Putting this blog to rest

For now at least, I am no longer interested in writing. My opinions matter little and my pain pales in comparison to that of so many wretched souls on this planet. But my pain is nonetheless intense and paralyzing and I need to go away for a while. Please understand and do not yet ask for details; and please do not say "I am so sorry for your loss." To me those words are like fingernails on a chalkboard.

3/8/2011-11/30/2013

150 Years Ago Today

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

You were wrong, Abe. We have long remembered your words. Alas, we have mostly ignored them.

Why am I alive?

As we come up on the fiftieth anniversary of that horrible day in Dallas, I have been watching a lot of the Kennedy specials on TV. The Zapruder film still makes me cringe, John-John’s salute makes me moan in sadness and seeing Jackie kiss the flag-draped coffin feels as painful today as it was a half-century ago.

It has become a cliché, but like most Americans my age I remember where I was when I heard the news and I remember almost everything of those four dark days in November. Hell, there was really only one thing to remember: sitting in front of the television in our national living room. Before that though, there was the eerie stillness that was downtown Atlanta on November 22, 1963. Cars had pulled over to the curb, with crowds of people gathering around the radio to listen to the bulletins. Women, and not a few men, were sobbing in public. The long bus ride out to my suburban home was sad and somber.

My friend Don asked yesterday why we are so caught up with this, fifty years later. I think a lot of answers can be found in Alessandra Stanley’s excellent piece in the November 14, 2013, New York Times, “We interrupt this generation…” Click here to read it.

As fate would have it -- cruel bitch that she is -- I learned today of the death of a vibrant young man I knew in the 70s. We met at the third Gay Academic Union conference in New York City in another November, 1975. Like me, David was involved in the gay student group at his university (Maine) and had come to New York to learn and network. Like me, he couldn’t resist an attractive man and so we ended up together, though only after a lot of “no, this is NOT why I’m here” back and forth.

David visited me twice in Richmond and though we were in contact for over ten years, we never became a couple. We eventually lost touch and I cannot even tell you how or when he died.

Like John Kennedy though, David’s was a life unfulfilled.

As the leafless November winds blow I look out the window and note the five graves on our property, the markers of five beloved dogs that have graced our lives. Some of them were like John and David, taken before their time; some lived long, fulfilled lives. I miss them all.

I think too of past boyfriends and though I have no idea what happened to a couple, I do know that five have died, four from AIDS. Death of course comes for us all, but my generation of gay men answered his call in far too great numbers, far too soon. Just as did John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

And I wonder, why am I alive?

Ellen was right

I was in New York last week for the current iteration of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, this one starring the strikingly handsome Orlando Bloom and the equally lovely Condola Rashad. Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times called Bloom’s performance a “first-rate Broadway debut.” About Rashad he writes, “Good as she is in the early scenes, Ms. Rashad doesn’t yet have the vocal heft and variety to take Juliet into the echoing halls of tragedy.”

I would say that about Orlando Bloom as well and, in fact, about the production as a whole. There were pretty people to look at, there were intriguing pyrotechnics to wonder at and there was a general ability to deliver Shakespeare’s words and cadences well enough – there just wasn’t much emotion on that stage, in perhaps the most emotional of Shakespeare’s tragedies.

This is not, however, a review. For that I would need to have seen the entire play and, I’m sorry, but I bailed just after the morning scene. (It was the nightingale, and not the lark / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear). I wasn't willing to have my love of tragedy dashed in the tomb scene. (Eyes, look your last; arms, take your last embrace…).

Leaving the theatre I knew what I would do as soon as I had a free night. That turned out to be last night, when I settled in for a thoroughly enjoyable two hours and eighteen minutes watching Franco Zeffirelli’s BRILLIANT 1968 interpretation of R&J. I cried when I first saw it in the movie theatre all those years ago, I have often cried listening to the soundtrack, and yes, I cried last night.

Why is that? It’s not like I don’t know how it ends. It’s not like it’s REAL – I know it’s a film, a film based on a play. It’s not even that I relate to it personally; luckily I've never had to make the kind of choices this doomed pair faces.

