BARACK & BAROQUE

And I thought I'd used up my best title.

What a fun day we had. I got up this morning and did a little four mile run while John went to breakfast. It was nice for me to actually miss a meal. I know I don’t have to eat just because he does, but if I sit down to eat, I eat everything on my plate, which explains why I’m getting so fat. So it felt good to run. I also had a chance to look at some of the condos at the far end of Kalakaua. Maybe next year if we can come for longer, we’ll rent something down there. (Fantasy reigns in my mind again.)

After I got back we went to the beach for our morning swim. I just love the fact that you can go swimming here in the morning and it’s not too cold. The water was lovely and even here at Waikiki beach, which doesn’t have big waves in the winter time, the waves were good enough for an old lady like me to ride. I had a really good time. John went in, too, but he thinks he’s getting an ear infection, so he didn’t want to get his head in the water. His sore toe is starting to look a little bit better, finally.



After lunch, we checked out the bus schedules and went up to Punahou to go to the early music concert. John is always happy to do anything that has anything to do with Obama, so we went early to the concert which started at 4 so we’d have enough time to go to the Punahou school which Obama attended as a teenager. As it turned out the bus stopped right at the school, and the church was a block up from the bus stop and across from the middle of the school, so it was very convenient. The Punahou school, if I remember correctly, is a very prestigious school which was built perhaps by one of the do-gooder missionaries and is supposed to be open to anyone of pure Hawaiian ancestry – or maybe it’s supposed to be free to anyone of pure Hawaiian ancestry who meets the admission requirements. Whatever it is, it’s open to other qualified students as well, usually if they are well connected. Obama’s grandfather worked for someone who was a donor to the school and that’s how he got in. It’s the most prestigious prep school in Hawaii.

And then there was the concert. Wow. It was titled “the Starks go for Baroque.” Ho-hum, that’s a pretty boring name for a baroque concert. The Starks are married – he’s a violinist and she’s a soprano. They are both very good, but she is absolutely fabulous. She has a short resume that includes singing in the NYC opera, Hawaii opera, musicals, etc., and sounds wonderful in early music as well, i.e. she can sing without filling the room with vibrato. He was a good violinist, no question about that, but she outshown him big time. She seemed to be an audience favorite as well. She got a standing ovation. He didn’t. They did the Vivaldi Four Seasons, with a small orchestra, and she sang a Handel Gloria HWV deest, and parts of a Bach church cantata BWV52. I especially liked the Handel.
We went to Giovanni’s Deli for dinner and had a Maui Wowie pizza. It was really good, but we had a small one, which led us to go buy a piece of cake afterwards which led me to be miserably full.

Tomorrow we plan to watch the MLK parade and may go to Hanaumaa bay to swim with the fishes. Depends on the weather. There was supposed to be a cold front today, but it didn’t materialize.