As a follow-up to my last post – I’m definitely loving life more often than I used to, there’s no question about that. Some days are still much more difficult than others, but that’s true for everyone. Fortunately, last Wednesday was another day for loving life. Here’s an explanation of my last epic Facebook status.
Wednesday was Lukas’s birthday, so a group of us went to Henry House for some food and drinks. As our table was being cleared, Ashley decided she wanted to walk to the waterfront. It was a beautiful night, so I opted to go, too, and we ended up with a little group: Ashley, Allison, Pat, Max, Jeremy, and myself. With a few drinks in us, Allison decided she had a specific destination in mind. There is a giant blue statue of a wave on the waterfront with a “do not climb” sign in front of it. But when it’s conveniently surrounded by squishy rubber flooring and situated in front of a playground, what do they expect?
It was coming up on midnight at this point, but after a few trials and errors, we all successfully ended up on top of the giant wave. After a few more trials and errors, we not-so-successfully tried to set the timer on my camera to take pictures of us from below. As we struggled with this, a group of tourists wandering by stopped to watch our antics. They were significantly older than us, but I looked down and shouted to them that they should be jealous that we were all huddled on top of the wave.
Jeremy was keen on becoming friends with these strangers, and invited one of the women to come up and take pictures with us. After further wave-climbing and picturing-taking mayhem, we found out that one of our new tourist friends was celebrating his 40th birthday. What are a bunch of opera singers to do but sing? We sang happy birthday to Jeff, milking the opportunity for all it was worth, and our new friends were awestruck. After finding out that these rambunctious “teenagers” were in fact a group of young professional opera singers, out came the video camera and the song requests. By 1 in the morning, we had spent a lot of time trying to come up with something classical that we all knew, and ended up being posed all over the boat-shaped playground singing snippets of our various unrelated arias. Allison and I also did some Flower Duet, Allison and Ashley did some Phantom of the Opera, and Max and Jeremy did their Pyramus and Thisbe scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Pyramus (Jeremy’s character, Bottom) falls in love with Thisbe (Max’s character, Flute, dressed up as a woman). By the time we decided we should head home, we’d attracted much attention along the waterfront: a little crowd, lots of applause, and an invitation to party on a random yacht. We opted to call it a night, but our tourist friends told us they were at the end of their trip and we were the highlight. We even beat out whale-watching! 😉
It took me a little longer than I would have liked to finish this post. I started it last week in a fantastic mood, of course, as I had so much fun that night. A few days later, though, before I was able to finish this, I got some very tragic news late Saturday night. Hence the Verve lyrics in my title. One of my closest friends texted me to say that her cousin (another of my closest friends) lost her little brother. He drowned on Saturday. He was 14 years old. I only met him once or twice, so I feel a little selfish that this has hit me harder than I would have expected, but it hurts me to see my friends hurting. Not to mention that the opera I’m working on here is a devastating tragedy in which my character’s last brother is drowned. I look on in horror as his washed-up body is laid on my kitchen table. The music was prevalent enough in my head day and night before, but now there are certain lines that won’t leave me… “he’s gone now, God spare us…” “and the almighty God won’t leave her destitute, with no son living…” we haven’t done a run-through since I got this news, so now my challenge will be to use this experience to inform my character without becoming overwhelmed. Here’s to hoping for more sweet than bitter in the upcoming days, and that Kenton’s family has lots of support in this difficult time.
Melody
