Tuesday 05/14/2024

Last Friday, between the morning and evening performances of the musicale, something happened to my right hip, so it was causing enough pain to make me limp a little. I’ve been coddling it ever since. Today I took a short walk (1.5 mi) to test it. OK. With a little ibuprofen after.

On the walk I concocted something for the writers group. The prompt this week was “Why are you in the witness protection program?” What I ended up with was more about why I was in protective custody, but it was funny and got a lot of laughs from the group.

In the afternoon I practice some music and arranged my collection of songs. And found a better score for the number I’m supposed to do with Mary next month.

Here’s the writers piece. I checked later and to get to Area 51, you would actually have to drive North out of Las Vegas, not East. Oh dear, fact-checked.

Monday 05/13/2024

Started the day with the monthly Resident Association meeting. I wasn’t running AV but I came early and got called in to help. For some reason the mics wanted to feed back, creating an annoying mosquito-like whine. Not sure what be we got it tamed more or less.

Then off to FOPAL for the post-sale-weekend cleanup. Three boxes of books that had not sold for 4 months off the shelves. Processed two boxes of donations. Did a little sorting.

Back home and scheduled a docent tour for Saturday, and a couple of guys from CH are coming along. Then sat down and edited Connie’s book talk video and got that uploaded. Had dinner with Marc and Sophia, new residents. They haven’t sold their Palo Alto house yet, still working on cleaning it out and getting rid of stuff. I sympathized.

Sunday 05/12/2024

Did some general housekeeping shit in the morning. Also, somebody after the concert had told me I should check out the songs of John Prine. I’d heard some of his, but spent an hour going through them on Ultimate Guitar, where I get my guitar music sheets. No. I can see the relation in style, but No. Only one I recognized from the rad-io was “Illegal Smile“. That’s typical of most of his songs, silly word play mostly. Some of them are real downers, like “Hello in There“, man I wouldn’t sing that to a Channing House crowd.

At 12 met with Jerry and Betty and new-ish residents Dean and Ellen. Nice lunch. The dining room was maxed out with tables full of families, it being Mothers Day. Extra nice menu, mimosas or champagne.

In the afternoon I was responsible for bringing in pizza. This was one of the holidays where the dining staff gets off early, and supper is a picnic. Rather than get the usual sack suppers, the 6th floor voted to have pizza instead. I met the delivery at 5:30, five large pizzas, and 15 of us chowed down in the floor dining room.

Saturday 05/11/2024

At 10am I set up the auditorium for Connie to re-do her book talk, the one of last week where I messed up and failed to get a video recording, even though she specifically wanted one (Day 5.157). She volunteered to re-do the talk today, and did, to a small audience of friends. And I got a recording, which I will edit tomorrow.

Later I edited the video of last night’s Musicale and made it available. I also edited out just the 10-minute clip of me performing and that is right here for my legion of fans.

Watching that I am shocked by a couple of things. One, how many people praised me for it, at the reception last night and again today. People really liked it. Two, how different the reality, as recorded by the camera, is from what I hear in my head. In the recording I can hear all kinds of vocal flaws that I am not aware of as I hear it inside my head. Y’all are missing a great performance, the one that happens between my throat and my ears. Anyway based on what I hear in the video, I’m giving up any hope of auditioning for American Idol. For sure.

Connie’s book, the one she read from, is The Muse of Menus, a nice personal memoir of feeding her family, and I thought it would be appealing to Toni Mills, who is in the hospital, so I took a copy down to Dennis for him to take to her.

Friday 05/10/2024

Update: picture by another resident:

So this was the day of the Spring Musicale, music by 7 different performing groups and soloists, as I sketched yesterday, two shows, 10am and 7pm, the latter followed by drinks and snacks in the lobby provided by the 6th floor. So I performed 6th of the 7 acts, and I did OK. Well, better than OK, to judge by all the people who complimented me during the lobby reception after. My ego got lots of strokes, very pleasant.

Also the events went off smoothly with no technical glitches and I remembered to press Record on both times–yes, I was doing the AV as well. Also being a stagehand in that I had to move a chair around and a mic on a stand, for two of the acts that wanted special audio treatment. So yeah, big success for me.

I will edit the video on Sunday or so, and post my 7 minute part of the show here, then.

