Last Minute Halloween Party

Trolley and Steph

Thumbnail: Sushi platter
Thumbnail: Halloween hallway
Thumbnail: Halloween pirate
Thumbnail: Kitty
Thumbnail: Living room
Thumbnail: Me and Trolley
Thumbnail: Halloween pimp
Thumbnail: Pumpkin lights
Thumbnail: Gathering
Thumbnail: Raggedy drink
Thumbnail: Dog skull-and-crossbones cape
Thumbnail: Spooky drinks
Thumbnail: Taking shots
 

Last minute Halloween par­ty means last minute cos­tume.

I’m walk­ing down the con­sol­i­dat­ed aisles of Walmart at 7:30 on Saturday night. The cos­tume pack­ages are all 50% off, and the mod­els on the labels are all pre-teen. I don’t think I’ll fit in the tights of this Batman cos­tume, and this vam­pire cape only goes down to my waist.

I’m sud­den­ly struck with a fit of nos­tal­gia. Remember that time when I was at that par­ty with Becky, who was wear­ing a witch­es mask, try­ing to engage her in a con­ver­sa­tion after we met at the Honest Lawyer1? Remember when we went as Supertroopers to the par­ty at the girls house? Remember when I got drunk off that bot­tle of Earnest and Julio Gallo?

I hur­ried­ly grab a black cowl and bloody knife, and walk to the check­out line. With my full-length leather trench coat, I’m hop­ing it’s enough to gain accep­tance to the par­ty, but not too much to stand out.

As I leave, I won­der if Halloween still exists for those of us past our trick-or-treat­ing days.

So the plan is to get there ear­ly. That way I don’t have every­one look­ing at me when I walk in the door. Bail when it gets too loud, or the peo­ple too drunk. But every­one invit­ed through Facebook was told eight while I was told nine, and I’m almost last one there.

Continue read­ing “Last Minute Halloween Party”…

  1. If you ever read this Christine, I will deny every­thing. [↩]

Feed Reader

I’m a visu­al per­son. Personally, I’d rather peo­ple vis­it my site instead of adding my feed to an aggre­ga­tor. It’s a sad fact that the num­ber of sub­scribers to my feed near­ly dou­bles my dai­ly vis­i­tors. The look of my site is a reflec­tion of my cur­rent per­son­al­i­ty and mind­set, and even though it has­n’t changed in a while, it’s still rel­e­vant. I’ve held off using a feed read­er for as a long as pos­si­ble, because I believe that a site’s look is as impor­tant as the infor­ma­tion that it con­veys.

But my blogroll keeps grow­ing, and I’ve reluc­tant­ly turned to using an aggre­ga­tor to keep track of the sites I read on a dai­ly basis. It’s a lot more effi­cient, but cold, and bor­ing, and I feel like I’m miss­ing out on some­thing the writer is try­ing to say.

Design By Chocolate

Design by chocolate

Worry-Free Friend

Pat does­n’t wor­ry about me. At first, I was hurt, but soon I under­stood.

It’s not that he does­n’t care, it’s that he knows I’ll be alright.

And this is enough to make me believe that I’ll be alright too.

Rachel Beausoleil at the NAC

A demo reel I made for Rachel Beausoleil, using footage I shot of her jazz vocal per­for­mance at the NAC Fourth Stage, as well as snip­pets of an inter­view I did with her. As a way of get­ting more expo­sure for future gigs, she asked for some video that she could shop around to dif­fer­ent venues. I agreed to make this demo reel for her in return for some tick­ets to the show for me and my friends.

It was a won­der­ful con­cert in an inti­mate set­ting. The reper­toire was quite var­ied — from waltz to Bossa nova to bal­lad — but all songs were per­formed as a jazz inter­pre­ta­tions. The setlist includ­ed Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, and Evangeline by Isabelle Pierre.

Of spe­cial sig­nif­i­cance is that the per­for­mance was on Rachel’s 40th birth­day. She had planned the con­cert over a year ago as a come­back after hav­ing two kids and giv­ing up her time for them.

I can now embed videos in HD after acquir­ing a Vimeo Plus account; they look oh-so-sexy, and even bet­ter in full-screen.

One of the high­lights of the night was Tom Posner’s bass solo dur­ing Caravan (a clas­sic Duke Ellington big-band piece) clock­ing in at almost two min­utes. You can see how sur­prised Rachel is when Tom los­es him­self in the music and keeps going on this great flur­ry of notes. This solo is some kind of awe­some that I can’t even describe.