It’s that it’s emotional, and I have come to realize I am an emotion junkie. Some people play up-tempo, happy music when they’re sad, to climb out of that hole. Me, I milk the mood, revel in the feelings and revisit the pain. And it has nothing to do with my overall feeling about my life. Bitch though I do, I am ecstatic about my life: I have the best possible husband, three wonderful dogs, a great house and a thoroughly enjoyable job.

But another thing I have was identified by my friend Ellen all the way back in high school. She meant it as a compliment – and I took it as one – when she said, “Walt, you have the feelings of a girl.” I’m now Walter and I’m now a man – and I’d trust the feelings of a woman over a man’s any day.

Avant-garde in Brooklyn

This is the bicentennial year of both Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner; orchestras and opera companies have been rolling out their music all year. Today though I’m thinking of the centennial of another classical icon; Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring debuted at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris a hundred years ago, on 29 May 1913.

As you probably know, the premiere provoked a near-riot. The audience was not prepared for the double whammy of avant-garde dance coupled to music unlike anything they had heard before. This was no Swan Lake.

I was in Brooklyn last night, thinking of that premiere. I don’t think there was a riot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but I can’t swear to that, for I left after forty minutes of avant-garde NONSENSE!

When Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cesena begins, the stage is nearly in total darkness. There’s a man making lots of strange noises; that much I could tell. Then he runs in a circle for a few moments; he might be naked; I’m not sure, it was too dark to tell. He leaves the stage.  Next perhaps twenty company members walk on stage; they move back and forth, left and right. Nothing they did would I call “dance.” Some sang polyphonic medieval music known as ars subtilior. The music at least was intriguing.

But still, the stage was in almost total darkness. Was that a man or a woman who just threw himself/herself on the floor? No idea. 

About thirty minutes in – at least fifteen minutes into my own “should I go or should I stay” debate – a woman not far from me shouted “Turn up the lights; we can’t see anything. This is unfair!” There were murmurs of what I took as agreement, though there were also hissings of “Quiet!” An usher approached her to tell her to stop.

Moments later the lights did come up a bit. I don’t think this had anything to do with her outcry, for the program notes told us that this piece was originally staged outside, using only natural light and began at 4:30 in the morning, in darkness. Since it lasts almost two hours, with no intermission, it would end well lit.

Clearly this was going to happen at BAM last night; before the performance started I had seen banks of stage lights awaiting their cue.

As I said though, I left. I realized that what I had been able to see made me want to see LESS, not more. I was on the 9:08 train home. I read Wild Tales, Graham Nash’s autobiography -- with plenty of light.

More on the summer of 1971

My post Remembering the pain, and the joy from October 1 has been on my mind ever since I started writing it. I have dug out and read my journal* from that summer and even gone online trying to find some of the people involved – not an easy task forty-two years later. It has been on my mind because, quite simply, it was the most intense summer of my life. I told the story of Matt in the earlier post, but there are other, equally emotional, stories to tell.

I was living with my friend Judy – not the Judy I asked to marry; no, that’s yet another tale – in Union City, New Jersey. It’s just through the tunnel from Manhattan, but a LONG drive to Merrick and Hempstead, New York, where I was working. It was a crazy drive: down Palisades Ave to Route 495, through the Lincoln Tunnel, all the way across Manhattan, through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, out 495 again to the Cross Island Parkway to the Southern State Parkway to the Meadowbrook State Parkway to Merrick Ave --but I was young and was driving my first-ever car, an AMC Gremlin.

Soon after starting work at Steak and Brew I became friends with a fellow my age named Paul. I wrote in my journal that the most striking thing about him was that he was a real challenge to me. He was smarter, more well adjusted and at least as strong a personality as I. Most of my friends up til then had been more likely to follow my lead than challenge it. Not Paul. He was in my face anytime I was less than direct or honest, or whenever I was manipulative, while also being loving and gentle, and, as I said, smart as hell. I loved him and cherished our time together.

