First of all, we finally got off our butts and joined the Renaissance Society. I don’t know if there are other renaissance societies in other cities, it seems like a pretty obvious idea. Here in Sacramento, it’s a sort of outreach program of California States University Sacramento. The university is somewhat underused on Fridays, so they allow the Renaissance Society to use their facilities (and parking) to hold classes. I don’t think you have to be a senior or retired to join the Renaissance Society, in practice everybody there is a senior. The general outline is that they have mini-seminars around 10 a.m., in which you can dangle your toes in a subject for an hour or so, and the next Friday the subject will be something else. Then they have time for lunch, or a couple of other drop in events where you can figure out how to do a power point presentation or something. The sort of heavy lifting is around 1 p.m. These are the classes where you can get your whole foot in the water, though I don’t think you’re ever going to go swimming in a subject like you might in a college class. They offer about 20 different seminars which last roughly a semester and include topics like U.S. foreign policy, The Iliad, Film Noir, 9-11 Deniers, post-Civil War Reconstruction, Hawaiian Islands history and culture, and more. If you’re a first-timer, you go into a big room and see what class you can get into – sort of the way you had to do when you were a college freshman, but ever after, you can sign up early and get the class you actually want. After that class in the afternoon, they have a lecture series from 3-4 to which they invite speakers from the world of entertainment, politics, etc. (I’ve performed at the lecture series before, once with Confluentes and once with RCRB. ) I’m taking The Iliad about which I know absolutely nothing.
Saturday night I made dinner for Zoe and Jim and John, and Zoe, Jim and I went to the Crest theater to see an old French silent movie called An Italian Straw Hat. John had important television to watch. The movie was made in 1928 and restored in the nineties(?), and when it was restored Raymond Alessandrini wrote an orchestral score to accompany it. It used a small pit band plus accordion. And Raymond Alessandrini came over from Paris to conduct it.
The Crest is an old theater that’s been refurbished to its 1930’s glory and seems to make a profit, or at least not operate at a loss, showing art films, new releases, indie films, and the occasional live performance or special event like this. The performance was a collaborative arts project between the Sacramento Symphony and the Alliance Francaise and got a grant from the Sacramento Region Community Foundation. The music was very appropriate to the action on screen, and without repeating the same thing for each actor, they did have their own themes when they showed up. (For instance, sometimes the soldier had trumpets, sometimes he had drums.)
Sunday we went to Davis for an early music concert (sounds like we’re never going to quit living in the past, doesn’t it?) Adrienne Fortini, a soprano I had the pleasure of playing with last year in a group with Kathy Canan and Robin Houston, did a concert with the two of them and Christopher Rumery –
a fabulous trumpet player, David Deffner, organist and pianist, Sean Bianco, baritone and violinist, and Ginny Morgan who came over from Hawaii to play cello and harp in this performance. It was a really nice concert, even if we did have to drive all the way to Davis for it. They also went from Scarlatti to Jerome Kern in slightly more than an hour. So we did make it all the way to 1945. We were supposed to babysit Rina tonight, but they decided not to go out because Heather’s been under the weather.So we stopped in Davis and had dinner at Kathmandu Kitchen. It was so good. And, I got to sit right next to the fire, and that was quite wonderful, too. I had a dish called Lal Maas, which is a lamb curry with red chili sauce, garlic, onion, black cardamom, cumin seeds, yogurt, coriander and turmeric. John had chicken curry with ginger, garlic and onion sauce. They were both delicious and the side dishes that came with them were good too. We both got the spicy version and neither one was very hot. People in New Mexico would have laughed their heads off about calling this spicy
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