Author: Jeff Tabaco

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Audra McDonald with SF Symphony

On Monday night we saw Audra McDonald sing with the San Francisco Symphony, and she was amazing, as usual. This isn’t a full-fledged review, but let’s just say the whole time she had me in a wonderful dreamy haze (alternating with cheering wildly). We had front-row center seats, so it was like she was singing just for us. Here’s her song list; it wasn’t listed in the program, so this is not necessarily complete or in order, only as Thom and I remembered them:

Gorgeous (The Apple Tree)
I Have Confidence (The Sound of Music)
It Might As Well Be Spring (State Fair) / Hurry, It’s Lovely Up Here (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever)
Will He Like Me? (She Loves Me)
Can’t Stop Talking (Let’s Dance)
Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe (Cabin in the Sky)
The Glamorous Life (A Little Night Music)
There Won’t Be Trumpets (Anyone Can Whistle)

Ribbons Down My Back (Hello, Dolly!)
Pure Imagination (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)
A Little Bit in Love (Wonderful Town)
I Wish I Were in Love Again (Babes in Arms)
Dividing Day (The Light in the Piazza)
Moon River (Breakfast at Tiffany’s)
Old Maid (110 in the Shade)
I Could Have Danced All Night (My Fair Lady)
What Can You Lose? (Dick Tracy) / Not A Day Goes By (Merrily We Roll Along)
When Did I Fall in Love? (Fiorello!)

10,432 Sheep (The West Point Story)
Edelweiss (The Sound of Music)
Ain’t It the Truth? (Cabin in the Sky)

A few more notes:

  • The symphony also played The Carousel Waltz as a sort of entr’acte after the intermission.
  • Audra made good on her tweet in which she promised to sing the name of that Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, on a high A-flat. I can’t vouch for pronunciation, but it sure sounded pretty!
  • She told us that when she was a little girl, she auditioned with the song “Edelweiss” with her father accompanying her. (He died three years ago.) Last night she sang it unmiked, accompanied by guitar and violin. So beautiful and poignant.

For Audra’s appearances on PBS singing some of these and other songs, check out AudraMcDonaldFan‘s channel on YouTube.

We’re excited for a couple of upcoming “Summer and the Symphony” concerts: Pink Martini (we’re seeing them on June 2) and Idina Menzel (July 9). Ha, I guess it shows how little I blog anymore: my post about last year’s Pink Martini concert is still here on the home page!

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And the most-preferred movie is…

As you may know, this year’s Best Picture category at the Oscars is different in a couple of ways. There are ten nominees, and voters rank them all rather than vote for their single favorite. Will this set up a standoff between Avatar and The Hurt Locker on polarization vs. consensus? From the New Yorker:

Members–there are around fifty-eight hundred of them–are being asked to rank their choices from one to ten. In the unlikely event that a picture gets an outright majority of first-choice votes, the counting’s over. If not, the last-place finisher is dropped and its voters’ second choices are distributed among the movies still in the running. If there’s still no majority, the second-to-last-place finisher gets eliminated, and its voters’ second (or third) choices are counted. And so on, until one of the nominees goes over fifty per cent.

This scheme, known as preference voting or instant-runoff voting, doesn’t necessarily get you the movie (or the candidate) with the most committed supporters, but it does get you a winner that a majority can at least countenance. It favors consensus. Now here’s why it may also favor The Hurt Locker. A lot of people like Avatar, obviously, but a lot don’t–too cold, too formulaic, too computerized, too derivative. (Remember Dances with Wolves? Jurassic Park? Everything by Hayao Miyazaki?) Avatar is polarizing. So is James Cameron. He may have fattened the bank accounts of a sizable bloc of Academy members–some three thousand people drew Avatar paychecks–but that doesn’t mean that they all long to recrown him king of the world. (As he has admitted, his people skills aren’t the best.) These factors could push Avatar toward the bottom of many a ranked-choice ballot.

I’d love to see the vote tallied onstage at the actual awards ceremony (with appropriate computer graphics)–sudden death lightning round!–but I guess that’s just the numbers (and game show) geek in me. For a producer it might not be so fun to watch one’s movie be numerically verified as the last among otherwise “equal” losers, er, non-winners.

By the way, so far I’ve seen only three of the ten Best Picture nominees: Avatar, An Education, and Up. Which have you seen, and what are your picks (or rankings)?

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Goodbye to the aughts

Previously on my blog, I was just about to head off on my honeymoon, and if you followed my Twitter or Facebook updates, then you know it was an amazing time. I haven’t gotten around to uploading all my photos (of course), but Thom’s full set is here.

The past ten years sure have been a decade of change in my life. In 2000 I found my first post-college job and moved across the country, from California to Washington, D.C. In 2001 I discovered the music of Rufus Wainwright and became a semi-groupie. In 2003 Thom and I first met. In 2006 we moved to my hometown just weeks before my father died. And this year Thom and I got married.

The other day I put together a “decade in pictures” slideshow, hastily assembled and thus imperfect, but evocative nonetheless. Enjoy.

Tonight we’re going to a small get-together to celebrate New Year’s with my family. Happy new year, and happy new decade!

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Our big fat Greek honeymoon

Wow, I really meant to write a wedding recap (more than a month has passed since the wedding, so it’s not like I haven’t had the opportunity!), and I will eventually, but for now here are a couple of links to photos, which you may have already seen on Facebook etc.: our Flickr group Happy Together, and our pro Julie Bernstein’s photos. Speaking of photos, if you’ve seen my Flickr photostream lately, you’ll notice that I recently started to post last year’s Alaska cruise photos. You know how I procrastinate. I figured I would try and post them all before our next cruise, but I may have to put that on hold yet again, ’cause our next cruise is here!