Soon after, I met Sue and Jay, more waiters. We became inseparable. Jay was a bit younger and shorter, so he became the “son” to my “father” and Sue’s “mother.” We saw each other virtually every day, worked together most nights; we called ourselves “the family.”

Drugs and alcohol were a daily part of our lives, but not to terrible excess. Binge drinking had either not yet been invented, or we hadn’t heard of it. Mostly we talked and laughed and listened to music and talked and hugged and talked.

Through the entire month of July my life was blissed-out happiness. If I wasn’t with Paul I was with my family, or we were all four together. Then, on August 2, I think, I met Matt and that relationship took me away from my three friends. I still worked with them and went out with them, but not as much.

You need to remember that Matt was my first boyfriend. I had had gay sex before but I had never had a relationship, and even though ours was incredibly short, it was also incredibly intense and mind-blowing. We were both Catholic boys from the 50s doing things that guaranteed us a ticket to hell – it was a lot to deal with.

I was being pulled in too many directions and I handled it badly. To this day I cannot tell you exactly what I did but I know I hurt my four friends badly and I take most of the responsibility. The family broke apart, though it’s partly true that Paul took my place. My individual relationships with Paul, Sue and Jay each suffered and the group dynamic was ruined.

Then Matt kicked me out of his life and I was totally destroyed.

Sue and I patched things up and she was supportive of me at the end of the summer, but the magic was gone. Pretty much the same was true of Paul. He was too good a person to add to my pain but, as with Sue, the relationship never regained what it had lost.

Jay was harder. My memory fogs but I think he was more hurt and he also had a harder time with my new sexual explorations. (For the record, everyone else in this tale, probably even Matt, was straight).

One final friend, a woman named Riki, got me through the last terrible week of the summer. Sue had gone back to college, Matt had told me never to see him again and Jay and Paul were casual friends at best. Riki listened to me, held me and tried to cheer me up; she kept me sane.

When I said in the earlier post that I cried most of the 400 miles to Richmond, I really was not exaggerating. I was always someone to feel the pain, to “experience” it; when I was sad I played sad music. Graham Nash and Cat Stevens were my misery mates; I played those tapes over and over.

I want to believe I learned things that summer and that my dealings with later friends were better. At Notre Dame I had been guilty of throwing over one friend for another, and on Long Island I played that scene again, less blatantly perhaps, but with worse consequences. Moving to Richmond and, especially, taking Education of Self, helped me toward being “self-actualized” while still being kind and considerate. It’s a process that continues.

__________ 

 *A shout-out to my friend Don, who, on my seventeenth birthday, gave me a journal. The tale of the summer of 1971 comes at the very end of that first journal. There have been ten more volumes since then.

Finally, some of you may wonder what happened to the cynicism and the currency that gives this blog its title. The truth is, I find the current political scene so stupidly depressing that I have almost nothing to say. I’d rather share myself with you; I hope you don’t mind.

The Eyes

Paul Auster wrote in one of the New York Trilogy books (I read them too long ago to remember which one: City of Glass; Ghosts; or The Locked Room) that the eyes don't change. A picture of a young boy will allow the keen observer to pick from a group of old men which one was once the boy. Is that so? I don't know. You be the judge. Many of the above images of eyes are of mine. Can you pick out the ones that are me? Here's a bigger version of my contact photo to help you out:

Answers:

Left 1 - NOT me; my brother Raymond actually

Left 2 - me

Left 3 - NOT me; Ransom

Left 4 - me

Left 5 - me

Middle 1 - me

Middle 2 - me

Middle 3 – David T, a friend

Right 1 - me

Right 2 - Josh (our Sound of Music tour guide in Salzburg)

Right 3 - NOT me; my Dad

Right 4 - me

Remembering the pain, and the joy

It was 2:00AM on a Sunday morning maybe; likely it was July, though it may have been August; we were at an empty apartment in Queens, or perhaps Long Island. The thing I know for certain is that it was the summer of 1971.

