Love Fool

What do you get when you take a tenor who likes to ham things up, and combine him with a silly love song, a stage and an audience that contains his new wife?

Embarrassment. For his new wife.

Caspian sang with the North Carolina Master Chorale Chamber Choir, an elite group of 22 voices, at their "Romance in the Air" concert. He sang a whimsical solo love song with piano accompaniment, Love in the Dictionary, and dedicated it to me, after informing the audience where I was sitting and that we were recently married. The audience was mostly old people and they ate it up. After the show in the mezzanine, several elderly couples exclaimed in wavering voices over the "lovely young couple."

We went out for dessert with another singer + friends, Caspian's parents and my parents. I hadn't eaten dinner, so I ordered mushroom couscous, and helped Caspian with his midnight martini and mug of chocolate cake. A lovely evening. I may claim embarrassment, but I was truly delighted and amazed at his poise and beautiful voice.

It snowed about 2-3 inches on Friday night, and I was feeling kind of moody and melancholy and decided not to go to the social dance at Elite. I practiced that confounded nocturne instead, in prep for the studio class on Sunday... Which I bombed. I listened to my studio mate, E, play a different Chopin nocturne ever so beautifully, and I almost cried with shame because I know I am capable of that delicacy and precision. I can't believe I had the nerve to stand up and announce my piece as Chopin, and then clomp around on the keys of that marvelous Bosendorfer like a gorilla. Fool.

I woke up on Sunday to find a Lindt truffle in the bed. And one on the music stand of my piano, one in the cupboard, two on the bathroom counter, one in the sugar bowl, one in my desk drawer, etc. etc. Caspian hints that I've only discovered about 2/3 of them. We sauteed potato and spinach pierogies with onions and butter for dinner, with steamed vegetables and white wine. That's the way Valentine's Day should be celebrated - simple, non-commercial, intimate, free of all mass-produced, blood-diamond-containing cheap jewelry procured from franchised jewelry stores.

The book that was snowed in at a Kentucky post office finally arrived - my 5-year diary. It's bound beautifully in red and white pinstriped cloth, with a red ribbon placemarker. Each page is a day in the year, each containing five sections with seven lines. I have such little space to write, which is good - I only document the stuff that I find meaningful for each day. I figure the next five years are going to be pretty interesting, and I intend to document them in such a way that I can look back on each day and see what I was doing on that particular day in years past. It's also easy to write seven lines, not cumbersome at all. I figure I get all of my rambling out in this blog.