On To Seattle
10 March
Up. Breakfast. Shower. Pack.
Muni to Civic Centre. BART to Oakland. Transfer to Airport. Wait. Take off. Flight. Bay area below. Cloud. Mountains. Snow. Cranberry juice. Red wine. Cloud. Mountains. Wilderness. Lake - steep sides. Railway - Straight line. Valleys, lakes, tree, roads, small village. Trees, trees, trees. Flat plain. Scattered houses. Patchwork fields. Portland. Mount Rainier. Seattle.
The rendezvous with Dale was easy but the car ride out to Lynwood in the North East of the city was more clogged with traffic than I remembered it. Dale confirmed this. Interestingly, a number of people in San Francisco had been talking about getting out of the pressures of Silicone Valley and heading off for the Pacific North West. Here was Dale saying that he would be happy to get out of Seattle for the San Juan islands.
We reached the house. Since I was last there, they have added a whole new guest wing named after Rod's favourite diva, Jane Eaglen. She's one of my favourites singers too, so I'm honoured. It's a beautiful room with some really cute lighting effects, a gas fired stove to warm the room, a monster bath with Jacuzzi effect in the en suite and a monster bed to retire to. I looked forward to hitting the sack.
Rod arrived back from work and we had food and catching up stories and then I was off to the opera for Samuel Barber's Vanessa.
Well, it was OK. I'm not wild about it. Very 1940s Warner Bros melodrama-style story. The music did not really hold it together. Too many ideas and not enough musical development. Rod thought this was showing off. I felt it was more like Barber didn't trust himself with anything so large scale and was compensating like crazy. I liked Sheila Nadler as the Old Baroness, a wonderfully rich contralto and convincingly made up to look decades older than her real age.
I was also taken with the mezzo Kimberley Barber as Erika - it's a difficult part to act and she inhabited the role well and it's a none too easy sing and again she more than surmounted the technical difficulties and threw in a memorable and memorably felt account of the work's most well known piece - the aria "Must the winter come so soon".
I don't know what the director had told Sheri Greenwald, playing Vanessa, but she appeared to be auditioning for a re-make of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. And Richard Stilwell as the Doctor had obviously decided to go his own way and to milk the evening for as many laughs and as much applause as he could garner. It felt like the director had totally lost control of the piece. However, the ending produced a genuine Gothic frisson so there must be something in the piece that works.
Richard, a friend of Rod and Dale's brought me home. He used to work for Microsoft and has opted out of Corporate America. He's renovating his own cabin in the Cascades and will be quite happy with a job commanding half the salary he once enjoyed but bringing with it one tenth of the pressure.
I was a weary boy by the time I climbed into bed at gone midnight.