I was working at two Steak and Brew locations, both on the island: Hempstead and Merrick. I had dropped out of Notre Dame after Kent State – for anyone too young to know, to my generation that’s a date as much as a place. I spent the summer of 1970 working in Manhattan and the winter in Wilmington, Vermont, living the incredibly hedonistic life of a ski bum. When the snows melted I went back to the city to reclaim my job, but the only one they could offer me was in Merrick and later, Hempstead.

Between the two restaurants I found many friends and lots of good times. On this particular night a bunch of us, maybe a dozen, were sitting around smoking dope (weed in current parlance) in a truly empty apartment; someone had just moved out, or was about to move in, and so the place had no furniture, no running water and no lights. We were sitting on the floor passing a joint and when I started coughing a buddy handed me the only thing we had to drink, a bottle of Jack Daniels! Oh, the things we did for our highs back in the day.

At around two in the morning I announced I was going out for a walk; Matt, a waiter I knew a bit from Merrick, said he'd come with me. We were all killing time before a pre-dawn road trip to Boston and I needed to clear my head. Matt, as you'll see, needed the same, in spades.

Matt was gorgeous. I mean drop-dead, head-turning, Italian model gorgeous. Think John Travolta in his Saturday Night Fever days, but far prettier. He oozed sex, but also charm. He had the best hair on Long Island. His girlfriend Sally was a hot Italian babe who got huge tips from the men, nasty stares from the women.

They were a dream couple and I liked them both, if only superficially. (Left: Matt was this good looking, and then some).

So Matt and I are walking on a beautiful summer night; I was stoned enough to think the street lamps were showering us with magical light and we were talking about work, about Boston, about New York and about wanting to have sex together.

WHAT?

Yes, it’s true. In the middle of nothing in particular Matt says, “Walter, I've never told anyone this and I've never done anything about it, but I want to have sex with a guy, and I want that guy to be you.”

I was stunned. Shocked. Astounded. And delighted. The thing is, this was 1971; I wasn't out to anyone. In fact I wasn't totally sure I was gay. I had had sex with all of three men, and none of it had gone particularly well. Yes, I was well aware how good looking Matt was but I don't think I had even entertained the idea of bedding him. He was straight; he was with Sally; end of story.

But there it was. We opened up to each other, walked for at least another hour and struggled hard to not jump each other’s bones on a random neighbor’s suburban lawn.

As fate would have it – or, the queer gods, if you will – Matt and I ended up in bed that very night. We were in Boston and five of us stayed with my Notre Dame buddy Steve. He was the one who assigned the sleeping spaces and, with no idea what it would mean, he told me and Matt to take the room by itself up on the third floor (thank you, queer gods). Obviously, Sally was not on this trip.

Matt and I fell madly in love. He demanded we keep it secret and I was closeted enough that I was okay with that. Anything to be with this beautiful man. It was intense. It was emotional. It was wonderful.

And it ended within a month. Badly. Very badly.

In a shouting scene worthy of Edward Albee Matt told me he wasn't gay, that he hated me for making him think he was and that he never wanted to see me again.

He got his wish. I haven't seen him or heard from him in forty-two years. The pain no longer throbs of course, but the memories are clear as a bell, and I remember that pain. Though I don't think what he said was true, I know that whenever a couple breaks up there’s fault on both sides. For years I wanted to try to talk things out but he never responded to any attempts I made to contact him.

And that, folks, is the incredibly long preamble to the story I am really here to tell today. (Note: I told a shorter version of this preamble in April of 2010 in a post named Coming Out, Part 1).

Just three months before this painful, painful break-up Graham Nash released his first solo album, Songs for Beginners. To this day it is still easily in my Top 5 albums of all time; it may well be my number one favorite album of all time. I have quoted before in this blog a few lines that hit me very hard that summer:

When your love has moved away

You must face yourself

And you must say

I remember better days

On the drive down to Richmond, Virginia, at the end of that summer, within maybe two weeks of Matt's devastating exit, I played Graham Nash’s album over and over and over, crying for most of the 400 miles from Long Island to the Old Dominion. (I also played Cat Steven’s album, Tea for the Tillerman a lot: "Now that I've lost everything to you / You say you want to start something new / And it's breaking my heart you're leaving / Baby, I'm grieving." My heart was breaking).