05/09/2024

Tidied the apartment, then rehearsed my songs. After lunch I opened the auditorium for the official tech rehearsal of the Channing House Spring Musicale. Previously this would have been a performance by the Chorus but the Chorus has been retired, or rather, Mary who was the director retired from the job, and nobody has stepped up to re-form the Chorus. Instead, Mary has made herself director of a musical variety show, eight acts by resident musicians. Tomorrow we give two concerts; today we rehearsed.

I say “we” because I am the 7th act on the bill, doing 2 songs with the guitar. Preceding me there is the Channing House Harmonica Group, doing 3 patriotic songs. Then Frances and John performing a classical piece for clarinet and piano. Then the Baroque Trio, Alice on cello, Kay on flute, Lou on recorder. Next up, Craig Allen, solo harmonica improvisations. The Jazzy Trio is Stew on box drum, Kay on flute, Arlene on piano. Followed by me, and then the Nameless Trio which is John and Kay, accompanying Jerry singing the Toreador Song. Singing it very well, by the way; Jerry is a real singer with some training.

So we got through all that, and I only messed up a couple of chords which hardly anyone noticed.

I had done a video recording of all this, and at 4:15 pm I took the USB drive out of the recorder up to my room and edited the video down to just the performance, dropping out all the chat and talking in between, and put it on Dropbox and sent an email to all the performers with a link to download it — by 5:30. Not bad turnaround time if I do say so.

Down to dinner, finished by 6:15, into the auditorium again to set up for the San Francisco Shakespeare troupe. Five actors, semi-pro and very good. They have been touring this one-hour condensed version of As You Like It for three weeks now, performing almost daily in schools and libraries, and they do three more shows this weekend. They came in, set up a portable backdrop, each of the five played several parts, and the whole thing was pretty entertaining.

Wednesday 05/08/2024

Took the standard walk, very pleasant. Was supposed to meet up with Lynne to rehearse our number but she messaged she had a sore throat. Testing negative, but confined until tomorrow and another test. Practiced some guitar. Had the monthly 6th floor meeting. So really nothing to do today. Tomorrow is going to be a monster, and also Friday and Saturday, so just as well.

Tuesday 05/07/2024

The prompt for the writers group was “restaurant experience” and I didn’t plan to write anything, then had a little flashback and wrote a few paragraphs in the half hour before the meeting. I’ll stick it at the end.

Prior to the meeting, which is chaired by Connie, we talked about the lost recording of her talk, and she volunteered that she wouldn’t mind doing the talk again and recording it. In the few minutes at the start of the meeting we agreed to do that on Saturday. Which is a great relief to me as I felt really bad about fucking up the recording of the actual event. Connie is a saint.

I rehearsed my own songs, and met twice today with Lynne to practice our number for the upcoming Musicale. That is coming on fast now: tech rehearsal on Thursday, two shows on Friday.

I was in the auditorium for something else this afternoon and three of the other acts were there rehearsing, and Mary the producer, and so we talked about some of the tech, where to put mics etc.

OK here’s a little flashback to the 1960s.

Monday 05/06/2024

Took the standard walk. Back in plenty of time to open up the Auditorium for the First Monday book talk, this month by Connie, a friend and a writer that I admire. So the event went off fine, she read well from her book, the audience loved it (everybody loves Connie). One little problem. I was supposed to record it. I thought I had, I had her nicely framed and lit on the camera screen, audio just right — but when I went to download the recording, there wasn’t one. I’m not sure what I did; I’m pretty sure I pushed the Record button, but somehow — no recording. I feel like a real schmuck. I apologized sincerely to Connie who was nice about it, but… damn.

Off to FOPAL for three hours of work to get my section ready for the sale this weekend. Back home to mess around, practice my songs for the upcoming performance — which was weeks away, it seemed, until somehow that became this week.

Sunday 05/05/2024

At 10, drove to CHM to lead a tour. This was a group from Temple Emanual-El, a dozen people of about my age which is nice, they knew right away what a punch card was.

After lunch I worked on Bob Schwaar’s printer issue and solved it, following a suggestion from Bert to just delete every file related to Canon and download new drivers. That worked.

At 3 joined Lou to figure out how to connect an Android phone to share its screen with Zoom.

Had dinner with Edie, Gwen and Craig, because Craig’s wife Diane is out of town.