Everyday Bliss

(scroll down for the apocryphal picture of me at close to max weight…and today’s version…)

I am fortunate enough to have a very good friend in social media expert Andy Wibbels (@andymatic on Twitter). We’ve masterminded and built our businesses side by side for years and he has been such a help and such a darling friend to me. Color me very grateful for this high class, high value friendship.

We met when Andy still lived in Chicago. When he and Ron and kitties Astroboy & Downy moved out here in 2008, Andy stayed with us while interviewing at SixApart, where he worked until recently on their TypePad, Vox and other products. Now he’s graduating to the bigtime and toddling off to North Carolina to work for sales shark Jeffrey Gitomer. I’m so proud of Andy I could bust. Love him like a sister. k

We’re getting in a lot of celebrating, dinners and theater, ballet and shows before they leave. Tonight we went to Swan Lake, which was great, though missing the iconic dying swan scene at the end. In Helgi Tomasson’s production of the San Francisco Ballet, Odette simply jumps off a cliff – offstage.

WHERE WAS MY DYING SWAN SCENE?! I waited the whole doggone ballet to see it. Ron was similarly taken aback. You just don’t cut the dying swan. It isn’t done.

At any rate, for afters we went back to the boys’ apartment and shot the breeze as long as eyes stayed open. Followed by a picture taking session (which followed the food pics at Santorini earlier in the evening). The below right picture is tonight’s. The one on the left is of me two years ago almost to the day. That chin is pretty much a straight line from under-lip to collarbone, and was a triple roll at my high weight.

BTW, I got that wrong in the caption below. (hey, it was late at night)  I went back to my records and found I weighed more like 265 in the lefthand picture, not 280. But once I got that large, I stopped counting as many do, so the lapse is understandable. 

All the cutting & sculpting done on this body happened pretty much in eight months. Close to 70 pounds, 5 dress sizes, 1 shoe size, 3 bra sizes and 2 chins down, plus over 6″ off my abdomen so far.

I didn’t effort, I just had fun.

I didn’t restrict my eating, I had what my body wanted. How I did it will be the stuff of a future workshop. Something to look forward to! For now though, photos unretouched, just captioned…

This stop-motion video, made by 300 French students for the ESCP Business School is nothing short of amazing. Think of the hours of work, the coordination, rehearsal and good will that must have had to prevail to get this project to come together. Vive la cooperation! New Bliss Key: Cheerful Cooperation. Will save you spending money on antacid. How can you leverage Cheerful Cooperation at Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa with those which you may in years past have spent time with playing unhappy tug-of-war games?

Attended the glorious San Jose Ballet and Symphony Silicon Valley performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana last night. I’ve been stuck on this piece of music for years and have performed it as an alto chorus member a number of times. It’s both sweet and bombastic  – the initial movement, "O Fortuna" has been used as a stage-setter in many heroic movie battle scenes.

As you can see from the promo photo at left, the stage was initially set with a giant Wheel of Fortune-cum-altar. No, you who are thinking television game shows, it’s the Wheel from traditional hermetic magic and tarot. With a pentagram in the center. Scattered in the audience, assorted gaggles of  Wiccans and hermetics burst into tears of rapture as the curtain went up. My partner turned to me and said "I’d go back to being pagan if I could get twenty guys to reliably show up and dance like that at rituals…and the set designer as well…."

While parts of the performance dragged, and local dance critic Rachel Howard of the San Francisco chronicle was ever-so (yawn) bored, the majority of the audience remained fascinated to the denouement and gave the cast a resounding standing ovation. 

The opening ballet, Summerscape, while well danced and whimsical, felt like a "cartoon before the feature" in contrast to what followed. Nice and well choreographed, it didn’t merit the endless rounds of standing ovation applause Carmina garnered for its sheer overwhelming technical artistry. Veteran Dennis Nahat ably choreographed both ballets, and the 130 voice chorus with its three featured vocalists, cloaked as monks (oh, the bass soloist! perfection!) contributed equally to Carmina’s soaring spectacle.

Was I alone in observing the deliberate mispronounciation of the lyrics in Carmina? I learned the lyrics while singing with a Cambridge, England church chorus. Our director and music teachers were German and Italian respectively, the languages of the Carmina. (well Latin, but Giovanni was well versed in his high church speak). I’ve never heard the C’s and G’s pronounced in quite the same way as the singers in SJB’s version – it almost seemed like a foreign language.

The fellow next to me had also sung in Carmina and, looking at me perplexed during the interval, said: "Was I hearing aright, or are they misprounouncing the thing?" Check out any CD of Carmina for compares.

I wonder – artistic choice or something else??  Comment, Herr Director?

If you haven’t been to SJB’s Carmina, you’ve already missed it, but do go and see Nahat’s venerable Nutcracker, opening December 9th. Well worth it for an evening’s dress-up and good funtime. Don’t forget dinner after the show at the inimitable Il Fornaio down the street. Best and thickest cappucino’s in San Jo. Tell Edgar and David that I sent you.