In all the years since I have played both those albums hundreds of times. I have bought many other Graham Nash albums as well as Crosby and Nash albums and, of course, albums by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, with or without Neil Young. But I go back to Songs for Beginners more than any of them.

This Sunday, forty-two years later, I finally heard Graham Nash in concert for the first time. I went with my friend Kathy who, ironically, I met within weeks of arriving in Richmond after that tortuous, tear-filled drive. She lives in Nyack, NY, across the river from the concert venue, the Tarrytown Music Hall. We were dear friends and roommates in Richmond, and have maintained contact ever since.

It was a terrific concert. He started by reaching all the way back to his days with the Hollies, opening with Bus Stop. He sang songs from all sides of his career; from my adored Songs for Beginners album he sang four songs: I Used to Be a King, A Simple Man, Military Madness, and Chicago. Though he didn't sing Better Days, he sang for almost two and-a-half hours and I was thrilled. He talked between each song, not too much, just enough. Often he told us the genesis of a song. Remember Our House from the CSNY second album, Déjà Vu?

I’ll light the fire
You place the flowers in the vase
That you bought today . . .

Well that’s exactly what happened when he and Joni Mitchell came home after she had bought a vase she had admired in a store window. By the time he got to the chorus, “Our house is a very, very, very fine house, with two cats in the yard / Life used to be so hard / Now everything is easy ‘cause of you” everyone in the audience was singing along – at Nash’s encouragement.

The final encore was another sing-along, the immortal (yes, I choose that word carefully) Teach Your Children. I turned to Kathy as we were walking out and said “it’s hard to choke back tears and sing at the same time.”

Was it worth the 42-year wait? Absolutely! And what have I played since Sunday night? Oh, Songs for Beginners four times, Teach Your Children as many, and lots of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tunes from this wonderfully-gifted, politically-perfect 71-year old musician whom I now love more than ever, if that’s possible.

An Odyssey Redux

An old joke defines an intellectual as someone who can hear the William Tell Overture and NOT think of the Lone Ranger. Three days past my sixty-fifth birthday I realize I've lived long enough for that line to be no longer true, at least not for more than half the population. But I’ll give you another one: a film lover is someone who does NOT think of Viennese waltzes when hearing On the Beautiful Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II. No, a film lover thinks of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

That’s been true since 1968 when the film was released, it was true in February of last year when I wrote about seeing it on the big screen for the first time in years and it was true last night when I once again saw it in a spectacular presentation by the New York Philharmonic.

While the film was projected on a large screen hung above the orchestra, Alan Gilbert conducted the Philharmonic in the musical segments. It was thrilling. No, make that THRILLING! I have loved this film for forty-five years and I fell in love with it all over again in February of 2012, but last night brought me to a new level: rapture. It was simply astonishing. To see those visuals while listening live to that orchestra – words fail.

(Words didn’t fail Anthony Tommasini, music critic of the New York Times; you can read his rave review here).

As he notes, it was a wildly appreciative audience -- and I would add one quick to laugh. I remember sitting in stunned silence for most of the film back in 1968 – alright, there was the chuckle at the image pictured on the left – and it was a very quiet audience last year at the Quick Center as well (you can read my post here) – but last night there were chuckles galore.

I posit two reasons: first, Americans aren’t comfortable with silence; they feel the need to fill the void; we are the giggliest people on the planet I am sure. Secondly, it could well be that this was an audience well versed in the film and its plot. Knowing what they knew, it was hard not to laugh when HAL the computer says “I have a bad feeling about this, Dave.”

But the laughter was appreciative and minimally distracting. At the times when the film demanded rapt attention this audience rose to the challenge. 2001 is not an easy film; there’s very little dialogue, there’s almost no character development and the ending is so opaque that one can spend a lifetime arguing its meaning. But the cinematography and the soundtrack add majesty to a film that is breathtakingly beautiful to watch.

