Opera, not just for browsing anymore

Last Friday, February 19, I traveled with David Rushing to see Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" at the Robert Baustian Theatre, Murphy Hall, on the campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. I had previously been to Lawrence, one other time for pleasure, and many times to help at the JCCC Lawrence location (Lawrence Centennial School), but I had never been to the University of Kansas, fortunately David had. He and I are friends with the stage manager, and went to see the production to support our friend.

Neither David nor I had ever seen an opera before. Fortunately the opera was in English, and the lighting, the vocal performances, the stage and the costume designs helped to communicate the wonderful story. All of the actors performed very well. Unfortunately the beautifully-layered polyphony of voices in some scenes sometimes became a cacophony with the accompaniment; however I agree with David's assertion:

This was a cultural experience for me. If I had to base my concept of an opera off of the show I saw tonight, I wouldn't mind seeing an opera again.

Saturday morning I experienced a half hour of difficulty connecting to Facebook in Mozilla Firefox, so I tried Apple Safari, and finally Opera. Linking to each of those Facebook pages reminds me of linking to areas only available on America Online, back in the day. For the record I should also say that I was using Microsoft Windows XP, for which Apple does make a Safari browser. Anyway, once I had sorted out that problem, I was not able to tag the fan pages of any of those products in Opera, so I switched back to Safari. That post strangely disappeared once I next updated my status, and never showed in my mobile browser, hm, like your girlfriend.