of porcelain chickens, owls, or mushrooms. A vitrine might display curios, knickknacks, aged sirloin, Braniff stewardess hot pants at the Frontiers of Flight Museum, or the A. B. Normal brain from "Young Frankenstein".

So many questions. So little time. It's quiz time:

1. In what Laura Ingalls Wilder book did Pa build a corner display case for Ma's porcelain shepherdess? By the Shores of Silver Lake

2. What was the display case called? A whatnot

3. Who was Lurleen Wallace? Not a Tudor. The first wife of George Wallace, and first female governor of Alabama, although a stand-in for her spouse. She just popped into mind between vitrine and the six wives. I was remembering a family in NE Nebraska who had named all their daughters Erlene, Sherlene, Darlene, Karlene, Murine...

4. What happens to the brains of NFL players who suffer head hits and concussions? Heard on NPR about a new study.

5. What was Emily Kaitz's hilarious wedding song about housing a hideous porcelain poodle collection in expensive glass cabinets? I Will Stay with You

6. Name each wife of Henry VIII and her chronological fate, and imagine how the Village People could dance to divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived:

7. Where can I get a cool name like Mary, Queen of Scots? I want a comma. I'll pass on the glass box, though. Collagemama, Queen of Blogs...


© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

The Royal Ten Bars

Golden beads are a basic Montessori math manipulative. Children work with the golden bead thousand cube, hundred square, ten bar, and units to gain the concept of place value. They gradually realize that eighteen means one ten bar plus eight units, while eighty-one means eight ten bars and one unit.

If you are reading this post, you probably googled "ten royal bars," and are disappointed. If you were on a class bus trip, you could sing "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall". That is another way to learn about numbers and place value, as well as drive adults crazy.

I've never been to a royal bar, but I rented two houses in Suburbia, Oklahoma built during the wet bar/great room craze. Both design amenities were highly overrated.

I can't hum a bar of music, or carry a tune in a bottle. It will be fun to attend the Dallas Opera's production of Donizetti's "Robert Devereux" tomorrow. The photo of the opera's Queen Elizabeth I appeared on the front of the Dallas Morning News weekend entertainment "Guide" section on Friday.

That was the same day a student carefully placed ten bars between his fingers to form claws, a creative but clearly unauthorized use of Montessori materials. I had to put on my teacher scowl at the same time I was imagining the costuming possibilities for Elizabethan math teachers.



© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Thankful for leftovers already

Teaching art is like always being on the fourth day after Thanksgiving, and trying to make something fresh and appetizing out of the same old leftovers. Today I'm grateful for donated leftover items, though it may take years for me to find the right combination to use them.

Thanks to the Woolly Mammoth for getting caught in the rain with a bunch of colored tissue paper in 2004. The colors bled in ways that look much like fall leaves.

Thanks for the bountiful okra harvest, no kidding! We used okra and tempera paints to make the prints.

Thanks to the school that quit using Tektronix Phaser 200 Series Printers Transparency Film sheets "with perforated tab". We are whittling away the stack making our school feast placemats.

Thanks to the woman who gave me three giant boxes of fancy scrapbooking papers in 2006. We photocopied an autumn leaf paper for the backgrounds of our placemat collages.

Thanks for the chance to use that brittle and faded construction paper to make crayon leaf rubbings. Now how else can we use that up? I'd be grateful for the storage space.

Thanks for folks who save old magazines and catalogs. Thanks especially for my former job that invites me back to work in a lovely library surrounded by beautiful fall foliage just ready to be pressed.

A song stuck in my head can be as unwelcome as the contents of that Tupperware way, way back on the refrigerator shelf for who knows how long. This time, the leftover song helped me realize the science potential for the preschool placemat project.

Cling-cling! Ding-ding! The Duettino from Act I of "The Marriage of Figaro" stayed in my head after the splendid Dallas Opera performance Sunday afternoon. Static cling is just the thing for science this week. The transparency film lets the kids experience static electricity. The film lifts, moves, and holds the tissue paper pieces as if by magic as we assemble our placemat collages. No glue is necessary, and neither is a technical explanation of the phenomenon.

FIGARO
Supposing my lady
Calls you at night:
Ding ding: in two steps
You can be there from here.
Or if it should happen
That his lordship should want me,
Dong dong: in three bounds
I'm there at his service.

SUSANNA
And supposing one morning
The dear Count should ring,
ding ding, and send you
Three miles away,
Dong dong, and the devil
Should lead him to my door?
Dong dong, in three bounds ...

Our creations are ready to be laminated. Somewhere out there Wolfgang and Leonard Weisgard are rubbing party balloons on their hair.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Chocolate flights

"Blimp", we might think after a delicious chocolate dessert, while forming the international hand signal for fatter-than-ever-thighs. "Blimp", we don't usually think in creating that delicious chocolate dessert. And so tonight I write about my favorite exhibit at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field.

The museum is a perfectly wonderful hangar salute to shiny airplanes. My sons would have loved it a decade and a half ago. As a MOBO I logged hundreds of hours listening to enthusiastic young males carry on about airplanes, aerial battles, and flight simulation programs. None of it stuck beyond the Cub Scout song about "Junior Birdman"--up in the air upside down!