It was especially satisfying to hear one of the world’s great orchestras play the György Ligeti pieces from the score. Kubrick appropriated Ligeti’s music without even asking, jettisoning the score he had commissioned from Alex North. Reportedly MGM’s lawyers agreed that Ligeti would win a threatened lawsuit but promised to tie up the matter in court for years, decades even, according to one source. Ligeti settled for an embarrassing $3500. One cannot imagine the film without his music, so it was especially heartwarming to hear the roar that went up from the crowd when his name appeared in the closing credits.

But that roar paled to one that Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic received when it was all over. The credits had ended, but the orchestra continued playing The Blue Danube in its entirety, probably for five more minutes. At that point the entire audience at Avery Fisher rose as one, thunderingly applauding this amazing experience.

I was thrilled to be there; a sad footnote is that my brother, who teaches film, and with whom I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey last year, was supposed to be with me, but was taken ill. I promise you, Raymond, I loved it enough for both of us, but I wish you had been there.

Fifty Years Ago Today

I was not in Washington fifty years ago today as Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous speech. My social conscience didn't really come alive until 1967-1968.

__________

Some two months earlier, on June 8, Pete Seeger stood in front of a packed Carnegie Hall and said:

“If you would like to get out of a pessimistic mood yourself, I got one sure remedy for you:
Go help those people down in Birmingham and Mississippi or Alabama.
All kinds of jobs that need to be done.
Takes hands and hearts and heads to do it.
Human beings to do it;
Then we'll see this song come true:

We shall overcome, we shall overcome,

We shall overcome someday;

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, 
We shall overcome someday.



We'll walk hand in hand, we'll walk hand in hand,

We'll walk hand in hand someday;

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,

We'll walk hand in hand someday.


We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace,

We shall live in peace someday;

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,

We shall live in peace someday.

The whole wide world around, the whole wide world around
The whole wide world around
Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, 
We shall overcome someday.

We are not afraid, we are not afraid,

We are not afraid today;

Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe,

We are not afraid today


I encourage you to give a listen to Pete Seeger’s immortal version of this civil rights anthem. If a lump doesn’t rise in your throat, get thee to a doctor to find out what’s wrong with you.

(Note: this is the slightly edited version from the original vinyl album. The full version, two minutes longer, is available on disc or you can buy the single for $.99 from iTunes. You might also be able to hear it here, via my Dropbox folder: https://www.dropbox.com/s/rda9ok857dat3ly/2-18%20We%20Shall%20Overcome.m4a)

Sights and Sounds of Summer

Twenty-two years ago I committed to riding 91 roller coasters in 1991. It was an ambitious goal but several road trips and a couple flights made it possible. I visited parks in Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas. The sights and sounds of that summer included beautiful wooden coaster cathedrals; unbelievably high and steep metal monsters; screaming, happy children of all ages; hot dogs, fried dough and sno-cones -- and me, grinning from ear to ear in the front seat of some magic machine or another. That’s the Texas Giant pictured, my all-time favorite roller coaster (since torn down and rebuilt as a wooden/metal hybrid that I have not ridden).

Twenty-two years later the sights and sounds of my summer are decidedly different. They are mostly indoors and exclusively theatrical or musical, sometimes both.

In June I saw ABT (American Ballet Theatre) present a very enjoyable evening of three pieces by Alexie Ratmansky; enjoyable, but lacking the fireworks with which the departed Angel Corella regularly lit up this company. The next night Paulo Szot sang beautifully with the New York Philharmonic in a program of mostly musicals and standards and a week later the Philharmonic played Dukas and Stravinsky to perfection.

The International Festival of Arts and Ideas comes to New Haven every summer and this year brought one of the most creative Shakespeare productions I have ever seen: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the Bristol Old Vic in association with Handspring Puppet Company. The same festival showcased a brilliantly sung rendition of the ethereal and haunting Rachmaninoff Vespers as well as the extraordinary performance that Ransom conducted, al fresco at Marsh Botanical Garden, of John Luther Adams songbirdsongs. My last festival event was Sequence 8, a compelling dance/theatre/acrobatic tour de force by the Canadians Les 7 doigts de la main, a gorgeous group of young gymnasts.

