So, two things to know.  Philadelphians are crazy.  I am a Philadelphian.

The new Carmina Burana ends tomorrow, and I had tickets to see it tonight.  We are having a terrible sleet storm--so much ice you would think it was snow.  So we decided that we'd better get an early start, have dinner near the Academy of Music, so we could get there while it was still light.  The restaurant was packed.  Good, too.  I had duck breast with pureed sweet potatos and a chocolate financier with vanilla ice cream for desert.  Had a light red Rhone wine to go with.  Nice.

The ballet was fun.  They did Balanchine's Serenade first--passionate in that cool, remote was that Balanchine had.  Wonderful shapes on the stage.  The Carmina Burana was interesting and I liked large bits of it.  There were some set of dancers with the women in stretchy dresses with huge tubes that were sometimes draped from their necks like floaty short trains, sometimes wrapped tightly around them, sometimes stretched out like wings, and sometimes stretched out with a guy inside the far end.  Very Martha Graham-ish in those parts.  Some sections the dancers looked like hitler youth if they'd worn lavender see-through shirts and dresses. 

Some parts worked really well, some parts not quite so well.  But the finale was spectacular.  The costumes were the simplest of the evening, and the dancing the strongest.  I think some of the parts may need some fine tuning, but the ending dance was worth the price of admission alone.  And, up, the singing- and the orchestra-also excellent.  A stirring evening, then slogging three blocks to catch a bus and three blocks back after the bus, through ice that came up past my boots in places. 

The company danced gorgeously.  I may have to get season tickets. 

I went to Mom Charlotte's memorial today.  I didn't stay long--I'd had a migraine earlier, and I had that dizzy slightly off feeling, like you are half in your body and half drifting along slightly to the left.  Met some of the family members I hadn't met before, and some of the other friends.  And Aunt Bertha, who was Mom Charlotte's sister.

I've meet Aunt Bertha several times before, and in the way of friends and relatives, we each had heard enough about the other to feel that we knew each other much better than our passing meetings would dictate.  But it is impossible not to love people who love the same people as you do, especially if they have a prior claim of such longstanding.  Aunt Bertha has tickets to the Philly Pops, and so does Barb.  I am not so much a pops fan that I seek them out, being more to the extremes--rock n roll, or classical.  But I may have to get season tickets just to sit with Barb and Aunt Bertha and learn the hand-dance that the peanut gallery does in unison with Peter Nero at the end of each concert.

Barb and I have tickets to the Arden theater, which is just three blocks from home, tomorrow, and tickets for the Pennsylvania Ballet on the 16th.  We don't have season tickets to the ballet, but they are doing a new Carmina Burana with choreography by Matthew Neenan, whose work I really love.  I've seen his pieces at the Pennsylvania Ballet before, and he had a wonderful piece I mentioned back in September that I loved at the Fringe Festival.  And I love Orff's Carmina Burana (and wrote one of my favorite books to it, though it was, as happens, the book that almost nobody else in the whole world read).  So we are very excited about the new choreography.

Then the NSO.  I'm trying to figure  out if I can fit Spamalot into my budget or my calendar the following week.  And I have to pencil in some sleep, somewhere!

Sometimes, you just gotta love the dayjob.