Day: February 20, 2020

MJ Monday-Music: Aria 2

Many years ago, a friend gifted me with a CD called Aria 2. The compilation is one of the most relaxing collections of music I’ve ever heard. Very few of the cuts are in English, which makes the songs unobtrusive. It’s difficult to be distracted by lyrics when you don’t understand them.

I love the CD. Even the synthesized percussion somehow make the music approachable. And the vocalists, particularly the females, sound relaxed.

But sometimes I’m a little slow.

Several years later, my husband and I were at the Glimmerglass Opera for La Traviata. Not being a true opera fan, I was shocked when I realized, “Hey! I know that song!” But I had no idea how I was familiar with the melody. Several hours later it came to me: it’s on my Aria 2 CD. With that insight, I also realized the CD was opera arias. Until that moment, I had no clue. Did I mention I can be a little slow?

But the performances on Aria 2 don’t sound operatic. They are … comfortable. I tend to find opera singers sound as if they are in pain while they are singing. That’s not the case on Aria 2. There is almost a folk music type of ambiance to the CD…if a CD can have an ambiance.

iTunes has a download of the CD. I’ve read where you can stream it on Spotify. Not sure about Pandora. But you should check it out.

MJ’s Musings-Book Bingo: Art for Love’s Sake

Art for Love’s Sake. I read Barbara Freethy’s Don’t Say a Word. and used it for this square.  Lots of art in this romantic suspense: heroine is a DJ, hero is a photographer and the son of a photographer. There are ballerinas involved in the story, too. The arts abound. The first clue is a photograph. Nothing is as it seems.

I really wanted to use Fiona Davis’s The Masterpiece for this square, but it isn’t a romance. It’s the story of two women, fifty years apart. Clara is an artist and teacher in the Grand Central Station School of Art (this was a real thing) in the 1920s; Virginia is a woman in the 1970s who is working to save the building from demolition. Both are hobbled in their pursuits by being women. In many ways, Clara was far more liberated than Virginia, but Clara had a clear sense of self and her goal. Virginia, a recent divorcee, was drifting. Having come of age in the 1970s, there were many times in the story when I wanted to scream at Virginia for her naivety. Wanting to scream means I cared.

Both books were good reads.

MJ Monday: MJ’s Music–The Monkees

Another of my teenage idols passed away recently. Peter Tork of the Monkees.  I vacillated between Mickey Dolenz and Peter Tork being my favorite. Some of my earliest forays into writing fiction included Monkees stories, which would now be called fanfic.  Mrs. Sherman, my sixth grade teacher, caught me passing stories to my friends. She called me up to her desk. I just knew: So. Much. Trouble.

Instead, she complimented me on my writing, but asked me to not share the stories during class.

Here’s a song from the Monkees’ third album, Headquarters. Vocals are by Davy Jones, who passed away several years ago,  on the first verse; Peter sings the second verse.

You can also hear Peter at the end of the chorus, sounding lonely, singing , the title of the song: “Only Shades of Gray.” The lyrics are just as relevant today as they were when the song was released.

 

 

 

 

Pregnancy Dreams

Back when I was pregnant, my doctor didn’t believe in routine sonograms. If something was wrong–spotting, or a baby refusing to be born–that was different. Even if you did have a sono, the techs weren’t allowed to tell you the baby’s sex.

But each time, I knew what I was going to have. Yes, I had a friend who did the pencil, needle, and thread trick. I don’t remember if her predictions were right or not. Because I had dreams. Vivid dreams.

When I was pregnant for Y-Chromo, I still had my cat. My dream consisted of tying to put blue disposable diapers on my male cat, and failing. You see, a cat’s legs only go forward and backward. They do not splay the way human legs can. That was the first problem. The second problem was the fur. The adhesive tabs kept getting stuck in the cat’s fur.  I awoke from that dream exhausted and knowing my child would be a boy.

To this day, I still cannot think about or discuss the dream I had when I was pregnant for X-Chromo. Let it be enough to say I knew she would be female.