That’s right, our honeymoon is upon us! Tomorrow we fly via Amsterdam to Venice, and the day after that we embark on a twelve-night cruise aboard the Grand Princess from Venice to Rome, stopping at the following ports and cities in Croatia, Greece, Turkey, and Italy: Dubrovnik, Corfu, Katakolon (Olympia), Athens (Piraeus), Mykonos, Kusadasi (Ephesus), Rhodes, Santorini, and Naples. We finish in Rome, where we’ll stay for a couple of days before heading back home. (Google map? You got it.)


View larger map

We’re totally excited, as you can imagine. I can’t wait to see so many things in person for the first time that I’ve only seen in pictures, like the Parthenon in Athens, the canals of Venice, and so on and so on. I’ll try to update now and then, but for now, γειά σου and ciao!

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Pink Martini with SF Symphony

A couple of weeks ago we saw Pink Martini with the San Francisco Symphony, and as expected they were amazing. We’d seen them here with the symphony in 2007, but this time I was on the ball when tickets went on sale, so we were sitting in the second row. It was great! And we ran into our friends Richard and Dennis at intermission, which was one of those “small-town San Francisco” moments.

Here’s the song list, as printed in the program:

Quizás quizás quizás (Farrés)
Tempo Perdido (Alves)
Sympathique (Forbes / Lauderdale)
Ebben? No andro lontana (Catalani)
Uskudar (Traditional)
Adagio from Concerto in F (Gershwin)
Pièce en forme d’Habanera (Boléro) (Ravel / Leyden)
¿Dónde Estás, Yolanda? (Jimenez)
Malagueña (Lecuona)

Splendor in the Grass (Marashian / Lauderdale)
Andalucia (Lecuona)
Sway (Gimbel / Ruiz)
Autrefois (Forbes / Lauderdale)
Praeludium and Allegro (Kreisler / Taylor)
The Flying Squirrel (Taylor / Lauderdale)
Amado Mio (Fisher / Roberts)
Il fox trot delle gigolettes (Lehár)
Carioca (Youmans / Eliscu / Kahn)
Aspettami (Forbes / Lauderdale)

For the encores, they did “What’ll I Do?” (Berlin) and “Brazil” (Barroso), and we joined in the conga line that went around the hall, led by bandleader Thomas Lauderdale. Fun!

After the concert, Thom and I went to Absinthe for a late dinner, and who should we see at the table across from us but Cloris Leachman! Apparently she was in town for the Pride parade the next day, in which she was one of the grand marshalls. (Here is Thom’s dark and surreptitious photo from over his shoulder.) On our way out Thom said hello to her as we passed her table, which turned into a conversation about the food, and then her manager (whom we later found out is one of her sons, I think?) started asking us what the local buzz was, if any, surrounding Cloris and her participation in Pride, so suddenly we were the voice of the LGBT community, heh.

And as we left the restaurant, we ran into Thomas Lauderdale, who was on his way in. I guess it was the place to be after the show.

By the way, Pink Martini will be back in the Bay Area later this year (tour schedule): Santa Rosa on October 1, and Mountain Winery on October 2.

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Independence Day 2009

We had a fun Fourth of July yesterday: first we had a big lunch with my aunt’s family at their house in Concord, and it was Thom’s and my first time to meet their new dog, Odie. How cute is he?

Odie

In the evening all of us, minus Odie, went to nearby Martinez to watch the fireworks at the waterfront. Here’s a short video I took of the very end of the show; don’t mind my addition of some stock iMovie music (the clip is called “Vintage News,” as in old newsreels, but it also reminds me of Wallace & Gromit):

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

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Nightlife (and a blast from the past) at the Academy

Last night Thom and I went to Nightlife, the California Academy of Science‘s weekly Thursday night party, and it was a lot of fun. We sort of went on the spur of the moment and it was sold out online, but they were selling tickets at the door, and thanks to Thom’s membership, we didn’t have to wait long to get our tickets.

It was my second time to the new Academy, but my first time in the planetarium. That show (narrated by Sigourney Weaver), which takes you on a short trip through the universe, is pretty amazing. Stuff like that reminds you how vast space is and how small we are. After that we saw a special movie/performance piece called Bella Gaia, which focuses on the Earth, mixing satellite images and data visualizations with the words of International Space Station astronauts. The director was there to present the film; he is also a violinist, and he played violin during the movie as part of the score.

(South Park viewers will be pleased to know that I pronounce it planet arium. Thom and I always crack up at this clip, below. “And these two little stars over here form the constellation The Crusades.” Hahaha.)

Afterward, we wandered the museum and spent the rest of the evening at the aquarium exhibits. It’s a fun vibe at Nightlife. (And you save a lot over the regular daytime admission, which is always nice!)

And now a blast from the past. Here’s a photo of me with my paternal grandparents, taken in March 1980 when I was almost three years old, in front of the old Academy of Sciences building. The only things I remember about the old Academy are the circular fish tank and the giant Foucault pendulum. And did they have an earthquake simulator or was that at the Exploratorium?

California Academy of Sciences (1980)

Aww.

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Wedding update: T-minus 3 months

I just wanted to cross-ref to a post I wrote on our wedding blog last week, about some of the planning progress we’ve made so far. At the time of that writing, we were about a hundred days out from our wedding, but as of today — let me check my handy-dandy countdown clock on my computer desktop — it’s T-minus 3 months, or 92 days!

Here you go: wedding progress at thomandjeff.com.