I visited the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival to hear Ransom perform Haydn and Mozart and to say goodbye to the famed Tokyo String Quartet at their last-ever public performance. Then back to New York for Michael Urie’s fabulous one-man show Buyer and Cellar, imagining what it would be like to work in Barbra Streisand’s underground mall – there really is such a thing. Read about the show here.

Venturing away from classical music I heard one of my favorite artists, Steve Forbert, at the intimate and classy Kate (Katherine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center) in Old Saybrook, and Emmy Lou Harris with Rodney Crowell at Caramoor. Both concerts were excellent and reminded me that aging baby boomers still like the music we've loved for decades (see picture); no Muzak for us, thank the gods.

The most intense electric music I heard all summer was in New Orleans, about which I just wrote. I bought El DeOrazio’s music when I got home and have been listening to it a lot. Their kick-ass live performance is more compelling, but check them out here and pay as much or as little as you wish.

This summer on Broadway I caught Nathan Lane in The Nance, saw the revival of Pippin and scored two good seats to the Tony winner for Best Musical, Kinky Boots. Sally was in town, about to board the Queen Mary 2 for a five-day cruise, and we both LOVED Kinky Boots. Who knew Cyndi Lauper could write a Broadway show? I also just saw Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, this year’s Tony winner for Best Play. It was brilliant, with David Hyde Pierce delivering the most screamingly funny rant I have ever heard on stage. Alas, in an all-too-typical sign of tourists’ love of musicals over plays, it will have closed by the time you read this.

I managed four events at this year’s fringeNYC (New York International Fringe Festival) but only one is worth mentioning: Gotham Radio Theatre’s performance of The Awful Truth as a radio broadcast. I LOVE the 1937 Cary Grant/Irene Dunne film and this production was wonderfully inventive: five actors playing all the roles, creating the sound effects and reading the commercials. Delicious fun.

Earlier this summer there was also the voiceless opera about which I wrote on July 20: Michaels Reise um die Erde, a fascinating, disorienting and enchanting hour of music -- and, at the other end of the spectrum, a great outdoor event on the New Haven Green: K C and the Sunshine Band. Disco rocks!

Yale classes start on Wednesday, so summer is over for me. The final cultural event was one of the best: Louis Langrée leading the Mostly Mozart Orchestra in the last three Mozart symphonies. Each one is a perfect example of the composer’s craft; hearing all three at once was a rare thrill.

Summer might be over, but there’s a lot to anticipate in the coming months:

The opera season opens for us with Anna Nicole by Mark-Anthony Turnage at New York City Opera. I know nothing about her, but am always interested in new operas that got good reviews. Ransom and I are going on my birthday.

And on HIS birthday we're going to – sit down for this – Matilda on Broadway. Matilda! With all those kids. OMG! I'm optimistic that I will like it; everyone says it’s great. But all those kids! OMFG!

Later operas include Two Boys -- Nico Muhly, composer; Craig Lucas, libretto -- and Prince Igor – for the first time at the Met since 1915 -- as well as the shortened, English-language version of Julie Taymor’s brilliant production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

I am also looking forward to Romeo and Juliet, with Orlando Bloom, on Broadway, as well as A Streetcar Named Desire at Yale Rep, featuring True Blood’s Joe Manganiello (he of the sexy body and brooding look). And I'll return to the New York Philharmonic as they present 2001: A Space Odyssey with the image on screen and the soundtrack played live; the Boston Symphony will do the same with West Side Story in February, repeating a Tanglewood performance my brother said was outstanding. I am excited about both.

I am equally anticipating a BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) performance of Angelin Preljocaj’s dance/theatre work And then one thousand years of peace that I loved so much in Edinburgh last summer and wrote about on 20 August 2012.

Music I’m looking forward to includes Graham Nash in Tarrytown, NY, on September 29, the Yale Philharmonia’s Rite of Spring the week before and the NY Phil’s Mozart Requiem in November. Add to that the Brandenburgs with Ransom and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as well as him conducting the Purchase orchestra three times this year and, well, as usual, it will be quite a dance card.

Come join me for a waltz!