La Boheme on my mother's birthday

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• photo of "the young and vibrant cast" of Portland Opera's production of La Boheme.
  

• interview with cast members by sponsoring radio station kink.fm - OPERA You Can LOVE!

Portland Opera's la Boheme  

Hold on to your heart!

A wondrous young love blossoms in the bohemian world of 1830s Paris.

It all begins with Mimi's gentle voice at the door. Might she have a light for her candle? And that one small light ignites opera's most touching and poignant love story.

From the moment Rodolfo stares into her eyes and Puccini's violins slowly rise from the quiet, an extraordinary journey begins. For them. And for us. With their first tender kiss, we're swept back to the miraculous time of our own first love.

One of the most romantic operas ever composed! Soaring, lyrical, and intensely emotional.

Sung in Italian with English translations projected above the stage.

- overview from Portland Opera website

I am so excited that we will be at the 2:00 p.m. production of La Boheme in Portland today. Mike and I attended Portland Opera's February 2001 production of this opera, just four months after my mothers death. We had been season ticket-holders for five years and had worked our way down to the center orchestra section by 2001, so close it was almost like being on stage. When, amongst the snowy scenery in Act III, there was a white bust of a woman in the foreground setting that looked so much like my mother that Mike and I gasped together as the curtains parted, it became a wondrous connection with her.

After my mother's death in October 2000 I experienced a random and magical series of occurences that I called ICMs (Ironies and Cosmic Messages) when describing them to Mike, in my journal, in letters to my sister. The bust on stage at La Boheme in 2001 was one of those.

We let our Portland Opera season tickets lapse in 2003. The money needed to go elsewhere and I ceased using charge cards for entertainment. But oh how I have missed the opera. Listening to it on the radio and on CDs is nice, but doesn't come close to being in the audience. Determined to attend at least one opera in the 2009-10 season, I was thrilled to see that the new production of La Boheme was scheduled on my mother's birthday (one of those ICMs as the anniversary of her death also approaches) - and I got us great Box Seat tickets, cash not credit, so all seems right with the world.

Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with desperate passion.

-- Puccini, quoted in M Carner, Puccini (1974)

candle photo via tinypic

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Earth Hour 2008 video: fun in the dark for a serious cause

In my post about the upcoming Earth Hour 2009 (March 28) I said I might share our video from Earth Hour 2008. Here it is..........I hope you have a good laugh!
(There are actually some really inspiring Earth Hour 2008 videos out there at You Tube to build excitement for 2009.)




Setting the Scene....... Earth Hour 2008 at our house. First view is across the living room looking out the front windows at the faint gloaming in the sky. After that you'll see the glow of flames in our gas stove and from scattered candles. Mike is on guitar.

Song selections (just clips of): Kumbaya, Light One Candle, and Mir Mir, U mir.
Additional sound effects by Shiva, who was a kitten at that time (and now weighs 13 pounds).


{Mike feels badly that he was goofing around with Kumbaya, but the whole experience of being in the dark for a purpose made us rather giddy with delight that night. We had a lot of fun.}

Kumbaya - (also spelled Kum Ba Yah) is a spiritual song from the 1930s. It enjoyed newfound popularity during the folk revival of the 1960s and became a standard campfire song in Scouting and other nature-appreciative organizations.

The song was originally associated with human and spiritual unity, closeness and compassion, and it still is, but more recently it is also cited or alluded to in satirical, sarcastic or even cynical ways that suggest blind or false moralizing, hypocrisy, or naively optimistic views of the world and human nature.

The origins of the song are disputed. Recent research has found that sometime between 1922 and 1931, members of an organization called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a song from the South Carolina coast. Come By Yuh, as they called it, was sung in Gullah, the creole or pidgin dialect spoken by the former slaves living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. In Gullah, "Kumbaya" means "Come by here", so the lyric could be translated as "Come by here, my lord, come by here." Another version of Kumbaya, which locals asserted was a traditional regional folk song, was preserved on a wax cylinder in May 1936 by Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of what became the American Folklife Center. Gordon discovered a woman named Ethel Best singing Come By Here with a group in Raiford, Florida.

These facts contradict the longstanding copyright and authorship claim of Reverend Marvin V. Frey. Rev. Frey (1918–1992) claimed to have written the song circa 1936 under the title "Come By Here," inspired, he claimed, by a prayer he heard delivered by "Mother Duffin," a storefront evangelist in Portland, Oregon. It first appeared in this version in "Revival Choruses of Marvin V. Frey", a lyric sheet printed in Portland, Oregon in 1939. Frey claimed the change of the title to "Kum Ba Yah" came about in 1946, when a missionary family returned from Africa where they had sung Frey's version and slightly changed the words. This family toured America singing the song with the text "Kum Ba Yah". This account is contradicted by the fact that a nearly identical Gullah version of the song was recorded almost two decades earlier.

Joe Hickerson, one of the Folksmiths, recorded the song in 1957, as did Pete Seeger in 1958. Joe Hickerson later succeeded Gordon at the American Folklife Center. The song enjoyed newfound popularity during the folk revival of the 1960s, largely due to Joan Baez's 1962 recording of the song, and became associated with the Civil Rights Movement of that decade. It is a standard campfire song in Scouting, YMCA, the Asian Guides, and others. It was also commonly used in Catholic and "folk" masses of the 1970s.
-Wikipedia

Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya

Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbayah

Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya



{Mike forgot the words, adding to our glee, but you can get the words at the link below.}

Light One Candle -- chords and lyrics
"Light One Candle" is a 1983 Hanukkah song written by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary. It is a very popular song and it has been sung by the trio at their concerts. It is a song that encourages the Jewish people to remember the history of the holiday and continue their heritage. - Wikipedia



{I have been unsuccessful in finding background on this song. We learned it in a peace group at the beginning of the Iraq War.}

Mir (Russian: Мир, Russian for either Peace or World)

Spirit of Peace
to your cause, we give our strength.
That love may reign and war may cease.
Mir Mir, U mir.





Photo and graphics: tinypic.com