"Oh, the humanity!" I do know a bit about zeppelins from Indiana Jones, the Hindenburg, and Led. The Frontiers of Flight collection includes a china service from the "Graf Zeppelin." Even better, it has a metal mold for making multiple chocolate zeppelins. Sweet Raiders of the Last Eclair!

Upstairs there's a fashion parade of Pucci-designed Braniff flight attendant uniforms from the Twiggy era. Downstairs, the command module from Apollo 7 invites inspection.

Thanks to the Dallas Opera's Figaro in Flip-Flops educational program for another excellent program. Dr. Stephen Dubberly's lecture about Rossini's "The Italian Girl in Algiers" at the museum last evening had his small audience pumped for the upcoming season.

Instead of a zep mold, I have a Sixties era toy science kit metal mold for a Mercury nosecone. Planning to melt some chocolate in it before adding a Rossini farce froth creme filling.



Up in the air, Junior Birdman
Up in the air upside down
Up in the air, Junior Birdman
Keep your eyes upon the ground


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

$295/yard

The air is just faintly crisp. Fall has officially arrived. My creative energy is coming back, but sadly, the hummingbirds have left the patio.

Back to the design problem of the Kansas car window storm quilt blocks. I have decided to use two or three of the blocks as stand-alone wall-hangings to work out design and technical questions. I received some great input on fabric and color options, including using headliner car fabric or trying a batik pattern.

Although I've worked near Kay's Fabric Center in Richardson, Texas for a long time, I'd never visited the store. I don't sew clothes for myself any more, and no longer make childrens' theater or Halloween costumes. Still, I felt like I'd entered Aladdin's cave when I found the incredible designer fabrics in this thirty-eight year-old, family-owned store at 518 W. Arapaho Rd,. Suite 113, Richardson, TX 75080.

Maybe a more timely analogy would be Howard Carter telling Lord Carnarvon that he could see "wonderful things" as he peered into Tut's tomb in 1922. These were fabrics fit for pharoahs, fairy godmothers, overpaid professional athletes, and Mozart's Queen of the Night. King Tut's treasures will be on display at the Dallas Museum of Art beginning this month.

When I reached visual stimulus overload, the store's staff led me on a tactile tour of luxurious wools. Like a tasting of fine wines, this experience took me far beyond my station in life! These fabrics were finer than those sewn for the Emperor's New Clothes. Even my inexperienced fingers could tell the difference between $150/yd. wool and $295/yd. wool. Three and a half yards would make a suit for a normal-sized captain of finance. It could take six or more yards to create a suit for a Dallas Cowboy or Dallas Maverick.

Sadly, I had to admit I was looking for a flat-fold remnant priced near $1.99/yd. to test color and construction techniques for my Kansas blocks. My price range is closer to Laura Ingalls Wilder's dugout on the banks of Plum Creek than Aladdin's jewels or Michael Irvin's closet. It was on up the trail to the sewing/craft chain store for me.


This gray quilting cotton could pass fairly well as the interior of a slightly rusty '96 Buick. It wouldn't detract from the intense colors of a July thunderstorm over lush green Kansas fields.


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Ruby-throated telenovela

It's a soap opera, for sure, but with grand opera possibilities:

A tiny green anole lizard has taken to patrolling the red base of my patio hummingbird feeder in search of yummy insects attracted to the sugar syrup. He parades around the circuit, and occasionally shows off his red throat flap. If he had a top hat he could be the ringmaster at the Barnum and Bailey Circus. So far, he refuses to pose for my photos.

The green hummingbird has frequented the feeder for the past month. This bird, no bigger than the lizard, rightly believes the feeder is its personal open-air cocktail lounge. On discovering the anole at its favorite watering hole, the hummingbird performed some irritable aerial maneuvers with prominent beak posturing. I'm thinking Hamilton and Burr will be dueling just before Ike's winds arrive tomorrow morning.

Last night I surfed through my cable line-up twice, not knowing any goal. Encountered many telenovelas. A telenovela is explained as a Latin American TV soap opera, often having a limited number of episodes.

Don't know how many episodes. For the present, the hummingbird has chased the lizard away. They are both still wearing their green suits with red cravats. The Dallas Opera has many operas scheduled this season with plots just as sketchy.




© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

A walk around works in progress

With time to spare before the opera lecture this evening, I took a long walk around the Dallas arts district to enjoy all the construction. Although you might think the first photo is a print ad for Playtex Cross Your Heart bras (think lift and separate), it is a view of the Morton Meyerson Symphony Center. As you look across the construction site the new Winspear Opera House is taking shape at the right of the photo.

The second photo shows the skeleton of the Wyly Theatre, the new home of the Dallas Theatre Center along Ross Avenue (which may or may not soon be renamed Cesar Chavez Avenue).



A five-story banner photo of Jaap Van Zweden, the new Dallas Symphony director hangs on the side of the Meyerson Symphony Center facing the Woodall Rogers Freeway beyond the Winspear construction site fence. Reminds me of that game we all played with our toddlers; "How big is baby? SOOOOOO BIG!!!"

Last photo is One Arts Plaza at the east end of the Arts District, and host location for the opera lecture. Dr. Stephen Dubberly of the University of North Texas provided insights into Donizetti's "Roberto Devereux" as part of the Figaro in Flip-Flops summer events series. Great fun for me imagining operas set in construction sites!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder